the notion of "rights"

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Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Molly Geidel

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 18, Number2, Spring/Summer 2010, pp. 29-54 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska PressDOI: 10.1353/qui.0.0014

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The Notion of Rights and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial ModernityIndigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia

silvia rivera cusicanquiTranslated by Molly Geidel

This article attempts to undertake a reading of gender as it oper-ates in Bolivias juridical history, in order to propose some issues of debate that I consider pertinent to any discussion of the rights of indigenous peoples and their close ties, at least as I see them, to the rights of women (whether indigenous, cholas, birlochas, or refi nadas).1 First I focus on the masculine and lettered aspects of the juridical process that has produced the documents known as the Laws of the Republic. In Europe both the law and the mod-ern historical formation of what is known as public space are anchored in the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, whereby the rebirth of the human being was implicitly imagined as a masculine Universal Subject, who was by nature a bearer of rights. Up to now the notion of human rights means noth-ing more than what were known as the rights of man (droits de lhomme) in the eighteenth century. Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler have noted this confl ation, writing of a phallogocentric version of the modern Subject, the enlightened heterosexual indi-vidual.2 This representation of the modern individual has been in-scribed in European history and imposed on the rest of the world

qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2 30

over the course of the last two centuries through multiple processes of political, military, and cultural hegemony.

In Bolivia the initial act of colonization was gendered: the very idea of rights arrived already tainted by the subordination (formal and real) of women in the household, governed by the pater famil-ias. Rossana Barragn has illustrated how, during the early Repub-lic, the Bolivian legislators copied and adapted a Victorian model of the family, transposing it onto a much older matrix of habitus and representations.3 This new hegemonic ideal of family relations prescribed that (1) men act as the sole public representatives of the family, subordinating wife and children under their author-ity; (2) women dedicate themselves exclusively to reproductive and decorative tasks, and thus become alienated, their agency denied, their public voices silenced (thus, the idea of public women be-came a cruel semiotic paradox, implying that the only public action a woman could perform was the marketing of her own sex); and (3) adolescents and children remain subject to the hierarchical authority of adults, principally of the father.

The liberal reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury only reinforced this patriarchal imaginary, reinstating it with new laws and behavioral codes. These reforms codifi ed a notion of human rights based on the subjugation of women, instituting and upholding restrictions, legal elisions, and archaisms, as well as a myriad of daily practices that ended up in the denial of the very notion of human rights to the female sex. For example, un-der the new liberal laws, the typical penalty for domestic violence led to the punishment of the perpetrator only if the victim had suffered at least thirty days of hospitalization or convalescence!4 Through legislative measures, the liberals further consolidated the institutionalized inequality of property and inheritance rights that had been imposed by the colonizers: practices like primogeniture, unequal status between legitimate and illegitimate children, and patrilineal inheritance were thus consolidated by the independent state.5 Moreover, while juridical rhetoric recognized the equality of the Indian in 1874, the structure of the republican habitus contin-ued to function through the invisible axis of the two republics (one of the subjects, the other of the citizens).6 As a matter of fact,

Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 31

women and Indians only accessed a degraded and restricted form of citizenship quite recently, with the declaration of universal vot-ing rights after the 1952 revolution.

Historical Nexuses between Colonial and Patriarchal Oppression in Bolivia

The latter example enables us to add a second thematic axis to our discussion. How is it that the subjugation of women, the oppression of indigenous peoples, and the discrimination against those who exhibit residual traces of native identities have been historically em-bedded in the subjectivity of each inhabitant of the Bolivian nation? That is to say, how was the modern universal Subject inscribed in each subject (individual or collective) through the erasure and sup-pression of his or her psychic constitution and social trajectory?

In the gender system of Andean societiesat least as it has been documented and reconstructed by ethnographic and ethnohistori-cal researchwomen have public and family rights more or less on par with those of their masculine peers (though these rights have been eroding in recent decades). The gender system is governed by a dynamic and contentious equilibrium, normatively oriented by the model of the Andean couple. This relation between the genders was founded in and continues to rely on a system of bilateral affi li-ation and inheritance, which forms the basis of the indigenous po-lis. The bilateral scheme of inheritance allows daughters to receive goods and rights along the maternal line (until very recently, this did not mean formal property, but only rights of access to land) while sons inherit another set goods and property rights along the paternal line. An adult is socially recognized as a person when in a partnered union, and his or her prestige increases in the course of the family life cycle, with the growth and labor of children and with the passage of a series of ritual and productive cargos (a set of obligations known as the thaki or road to adulthood). The Andean order of inheritance favors the younger son or daughter, granting the youngest sibling arable and pastoral land as well as the family house in compensation for having sacrifi ced migrato-ry or educational aspirations to support his or her aging parents.


Women just as much as men have enjoyed bilateral ceremonial rights, according to a symbolic order that projects the male/fe-male dichotomy onto the wider realm of nature and the time-space cosmos. At the smallest level of the community or ayllu, women have participated in creating and enacting symbolic and kinship systems, using their voices to shape the communal cargo system and protocol from within. Although since the implementation of colonial cabildos or community and town councils, men have usu-ally represented the family at meetings (a practice that continues today in the assemblies and gatherings of peasant unions), women have still managed to preserve an autonomous space of social and politico-symbolic power by performing crucial productive tasks, organizing the domestic cycle and division of labor, and maintain-ing their roles as weavers and ritual specialists. They have never been completely segregated from the spaces of normative produc-tion and public opinion in the ayllu or in its fragmented form, the indigenous community.7

The frustrating and contradictory nature of Bolivian moderni-tyincluding the modern legal systemhas thrown this intricate gender system into crisis, threatening to break the delicate balances and mechanisms that rule its internal reproduction. Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita, for example, have demonstrated how modernity (which arrived in the 1970s to the ayllu Qaqachaka by way of mothers clubs and development NGOs) contributed to the creation of a maternal image of women that resulted in a de-valuation of their pastoral, textile, and ritual abilities. As a result the new Qaqa generations have married at a younger age, and the women have dedicated themselves to having more children, in or-der to gain the social support and recognition they have lost due to the agricultural crisis, the deterioration of textile activities, and the migratory diasporas. Additionally, increasing emigration has had a deep impact on gender relations, further revealing the intimate relationship between Westernization and patriarchalization of An-dean gender systems.8 Part of the patriarchal strategy of Qaqa mi-grants to the cities or to the coca-producing lowlands consists of leaving their wives pregnant each year in order to maintain control over their fertility and enhance their family land rights.9


These changes in Andean practices indicate the slow incorpo-ration of a hegemonic family model into the fabric of indigenous community life, as well as the rapid change of behaviorsdemo-graphic, social, and culturalthat these communities have experi-enced in the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of their incomplete and illusory participation in Bolivian modernity. The modernization process as a whole has meant a deepened patriar-chalization of indigenous societies, as they live out the widening gap between state law and a motley communal law constructed through successive negotiations and tensions between the sacred realm of rights and the legal norms imposed by the colonial and republican regimes. This situation constantly degrades the eco-nomic conditions for the majority of the population (a process ex-pressed in post-adjustment reformist jargon as the feminization or indianization of poverty), so that precarious labor conditions and market inequalities go hand in hand with political disposses-sion and human rights violations. These historic and continuing dislocations, along with the attempts to reassert indigenous and communal rights, provide a framework for articulating the present condition of women and Indians.

A Male and Lettered Society: The Struggles for Land and Territory

I have elaborated elsewhere that the model of citizenship that be-came hegemonic in Bolivia from the 1950s onward was in fact a cultural package of behavioral prescriptions designed to turn the unruly but passive Indian into an active mestizo citizen: property-owning, integrated into the capitalist market, and castil-ianized (speaking Spanish). Invariably, this citizen was an urban young male, dressed in a tailored suit, imitating the behavior of the Westernized elite.10 The initial version of this modernization project was expressed in the Law of Expropriation (Ley de Exvinculacin), which held that the only citizen right vested in adult Indian men was the right to sell their families access to communal lands. After the laws approval by the government of Toms Fras in October 1874, old and new hacendados (estate owners) proceeded to ex-


pand their haciendas (large estates with servile labor) with the help of the army and mercenary forces recruited in rural towns, using the letter of the law to hide the brutal nature of their forced con-fi scation of Indian land. The section of the law that most severely impacted the ayllus internal authority system was the declaration that communities or ayllos (sic) were to be extinguished and that caciques, kuraqas, or other ethnic authorities were prohibited from representing their communities in court.11 Instead, a power of attorney (poder general) was to be given to literate apodera-dos, middlemen empowered to voice the complaints and demands of the affected communities. Craftily combining translation and betrayal, the early apoderados facilitated the expropriation of al-most two-thirds of the land possessed by the Andean communities in western Bolivia. In the province of Pacajes alone, more than sev-enty thousand hectares were illegally transferred from the ayllus to the haciendas between 1881 and 1920.12

The study of the indigenous legal struggles during the liberal period reveals the traces of an ancestral system of rights and no-tions of justice that legitimated the indigenous leaderships tena-cious questioning of the liberal lawslaws that superimposed the notion of human rights onto the colonial legal horizon and the pre-Hispanic normative and religious orderat local and national courts.13 The colonial legislation recognized a certain degree of ayl-lu autonomy and self-government, based in the Spanish notion of separate fueros or jurisdictions, whereby the overall relations be-tween Indians and Spaniards were regulated. In the Leyes de Indias these norms were expressed through the notion of the two repub-lics.14 According to this legal frame, which continued in practice if not in name after the liberal reforms, the indigenous society was a separate but subordinate republic. As constructed collectively in the legal discourse, Indians were the inhabitants of a conquered space, the subjects of a colonial state that deprived them of rights and overburdened them with obligations. However, during the lib-eral period, the lettered elite of the communities and ayllus also used the notion of the two republics as a strategy for land defense and political autonomy. They defended the organizational auton-omy of the ayllus, markas, and indigenous communities by using


the colonial legislation of the two republics as a legal instrument in their confrontations with the (formally) liberal Bolivian State.15 For example, to argue against the forced land expropriations per-petrated by republican hacendados, the cacique-apoderado move-ment in the 1920s and 1930s drew upon the terms of the sixteenth-century colonial tributary pact with Viceroy Toledo: in what they saw as sort of truce with colonial hacendados, ayllus had agreed to pay tribute and labor in the Potosi mines in exchange for the pro-tection of the Spanish Crown to their rights over land and other re-sources, against the encroachment of hacendados and the abuses of colonial authorities. This pact also involved the recognition of a certain measure of political autonomy and self-government. The movements use of the terms of this pact to enact their resistance to the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century was an assertion of juridical memory, reminding the Bolivian state that the equality proclaimed in the law was fi ctional and that it actually served to disguise and perpetuate a colonial habitus of brutality and abuse.

The land expropriations played out as a protracted and uneven confrontation between hacendadosfavored by the Ley de Exvin-culacinand the Indian communities of fi ve departments in An-dean Bolivia. The latter were tightly organized under the leadership of Santos Marka Tula, Feliciano Inka Marasa, Faustino Llanki, Mateo Alfaro, and many others, who jointly producedwith the help of their own literate advisersa coherent juridical discourse aimed at uncovering the true nature of the liberal reforms, pointing out that even as members of Parliament made fl owery proclama-tions on equality and citizenship, the army and the private forces recruited by the hacendados were carrying out a colonial campaign of expropriation and deprivation of land and political rights. From the point of view of the caciques-apoderados, Bolivia was not a liberal state, but a colonial state.

The cacique-apoderado movement evolved on the eve of the Chaco War (19321935) to form the Repblica del Kollasuyo, a movement led by Eduardo L. Nina Qhispe and many other local leaders representing their communities in a vast territory cover-ing at least six departments of Bolivia. According to the research by Mamani, Nina Qhispe was an Aymara intellectual with urban


experience and lettered skills who envisioned the Renovation of Bolivia (see TM). The Repblica del Kollasuyu had also a collec-tive and pluralistic leadership, with representatives not only from the altiplano and valleys of the Andean region but also from the Guarani communities of the Izozog region in Santa Cruz. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Antiguos Caminantes, the Apodera-dos Espiritualistas, and the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares were In-dian movements that inherited the networks and the legal skills of their predecessors. All these Indian organizations had a rural and an urban constituency. They struggled for economic, politi-cal, and cultural rights. They demanded full rights and equality as citizens and at the same time emphasized their right to cultural dif-ference, political autonomy, and freedom from labor exploitation and from the expropriation of their ancestral lands.16 Because of the dual nature of their demands, the indigenous representatives undertook a legal struggle appealing simultaneously to the colo-nial legislation of the two republics and to the notion of equal citizenship formally consecrated by the new laws. Through the use of these legal and rhetorical strategies, which have left abundant documentary traces, the resistance of the male and lettered elite of the communities eclipsed the quieter daily practices of women. The Indian and the state versions of communal land rights were both masculine and emphasized territoriality, advocating the act of mapping and cataloging of the Indian universe. They created a modern stereotype of the Indian as a rural and backward sub-ject, passive and stagnant, enclosed in an isolated community that was therefore feminized as the object of (male) lettered reform and progressive action.

The caciques-apoderados faced the tensions and challenges of embodying a social space of mediation between two opposing ju-ridical systems. They had to perform the exegesis of the new laws in order to understand their logic and defend themselves against their effects. At the same time, they had to translate the demands of their communities into terms that could be understood by all. They had to plan their legal strategy using the arguments of the colonial pact of land and autonomy in exchange for tribute and labor and at the same time shape in liberal terms the communal perceptions of


territorial rights and political autonomy. In other words, they were charged not only with translating for both sides but also with dis-covering the contradictions in the republican legislation on which to base their juridical challenges to the usurpation of their lands.

In 1883 the community members of Paria, in the Oruro high plains, had discovered just such a contradiction, realizing it would be advantageous to present to the legislators their Ttulos de Com-posicin y Venta with the Spanish Crown, acquired from the Visi-tadores from the sixteenth century onward and kept in communal archives under the custody of ayllu authorities. Since both hacen-dados and ayllus had these colonial titles to land, the legislators had to recognize them as valid and register them within the liberal frame of the Ley de Exvinculacin. To accomplish this act of ju-ridical translation, they were eventually forced to approve the Law of November 23rd 1883, by which those communities that had bought their land from the Spanish Crown and could present their Ttulos de Composicin y Venta were exonerated from the divi-sion of communal property enforced by the liberal Law.17 The legal fi gure of private property was a translation of the communal pur-chase of land titles, done by colonial ayllu representatives (mallkus and kuraqas) of the Andean altiplano and valleys, who had ac-quired such titles as a settlement with colonial authorities. Thanks to the 1883 law, the ayllus were able to claim that they actually had private ownership rights over their communal lands. In face of the land expropriations, intensifi ed in the early twentieth century, these colonial titles were used to claim the legitimate inheritance rights held by the caciques de sangre as descendants of the colonial ethnic authorities. The leadership of the cacique-apoderado move-ment thus found a powerful legal argument to challenge the 18811882 offi cial commissions (Mesas Revisitarias) that granted indi-vidual land titles to community members, without their consent and using false apoderados. As a result, communities were forced to sell vast tracts of land all over the Andes. We dont know how much more land the communities would have lost if it was not for this fi erce and persistent legal struggle by the cacique-apodera-do movement, which eventually grouped more than four hundred markas or Indian towns, with thousands of affi liated ayllus and


communities, mostly inhabited by Aymara- or Qhichwa-speaking peasants. Nor do we know if the 1953 agrarian reform would have been produced as it wasas a broad movement to recover land and autonomy for peasant and indigenous communitiesif not for the social imprint of the cacique-apoderado movement. What we do know, however, is that the memory of the indigenous leaders strategies to resist the conversion of the Indians into degraded citi-zens played an important role in the formation of the modern eth-nic movement in the Aymara region in the 1970s and 1980s.

This long memory of anticolonial and antiliberal resistance and juridical debate has shaped the Indian resurgence of today. The present reorganization of the country along ethnic and terri-torial lines is rooted in these processes of resistance and political action, facing the various successive reformist attempts by the Bo-livian elites. The juridical memory of the ayllus struggles and the image of Tupaq Katari (1781), Pablo Zrate Willka (1899), and the caciques-apoderados of the 1920s have reemerged in the pro-cess that led to the fall of the neoliberal regimes and the election of Evo Morales as the fi rst indigenous president in the history of South America. The weight of the territorial demands of the Indian movement, and the granting of territorial and political autonomy to thirty-six Indian peoples of the highlands and the lowlands in the new constitution approved in February 2009, bear witness to the is-sues and confl icts aired in a long process of confrontation with the colonial and republican regimes. The territorial and male-led In-dian movements of today have had a partial though important suc-cess, through the appeal to memory in their challenge to the liberal and populist State, forcing the recognition of plural ethnicities and plural forms of exercise of citizenship and personhood. They have thus put forward a new model of citizenship that, far from erasing cultural differences, has reinforced and multiplied them.

Indigenous Peoples and Neoliberal Reforms: A Majority with a Minority Consciousness

But looking at the other side of the preceding argument, one can see that the practice of liberal law in Bolivia, even in its modern-


ized and pluralistic version, has led to subtle exclusionary practices that affect indigenous populations and women most intensely. The exclusion began as Indians and women were made invisible in sta-tistical data. It then continued as their demands were marginalized to remote peripheral territories fragmented and controlled by local powers, thus cutting off their potential impact on municipal reform or the overall redesign of state policy and legal frame. This process culminated in the mestizos enlightened hope that the Indi-an portion of the population would fi nally extinguish, condemned to an inevitable mestizaje inscribed in a long-term project of mod-ernization and progress.18 At the end of the nineteenth century the renowned liberal historian Gabriel Ren Moreno already celebrat-ed this fate, imagining the Andean Indians pushed toward dissolu-tion by the progressive impulse embodied in the elite entrepreneurs and landlords. Rough versions of the same fantasies cloud the vi-sion of todays elites and prevent them from seeing that Bolivia will be a colonial country as long as the dominant classes continue to be colonized, and as long as the mestizo, educated sectors do not proudly reaffi rm their own cultural difference and establish equal and dialogic relations with the Indian cultures that inhabit the na-tional territory.

In contrast, we see what the mestizo political middle classes have done during the neoliberal 1990s. Since the 1976 and the 1992 census, as was the case in the elaboration of the Indigenous Census of the Low Lands (19931995), ethnicity has been consistently re-stricted and made invisible. From 1988 onward the dismantling of the Katarista ideological current within the CSUTCB (Single Boliv-ian Confederation of Peasant Workers) led to a deep internal crisis and loss of autonomy, a process that quietly continues up to the present day.19 On the other hand, since the liberal reforms of the 1990s, the eastern lowlands have been turned into a showcase of a pure and clean ethnicity, sponsored by the state and interna-tional organisms such as the World Bank, the Inter-American De-velopment Bank, and the United Nations Development Program, whose universalizing approach to Latin America contributed to the stereotype that Bolivian Indians had little demographic relevance and were a marginalized minority located in remote and inacces-sible tropical forest areas.20


During the 1990s the neoliberal state perfectly interwove such visions of marginality with its own desire to modernize and to rid itself of the cumbersome dead weight of ethnicity. This is verifi ed by even a superfi cial analysis of the censuses, which clearly shows the evolving notions of indianity that permeate the elites legal and social policy reforms. According to data analyzed by Xavi-er Alb, out of 4,613,486 people living in the country in 1976, 36.3% were monolingual Spanish speakers. By 1992 those who declared themselves monolingual Spanish speakers had ascended to 41.7%. Speakers of native languages continued to be the majority, but among them monolingualism had proportionately decreased: from 20.4% in 1976 to 11.5% in 1992. On the other hand, the bi-lingual speakers (Spanish plus one or two native languages) had in-creased, from 42.5% of the population in 1976 to 45.7% in 1992. The data also confi rm a peculiar reproduction of urban ethnicity in the cities of Bolivia. According to the 1992 census, the percent-age of speakers of an indigenous language in the main cities of the Andean region was as follows: Aymara speakers made up 40% of the population in La Paz and 60% in El Alto; Qhichwa speakers made up 50% of the population in Cochabamba, 60% in Sucre, and 69% in Potos. In the case of Oruro, the speakers of Qhichwa (22%) and Aymara (40%) added up to about 51% of the popula-tion.21 Monolingualism in a native language as well as bilingualism continued to be more frequent in women, showing the gendered impact of universal castellanizacin since the Educational Reform of 1955.

However, for both rural and urban areas, signifi cant sources of error in the census reveal persistent attempts by the state to make indigenous people invisible. The census data show that in the pe-riod between 1976 and 1992, there was a net decrease in the na-tive-speaking population and a proportional increase in declared Spanish monolingualism. However, despite authoritative opinions to the contrary, the 1992 census excluded children under six years of age from questions about language. Moreover, materials distrib-uted by the census ignore data (thoroughly examined by Alb) that indicate the net growth of the bilingual population, data that also imply the growth of urban bilingualism through migration and the


reproduction of urban ethnicity in new generations. The fact that in the same period the urban population shed its minority status, growing to encompass a clear majority of 58% of the total popula-tion, also contributed to a progressive imaginary that breathes life into the states readings of the censuses. Based on this census data, specialists made calculations and projections that tended to deny the diffi culty of assessing the percentage of the rural population who maintain a double residence and live straddling two worlds, offi ciating as peasants in the city and as mercantilist and urban cultural brokers in the countryside. They also underestimate those who, in the cities, because they exhibit visible symbols of their cul-tural identity, are discriminated against as indios, despite their fi erce denial of being speakers of Aymara when responding to the census and their equally stubborn declaration of being mestizos when answering public opinion polls.

The Censo Indgena de Tierras Bajas (Indigenous Census of the Lowlands), carried out by the United Nations Development Pro-gramme, through the Instituto Indigenista Boliviano (Indigenist In-stitute of Bolivia) and the Secretara Nacional de Asuntos tnicos, de Gnero y Generacionales (National Secretariat of Ethnic, Gen-erational and Gender Affairs), similarly contributed to indigenous invisibility. Infl uenced by the Latin American experiencein the majority of countries, indigenous people are effective minoritiesthe authors of this census project a very strange image of the indig-enous populations of the Amazon, the eastern lowlands, and the Chaco. The Confederation of Eastern Lowland Indigenous Peoples (CIDOB), which emerged in the heat of the Indigenous March of 1990, participated in the organization of the event (although not in its design), with the goal of measuring the forces that could mo-bilize their communities around land and political demands articu-lated in relation to ethnicity, especially after the initial successes on the legislative level gained by the Marcha Indgena por el Ter-ritorio y la Dignidad (Indigenous March for Territory and Dignity) in 1990. The architects of the census rejected the use of linguis-tic indicators in the 19761992 census and instead adopted the criterion of self-identifi cation (most probably taken from Barth), which claims to be more appropriate in regions like the Amazon


where, despite the populations continued practice of ethnicity and the prevalence of ethnic forms of political representation, linguis-tic loss is notorious.22 However, by ignoring the fact that the en-tire history of the urban population of the Amazon, the Oriente, and the Chaco is rooted in the colonial Jesuit missions and that, in addition, the asentamientos caucheros (rubber plantations) had a large population categorized as indigenous, the census designers inexplicably excluded populations of two thousand or more inhab-itants from the census. An error of such magnitude produced a fa-tal miscounting of the indigenous population in the lowlands, a sit-uation that resulted in the discrediting of this instrument as offi cial data for the purposes of municipal reform. In an attempt to correct this error, the creators of the census based their recalculation of the indigenous population in these three lowland regions on linguis-tic indicators. They determined that in departments such as Beni, where the degree of linguistic loss reaches more than 50% (this average would surely be higher if it had included the urban com-ponent), the level of underestimation could not be corrected. These problems of method and interpretation had profound implications for defi ning the rights of indigenous peoples. For example, the results of the census are not compatible with the territorial scheme enforced by municipalities that articulate urban and rural constitu-encies, and in which indigenous populations, above all in the areas associated with historical Catholic missions, have been an integral part of the urban structure for centuries. The census also does not allow an accurate calculation of the impact of the migration pro-cess on rural indigenous populations, which, in particular, affects women (through the migration of indigenous women workers as urban domestics, the feminine leadership of the household in areas of majority masculine labor immigration, etc.). Indigenous women are also problematically made invisible by the skewed defi nitions in the census of the head of the household, defi nitions that fail to recognize womens contributions to the complex productive and reproductive activities of indigenous households. Perhaps the only (albeit dubious) benefi t that we can ascribe to Censo Indgena de Tierras Bajas is the gift of a meticulous inventory of the lumber and forest resources in regions of tropical forest that fall under


indigenous control. We can only hope that those interested in un-derstanding these results will not solely be the loggers and corpora-tions that swarm these forests.

We are now able to elaborate fully the idea that informs this section. The Censos de Poblacin y Vivienda (Cenuses of Popula-tion and Housing) of 1976 and 1992, and the Censo Indgena de Tierras Bajas, the two principal political state instruments in the area of population and development, subtly infl uenced the forma-tion of the literate public opinion in Bolivia in the very defi nition of the nature and scope of the notion of indigenous rights. In this way, though the censuses have documented the well-known growth in bilingual urban and rural populations, the Educational Reform focuses principally on monolingual communities that are isolated in rural areas and is able to ignore the demands for linguis-tic recuperation that support intercultural and bilingual education for all. In the same way, the Popular Participation Act (1994) did not recognize indigenous territories consolidated at the beginning of 1990 and indirectly excluded those ethnic organizations from participating in urban municipal reforms (monopolized by the Jun-tas Vecinales, or urban neighborhood councils). In the traditional Andean zones, the demands of federations of ayllus and of other groups organized around ethnicity were blocked by political par-ties and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).23 Finally, indigenous women are further alienated by this space of mediation in which literate culture, Western notions of develop-ment, and patron-client politics impose a patriarchal political cul-ture in which they fi gure solely as symbolic elements of transaction within dominant (male) strategies of power.

Thus the states narrative of indigeneity, via the census informa-tion and through the unconscious desires of the dominant minor-ity, represents the Indians as a diminishing entity, with indigenous languages in blatant and quick deterioration and with the rural world persistently depopulating. All of these factors contributed to narrow the consciousness as a majority that informed the political consolidation of the Kataristas and Indianistas, who in the 1990s began to acquire a minority consciousness.24 During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the diminishing representation of


the demographic potential and autonomous politicization of indig-enous communities was translated into a loss of historical memory, an erosion of cultural self-esteem, and a series of subaltern charac-teristics that led them to occupy a subordinated role in the public sphere, thus perpetuating their discrimination and exclusion.

The New Indianity and the Plurinational State Reforms

Intense mobilizations of indigenous and popular sectors began in 2000 and continued with varying intensity until the overthrow of interim president Carlos Mesa G. and the call for new elections for December 2005. This complex and convulsive process revealed the collapse of neoliberal promises of equity and market democra-cy, and the emerge of a new style of ethnicity politics, represented by the powerful coca producers movement in the Chapare and the leadership of Aymara union leader Evo Morales. These pro-cesses also bear the imprint of deeper trends in population move-ments and ideological identifi cations. As we can see in the 2001 census, the linguistic indicators of ethnicity were supplemented by self-identifi cation, a trend thatcontrary to the expectations of the census designersconfi rmed and expanded the recuperation of a majority status. Speakers of a native languagewhether monolin-gual or bilingualhad slightly increased to become 49% of the total population, but in spite of an accelerated urbanization pro-cess, the self-identifi cation with one or other native people rose to 62% of the population. Ethnicity, no doubt, had become a conten-tious political arena, and its state effect was to reverse the trend of marginalization that was so blatant during the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. But on the other hand the predominance of partisan politics, including the MAS (Movement toward Social-ism, led by Evo Morales) has narrowed and subordinated Indian demands and turned them into cultural inputs to the new mestizo elite revolutionary project, which partially incorporated them into the new laws, in the restricted form of Indigenous Autonomies, enclosed in thirty-six TCOs (Original Community Lands) recog-nized by the new Agrarian Reform Act (Ley INRA) and the new Political Constitution of the Plurinational State (February 2009).


The localization of ethnicity in bounded rural territories leaves aside the political imprint of urban ethnicity and multiethnic low-land settlements. Even the coca-growers movement is deprived of ethnic identity, since the lowland areas where it was born and ex-panded to become a fundamental political force are not part of the Indigenous Autonomous Territories recognized by the new constitution. In spite of the radical discourses around decoloniza-tion and a process of change that is being put forth by the new government, fundamental aspects of the neoliberal reforms (par-ticularly the Agrarian Reform and the Popular Participation Acts) have largely remained untouched.

Womens Rights or the Limits of Territoriality

Up to this point, by way of an exegesis of the normative produc-tion and political discourse of the movements denominated as in-digenous, both modern and historical, I have produced a reading of how gender in the lettered masculine world is translated into the laws and state practices of Bolivia. I end this article with some ideas about the implications of all of these processes for women, be they indigenous, cholas, or birlochas, or even for those who belong to the lettered world of the mestizo elite.

The situation of women in Bolivia is shaped by a broader co-lonial situation: the Western cultural and ideological matrix is installed within the state, guiding its philosophy and policy. This matrix names, enumerates, and oppresses the diverse peoples and native cultures of Bolivia, inserting them into a hierarchy based on the Western assessment of their relative humanity. Western co-lonial ideology deems racial and cultural others semi-human, marginalizing them for their differences and constructing them as subservient subjects, originally bequeathed to the republic as spoils of the conquest from which it was born. Even the most advanced spaces of enlightened modernity and the new mechanisms of popu-list mediation grafted onto the state from the 1950s onward have reproduced these structures of colonial oppression. Yet, despite more than a half century of homogenization through a constantly renovated pact of citizenship with the state, Bolivia contains a pan-


orama of ethnicity whereby entire populations have, despite their insistence in the fi erce negation of their ethnicity, paradoxically transformed this same act of negation into a new mark of ethnicity. This is the case of the Andean cholaje. Despite their adoption of the three-piece suit, private property, and many other Western cul-tural characteristics, the cholo remains subaltern precisely because he practices such strategies of cultural mimesis and social climbing that end up reinforcingby way of caricaturethe dominant cul-tural world and its appearance of equality.

The cholajes adoption of and containment by their own mi-metic practices illuminates the situation of women in Bolivia. One of the clearest examples of the stigmatization of cultural mimesis has been the evolution, from the eighteenth century, of the fash-ion of the chola pacea as studied by Rossana Barragn.25 Initially conceived as a strategy that would allow indigenous migrants to gain social mobility and access the mercantile dominant culture, the practice of wearing the pollera (wide skirt), the Manila shawl, and the Borsalino hat (adopted in the nineteenth century) has been converted into a form a resistance against cultural assimilation, as the clothing items have come to be seen as emblems of an op-pressed and subaltern ethnicity. However, this attempt to re-ap-propriate the markers of the dominant culture, to don them with a difference, remains ambiguous: it both highlights and negates dif-ferences of gesture and conduct, but it also masks the assimilation-ist aspirations and self-perceptions as mestizas or middle-class women, which are projected onto the working classes as a whole. I have studied these processes elsewhere in an attempt to trace the colonial construction of identities, particularly the identities of the cholas and mestizas of contemporary Bolivia.26 What interests me here is this question from the perspective of rights, under-stood through historical examples, to which I prefer to adhere. The following analysis draws on many ideas that have previously been expressed in different forms.

Migrant womens (cholas or birlochas) construction as a de-graded space of mestizaje within the structure of the urban la-bor market constitutes a prime example of the phenomenon I have been discussing: propelled by their desire to mirror the Westernized


dominant elite, they end up representing the characteristics of urban modernity in an archaic and caricatured form. No doubt the segre-gation and exclusion imposed upon these intermediate classes con-tribute to the new fi xity of borders surrounding the cholas, strand-ing them halfway along the path to Westernization and citizenship. Paradoxically, the most visible trace of this process appears in the cholas attempts to render their own culture invisible and clandes-tine. As a study by Elizabeth Peredo on market women in La Paz shows, they pass on to their children this negation of their ances-try, estranging the next generation from their rural cultures of ori-gin.27 Historians have suggested that these spaces associated with mestizaje,of scaled contempt or linked exclusions,have been constituted through the ethnic uprooting, the shift in category of origin, marriage to men of higher status, and many other prac-tices.28 However, none of the indigenous rights discussed above actually addresses the specifi c problems these women face: labor discrimination, the lack of educational opportunities, and the frus-trations of citizenship that affects precisely these emergent and up-ward-climbing middle rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

The experience of ethnicity as it is lived daily in the highlands, valleys, and lowlands (as well as in the cities) undoubtedly has much to do with the structural forces that shape the labor, mar-riage strategies, and cultural perceptions of hundreds of thousands of women. The already discussed study of four different ethnic set-tings in Bolivia (three rural and one urban), which I compiled in 1996, has shown how the invisible work of women contributes to the reproduction of ethnicity, even in urban and mercantile con-texts where they occupy the center of a wide social network that enables the survival of the households and the family businesses of migrant families. In this third labor shift, women complete aynis (reciprocity arrangements), nourish social and fi ctive kinship rela-tions of compadrazgo, and organize businesses or workshops on the basis of circuits of nonmonetary labor and produce exchange. The work time devoted to these practices permits not only eco-nomic survival but also cultural reproduction and the prosperity of their businesses and families, despite the barrier of discrimina-tion that weighs against them. In all of these contexts, womens


productive labor and enterprise does not enjoy social respect and recognition, eclipsed by the avatars of the migration adventure of men, as the classic study by Alb et al. showed some three decades ago.29 As Lucila Criales has documented, women resist this patri-archal model by returning to the countryside, where they convert the patron saint celebration and its mark of origin into a fl eeting scenario of feminine empowerment, extravagantly spending mon-ey and accumulating symbolic prestige. These acts both legitimate and compensate for the profound inequalities of everyday life, where the shortcomings and sufferings they experience as cholas earn them the cultural contempt of the dominant urban society.30 Until now, no indigenous organization has reclaimed these settings as terrains of struggle, and there is no notion of indigenous rights that applies to these women, who in the state imaginary exist only as mestizas.

It is possible to observe the same phenomenon from a differ-ent angle by reviewing the history of labor union formation in the valleys of Cochabamba in the decades following the revolution of 1952 and the agrarian reform of 1953.31 This history confi rms the systematic exclusion of women from the new public spaces con-structed in the heat of unionization and the political mobilization of the peasantry (sindicatos campesinos). Both in Mizque and in Tiraque, the political process unleashed by agrarian mobilization ended up blocking the entrance of women to the public sphere and converting the labor unions, armed militias, and other organisms into spaces of state patron-client relations and masculine media-tion. Paradoxically, it was the secular mercantile and social activ-ity of the women of Cochambambaselling chicha, engaging in long-distance trade and other activitiesthat permitted the men to dedicate the majority of their time to union organization and party politics.32 The exaltation of the chichera (chicha bar) and of the maternal virtues of the women (across the urban-rural con-tinuum of mestizaje) as well as the popular myth of matriarchy prevalent in the valleys, demonstrates the perversity of the lettered image of the citizen and its real consequences for women: when it came to the relentless exploitation of mothers and grandmothers, the unionist and itinerant workers of the valleys consented to a


degraded form of citizenship that was grafted onto the masculine and patron-client networks of the dominant party. Shame and self-loathing are in this way transferred onto women, who represent rural backwardness, a pre-mercantile economy, and the familys barbarity of the past.

But perhaps there is an even more vivid example of ethnic seg-regation and discrimination in the Andean region of Boliviaal-though this exists as well in other regionsand this is the remuner-ated domestic service, which characterizes the structure of urban employment in our country. According to a study published by the Center for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), the contribution of this population to the urban EAP (economi-cally active population) has grown, from 5.0% in 1985 to 6.2% in 1991, reaching 47,909 domestic workers. Of them, 90% were women and 70% were migrants, that is, indigenous women who were born in rural communities and speak native languages. Aside from domestic work, which provides a salary that usually does not reach 50% of the normal minimum wage, the urban economy pro-vides few spaces for indigenous migrant womens labor.33 Certainly a situation like this exacerbates gender segregation in the society as a whole and alludes to the profound inequalities that have up to now been ignored by radical feminist thinking in Bolivia. One of these inequalities, in my opinion, is the postponement of the debate over paternal and male domestic co-responsibilities made possible by the existence of these other women at home, who carry the burden of the womens second labor shift. What remains out-side of the discussion regarding this transaction between women in distinct positions of economic power and cultural origin is the representation of domestic labor as naturally belonging to the feminine sex. Although this naturalization is something that femi-nist theory has contested for many decades, in Bolivia it continues to be nearly a taboo subject due to the invisible labor of domestic women workers, who work in the households of even the most radical feminist activists and ideologues.

In the context of the debate about indigenous rights, the ex-amples given in this section point to a situation in which even the most basic human rights are denied to people on the grounds of


their gender and ethnicity. While situations like the low level of salaries for domestic work, the duplication of the burden of labor by women who are heads of households, and selective emigration affect indigenous communities in diverse regions of the country as much as their migratory fl ow to the cities, these populations have yet to fi nd a space for their demands within ethnic organizations. These organizations have confi ned their demands to a defi nition of collective rights based on territory, which, paradoxically, lim-its the very demands of indigenous populations that live outside these narrowly defi ned spaces. While salutary in the moment in which it emerged, the indigenous struggle for territory has been an important site of interpellation to the Bolivian state. Neverthe-less we continue to believe that the issue of dignity has not been addressed in full, as it is expressed in a plurality of contexts, both urban and rural, in which ethnicity is associated with the loss of prestige and lack of fulfi llment of human rights. The territorial-ization of indigenous rights has prevented indigenous women and their communities from escaping the ethnic straightjacket embed-ded in the liberal conception of rights, a discourse that produced a narrow literate and masculine space that erases numerous ques-tions of human and citizenship rights implicit in the practices of indigenous mobilizations.

Perhaps it is because neither the state nor indigenous organiza-tions have taken up a politics of ethnicity capable of presenting alternatives for women that they have been unable to suffi ciently advance the gains achieved by the recognition of the multiethnic character of the nation in the new Constitucin Poltica del Estado and other similar measures.34 In the same way, as long as indigenous organizations do not recognize female migrantswho work in the degraded conditions of middle-class urban homesas members of their people and communities, their own notion of rights will re-main limited and fragmented. As long as ethnic organizations are not capable of facing the phenomena of gendered oppression that is unleashed by the emigration of male labor force to the city or to the zafra, and the increasingly extended problem of indigenous households led by women, the notion of human rights will remain empty rhetoric.35 If this is the case, we will have contributed to the


prolongation of the states aspiration to transform the conscious-ness of a Bolivian indigenous majority held in the 1980s into a consciousness of a minority that lives only off the crumbs of de-velopment and the unequal ecological and economic transactions within the mestizo-dominated power structure, which has not sub-stantially changed with the recent electoral events leading to the ascent of the fi rst indigenous president. The implicit corollary to this entire argument points to the need for a simultaneous decolo-nization of both gender and indigeneity, of the quotidian and the political, by way of a theory and a practice that links alternative and pluralist notions of citizenship rights with rights inhering in traditional indigenous laws and customs, as much in legislation as in the everyday and private practices of the people.

Notes

1. The term cholo/a is used in Bolivia, generally, to refer to indigenous people who have emigrated to urban areas and live somewhere be-tween the cultural spaces of mestizo and indigenous identity. The term birlocha refers specifi cally to chola women who adopt the dress style and customs of what Rivera refers to in jest as the refi nadas, the upper-class and formally educated women associated with urban spaces.

2. See the preface to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

3. Rossana Barragn, El espritu de la modernidad boliviana: Ciuda-dana, infamia y jerarqua patriarcal, paper given at the Seminar on Nation, Ethnicity and Citizenship, organized by Sephis (South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development), New Delhi, February 68, 1996. Hereafter cited as EM.

4. It is hard to believe that this law remained in force until the 1995 reforms.

5. Juridical norms like the patria potestad are the living incarnation of an even more archaic and patriarchal law, implicit in the multiple normative products of colonial Catholicism, as has been shown by Barragn in EM.

6. The notion of habitus has been used here in the sense proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in El Sentido Prctico, trans. lvaro Pazos (Barce-lona: Taurus, 1991). Published in English as The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).


7. The ayllu was the basic political and social unit since precolonial times. It refers to a (sometimes discontinuous) territory where people are tied together through kinship and symbolic networks. It encom-passes religious, symbolic, and inheritance practices peculiar to the people who belong to it. It loosely could translate as community in English but goes well beyond the meaning of this term.

8. See Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita, Aspectos de gnereo en Qaqachaka: Maternidad, textiles y prcticas textuales alternativas en los Andes, in Ser mujer indgena, chola o birlocha en la Bolivia post-colonial de los 90, ed. Silvia Rivera (La Paz: Subsecretara de Asuntos de Gnero, Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, 1996). This edited vol-ume is cited hereafter as SM.

9. Compare with Denise Arnold, Hacer al hombre a imagen de ella: Aspectos de gnero en los textiles de Qaqachaka, Chungar: Revista de Antropologa Chilena 26.1 (1994): 79115.

10. See, for example, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Mestizaje colonial an-dino: Una hiptesis de trabajo, in Violencias encubiertas en Bolivia, vol. 1: Cultura y poltica, ed. Xavier Alb and Ral Barrios (La Paz: CIPCA, 1993) and Zulema Lehm and Silvia Rivera, Los artesanos lib-ertarios y la tica del trabajo (La Paz: Ediciones del THOA, 1988).

11. Caciques and kuraqas refer to leaders of indigenous ayllus who held local political power in the time of the Inka. Though this power was severely eroded in the colonial period, it remained substantially strong until the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century.

12. See, for example, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, La expansin del lati-fundio en el Altiplano boliviano: Elementos para la caracterizacin de una oligarqua regional, Avances 2 (1978).

13. Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), El indio Santos Marka Tula, cacique principal de los ayllus de Qallapa y apoderado general de las comunidades originarias de la Repblica (La Paz, Ediciones del THOA, 1988), hereafter cited as IS; Carlos Mamani, Taraqu 18661935: Masacre, guerra y renovacin en la biografa de Edu-ardo L. Nina Qhispi (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1991), hereafter cited as TM; Leandro Condori and Esteban Ticona, El escribano de los ca-ciques apoderados, Karikinakan Purirarunakan Qillqiripa (La Paz: HISBOL-THOA, 1992).

14. See Frank Salomon, Ancestor Cults and Resistance to the State in Arequipa, 17481754, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 16th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); see also Juan Flix


Arias, Historia de una esperanza: Los apoderados espiritualistas de Chuquisaca, 19361964 (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1994), hereafter cited as HE.

15. Markas were rural towns or pueblos de reduccin where the Indian population was resettled in early colonial times. They loosely corre-sponded to the precolonial federation of ayllus gathered around ritual and political centers.

16. See HE and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Pedimos la revisin de lmites: Un episodio de incomunicacin de castas en el movimiento de caci-ques-apoderados, 19191921 (hereafter cited as PR), Reproduccin y transformacin en las sociedades andinas, siglos XVIXX, ed. Se-gundo Moreno and Frank Salomon (Quito: Abya Yala, 1992).

17. See, for example, IS and PR.18. Mestizaje is defi ned as the notion of racial and cultural mixing, which

consists of the complex ideas surrounding race, nation, and multicul-turalism and their role in nation building.

19. The Katarista political movement, named after Tupac Katari, who led the 1781 indigenous rebellions in and around La Paz, has been a militant indigenous movement born in the late 1960s and largely made up of Aymara nationalists who seek to revitalize Indian auton-omy, culture, and religion. See Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed but Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles among the Aymara and Qhichwa in Bolivia, 19001980 (Geneva: UNRISD, 1986).

20. Mexico and Colombia, for instance, come closer to this model of in-digenous marginality.

21. Xavier Alb, Bolivia plurilinge: Gua para planifi cadores y educado-res (La Paz: UNICEF and CIPCA, 1995), vol. 11:69.

22. Los grupos tnicos y sus fronteras: La organizacin social de las diferencias culturales, ed. Fredrik Barth (Mxico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1976). Published in English as Ethnic Groups and Their Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fre-drik Barth (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

23. Silvia Rivera and THOA, Ayllus y proyectos de desarrollo en el norte de Potos (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1992).

24. A counterpart to the Katarista movement, the Indianista movement developed a more radical vision based on Indian autonomy and the right to self-government.

25. The chola from La Paz, an emblematic icon of subaltern female eth-nicity in Bolivia. See Rossana Barragn, Entre polleras, llicllas y aacas: Los mestizos y la emergencia de la tercera repblica, in


Etnicidad, economa y simbolismo en los Andes: II Congreso Inter-nacional de Etnohistoria, Coroico, ed. Silvia Arze, Rossana Barragn, Laura Escobari, and Ximena Medinacelli (La Paz: HISBOL/IFEA/SBH-ASUR, 1992).

26. See SM and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Diferencia complementarie-dad y lucha anticolonial: Enseanzas de la historia andina (hereafter cited as DC) in 500 aos de patriarcado en el Nuevo Mundo, Clara Leyla Alfonso (Santo Domingo: CIPAF/Red Entre Mujeres, 1992).

27. Elizabeth Peredo, Recoveras de los Andes: La identidad de la chola del mercado: una aproximacin psicosocial (La Paz: ILDI-TAHIPA-MU, 1992).

28. These terms (desprecio escalonado and exclusiones escalonadas in Spanish) come from Tierry Saignes, Los Andes Orientales: Historia de un olvido (Cochabamba: CERES, 1985) and SM, respectively.

29. Xavier Alb, Toms Greaves, and Godofredo Sandval, Chukiyawu, la cara ayamra de La Paz, vol. 1: El paso a la ciudad (La Paz: CIPCA, 1981).

30. Lucila Criales, Mujer y confl ictos socio-culturales: El caso de las migrantes de Caquiaviri en la ciudad de La Paz (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1994).

31. Mara Laura Lagos, Autonoma y poder: Dinmica de Clase y Cul-tura en Cochabamba (La Paz: Plural, 1997), as well as Susan Paulson, Familias que no conyugan e identidades que no conjugan: La vida en Mizque desafa nuestras categoras, in SM.

32. Chicha is an alcoholic drink made from fermented corn or other grains, used for ritual purposes by the Incas, and consumed ritually and socially throughout the Andean region today.

33. ILDIS-CEDLA, Informe Social Bolivia: Balance de indicadores so-ciales (La Paz: ILDIS-CEDLA, 1994).

34. The notion of Indigenous Rights was fi rst introduced in the 1994 Po-litical Constitution of the Bolivian State and was further expanded in the recent constitutional text approved in early 2009.

35. The zafra is the sugar cane harvest. In the last decades this migra-tory process is increasingly oriented toward other countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Spain.

the notion of "rights"

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