Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals by Waskar Ari (review)

In Earth Politics, Waskar Ari tells the story of an indigenous social movement in Bolivia as it developed over the long arc of the twentieth century. The association of Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP) emerged in the altiplano region at the turn of the century, a period roiled by civil war and intensified indigenous activism in the wake of the Ley de Exvinculación (the agrarian reform of 1874), which undercut the legal basis for the landholding status of indigenous communities. Anchoring their movement in what they called the “Indian Law,” AMP leaders spoke forcefully against the continuing subordination of indigenous peoples in Bolivia, articulating a vision of indigenous autonomy that undercut the legitimacy of white and mestizo dominance. The AMP’s Indian Law was an ideological amalgam of tenets of colonial legislation drawn from the Law of the Indies with the addition of discourses derived from indigenous Andean ethnic experiences and religious concepts and practices. Ari’s discussion presents this as an emerging analytic identification and rejection of “internal colonialism, and shows that it fed into a decades-long project of “decolonization” carried out by successive generations of AMP leaders.

Ari presents a genealogy of the movement through political biographies of four AMP leaders: Toribio Miranda, Gregorio Titiriku, Melitón Gallardo and Andrés Jach’aqullu. The four cases span two generations of AMP leadership. Miranda and Titiriku were part of the founding generation of AMP activists. They had experienced the emergence at the turn of the twentieth century of what Ari dubs the “modern segregationist state,” in which citizenship was conferred based upon Spanish literacy and fluency, property-holding, Christianity, and other attributes of civilized modernity. Gallardo and Jach’aqullu represent a second generation of AMP leadership, through whom the critique of internal colonialism and the quest for subaltern nationalism, crystallized in the AMP discourse of the Indian Law, were realized and reapplied in the shifting ethnic and political contexts of Bolivia following the 1952 revolution led by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario.

These AMP leaders advanced a sort of ecumenical indigenous and nationalist discourse, exhorting Aymara, Quechua, and other indigenous peoples to unite around their common condition as survivors or “vestiges” (-puchus) of the “first people” who still endured after four centuries of white invasion and colonization. AMP leaders stressed the liberation of indigenous peoples as Indians, insisting on indigenous dress and language and refusing to include their political project within the scope of mestizo political parties. At the core of the AMP ideology was the claim that the cultural and political liberation it advocated would be pleasing to the earth (Pachamama), place deities, and the ancestors. It is here that the idea of “earth politics” enters the analysis. As Ari stresses, the AMP discourse connected the political liberation of indigenous Bolivians with the restoration of a balanced relationship with the earth and cosmos. For the AMP, this connection is the legitimating charter of indigenous rights in the land, once maintained through indigenous religion but warped over centuries by colonization and then by the assimilationist policies of modern citizenship.

Ari makes effective use of these four cases to illustrate the ways the AMP distinguished itself from other indigenous or progressive social and political movements, from the “caciques apoderados” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the post-1952 land reforms and the establishment of peasant syndicates in localities across the altiplano. His accounts of these differently positioned activists take us through the complex micropolitics of Aymara-Uru-Quechua relations and show us the connections and differences among ayllu residents, hacienda peons, and urban dwellers as they moved in a dynamic racialized environment in which intermediary categories such as “cholo” marked the assimilation of backward rural Indians toward modern urban citizenship. Ari shows us how each of the four men’s politics was framed through the course of his life and within an activist circuit of engagement with...