STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS

The Crisis of
Multiculturalism
in Latin America
Edited by David Lehmann
Studies of the Americas

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 David Lehmann
Editor

The Crisis of
Multiculturalism in
Latin America
Editor
David Lehmann
Department of Sociology
University of Cambridge
London, United Kingdom

Studies of the Americas

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 FOREWORD

John Gledhill

The essays presented in this book offer penetrating critical analyses of the
consequences of the embrace of multicultural policies by Latin American
states. As David Lehmann points out in his introduction, multicultural-
ism has not ‘caught on’ as an expression in the Spanish and Portuguese
academic literature despite its prevalence in English-language writ-
ing on Latin America. I was myself once publicly scolded by a leading
Mexican scholar for having the temerity to try to bring political and
scholarly debates about multiculturalism in Europe into the same frame
as debates about mestizaje, indigenous rights and autonomy in Latin
America. ‘Latin’ America’s exceptionalism in terms of ratification of
ILO 169 clearly does reflect the specific historical characteristics of the
European colonization of the region, the role of slavery, and its subse-
quent histories of immigration and state formation, despite the impor-
tant national differences that these essays also highlight. Yet it would be
perverse to ignore ways in which developments in Latin America also
reflect the role of development agencies, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), and legal institutions that transcend regional boundaries, and
it is extremely fruitful to think comparatively about the common prob-
lems posed by key processes, such as the construction of ‘indigeneity’, in
culturally and historically distinct settings. The case studies in this book

v
vi FOREWORD

strike the right kind of balance: all are carefully placed in their individual
national historical contexts and strongly ethnographically grounded, but
they never lapse into an unreflective particularism that ignores the transna-
tional or global issues that are pertinent to, or suggested by, the analysis.
This is important because, as the book demonstrates, there are both
scholarly and extra-academic political dimensions to the contemporary
‘crisis of multiculturalism’. An important aspect of the scholarly crisis, dis-
cussed at length in Lehmann’s introduction and touched upon repeatedly
elsewhere in the volume, relates to the difficulties of combining engage-
ment, let alone activism, with the critical distance needed to recognize
contradictions, plus the dilemmas posed by publication of research results,
given that any publicly available academic account of events or representa-
tion of research subjects as individuals and collectivities becomes subject
to appropriation and re-interpretation by other actors in a political field,
including the research subjects’ own intellectuals. As the chapters on Brazil
by Véronique Boyer and Lehmann demonstrate particularly clearly,
anthropologists who work exclusively in the academy may sometimes feel
uncomfortable about the efforts of colleagues who are directly involved
in supporting groups seeking recognition by the state, as expert witnesses,
consultants or producers of surveys or documentary support for land
claims. Even if there is often a case to be made that the ends, in terms of
concrete benefits to real people, justify recourse to means that might be
questioned in terms of other criteria, academics tend to be particularly
nervous about how to deal with the strategic essentialisms and invented
traditions that multicultural politics frequently invoke, not to mention
situations that are less than ennobling for some or all of the subaltern
actors involved. A merit of this book is that it does not shirk the task of
speaking truth, as the authors understand it, to all parties in the conflicts
that it analyses. Yet the authors also show that it is possible, on the basis
of solid ethnographic research, to be realistic about what people want and
why they want it, without diminishing the force of demands for social jus-
tice and dignity that remain urgent despite apparent advances in terms of
state commitment to respecting differences and addressing discrimination
and disadvantage. It is the gaps between apparent aspirations and commit-
ments, on the one hand, and the actual achievements and consequences of
multicultural politics and state policies, on the other, that constitute the
second, and more important, dimension of the current crisis, and the main
focus of this book.
 FOREWORD vii

Many critical analyses have now been offered of the relationships

between the multicultural turn and neoliberal capitalism. It is no accident
that Latin America has figured particularly prominently in these debates,
given Chile’s role as a pioneering laboratory for Chicago-style neoliberal
economics, the subsequent embrace of neoliberal policies by other Latin
American governments, and continuing questioning, both by academics
and activists, of the usefulness of talking about even a limited shift to a
‘post-neoliberal’ phase (Goodale and Postero 2013). Nevertheless, there
is a danger in seeing neoliberalism as the root of all contradictions. It is
instructive, for example, in the light of the insightful discussions of land
claims in post-dictatorship Argentina and Brazil offered in this volume
by Maité Boullousa-Joly and Boyer, respectively, to remember how, in
1972, when Brazil was still firmly in the grip of a military developmentalist
state that strongly suppressed other forms of rural mobilization, a group
of Afro-descendent rural workers in the poor northeastern state of Sergipe
began, with support from the Liberation Theology wing of the Catholic
Church, what by the end of that decade had proved a successful struggle
to be recognized as valid indigenous claimants to lands usurped by their
former masters (French 2004). As Boyer shows, in this as in other mat-
ters, there is a lot that is historically specific to Brazilian political and legal
culture since the restoration of democratic government that we need to
understand in order to appreciate why indigenous and quilombola land
titling is such a tortuous, limited, and today, as the landowner lobby flexes
its muscles in an exceptionally reactionary congress, increasingly fragile,
process. Boyer shows how the situation is further complicated by offi-
cial recognition of other groups which do not belong to either category,
and are, indeed, somewhat fuzzy in definition, with the consequence that
local conditions and inter-group relations shape the choices that claim-
ants make about their preferred identities. This first but not last historical
caveat in my discussion does not, of course, seek to deny the crucially
important relationships that do exist between neoliberalism and multi-
culturalism, starting with the fact that, in cases such as Mexico, there was
a clear tendency for groups that had previously made claims on the state
as campesinos to start doing so as indigenous people following the con-
stitutional changes of the early 1990s that combined declaring an end of
the revolutionary land redistribution programme with recognition of the
‘pluricultural’ foundations of the Mexican nation (Overmyer-Velázquez
2011).
viii FOREWORD

Some anthropologists, such as Charles Hale, have focused very pro-

ductively on the snares of neoliberal governmentality and their capacity to
disempower ‘too radical’ indigenous movements that combine demands
for resource control with demands for the right to maintain different
cultural practices. In his work on Guatemala, Hale also highlighted the
‘backlash’ reactions of existing local elites to the political advance of the
kinds of ‘permitted’ indigenous actors with which central government
and major economic power holders feel able to deal (Hale 2006). As
Nancy Fraser (Fraser 1995) points out, backlash is a general problem, to
which I will return later. Yet it is important to keep the impacts of neo-
liberal capitalist economics as firmly in view as neoliberal techniques of
rule. ILO 169 remains the fundamental international legal yardstick for
defining indigenous rights despite its non-ratification by a majority of the
world’s governments, including that of India, the country whose adivasis
constitute the world’s largest number of people recognized as ‘indige-
nous’ by the United Nations, although the Indian government and a sig-
nificant number of Indian anthropologists insist on continuing to use the
British colonial category of ‘tribal’ peoples, also legitimated by ILO 169.
At first sight ILO 169 does look like a radical proposal, and it was cer-
tainly an advance on the ILO’s first intervention in this area, ILO 107. In
contrast to the earlier convention, ILO 169 is anti-assimilationist in terms
of identity and culture. It attributes to indigenous peoples distinctive con-
tributions to the ‘social and ecological harmony of humankind’, an idea
that has become central, for example, to the promotion of ‘Living Well’
as an alternative development paradigm in the current official Bolivian
model of indigeneity discussed in depth in Andrew Canessa’s chapter, and
more importantly, perhaps, insists that indigenous groups have a right to
be consulted on any development plans, national as well as local, which
would directly affect them. Implementation of plans should be based on
‘free, prior and informed consent’ and indigenous ‘spiritual relationships
with land and territories’ should be ‘respected’. Yet the convention does
also recognize the right of states, or of private companies granted conces-
sions by states, to exploit mineral and other subsoil resources, one of the
biggest bones of contention in contemporary relationships between indig-
enous groups and states in Latin America. ILO 169 is in fact a two-edged
instrument, for it also grants states the right to forcibly relocate people and
intervene in disputes over land, and, perhaps most tellingly of all from the
point of view of detecting neoliberal capitalist hidden agendas, establishes
 FOREWORD ix

procedures through which indigenous people can alienate their lands or

transmit their rights outside their community.
None of this is surprising. Guy Standing, who himself worked at the
ILO from 1975 to 2006, argues that since the USA renewed its participa-
tion in the ILO in 1980, after a period of withdrawal whose underlying
motive was to ensure that the organization did not constitute a threat to
the neoliberal restructuring of labour markets and ‘rebalancing’ of the
relationship between capital and labour that began in a highly repressive
manner in Chile, the organization has failed to make a convincing adjust-
ment to the transition from a developing world in which the ‘standard’
to be attained was that of unionized organized labour to a globalized
world whose dominant reality has become flexible and precarious work,
despite its embrace of concepts such as the ‘informal sector’ and ‘decent
work’ (Standing 2008). Standing insists that the 1998 ILO Declaration of
Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work ‘corresponded with a neolib-
eral economic view of protective regulations’ based on ‘negative rights’,
such as banning slavery and ‘the worst forms of child labour’ (Standing
2008: 367). ILO 169 conforms to a similar logic: not only does its weak
regulatory regime rely on governments and private corporations acting in
good faith on matters such as consultations, which is arguably more the
exception than the rule in Latin America, but it also includes more than
enough escape clauses to ensure that the obstacles to capitalist develop-
ment as usual are minimized. This is not to argue that it is totally pointless
for indigenous movements to seek leverage from ILO 169 in making legal
challenges to external attempts to expropriate their land or resources, in
just the same way that they can sometimes leverage company corporate
social responsibility policies with sufficiently strong mobilization and
effective transnational support, although corporations usually prove as
adept as states at managing challenges to the harm they so frequently
cause (Benson and Kirsch 2010). It is simply to say that the legal deck,
including the international arbitration system to which foreign corporate
interests can appeal, is generally stacked against them and that, as Standing
insists, there is no truly positive and empowering alternative model of
development embodied in a neoliberal framework of ‘negative rights’.
It would perhaps be unreasonable to expect more from a body that, as
Standing shows, has had difficulties reinventing itself as an international
development organization and remains relatively marginal in that field.
Another major problem with the mind-set created by contempo-
rary multicultural politics based on respect for difference and the rights
x FOREWORD

of ‘indigenous and tribal peoples’ is that it fosters the reproduction of

historical myths about many of those peoples’ economic lives and social
property relations. Once again, this problem has quite a long history. It
was central to disputes between nineteenth-century colonial administra-
tors before it resurfaced once again within the international development
apparatus, especially the World Bank, as Tania Li (Li 2010) has shown
in a wide-ranging analysis that focuses primarily on Asia and Africa, but
begins with the ‘closed corporate community’ that Eric Wolf showed was
a common community response to perceived external threats during the
colonial period in both Mesoamerica and Java (Wolf 1957). Some lib-
eral colonial officials in Asia favoured a rapid integration of the colonized
into a market-based private property regime and saw dispossession from
the land in the process as beneficial from the point of view of creating
a free labour force that would also be easier to ‘modernize’ culturally.
Other officials who adopted an ‘Orientalist’ reading of the native popula-
tions as radically different from their colonizers in their worldviews and
attitudes to land and territory argued that mass dispossession would risk
social upheaval, given the lack of readiness for ‘development’ that became
central to nineteenth-century European ideas about ‘race’: it would there-
fore be desirable to protect at least a segment of the colonized population
from dispossession through colonial recognition of ‘customary’ common
property regimes and prohibition of land alienation, even when colonizer-
owned plantations and landed estates also played a key role in the colonial
economy. Li carefully documents the frequency with which colonial offi-
cials simply failed to notice how profoundly commoditized the native rural
economy already was, how irksome some more ambitious natives found
colonial tutelage and how important indebtedness related to failure in the
market was in obliging peasants to abandon the land, whatever kind of
social property regime was imposed upon them.
These arguments are also relevant to Latin America. As Li points out,
the sanctions against land sales to outsiders and frequent insistence on
endogamy associated with the closed corporate community, which was
not so much an institution as a strategy that could be deactivated and
reactivated in accordance with the strength of external threats, sometimes
proved effective for a while in limiting processes of internal class differ-
entiation and dispossession. Yet this was far from being universally the
case because indigenous economies were often relatively open and market-
orientated in other ways, and as Wolf himself conceded in his later writ-
ing (Wolf 1986), the economic levelling effect was generally more limited
 FOREWORD xi

than he had originally postulated. Closing the community was also a strat-
egy that could be defeated by the new bureaucratic tactics made possible
by liberal land laws, such as the taxing of undivided communal forests
at rates based on the profits that they would yield if they were exploited
by capitalist logging companies. This burdened indigenous communities
with unpayable tax debts that enabled the state to embargo and auction
off community property (Gledhill 2004).
The transformation of some of Mexico’s communal forests into capital-
ist assets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did lead to the
complete extinction of some indigenous communities, but thanks to inter-
ruption of the process by the 1910 Revolution many lived to fight another
day, under the banner of indigenous rights, as Luiz Vázquez’s chapter in
this book demonstrates. The turn of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies has now brought a new global round of land and natural resource
grabbing whose consequences for ‘indigenous and tribal peoples’ have
often been more devastating than those of the nineteenth century because
local population densities were higher and because the new dispossession
processes targeted precisely those highland and forest regions that had
been left to their own devices up to this point, or even served as regions
of refuge for peasants dispossessed in earlier rounds of capitalist expan-
sion (Li 2010: 395). As dispossession linked to new plantation crops and
mega-projects attracted growing public attention and as indigenous com-
munities mobilized, the World Bank, which had previously been pushing
for full market integration for everyone, rediscovered the protectionist
alternative in the colonial tradition and acknowledged the potential vir-
tues of ‘customary tenure’ and collective rather than individual land rights
in at least some contexts (Li 2010: 397). In doing so, Li argues, the World
Bank also once again tended to embrace an idealized notion of indigeneity
that abstracted from the micro-processes of differentiation and disposses-
sion that arose from the integration of these groups into modern capitalist
markets.
This is a valuable observation, even if it needs to be complemented by
other, and in some cases complementary, stories that explore the role of
state-backed processes of dispossession that today often involve resorting
to the ‘deniable violence’ of cartel gunmen and other kinds of paramilitary
forces, which tends to wear down the will to sustain resistance and instead
provokes out-migration. But what Vázquez’s chapter in this volume
brings to the broader debates is a case study of a region, the Purhépecha
highlands of Michoacán, in which a long history of inter-community con-
xii FOREWORD

flict over land boundaries has resulted in what he argues is an ‘instrumen-

talization’ in local strategies of resource appropriation of the discourses
of indigeneity. His narrative principally refers to a neoliberalized context
in which old corporate structures (but not all forms of patron-client rela-
tions) have been dismantled, leaving the local rural economy in a precari-
ous situation of marketization with a few winners but many more losers.
Some Purhépecha intellectuals have sought to construct an overarching
Purhépecha ‘people’ or ‘nation’, but Purhépecha ethnic politics in prac-
tice is also about using what are often fictitious colonial ‘primordial titles’
to defend the rights of particular communities against their neighbours.
Although organized crime as well as politically connected commercial tour-
ism and fruit and avocado exporting interests have played a role in devel-
opments in this part of Michoacán state, Vázquez is justified in pointing
out that with one exception, this region’s showcase indigenous develop-
ment projects, communal sawmills, have failed, and that when people refer
vaguely to ‘illegal loggers’ they are often referring to other indigenous
people, whilst trying to avoid making this explicit. Entrepreneurialism and
resource competition between leading members of different local commu-
nities during the indigenous rights era has produced precisely the kind of
internal community differentiation that interests Li, and here, as in many
other regions of Mexico, rights asserted in the name of indigenous people
may be claimed at the expense of people who abandoned indigenous for
mestizo identities. Some of those people are relatively poor and their pres-
ent assumed ethnic identity is the result of past dispossession during the
dissolution of some of the colonial indigenous communities of the wider
region, so the issues of social justice posed by recognizing that indig-
enous actors can also be interested in land grabbing are substantial. Many
of us who have studied rural Mexico will feel sympathy with Vázquez’s
insistence that we need to be careful about using the expression ‘social
movement’ in this kind of context. Yet it also seems vital to accept that
there is little historical or comparative novelty in the existence of these
kinds of actions and actors in indigenous communities engaged with colo-
nizing forces and commercial networks, despite the disappointment that
puncturing the myth of what Brazilian anthropologist Alcida Ramos once
called ‘the hyperreal Indian’ causes to activists, NGOs, and their interna-
tional sponsors (Ramos 1994).
The themes of indigenous resistance to resource extraction and indig-
enous participation in the commodity economy are central to the cases of
Bolivia and Ecuador, which at one level seem to embody more positive
 FOREWORD xiii

experiences of multicultural politics and at another level also reflect its

susceptibility to contradiction and crisis, even at its best. Manuela Picq’s
chapter on Ecuador focuses on the now much debated issue of wom-
en’s rights within the framework of indigenous rights. The dilemma at
the heart of the debate is how far respect for cultural difference can be
reconciled with the kinds of aspirations for women’s rights enshrined in
universalist human rights legislation, aspirations that range from issues
such as women’s rights in marriage and divorce to women’s participa-
tion in the public sphere and community organization. Although the issue
of women’s rights has figured prominently in debates about indigenous
rights, similar dilemmas have arisen in countries such as India in which it
has proved complicated to reconcile secular liberal constitutional provi-
sions for equal treatment with recognition of the right to difference of
Muslims (Das 1995). Picq’s story is especially instructive because she is
analysing how what started as a bottom-up initiative gained traction in
Rafael Correa’s Ecuador, despite the scepticism of a lawyer aligned with
the indigenous movement, and could even be seen as significant for the
international level, despite the fact that here, as elsewhere, the practical
consequences for women’s everyday lives of what was gained on paper still
largely remain to be seen.
This is one of the book’s most positive examples of multicultural poli-
tics in practice. Yet both Ecuador and Bolivia have seen conflicts between
(some) social movements that speak for (some) indigenous people and
governments that have embraced projects promising recognition and
empowerment but also argue that the profits from natural resource
extraction are essential to reducing social inequality through redistribu-
tive policies, even if this requires some sacrifices on the part of (some)
indigenous citizens and involves environmental costs. On the environ-
mental arguments, it is interesting that left-wingers such as Bolivia’s
vice-president Álvaro García Linera and right-wingers such as Peru’s for-
mer president Alan García seem equally willing to give foreign corpora-
tions from inside and outside the region the benefit of the doubt on the
grounds that they operate safe technologies responsibly, despite a consid-
erable weight of evidence to the contrary (Bebbington 2009; Gustafson
2013), whilst advocating strong action against those who oppose new
energy and mining projects, a pattern also repeated recently in Ecuador,
as Picq can attest on the basis of personal experience. Yet once again, it is
vital to recognize the complexity of these conflicts. In his chapter in this
volume, Canessa cites John-Andrew McNeish’s analysis of the TIPNIS
xiv FOREWORD

conflict in Bolivia (McNeish 2013), which argues that opposition to the

road was not necessarily so much opposition to ‘development’ as such
but to the pattern of development likely to result from the road’s loca-
tion, a theme that Canessa develops further in his discussion in this book.
McNeish also reminds us that indigenous Bolivians have been involved in
the commodity economy for centuries. Furthermore, in this as in so many
other contexts, indigenous people express a diversity of views about the
extractivist economy itself.
Conflicts of the kind that have emerged in Bolivia and Ecuador in fact
seem inevitable. It is not hard to understand why tensions might emerge
between demands for recognition on the part of groups that feel them-
selves to have been victims of a particular kind of historical injury and the
demands of other groups that seek improvements to their material living
standards but find it more difficult to base their demands on possession
of a stigmatized identity. Ironically, as Lehmann points out in his discus-
sion of affirmative action in Brazil, those who are most obsessed with
a militant racialized politics of blackness today are very often upwardly
mobile people responding to the discovery that glass ceilings impede their
career prospects. It would be a mistake to think that their world view is
shared by the majority of the people whose poverty is ‘blackened’ by their
residence in a favela (and who will today more likely be members of an
Evangelical church than adepts of candomblé). In Bolivia, timeless visions
of indigeneity anchored in much criticized but resilient rural ‘Andean
utopias’, and opposition to the development of natural gas exploitation
premised on those visions, have little to say to the millions of indigenous
Bolivians whose livelihoods are constructed in the informal economies
of urban centres where infrastructure and climate change-exacerbated
environmental problems are severe, but radically different from those of
rural areas (Fabricant 2013). At this point it is worth reminding ourselves
of the punchline of a now classic argument of 20 years ago about the
possible relationships between a politics of recognition and a politics of
redistribution.
In her discussion of the dilemmas of combining a redistributive poli-
tics aimed at reducing the growing socio-economic inequalities of an
era in which socialism seemed to have lost its allure with the demands
for recognition of ‘difference’ on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, race,
gender and sexuality that seemed to have supplanted class interest as the
principal basis for political mobilization and demands for justice, Fraser
offered her readers a four-celled matrix that related her two general kinds
 FOREWORD xv

of justice, redistribution and recognition, to two general kinds of remedy,

affirmation and transformation (Fraser 1995). The combination of redis-
tribution and affirmation corresponds to the liberal welfare state, and the
combination of recognition and affirmation to what Fraser called ‘main-
stream multiculturalism’. The problem with affirmative remedies is that
they support group differentiation and provoke ‘backlash misrecognition’
(encapsulated in familiar expressions of hostility against ‘the undeserving
poor’ and ‘special privileges for indigenous people’). The combination
of transformative remedies with redistribution represented by a socialist
programme of ‘deep restructuring of relations of production’, in con-
trast, could reduce social inequality without creating ‘stigmatized classes
of vulnerable people perceived as beneficiaries of special largesse’ (Fraser
1995: 85). The final cell in Fraser’s matrix, where recognition combines
with transformative remedies, also promises to undermine rather than
enhance group differentiation by deconstructing the underlying ideo-
logical as well as material basis for unjust treatment. In the case of ‘race’,
for example, liberal affirmative action does not transform the deep struc-
tures of racialized labour markets and the corresponding efforts of black
people to assert the positive value of their identities tend to reproduce
the binary model on which racial stratification in the USA rests. Afro-
American expressions of ‘cultural nationalism’ are also highly productive
of ‘backlash misrecognition’. Fraser therefore argues for a deconstructive
anti-racism which seeks to replace hierarchical racial dichotomies with
‘demassified and shifting networks of multiple intersecting differences’
(Fraser 1995: 91).
Fraser is clearly thinking principally about the USA in developing her
argument. Lehmann’s broad-ranging discussion of the social as well as
academic debates about race and affirmative action in Brazil provides
this book’s readers with a survey of the strident controversies related to
alleged efforts to import US models, including US models for anti-rac-
ist action and the politics of reparations, into the Brazilian context, as
well as the long-established debates about what may be ‘different’ about
‘race’ in Brazil. Yet the final part of Fraser’s analysis has some affinity
with arguments, also touched upon by Lehmann in his introduction, that
‘hybridity’ or ‘mestizaje’ offers an escape from the strategic essential-
isms and strong forms of group differentiation that frequently become
central to the politics of recognition. In discussing the issues in terms
that reflect the influence of US Latino and Black Atlantic scholarship as
well as debates on Latin America, Peter Wade has explored the differ-
xvi FOREWORD

ence between a ‘roots’ version of hybridity and mixing, in which there is

a simple syncretism between two pre-existing wholes, and essentialisms
can therefore easily be reproduced, and a ‘routes’ version that emphasizes
the complexity of diasporic networks and the encounters between subal-
terns with different cultures and origins (Wade 2005). Wade concludes
that in the case of Latin American mestizaje, even when a ‘routes’ model
of mixing generates the notion that a mestizo person is a mosaic of dis-
tinct racialized elements, thereby militating against essentialized notions
of identity, in their everyday lives people still think ‘in terms of roots
and racial origins’ and may think about some of the particular elements
that they associate with their identities in essentialist ways that reinforce
existing racial hierarchies and stereotypes (Wade 2005: 257). Historically
speaking, Latin American mestizo identities are no more fixed and eternal
than indigenous (or ‘Indian’) identities (which tended to be most sig-
nificant for action in their most localized forms prior to the development
of modern indigenous movements, such as Pan-Mayanism, and official
representation of indigenous interests). The social and cultural meanings
of being a mestizo and the place of mestizos within social hierarchies
vary within countries through time and between different countries in the
same historical periods (De la Cadena 2005). Wade’s line of argument is,
however, consistent with Fraser’s own original emphasis on the need to
look beyond intellectual abstractions and political programmes to analyse
the actually existing subjectivities of grassroots actors in terms of the pro-
cesses that shape them at various different levels.
The punchline of Fraser’s conclusions was that ‘both deconstructive
anti-racist cultural politics and socialist anti-racist economic politics are
far removed from the immediate interests and identities of most people
of colour, as these are currently constructed’ (Fraser 1995: 91, emphasis
added). One of the achievements of the present book is to add original
new insights to our understanding of the social as well as the political and
legal processes that lie behind the processes of constructing.
Boullosa-Joly’s chapter on recent processes of ethnogenesis in
Argentina cuts through the smokescreen of the charges of ‘inauthen-
ticity’ that are so frequently levelled against rural workers seeking land
rights as indigenous people in this kind of context—and often not simply
by landowners with a direct vested interest in the matter—to help us to
understand how and why social actors seek to take advantage of the kinds
of changes in political opportunity structures that have resulted from the
Argentine state’s recognition of its ethnocidal history. It does so through
 FOREWORD xvii

careful contextualization of local social and political action and compari-

son of the effects of contexts, in a way that does not romanticize the
protagonists but does allow us to see how the ends of social justice may
be served by providing rural workers with the opportunity to make claims
for restitution on the basis of a colonial experience. The crucial test is
whether multiculturalist remedies for some constitute injustice for others
or enhance overall social well-being.
Canessa paints his discussion of Bolivia on a much broader canvass,
in keeping with the predominance of self-identified indigenous people in
that country in contrast to their decidedly minority status in Argentina.
But he also uses comparisons between different sub-national ethnographic
contexts in developing a fine-grained analysis of how the government of
Evo Morales has made a generic or, as Canessa puts it, homogenizing,
model of indigeneity the basis for a process of state (re)formation that
is comparable in its political logic to earlier uses of mestizaje in national
state-building. This takes us even further beyond sterile debates about
authenticity in terms of understanding the political effectivity of ways of
being indigenous that are not rooted in localities, landholding communi-
ties, and their putative cultures and usos y costumbres. Although current
tensions between indigenous groups in Bolivia are often seen in terms
of conflicts between highland and lowland groups, Canessa argues that
this is too simple an opposition to capture contemporary realities and
that the deeper tension is now between ‘territorialized’ and ‘deterritorial-
ized’ indigenous groups, the latter including coca-growing Aymara and
Quechua colonists who have moved from the highlands to the lowlands
but, Canessa shows, no longer identify with the lifeways of their commu-
nities of origin, as well as the residents of major urban settlements such
as the sprawling suburb of El Alto overlooking La Paz. It is worth noting
that it is not simply the state that Morales and his Movement for Socialism
have built that has resorted to a generic, deterritorializing, vision of indi-
geneity: this kind of construction was also important for the wider polit-
ical project of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, even if that
movement is now principally focused on building autonomous communi-
ties locally, and under relatively adverse circumstances, in Chiapas. In both
cases, we are talking about an indigeneity that can make some sense to
people in different class positions and living in urban situations. In prin-
ciple, generic indigeneity should transcend the localism associated with
territorially anchored identities, and thereby also transcend part of the
logic of difference that divides indigenous groups amongst themselves. Yet
xviii FOREWORD

as Canessa shows, although Bolivia’s deterritorialized model of indigene-

ity has facilitated struggles to wrest economic and political power from the
hands of white and mestizo elites at national level, this ‘national’ model
of indigeneity tends to exclude and marginalize the kinds of indigenous
Bolivians whose everyday cultural practices are most ‘different’. In Bolivia,
where economic good times seem to have reconciled even the formerly
antagonistic elites of Santa Cruz to Morales’ ‘multipluri’ state, the chal-
lenges to reconciling recognition of all with socio-economic justice remain
considerable.
As Lehmann notes in the introduction, the ‘decolonization’ of Latin
America might be best promoted by a fully ‘intercultural’ model, in which
‘white’ citizens would, for example, encourage their children to learn
indigenous languages (Gustafson 2009). For the moment such a utopia
still seems largely out of reach, and multicultural politics and policies may
themselves create obstacles to its realization. I once interviewed a mes-
tizo landowner in a community on the Pacific Coast of Michoacán whose
wife was one of the few residents of his village descended from its origi-
nal indigenous inhabitants, who had mostly been dispossessed through
an insidious and piecemeal land grab by members of the husband’s own
group, cattle herders from another region. Ruefully reflecting on the
rising fortunes of political and economic leaders from the local villages
that had preserved their indigenous identities, and expressing resentment
about the targeted scholarships that indigenous children now received to
pursue higher education, he concluded with a strong dash of not very
optimistic realism: ‘Well, we used to screw them, so I guess it’s their turn
to screw us.’ Leaving violence related to mining and generalized extortion
by what many indigenous people see as ‘politically authorized’ crime to
one side, there is certainly plenty of ‘screwing’ going on in the economic
life of this region, which replicates a problem that Vázquez identifies in the
Purhépecha highlands: those who claim to be its ‘original inhabitants’—a
rather complicated claim given the high degree of disorganization and
reorganization of native societies that followed the Spanish invasion of this
zone—now have opportunities to express their ‘difference’ from the even
more disadvantaged indigenous migrants who come up from Oaxaca state
to work in regional agribusiness.
Yet things do not always have to be this way, and the ‘differences’
that multiculturalism is in danger of reinforcing rather than transcending
sometimes turn out to be quite insubstantial, from a cultural historian’s
perspective, precisely because there has always been an unscripted two-
 FOREWORD xix

way, intercultural exchange going on in many places. Mestizaje often has

little to do with ‘race mixing’. As this book shows, ethnic identities often
remain malleable and negotiable despite the violence of much of Latin
America’s history. Lehmann is justified in concluding that all the chap-
ters in the book show that ‘indigenous and race-based mobilization has
brought about significant changes’ even if ‘they may not always be the
changes intended and they may not be particularly egalitarian’. The book
does not suggest there are easy solutions to the dilemmas posed by the
current crisis of multiculturalism. Yet it does explore the causes of that
crisis in a searching way, underscoring both the need to distribute the
benefits of mobilization beyond the activists and leaders who succeed in
establishing institutional niches (or personal business opportunities) for
themselves in the worlds that neoliberal multiculturalism creates, and also
the need for those benefits to be material in the sense that they address
questions of livelihood, income and employment within a framework of
generalized social dignity and mutual respect for the ‘other’.

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——— (2013) “Amid Gas, Where Is the Revolution?” NACLA Report on the
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The TIPNIS Effect.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 8(2):
221–42.
Overmyer-Velázquez, Rebecca (2011) Folkloric Poverty: Neoliberal
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Ramos, Alcida Rita (1994) “The Hyperreal Indian.” Critique of Anthropology
14(2): 153–71.
Standing, Guy (2008) “The ILO: An Agency for Globalization?” Development
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Wade, Peter (2005) “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience.”
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Wolf, Eric R. (1957) “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor wishes to thank the authors for their commitment and enthusi-
asm, and Maxine Molyneux for her patience and encouragement since the
inception of this project.

Other acknowledgements:

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for permis-

sion to translate and publish ‘El multiculturalismo como arma juridíco:
el uso del concepto “pueblo originario” en los conflctos agro-territoriales
en Michoacán’, published in Luis Vázquez León: Multitud y Distopía,
Mexico City, UNAM, Programa Universitario de Estudios de la Diversidad
Cultural y la Interculturalidad, 2010.
Sage Publications for permission to publish a revised version of Andrew
Canessa: “Conflict, claim and contradiction in the new ‘indigenous’ state
of Bolivia.” Critique of Anthropology 34(2): 153–173 (2014).
Editions ESKA for permission to translate and publish Maité Boullosa-
Joly: ‘Chronique d’une ethnogenèse annoncée – Histoire des luttes
indiennes contemporaines dans le nord-ouest argentin (1970–2014)’,
Problèmes d’Amérique Latine, 92 (2015).

xxi
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1
David Lehmann

2 Multiculturalism as a Juridical Weapon:

The Use and Abuse of the Concept of 
‘Pueblo Originario’ in Agrarian Conflicts
in Michoacán, Mexico 35
Luis Vázquez León

3 Paradoxes of Multiculturalism in Bolivia 75

Andrew Canessa

4 The Ethnicization of Agrarian Conflicts:

An Argentine Case 101
Maité Boullosa-Joly

5 Inventing Rights of Our Own: Women

Transcending the Opposition Between the 
Indigenous and the Universal 133
Manuela Lavinas Picq

xxiii
xxiv CONTENTS

6 The Demand for Recognition and Access to Citizenship:

Ethnic Labelling and Territorial Restructuring in Brazil 155
Véronique Boyer

7 The Politics of Naming: Affirmative Action in

Brazilian Higher Education 179
David Lehmann

Index 223
 CONTRIBUTORS

Maité Boullosa-Joly is an anthropologist and holds the positions of Maitre de

Conférences at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne (France), researcher at the
Centre Universitaire de Recherches Administratives et Politiques de Picardie
(CURAPP-ESS, UNR 7319, CNRS) and research associate at the Mondes
Américains (MASCIPO) research centre which is part of the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Socales (EHESS). She has recently edited a special issue of the
journal Problèmes d’Amérique Latine, (num. 92) on the paradoxes and ambiguities
of multicultural policies in Latin America and a special issue of Cahiers des Amériques
Latines on the subject of ‘Heritage tourism: culture as a resource in the world mar-
ket’. Her current research is on social and environmental conflicts between Indian
communities and multinational mining corporations in north-west Argentina.
Véronique  Boyer is an anthropologist and holds the position of Directrice de
Recherche at the CNRS. She is also Director of the Mondes Américains research
centre (MASCIPO) of the l’École des Hautes Études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
She has specialized in the study of Brazilian Amazonia and her publications include
Les esprits dans la ville (Acmé/RTBF/La Sept, 1991), Femmes et cultes de possession
au Brésil: les compagnons invisibles (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1993) and La renaissance
des perdants: Évangéliques, évangélistes et migrations en Amazonie brésilienne (Paris,
IRD-Karthala, 2008). She has also published extensively in scholarly journals
including the Journal of Latin American Studies. Her current research is on the
social effects of legal classification.
Andrew  Canessa is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Essex and
Director of the University’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He
has been working with indigenous people in Bolivia since 1989, and his current
research is entitled ‘Bordering on Britishness: an oral history of Gibraltarian iden-

xxv
xxvi CONTRIBUTORS

tity in the twentieth century’. His most recent books are Intimate Indigeneities:
Exploring Race Sex and Gender in the Small Spaces of Life (Duke 2012) and, with
Aida Hernández, Género, Complementariedades y Exclusiones en Mesoamerica y los
Andes (IWGIA & Abya Yala 2012). He is also editor of the Journal of Latin
American and Caribbean Anthropology. Andrew is currently working on a book
with Manuela Picq on indigenous people and the state, combining anthropologi-
cal and international relations perspectives.
John  Gledhill is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester. He did his PhD at Oxford University and taught at University College
London and later at Manchester where he was Head of the Department of Social
Anthropology from 1997 to 2001. He has also taught at several Mexican universi-
ties. In 2005–2009 he was Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of
the UK and the Commonwealth, and in 2013 he organized the 17th Congress of
the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in
Manchester. He has also been editor of the journal Critique of Anthropology since
the 1980s. In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He has worked
intensively on Mexico from the early 1990s, and more recently on Brazil, as well
as on theory in anthropology. His principal writings include Casi Nada: A Study of
Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo, (Albany: SUNY Press 1991);
Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. (London: Pluto
2000); and, with Patience Schell, New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and
Mexico. (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Gledhill’s most recent
research has been on the securitization of social issues in Brazil and Mexico, for
which he gained a three year Major Research Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme
Trust, leading to his latest book, The New War on the Poor: The Production of
Insecurity in Latin America (London, Zed Books, 2015).
David  Lehmann is Emeritus Reader in Social Science at Cambridge University.
He has worked for most of his professional life on and in Latin America. His main
works are Democracy and development in Latin America: economics, politics and
religion in the post war period (1990) and Struggle for the Spirit: popular culture
and religious transformation in Brazil and Latin America (1996). With Batia
Siebzehner, he has also written a book on religion and ethnicity in Israel Remaking
Israeli Judaism: the challenge of Shas (2006). In 2007, he began to work on multi-
culturalism and affirmative action policies in Brazil and Mexico leading to publica-
tions in English and Spanish on Intercultural Universities in Mexico and to the
preparation of a book on the campaign for affirmative action in Brazilian higher
education. His current project is entitled ‘Redrawing religious boundaries and
reshaping identities: the case of Messianic Jews and Christians’.
 CONTRIBUTORS xxvii

Luis  Vázquez  León was born in Puebla, Mexico, and has been a social anthro-
pologist for almost 40 years. His first research was with the Kikapú tribe, and he
gained his Licenciatura from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia
(ENAH) with a thesis on the collective ejidos of La Laguna region. In 1977, he
joined the National Institute of Archaeology and History (INAH) and in 1996 he
joined CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología
Social). He gained his Masters from the Colegio de Michoacán with a study of
forestry and ethnic renewal in the Meseta Tarasca. This research foreshadowed
what would become Purhépecha nationalism, a subject on which he has continued
to conduct a long-term study. His doctoral thesis marked a detour through the
anthropology of science using an ethnomethodological approach. It focused on
Mexican archaeology as a scientific tradition—a subject he occasionally revisits in
collaboration with archaeologists. Another topic of his research has been the his-
tory of anthropology and archaeology. Since 2006, he has concentrated on the
study of ethnic conflict in Michoacán state. His main publications have been: Ser
indio otra vez: la purepechización de los tarascos serranos (1992); El Leviatán
Arqueológico. Antropología de una tradición científica en México (1996 and 2003);
Multitud y distopía. la nueva condición étnica en Michoacán (2010); Historia de la
etnología: la antropología sociocultural mexicana (2014).
Manuela Lavinas Picq is Professor of International Relations at the Universidad
San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Her research explores international politics from
peripheries like gender and Indigeneity in Latin America. She has been a Member
of the Institute for Advanced Study (2014), a Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst
College (2011) and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2005). Her publica-
tions have appeared in scholarly journals as well as media outlets. She is co-editor
of Sexualities in World Politics (Routledge 2015) and Queering Narratives of
Modernity (Peter Lang 2015).
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

David Lehmann

The International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples

Convention, no.169, drawn up in 1989, is the most important interna-
tional agreement on the subject of the rights of indigenous peoples. It
has been ratified by every Latin American country except Uruguay and
Cuba, but only by six other countries in the whole world.1 This exception-
alism is rarely remarked upon. It shows that in the past generation, the
states of the region, and their political élites, have been confident enough
to proclaim their pluriethnic character without conveying any sense that
they were endangering their sovereignty or their unified constitution. The
ratification of the Convention by so many of the region’s countries also
reflects, and has brought about, a significant long-term development of
ethnic awareness and a politicization of race and ethnicity which may only
be in their infancy, raising questions which will not go away.
In our different ways, the authors of this book write in a somewhat
critical vein of the policies and practices which governments have adopted
in respect of indigenous and Afro-American peoples, and of the directions
taken by some academic writing on the subject, but the simple fact of
the region’s exceptionalism in recognising its ethnic diversity and implicitly its

I wish to thank Maxine Molyneux, Joanne Rappaport, Peter Wade John Gledhill
and Tanni Mukhopadhyay for their help in writing this Introduction.

D. Lehmann ( )
University of Cambridge, London, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_1
2 D. LEHMANN

history of racial exclusion should not be forgotten. We have come together

because, sharing a basic commitment both to the pursuit of social justice
and also to the rights of people and peoples subject to exclusion and dis-
crimination on account of their racial and ethnic affiliation, we believe
that a renewed discussion is called for in the study of identity and ethnicity
what is also called the politics of recognition. This also applies to the enact-
ment by governments of constitutions, laws and programmes inspired by
identity politics, broadly known as multiculturalism. There are conflicts
between the rights of a society’s population as a whole and indigenous
rights, and between legal systems at the international, national and local or
community level. Tensions can arise when multiple interests legitimately
claim competing protection under legislation designed to support varied
indigenous and Afro-descendant populations offering ‘omnibus’ recogni-
tion to them in general, but not the same recognition to them all. The
scholarly enterprise itself may be in tension if researchers’ commitment
to a cause or to particular movements draws them to silence some things
and emphasize others, and sometimes even to possess information they
would rather not have. Problems of naming arise when populations find
themselves at odds with state agencies or with each other in the very des-
ignation of their own identity as in the case of the Mam people of Chiapas
(Hernández 2003: 68). After some three decades of national and interna-
tional legislation, multicultural legislation and policies have created new
axes of power which in turn create novel inequalities and vested interest.
After Charles Taylor coined the term in the early 1990s, the politics of
recognition generated all sorts of philosophical disputes (Appiah 2005:
135–6 and passim), especially around the notion of authenticity, but his
essay did not confront the question of who is ‘doing the recognizing’, or
who is the ‘agent of recognition’ as distinct from its ‘object’. Since then,
recognition has become a matter of everyday politics and bureaucracy,
raising new questions such as who has the authority to pronounce on
authenticity? how can it be fitted into a framework of social justice? does
recognition involve special dispensations for practices which are the heri-
tage of a particular group, and if so, who has the authority to decide on
what is heritage and what is not? And when it comes to material questions
of land and territory, can the state simply reallocate land to deserving
groups or communities and make that the ‘end of the story’? Our stud-
ies show that reallocation is extremely complicated and such stories seem
never to end.
 INTRODUCTION 3

The two themes of recognition and land tenure are closely connected.
Whether the subject is the reappearance of indigenous groups claiming
their own land back in north-west Argentina or bitter land disputes in the
Mexican state of Michoacán, or bureaucratic redrawings of ethnic bound-
aries in the Brazilian Amazon, strenuous efforts are deployed to demon-
strate and contest the authenticity of land claims based on ancient written
title or on cultural criteria or some combination of the two; in Bolivia, as
described by Andrew Canessa in this volume, Aymara from the highlands
adopt ‘kinship strategies’ to gain access to land in the lowlands by taking
a locally born ‘second wife’. Once land title is at stake, government agen-
cies and sometimes also courts of law are required to make bureaucratic
assessments and decisions on the basis of very unbureaucratic criteria like
self-assigned racial classification or ethnic affiliation. In our Mexican case,
the status of comunero (member of a landowning community with ancient
title), which one might think is a consensual affair, is the subject of bit-
ter legal and political contestation, especially when the land is valuable.
Our themes bring what might otherwise appear to be ethereal discussions
about the construction, or (as Judith Butler would have it) performance,
of identities into the realm of state resource allocation and land tenure,
and these are as important to social justice as a recognition of identity and
culture.

MULTICULTURALISM AND ‘INTERCULTURALIDAD’:
THE MATERIAL AND THE SYMBOLIC
In placing multiculturalism in our title, we have taken some liberties with
the word, using it as shorthand for a range of advocacies including claims
to indigenous land restitution, affirmative action for groups suffering eth-
nic exclusion and racial discrimination, rights to indigenous political and
judicial autonomy and the politics of identity in general. We are taking the
word in its normative sense, so that our subject is not racial, ethnic and
other culture-related coexistence in the region, but rather the crisis of the
ways in which scholarship and politics have constructed and responded to
the region’s multifarious racial and ethnic-based social movements. The
word is used here principally because that is what the Anglo-Saxon and
French literature uses—though in France, the word ‘communautarisme’ is
also used widely: if the book is translated into Spanish or Portuguese, we
might well not use ‘multiculturalismo’ in the title, but the resonance of
‘multiculturalism’ for the readership of a book in English is unavoidable.
4 D. LEHMANN

The possible reasons why ‘multiculturalismo’ has not caught on in

either Spanish or Portuguese-speaking Latin America are in themselves
relevant. In Brazil, where little attention is paid to cultural faultlines as far
as the black population are concerned and where Afro-Brazilian religions
are considered part of Brazilian culture as a whole and not the preroga-
tive of the black population (large numbers of whom are evangelicals and
reject them violently), the word is very rarely heard in connection either
with indigenous peoples or with racial discrimination: the watchwords are
‘rights’ and ‘affirmative actions’. In Spanish-speaking countries, political,
scholarly and policy debate overwhelmingly use the word ‘interculturali-
dad’. It would appear that the word multiculturalism is avoided for some
or all of the following reasons: one is the connotations of ghettoization and
social fragmentation associated with Europe’s immigrant, populations; a
second reason could be that in spite of sometimes fervent advocacy of the
recognition of cultural and collective rights for indigenous peoples, Latin
American advocates, scholars and politicians do not question the unitary
and pyramidal Republican order, and, however vociferous their demands
for autonomy, avoid connotations of political separatism.2 A third possible
reason may be simply that Latin American intellectuals prefer to avoid
terminology coined in Europe and the USA.
To compound the non-correspondence of terminology, whereas in
Europe, the word ‘intercultural’ is largely restricted to the adaptation of
educational curricula and institutions to the needs of some immigrant
populations and their children, in Hispanic America, ‘interculturalidad’
could be described as multiculturalism ‘latino-style’, ranging widely from
proposals for the recognition and institutionalization of distinctive edu-
cational and juridical arrangements tailored to the heritage or culture
of indigenous peoples (usos y costumbres), to a heightened wide-ranging
public profile for ‘indigeneity’ as a category covering multiple linguistic,
territorial and cultural affiliations, and integrationist policies designed
specifically for indigenous people to enable them to participate on equal
terms in the hegemonic culture, in education and in labour markets. In
addition, it is also used in connection with the content of education,
involving notably bilingual education especially at primary levels, and
also including Intercultural Universities (Llanes Ortiz 2009; Schmelkes
2009; Lehmann 2013). Importantly, as defined by the leading authority
on intercultural education Luis Enrique López and by the anthropologist
María Elena García, it also includes a mutual relationship with dominant
cultures by taking the prefix ‘inter’ seriously and including indigenous
languages and culture in all educational curricula—not only in indigenous
 INTRODUCTION 5

education (López and Sichra 2004)—and enabling pupils and students

to attain competence in different cultural and linguistic environments
(García 2005).
The impact of intercultural and multicultural initiatives and also of
movements themselves is as symbolic as it is material. Cultural rights of
indigenous people embodied in interculturalidad are inseparable from
the socio-economic components of universal citizenship, such as income,
employment, general education, environmental preservation or protection
and personal security. The resulting campaigns should awaken opinion to
the vulnerability of indigenous people and to the willingness of govern-
ments to bypass or trample on legislation which is not even specifically
indigenist, like laws requiring prior consultation on mining projects and
properly conducted environmental assessments. From some points of view,
these are primarily issues of survival and human rights and only secondarily
of identity. The great rivers which bring energy and the mineral wealth con-
tained in the subsoil have become indissolubly linked to conflicts over min-
ing and dam construction, but the campaigns against them are probably
strengthened by the portrayal of indigenous cultures, ways of life, bodies of
knowledge, even moral codes, threatened with extinction. In Peru, where
highland populations do not have a modern history of mobilization around
indigenous causes, mining projects which usually affect the health and the
territory of indigenous communities have provoked severe local conflicts,
while governments circumvent or ignore requirements for prior consul-
tation (Bebbington 2012). This has fed a renewal of indigenous aware-
ness, and the leading highland indigenist organization is the organization
for the defence of communities threatened by mining, CONCAMINA
(Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la
Minería—National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by
Mining). In Brazil, approval and financing the massive complex of dams
known as Belo Monte was rammed through without proper environmental
assessment and against much expert opinion, and is expected to destroy
the lives of indigenous communities, notably the Munduruku people-
although judicial decisions in 2016 may obstruct the project.3

THE INDIGENOUS AND THE POPULAR

IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

Another aspect of the study of ethnicity and multiculturalism in Latin

America is the proliferation of what some would call false dichotomies. It
has to be remembered that cultural variation is not by any means exclu-
6 D. LEHMANN

sively associated with ethnic difference, or with linguistic difference: it can

be rooted in and reproduced by socio-economic differences, by ecological
and regional differences, and of course, by religious differences. The English
historian E.P. Thompson wrote extensively and influentially about the dis-
tinctive culture of the working classes, as did the early pioneer of cultural
studies, Richard Hoggart, in his classic The Uses of Literacy, published in
1957: was the cultural abyss dividing the classes in their account of England
at that time, or even today, any less deep than those dividing the Indians of
Chiapas from Mexico’s respectable classes? In Latin America, we can point
to works by the Brazilian sociologist José de Souza Martins on the São
Paulo working-class culture and the culture of the peasantry (Martins 1979,
1986, 1989, 1992) and by the anthropologist Carlos Rodrigues Brandão
on the religious culture of those who are sometimes called ‘the little people’
(Brandão 2007)—a phrase echoed in Véronique Boyer’s chapter where she
poignantly quotes individuals who think of themselves not as indigenous,
or quilombolas, or even dwellers in a particular place, but as just that: ‘os
pequenos’. People somehow bereft even of a name.
Another dichotomy which may mislead is that opposing indigenous and
‘mainstream’ legal arrangements. This is because the differences observed
seem to be as much about popular versus established ways of doing justice
as they are about indigenous versus ‘white’, ‘mestizo’ or ‘mainstream’ ways
and also because while the literature itself seems to use the terms ‘justicia
indígena’, ‘justicia comunitaria’ (community justice), ‘justicia popular’ and
‘legal pluralism’ almost interchangeably (Van Cott 2000; Sierra 2009), there
is an underlying presumption that the pluralism refers to cultural differences
separating indigenous people from the rest of society. It is worth dwelling
on examples of this because the contributions help us to clarify what is at
stake analytically and also for the state when we speak of cultural difference.
Thus the legal anthropologist María Teresa Sierra, in an account of com-
munity justice in the Mexican state of Guerrero, describes how the unre-
liability of formal judicial institutions and the lack of trust in them has
encouraged the development of non-official justice and policing to deal
with small-scale disputes, to the extent that these ‘grassroots’ instances have
been pressured to deal with a wider constituency and larger-scale issues. In a
case described by Sierra 2013 the community justice officers themselves, in
this case, were unwilling to become involved in property disputes, precisely
because property belongs in the sphere of the federal justice system, but they
did insist on retaining authority in one case: having impounded 600 kg. of
marijuana, they refused to hand over those accused of this traffic to the state
 INTRODUCTION 7

police (hence the judge’s detention order), and after deliberations in an

assembly, sentenced them to a period of re-education. In response a judge
ordered the detention of a member of the community justice body, though
it is unclear whether this was carried out. This is an instance of local commu-
nity justice: the people involved may identify as Indians, but although the
author is known for her advocacy of indigenous law, indigeneity is not men-
tioned: the description does not attribute any of the procedures to an indig-
enous tradition, nor does the text mention ‘usos y costumbres’. A definition
of the procedures described in the article might be as follows: ‘grassroots
legal adjudication and enforcement conducted together with an attempt to
delineate spheres of competence vis-à-vis the official system and to derive
legitimacy from that system’. While Sierra understandably contrasts local
justice with the ‘colonialist, classist and racist’ official justice system, the
justice imparted by local procedures and guidelines, though by no means
‘summary’, would probably best be described as ‘rough and ready’. So, for
example, the proceedings of the Assembly at which those traffickers were
judged remain unrecorded. Sierra herself notes that gender as well as human
rights generally are ‘pending issues’ in ‘community dynamics’ (Sierra 2009:
39), - a theme taken up by Manuela Picq in this volume.4
Similar reflections can be drawn from leading Guatemala expert Rachel
Sieder’s analysis of that country’s indigenous law and the delineation
of its authority vis-à-vis state institutions, recognized under the peace
accords of 1996. As in Guerrero, the police and the judiciary are discred-
ited from almost every point of view: when they do operate, their actions
are characterized by excessive violence and corrupt interests, but in any
case, they rarely intervene in  local issues at all, being forcibly excluded
by local consensus or local leaderships, as in a distressing case of lynching
(Sieder 2011). This article describes opposing indigenous and state law
over the issue of the death sentence, which the indigenous authority—the
Alcaldía Indígena—opposes. In Sieder’s words, the indigenous justice sys-
tem emphasizes ‘achieving a settlement to re-establish a balance in social
relations between the parties and the communities involved, rather than
on retribution’ (Sieder 2011: 166). This is often achieved by imposing
monetary compensation, whereas the state system emphasizes retribution
and admits the death penalty. The widows of the victims in this case were
ladinas, that is, of a higher mestizo status in the country’s race-based
stratification in which a thick line divides ladinos from the indigenous,
and they demanded the death penalty: one may ask whether there was
not a complicated underlying racial or communal tension. In despair at
8 D. LEHMANN

the failure of the official justice system to advance the investigation, they
turned to the Defensoría K’iche, a ‘non-governmental grassroots associa-
tion of community activists’ created after the signing of the peace settle-
ment, whose reputation for ‘resolving difficult cases and for ensuring a
swift dispensation of justice’ brought them, as ladinas, to ‘take the unusual
step of appealing to indigenous justice or Mayan law to intervene on their
behalf’ (ibid. p.  165–6).5 So while the widows were prepared to cross
ethnic boundaries in their pursuit of justice, they were unsatisfied with the
rules governing the indigenous system. Sierra corroborates Sieder’s obser-
vations, noting that in Guerrero ‘even wealthy mestizos’ have brought
their disputes before the unofficial system (Sierra 2013: 22).
Sieder describes the recognition by the state of an indigenous system as
multicultural, but although the differences over the death sentence and also
the purpose of the justice system, are real, to what extent do they reflect pro-
found cultural differences? It could be argued that the Rabbinical Court sys-
tem in Israel, or the law operating in many Muslim-majority countries, and
informally in the UK and elsewhere in Europe (McGoldrick 2009; Edmunds
2012), reflect far more profound cultural differences vis-à-vis secular legal
systems. In those instances, judicial authority is vested in people whose qualifi-
cations derive from their recognized knowledge of an inherited body of juris-
prudence the validity of which ultimately relies on divine authority.6 There
are shocking abuses in Guatemala, from summary executions by police to
mob justice by lynching, but none of these occur within either state or indig-
enous judicial procedure, both of which are designed to follow rational con-
cepts of authority and responsibility. Nor does the indigenous system appeal
to a supernatural or divine authority or to supernatural causal mechanisms.
Finally in this volume Manuela Picq further undermines the binary opposi-
tion of indigenous and state justice systems by showing that the Ecuadorian
Constituent Assembly, under pressure from organised grassroots indigenous
women, incorporated international human rights norms into its wording
about indigenous collective rights and juridical norms.
To doubt the depth of cultural distance between indigenous and state
institutions is not to say there are no differences, but it is to say that those
differences can be exaggerated, especially when we remember that it is not
easy to agree how to define a conflict as specifically cultural, and also when
we see that concrete descriptions provide further indications that the most
common and visible motivations of protest and conflict between indigenous
groups and states are so often driven not by cultural disagreements but by
resentment, even fury, against straightforward abuse of power. This is seen
in accounts of the Zapatista movement, widely recognized as a beacon of
 INTRODUCTION 9

resurgent ethnic movements in the region since 1992. Araceli Burguete’s

description of how Zapatista autonomous government worked in practice,
written in the 1990s and updated in 2000, shows that the main issues at
stake in the rebellion were to do with corruption, oppressive government
and poor government provision of basic services like water and electric-
ity (Burguete Cal y Mayor 2003: 197). The demand for land was not
very prominent for the simple reason that the Agrarian Reform originally
decreed in 1917, had run its course and there was no land left to redistribute
(ibid. p. 204). In the 1996 San Andrés accords, agreed between Zapatista
delegates and a largely sympathetic government team (later disavowed by
President Zedillo), cultural issues were conspicuously absent (Gobierno del
Estado de Chiapas 2003). Recognition of indigenous justice (described not
as indigenous but simply as ‘internal norms and procedures’) was restricted
to the ‘resolution of internal conflicts’ and included a call for the confirma-
tion of its decisions by the state judicial authorities (p. 33 and p. 226); it was
clear that indigenous justice should respect human rights (p. 48) and that
the state should recognize the right of indigenous communities to preserve
their institutions and their own customs, again specifically in the resolu-
tion of internal conflicts. In addition the agreements require government to
make arrangements to enable indigenous people to participate fully in judi-
cial proceedings (para. 189 ff.), to propose laws to the state Congress (para.
198), and to take the lead in the appointment of prosecuting magistrates
working with indigenous communities and municipalities, (para. 200). As
a sign of recognition, the entire text of the accords is printed in parallel
columns in Spanish and Zoque, one of Chiapas’ indigenous languages.
Reference to indigenous justice itself is surprisingly curt: it merely proposes
defining the scope and space for indigenous office-holders to exercise their
authority (para. 202). But the crucial point is that all these demands are
made to fit in with the national state system.
Another study, by Aida Hernández, focused on the small7 Mam peas-
ant population of highland Chiapas who were significantly, but indirectly,
affected by the conflict, further illustrates the porousness of cultural
boundaries. Even without using the term interculturalidad, Hernández
captures very well the interweaving of hegemonic and indigenous cultural
themes and discourses, and also the negotiation of rights and demands
between indigenous leaders and representatives of the state, and in par-
ticular a kind of shadow-boxing in which the state seems to want to steer
the leaders towards cultural recognition while the leaders ‘expand their
definition of culture to include demands for rights to land and greater
municipal autonomy’ (Hernández 2003: 69). In addition, Hernández
10 D. LEHMANN

notes the influence of Liberation Theology among some groups and the
irony of pastoral agents, imbued with its emancipatory ethos, encouraging
their followers to renew their commitment to their own cultural traditions
while at the same time distancing themselves from official indigenism and
from ‘traditional’ methods of evangelization (ibid. p.  69). One faction,
inspired by ‘the struggle of Mam women to participate at the same level as
men’ disagreed with ‘the Indianist discourse claiming that indigenous law
was essentially democratic and based on consensus’, and ‘stressed the need
to work on the construction of a democratic communitarian culture’ (ibid.
p. 80). These disputes and conflicts can hardly be interpreted as predomi-
nanly concerned with the accentuation of cultural difference, for they still
seem to be indissolubly linked with a demand for self-government within
the framework of Mexico’s institutions—though the Mam were far from
united in this respect or with respect to the Zapatistas.
These vignettes from the early years of Latin America’s most famous
contemporary indigenist movement tell us that demands for recognition
couched in terms of identity and heritage are also and often principally
demands for decent government and socio-economic improvement within
the context of a pyramidal state. The Zapatista autonomous administra-
tions themselves were allowed to remain in public administration premises
which they had occupied by force, denoting an underlying tacit coexis-
tence (Burguete Cal y Mayor 2003: 202).
These points are brought out by several of the authors in this book:
for Maité Boullosa, commenting on her study of ethnogenesis in north-
west Argentina, ‘these ethnic movements … should not be analysed from
an essentialist point of view, but rather as social movements fighting to
change power relations in postcolonial contexts characterised by severe and
persistent discrimination’, while for Manuela Picq, reflecting on the cam-
paign by Andean women to get their rights incorporated into the country’s
Constitutional provisions for indigenous justice systems, ‘cultures are in
permanent interaction, mutually constitutive and loosely joined together’
and ‘the repression of women’s rights is often due not to cultural difference
… but to cultural sameness. The gender inequalities that affect Indigenous
communities cannot be disentangled from the gender inequalities that affect
Ecuador’s non-Indigenous society’. Andrew Canessa, in his dissection of
the uses of the word ‘indigenous’ in the enthusiastically indigenist climate of
today’s Bolivia, takes pains to distinguish between people who might mobi-
lize ‘as indigenous people per se’ and people mobilizing as ‘Bolivian citizens
who happen[ed] to be indigenous’.
 INTRODUCTION 11

To question the depth of the cultural differences between official and

indigenous justice, or pointing out that many indigenous demands are
also demands for inclusion and citizenship, is not to deny the demand
for the power to name oneself individually or collectively. The title of
indigenous justice, for example, must not therefore be denied to those
demanding it: that is a question of recognition and it is very important
that the protagonists have the power to name, even more so when there is
a long history of imposition of names.

RECOGNITION’S UNAVOIDABLE MUDDLES

Struggles to shake off oppression often take the form of raising the banner of
identity, sometimes even taking pride in those very markers such as language
or skin colour which the oppressor has singled out as pretexts for inflicting
harm. They want to be recognized as different and special, and their allies in
the academic community encourage this even though their own disciplines
are wedded to the idea that differences are the product of social forces and
not of inherent, let alone ‘essential’ features of social groups. In an extreme
version of this view this view, each social process, if it can be isolated and
configured at all separately from others, will itself be constructed, and cannot
exist independently of the gaze, or interpretation, of each individual beholder.
The construction of identities carries a moral and even emotional
charge, but it is not univocal: chronicles of exclusion and discrimination
are interspersed with celebration of resistance and of self-organization.
Ethnographic studies in the Amazon, for example, rarely point to a big
picture which already ten years ago revealed strong evidence both of an
endogenous demographic turnaround in lowland tropical areas and of a
widespread adoption of indigenous identity (McSweeney and Arps 2005;
Perz, et  al. 2008); Véronique Boyer in her chapter quotes FUNAI, the
Brazilian agency charged with the protection of the country’s Indian
population, as saying that ‘the number of Brazilians who considered
themselves indigenous grew by 150% in the 1990s … a growth rate six
times higher than the population as a whole’. It seems that the desire to be
indigenous or be recognized as indigenous, has been ‘taking off’ in some
regions, as is the desire or readiness to be recognized as negro in Brazil
(Bailey and Telles 2006). These shifts are a persistent underlying theme in
this book, but they are not easy to interpret: to attribute them to strategic
choices motivated by government policies of recognition, reparation or
land redistribution, is to step into an analytical, empirical and even politi-
12 D. LEHMANN

cal and ethical minefield. Theorising about cultural difference, ethnicity

and identity becomes very complicated once the state or non-state actors
like NGOs, catechists or political campaigners come with their mission
to improve their livelihoods and institutionalize a system of governance.
Our chapters on Argentina and Brazil include several instances where legal
processes and categories can be said to have shaped identities or at least
declared affiliations, yet at the same time, none of the authors would be
willing to dismiss them as cases of manipulation or ‘mere’ strategy.
To gain clarity on this, we may turn to the highly insightful, though
slightly ironic book on the subject by the philosopher Ian Hacking, The
Social Construction of What? (1999) in which he writes:

Social constructionists about X tend to argue that:

1. X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is
at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not
inevitable.
Very often they go further, and urge that:
2. X is quite bad as it is.
3. We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least
radically transformed.

He goes on to say that ‘most people who use the social construction
idea enthusiastically want to criticize, change, or destroy some X that they
dislike in the established order of things’ (Hacking 1999: 6–7). His book
dates from a time when to describe something as a social construction was
to discredit it, when racial identities were viewed less favourably than now,
and it can be thought of as an exploration of the many forms which such
discrediting may take.
But times have changed: the discourse of social science has come to
reflect a discomfort with the implication that to describe identity-based
claims, notably those of victim groups and movements of national and ethnic
renewal, as constructions, amounts to an attitude of contempt. During the
same period, these claims have been enshrined in national and international
Resolutions, Conventions, Declarations and laws, which are couched in a
language far removed from that of social construction, while at the same
time, social scientists, shying away understandably from any hint of passing
judgement on the identity claims of those groups, are less inclined to see in
social construction a reason for doubting the authenticity of any claims at
all. In short, authenticity is an unrestricted speech zone for its subjects, but
a (self-imposed) no-go area for observers. Some of the resulting theoretical
confusion, linked also to land claims based on disputed and distant histori-
 INTRODUCTION 13

cal events, has been criticized by several authors quoted by Andrew Canessa
(Gledhill 1997; Béteille 1998; Dombrowski 2002; Kuper 2003, 2005). But
it is noticeable that these articles are all at least nine years old, as are the
philosophical treatments by Taylor, Appiah, Young and Benhabib (Young
1990; Taylor 1992; Benhabib 2002; Appiah 2005) and the political theory
debates (Molyneux and Razavi 2002; Modood 2007; Phillips 2007). To
judge by these dates, it seems that these and related disagreements about the
conceptualization of identity and difference have been put into cold storage:
the disagreements have hardly been settled, rather it appears that writing on
the subject has divided into separate silos who prefer to ignore each others’
existence and to engage in exchange only within their own ‘camps’.

ROLE OF THE STATE
Whatever the means whereby demands for restitution, recognition or
reparation will be met, they will be deployed by or under the auspices
of state agencies. If the resource at issue is land, local institutions will be
reshaped by modern bureaucracy, and the restitution of resources will not
follow the procedures of, say, indigenous land tenure, but rather a version
of them reshaped for bureaucratic purposes. There is also no guarantee
that an open process would prevent all sorts of unexpected actors from
jumping on the bandwagon. The irony, which we see in the chapters by
Véronique Boyer and Luis Vázquez, is that to restore indigenous tenure,
it is necessary to mobilize the state’s property regime with all its appara-
tus of classification, territorial measurement and regulation which clashes
with many indigenous forms of tenure and may well be ill adapted to the
prevailing modes of production and livelihood, and this is without count-
ing the chicanery described in Vázquez’ Mexican case. If the policy of
recognition takes the form of bilingual education, then it is liable to get
tied up in the murky politics of education and teachers’ unions, leading
to mismatches between teachers and the language of the locality to which
they are sent, or to the application of bookish methods to teaching indig-
enous children their own language which are just as unsuitable as bookish
methods of teaching the dominant language—as has occurred in Peruvian
highlands, though not so much in the lowlands where bilingual educa-
tion is heavily influenced by the indigenous organization Formación de
Maestros Bilingües de la Amazonía Peruana (FORMABIAP).8
In his masterly study of the introduction of the system of ‘usos y costum-
bres’ in the municipalities of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, David Recondo
described with abundant detail the counterintuitive ways in which the
habits of governance associated with indigenous culture—notably the fear
14 D. LEHMANN

of confrontational community politics and the preference for consensus—

perfectly matched the ‘consensus management’ (concertación’) practiced
by the PRI.9 which throughout the twentieth century had ruled without
ever having to put up with contested elections, because there was never
more than one candidate (Recondo 2007: 403). Under ‘usos y costum-
bres’, the option of municipal government according to indigenous tra-
ditions under the aegis of the state electoral commission and involving
open meetings and competing candidates, risked opening up old and new
wounds. Another example of scholarly scepticism concerning state rec-
ognition, based on an Alaskan study, is quoted by Canessa: ‘recognition
by power can, and increasingly does, involve as many problems as the
neglect and marginalisation that comes from an absence of state interest’
(Dombrowski 2002: 1071).
The outcome then, if we keep to a simplified model of excluded and
ethnically distinct populations, is to further their incorporation and clas-
sification under the aegis of the modern state apparatus, even while they
reclaim their birthright, and even though this is likely to produce stereo-
typed or ‘folklorized’ versions of a heritage. The necessary classification
of groups, based on hypostasized conceptions of indigenous histories, by
a state undertaking the allocation of resources, will invite accusations of
‘essentialism’, but that is in the nature of the bureaucratic process. The
fluidity in their history, for example, the migrations between regions
dominated by different groups, or intermarriage or their internal fac-
tional disputes, will be overlooked. Outsiders should suppress their shock
when hearing of the Indians in the Amazon who shift to and fro between
Protestantism and Catholicism, or at least their particular versions thereof
(Vilaça 2010) or of comuneros in Mexico who care little for anything col-
lective and just want to become millionaires. When spokesmen for a mod-
ern Mexican group claim exclusive recognition from the state government
of Michoacán as the state’s only native people, they have forgotten or are
unaware of migrations which occurred in pre-colonial times from other
parts of Mesoamerica, not to speak of the hundreds of thousands who
today migrate from indigenous areas in southern Mexico to work, usu-
ally as seasonal labourers, in the North of the country, as Luis Vázquez
points out. But on what basis can they be challenged? The migrants from
the South are likely to receive more recognition if they find a way to cross
the border, where they reconstitute themselves as part of ‘Oaxacalifornia’
(Fox 2011).10 Even there the state will continue to play a leading part, as
Laura Velasco concludes from her study of indigenous Mexican migrations
 INTRODUCTION 15

to the USA: ‘State action continues to organize much of the political and
cultural content of subnational identities, and the state remains the inter-
locutor in processes of ethnic agency every step of the way’ (Velasco Ortiz
2014: 54).

OBSERVERS AND OBSERVED DEALING WITH CONSTRUCTED

IDENTITIES
In the face of such situations, a pro-indigenous or committed social sci-
ence finds itself fraught with ambiguities and split moral positionings: one
way out of the resulting dilemmas is through the term ‘hybridity’. This
has been adopted in the place of mestizaje after that word was discred-
ited in intellectual circles by its association with nation-building ideolo-
gies accused of diminishing indigenous culture (de la Peña 2005: 719).
Hybridity is described in a way which makes it polyvalent and capable of
transmitting or expressing varied and even contradictory socio-political
messages, or signals. Thus an article on the dress codes of Ecuadorian
women argues that hybridity contains within it a ‘process of ongoing rela-
tions of domination and resistance. If they have been through a period of
not wearing indigenous clothing, their re-adoption can be interpreted as
a ‘statement of resistance to a homogenizing mestizaje project’ (Radcliffe
1997: 17). However, ‘while ambivalent hybridity represents resistance on
one axis (ethnic resistance) it reiterates domination on another (gender
domination)’ (p. 24) and despite, or perhaps because of, the ‘layering of
clothing’ the woman’s body remains ‘racialized’ and ‘colonized’ (p. 18),
and so, inevitably, ‘the “original” has its own constructed authenticity’
(p. 24). Once again, we see the double-edged nature of construction.
The term ‘hybridity’ well reflects the positioning of the women in
question, and of their interlocutors, and of people in innumerable other
situations, while avoiding the hierarchical connotations of ‘mestizaje’,11 it
solves nothing for the policymakers who are charged with undoing racial
exclusion. Yet the impossibility of precise and stable demarcation of eth-
nic boundaries can hardly be an argument for the state to remove itself
from any project to confront the undoubted reality of racial and cultural
exclusion and discrimination. So it is not surprising that what might be
called a generic indigenous identity has grown up, notably in Bolivia, as
described here by Andrew Canessa and as deployed by Manuela Picq, but
also throughout Latin America. And as we saw, the Zapatistas and others
16 D. LEHMANN

in Chiapas use the word ‘indígena’ as a synonym for ‘the popular’, with
little concern for the fine-tuned delineation of ethnic boundaries. A sepa-
rate enquiry is called for which would ask whether the difficulties faced by
practitioners and scholars in drawing lines of difference in cultures which
persist in blurring them and in celebrating that blurring is not a projection
of habits of racial demarcation developed in British colonial ventures and
in the USA, filtered through to Latin America from Anglo-Saxon anthro-
pology or US race politics.

RESPECT
One effect of the dominant focus on ethnic dimensions of the exclusion of
indigenous people, blacks and Afro-descendants and the many combina-
tions of these, is that it creates an inclination among scholars and readers
to think of them as a separate category of victim whose social exclusion is
different in kind—because race-based—from that afflicting other sectors.
In his book Respect, Richard Sennett develops an argument which,
because it focuses on inner feelings common to all humans, would help
us to take the politics of recognition beyond the confines of a discourse
about ethnicity and race and into one about exclusion in general and dis-
crimination in general. He recalls that ‘for John Rawls recognition means
respecting the needs of those who are unequal’ and for Habermas, it
means ‘respecting the view of those whose interests lead them to disagree’
(Sennett 2003: 54). But for Sennett, beyond these rules of good behav-
iour, there lies the ‘awareness of mutual need’ which he would like to
prevail in relationships quite independently of what people say, or of what
they achieve. Hence Sennett does not fall in entirely with Taylor’s idea of
recognition, because that type of recognition is connected to a person’s
identity and their achievement (Taylor 1992).
Sennett wants to go further into everyday social life, and into care for
others, but he views the emotional dimension of care for others with some
suspicion. Although an admirer of compassion in the care of the needy,
he seems to incline to a more hierarchical, neutral and even bureaucratic
approach to welfare: ‘giving to others can be a way of manipulating them,
or it can serve the more personal need to affirm something in ourselves’
(Sennett 2003: 136). In the end, compassion will always run out, but
hierarchy, or bureaucracy, does not, and so ‘hierarchical regimes free the
expression of compassion from this danger’ and also should (in principle)
spare beneficiaries any sense of obligation, guilt or shame (ibid. p. 149).
 INTRODUCTION 17

Mutual respect is a relationship which does not project onto the other (my
phrase, not Sennett’s) an expectation that they will enact, perform or fulfil
according to my notion of their authentic inner being.12 In the same way,
it is important in the study of ethnicity, especially in the study of excluded
groups by people from non-excluded groups whose ideas carry weight in
policymaking by government and by NGOs, that observers remain alert to
the seepage of sentiment into their professional roles. Yet this is what has
happened in the study of Latin American race and ethnicity as researchers
have become intimately involved with the people whom they observe and
about whom they publish.

DETACHMENT AND ATTACHMENT IN ETHNOGRAPHY

There has been an evolution from the radical contestation of positivism
which began in the 1960s to the activist research which has been advo-
cated and practised in some quarters in recent years. If we return to the
landmark volume Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1974 (1971)), and
numerous related publications, we will find fierce criticisms of anthropol-
ogy’s role in the USA’s military interventions, notably in South East Asia,
but we will also find a call for introspection, so that the understanding of
the anthropologist’s own society and self-emancipation is connected with
the understanding of other societies:

The comparative understanding of others contributes to self-awareness;

self-understanding in turn, allows for self-reflection and (partial) self-
emancipation; the emancipatory interest, finally, makes the understanding
of others possible. (Scholte 1974 (1971): 448)

But this in turn raised the question described by Clifford Geertz, in

what is seen by some as a ‘middle-of-the-road’ position, as the ‘un-get-
roundable’ fact that ‘all ethnographical descriptions are homemade, that
they are the describer’s descriptions, not those of the described’ (Geertz
1988: 141). Geertz concluded that all these self-criticisms make it even
more necessary to render perceptible and accessible the views and cultural
framework of the interlocutor, even while recognising that this ‘difficult
business’ is not without consequence for ‘“native”, “author” and “reader”
… alike’ (ibid. p. 146) (quotation marks in the original).
Paul Rabinow, in 1986, had already written that ‘despite Geertz’s occa-
sional acknowledgements of the ineluctability of fictionalizing, he has
18 D. LEHMANN

never pushed that insight very far’ (Rabinow 1986: 243). Like others, he
recognized an ambiguity: especially, but not exclusively, in ethnography,
where the observer is ineluctably thrown in among the observed, one’s
person is almost like a third active participant in research and writing; and
‘person’ here means one’s emotions. But he also hoped that they could be
kept under control.
Rabinow also reminded his readers that social scientists live not only
in the field but also in the fiercely competitive world of academia which
provides them with a livelihood: power relations intrude as a serious con-
straint: ‘textual radicals’, he wrote, seek to advance ‘the possibilities of
sharing and mutual understanding while being fuzzy about power and …
socio-economic constraints’ (Rabinow 1986: 255): asking whether ‘lon-
ger, dispersive, multi-authored texts would yield tenure might seem petty
… But those are the power relations to which Nietzsche exhorted us to
be scrupulously attentive… The taboos against specifying them are much
greater than the strictures against denouncing colonialism’ (ibid. p. 252).
These ironies he described as ‘exhilarating’ (ibid. p.  255), but they do
point to the pressures and incentives facing the ethnographer on moving
between field and home base: in the field, one is drawn to sympathize and
empathize with one’s interlocutors, and it would be inhuman not to be,
although Malinowski’s diaries revealed how little he liked his ‘subjects’.
Back home, sitting at the computer ‘writing up’, one puts oneself in the
minds of colleagues, conference attendees and reviewers: and so the appa-
ratus of theory and (in the field of ethnicity especially) the minefield of
political or tribal (academic) allegiances loom large and come to shape
one’s output.
The outlook reflected in the essays by Scholte, Geertz, Clifford and
Rabinow was self-aware, introspective and self-questioning: while openly
admitting that ethnography could not but have an element of commit-
ment, it expressed a distrust of grand narratives and political certain-
ties. The extent of its influence in the discipline of social anthropology
as a whole is a separate matter, but its genealogy—especially the license
for commitment—is visible in subsequent writing on Latin American
indigenous and Afro-descendant populations and the social movements
among them. After the wake-up call of the 1960s and 1970s, the move-
ments themselves acquired international visibility, their local leaders
became gatekeepers and informants for ethnographers (in accordance
with standard ethnographic practice), some of their activists or followers
themselves went to university and undertook graduate study, or invited
 INTRODUCTION 19

anthropologists to take part in their own workshops (Rabinow 1986: 255;

Rappaport 2005), while anthropologists became advocates for indigenous
causes—for example, in the drafting of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988,
in the establishment of the National Indigenous Commission in Chile, in
the development of intercultural education in Mexico and in leading the
research of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru.
Thus the distance, or alienation, which had been a convention in ethnog-
raphy, was reduced.

ACTIVIST AND COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH

In addition to this more intimate personal involvement of ethnographers
with their subjects, we also observe that in sectors of the social science
profession, the recognition that the discipline cannot be apolitical or
objective, has opened the way to practices which adopt the view that in
that case, it is acceptable or even desirable to promote political positions
through research or to identify research with political positions, and also
to use highly politicized language in social scientific writing. The radical
doubt of early postmodernists is cast aside: the uncertainty of ethnographic
observation and interpretation is forgotten. This is particularly vulnerable
to criticism when the subject matter is ethical behavior and legal disputes:
if we are describing a pattern of behavior as racist or corrupt, or if we are
describing a judicial process in which someone is accused of creating the
conditions for a murder, or of trafficking in drugs, how can we also with-
draw behind a screen of postmodern doubt (Van Cott 2000; Sierra 2013)?
This is not the same as the pursuit of political activity in the political
sphere itself (as distinct from the professional sphere), nor is it the same
as taking a role as advisor or expert witness in policymaking or even legal
proceedings. Nor, obviously, can it be a basis for saying that if an ethnog-
rapher observes egregious violations of human rights, those observations
should be suppressed. Rather it is a matter of framing ethnographic
reporting and interpretation, stylistically and substantively, in a dispassion-
ate language and respecting the principle of professional impersonality.
Otherwise, the reader will sense that writers are only addressing people
who agree with their views. (It may also be a matter of knowing there are
places where ethnographers should not go.)
Although Max Weber in his 1918 lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ recog-
nized that it is not easy for a lecturer to leave his opinions at the door of
the lecture hall, he still argued that the effort must be made. But for the
20 D. LEHMANN

advocates of ‘activist anthropology’, purely academic research on identity

politics should ‘generate new knowledge … on the problems of using the
law to advance indigenous rights, and more broadly, the challenges of
such struggles in the face of neoliberal multiculturalism’—in other words,
even in purely academic terms, professional anthropology should not only
be inspired by a political ideal, which Weber would recognize, but also be
committed to a specific programme and even predetermined conclusions.
Activist research, according to Hale, looks to be judged in terms of ‘its
potential contribution to the political struggle underway’. Hale cites as
an example of activist research his own involvement as an expert witness
before the Inter-American Human Rights Court—a role I have excluded
from the category of activism (Hale 2006: 105). It could be said that, by
appearing as an expert witness—not a witness of events but an expert clari-
fying their background—in a courtroom, he was implicitly confirming the
objectivity of anthropological knowledge, and thus contradicting what is
by now a standard view about the impossibility of objective social scientific
knowledge. Richard Wilson, an anthropologist with extensive experience
of Truth Commissions and Human Rights Tribunals, admittedly very par-
ticular judicial institutions, tells us that already in 2006, they had become
more concerned to grasp the subjectivity of perpetrators and the historical
context of perpetrators’ actions, and so had become more open to inter-
pretative and narrative-oriented approaches (Wilson 2006: 81). But that
refers to the subjectivity of the protagonists not of the observers.
In a much more direct and explicit statement, which harks directly back
to the critical interventions of the 1960s and 1970s, another anthropolo-
gist, Shannon Speed, reiterated the well-known denunciation of the ‘myth
of scientific objectivity’ which has served to ‘conceal both indirect, unin-
tended effects of anthropological research and work with obvious political
ends such as spying for government agencies under the guise of fieldwork’
(Speed 2006: 66). She seemed to assume that the myth had served no
purpose other than this nefarious political cause, yet at the same time,
she came near to drawing the conclusion that if there is no objectivity,
then partiality in research and reporting is justified and, at least up to a
point, called for. Although she argued for an anthropology ‘committed to
human liberation’ and ‘critical cultural analysis’, she was far from blind to
the risks and ambiguities involved, recognizing—like Rappaport below—
that ‘engaging in advocacy is not a simple solution’. She admitted that
whatever ideas they may be promoting, ‘anthropologists in advocacy roles’
may be ‘failing to maintain a critical analytical focus’ and might be ‘serving
neoliberalism (in a disturbing parallel to our former service to colonial-
 INTRODUCTION 21

ism) by facilitating the fixing of cultural identities in law and reinforc-

ing the legal regimes that underpin neoliberal power?’ (ibid. p. 67). The
implication that if some scientists believe that they are justified, or even
obliged, to place their research at the service of a struggle against neoliber-
alism, then others will be equally justified to take the opposite position and
defend neoliberalism, seems to be lost on her. Speed acknowledges the
‘multiple tensions and contradictions’ that come from critical analysis and
‘engagement with our research subjects that is directed toward a shared
political goal’, but describes them as ‘productive tensions’ with analytical
benefits (ibid. p. 71), just as, again in a spirit of postmodern suspicion of
reaching definitive conclusions, she later writes that conclusions are always
‘partial, contingent and subject to debate’ (ibid. p. 74).
This admirably frank account brings us to the limits of involvement
when, speaking of her fieldwork experience, the author tells that ‘along
with other activists’ she ‘approached the community and guided them
towards the notion of establishing recognition of their indigenous identity
as an alternative basis for addressing their land struggle and their local
conflict’, even while she acknowledges that her advocacy, which in the
event was not accepted by the indigenous authorities, ‘violated some indi-
viduals’ right to work the land’ (ibid. p. 72). One is led to ask how she can
reconcile this advocacy, founded on an argument about identity, with her
denunciation of the ‘fixing of neoliberal identities in law’ or with the view
that social science cannot reach definitive conclusions.
In the end, Speed implicitly recognizes that her professional or scholarly
and political commitments were almost irreconcilable, and she concludes
that activist research should be judged ‘by its results and by the questions
it asks about “neocolonial power dynamics”’, and defends her decisions as
‘more explicit and transparent than in some other circumstances’ (ibid.).
Nonetheless, the tension or even incompatibility between activism and
postmodern skepticism is self-evident.
These dilemmas are eventually resolved within anthropology by
recourse to intangibles: Mark Goodale, another prominent anthropolo-
gist of human rights, ends a discussion on the subject in the same issue of
American Anthropologist as Speed’s and Wilson’s papers (Goodale 2006a:
34), by also quoting ‘the inimitable Clifford Geertz’ as follows:

Looking into dragons, not domesticating…them… is what anthropology

has been … We have, with no little success, sought to keep the world off bal-
ance… It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle. (Geertz
2000: 63–64)
22 D. LEHMANN

I would interpret this as saying that anthropologists should write in a

style like Geertz’s own—a light touch with piercing insights, but an avoid-
ance of moralizing and of dead certainties, and most certainly of activ-
ism. The problem for lesser mortals is that, as in the case of Lévi-Strauss,
for whose writing style Geertz expressed unbounded admiration, few can
master such style. Elsewhere, however, Goodale has been much less cir-
cumspect. He proposes a ‘normative humanism’, which ‘rejects ‘immanent
or metaphysical versions of human rights’... does not anticipate…specific
types of legal, moral or other orderings’ except within a broad range
informed by collective anthropological and other analytical experience’ In
other words a universal doctrine which places the individual at the centre
of a human rights regime is rejected, although ‘international human rights
might…be adopted’ in certain places and times. But the legitimacy of
human rights is derived from ‘the conditions through which they emerge
or are incorporated’ - that is, when ‘human rights become actually eman-
cipatory to the extent that individuals in collectivities are able to engage in
meaningful interactions free from constraint’ (Goodale 2006b: 494).
The further problem for Goodale and Speed is that even while expressing
skepticism about reaching definitive conclusions, they have no doubts that
the encouragement of the idea of rights, especially human rights, by civil
society groups such as NGOs, among indigenous peoples, will lead them
to ‘waste valuable energy and resources on actions that further legitimate
institutions and empty forms that function to guarantee their ultimate sub-
ordination’ (Speed 2008: 153–4). For them ‘rights are the foot soldiers of
liberalism … essential features of a particular disciplinary regime in which
the grandeur of liberal legality is used to create loyalty to the wider project of
liberalism within the consolidation of late capitalism’ (Speed 2008:153–4).
Such wide-ranging absolutist claims sit uneasily with the radical doubt which
the same authors express in their methodological reflections.
Another approach to the dilemmas of engagement and commitment is
that of collaborative research, inspired by Orlando Fals-Borda and articu-
lated by Joanne Rappaport. The way Rappaport describes it, collaborative
research is not something to be undertaken lightly or to be written up
without a high degree of self-awareness and even some scepticism. In her
Intercultural Utopias (2005), a book which reflects at length on reflexivity
(her own and others’), based on collaborative research with the Comisión
Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC) and building on decades of research
with the Nasa people in the Tierradentro region of Colombia, she was very
careful to hedge her enthusiasm with numerous caveats. An article which
summarizes much of the material contained in that book speaks of ‘the
 INTRODUCTION 23

political role that ethnographers can play, which most certainly can involve
collaboration through joint creation’. But the very same sentence states that
it ‘does not necessarily imply activism, which … entails a skill set that anthro-
pologists as scholars do not bring to the table’ (Rappaport 2008: 8–9). In
the same passage, she goes on to write, delphically and tentatively, that ‘the
external ethnographer is not so much on the verge of activism as of enhanc-
ing activist agendas by entering into dialogue with methodologies already
chosen by the community’. Her book is largely about relationships among
academics and students at the CRIC’s Intercultural University,13 where she
facilitated a workshop with educational activists who were also members of
indigenous communities, leading to much reflection on whether insiders
and outsiders can be distinguished from one another. Her observations
remind us yet again how anthropologists’ agonising about essentialism and
authenticity reflects itself as in a hall of mirrors in the dialogue with their
interlocutors and their collaborators, and also among the interlocutor/
collaborators themselves: while she remarks that the researchers’ mission
to discover the ‘inside’ or essence of their own culture would have been
‘anathema’ to academic anthropologists, the CRIC leadership themselves
were in practice far from doctrinaire in their approach to difference.
It is little wonder that Rappoport steers clear of activism, for experi-
ence has told her that if she espouses a cause among indigenous people,
she is liable to run into, or even cause, divisions. Academic activism in the
politics of identity and claims to culture are one thing, but land conflicts
and guerrilla warfare—which was never far away in Nasa life—are another,
and obviously activism in the latter spheres poses ethical and material chal-
lenges of quite a different order. It is also noticeable that she does not deal
directly with conflicts over material resources like land, although some of
the research was to be used by indigenous authorities as part of a cam-
paign to extend their territorial base (Rappaport 2005: 35–38).14

RECOGNITION AND INCLUSION
The chapters which follow look to blur the supposed polarizing opposition
between universalism and particularism, and also between separation and
social inclusion. I have already remarked that the implied radical difference of
indigenous justice begins to look less different if it is thought of as popular
justice, and that demands for recognition by indigenous movements often are
protests against abuse of power in what might be called resemanticization—
reformulating old demands in a new vocabulary. Sometimes, unconscious
assumptions need to be revisited: in the chapter on Mexico, the reader might
24 D. LEHMANN

easily take it for granted that people making land claims on the basis that they
are descendants of originarios or the holders of ‘originario’ title are identify-
ing as indigenous: but this is not necessarily the case. They are making legal
claims based on colonial land grants to pueblos de indios, or on their belonging
to a pre-colonial people, but this does not confer on them a cultural connota-
tion affecting their daily lives, the language they speak, the clothes they wear
or their political allegiances and solidarities. It is just, as they see it, a legal fact.
The symbolic and institutional expressions of difference may themselves
signal shared histories and shared origins, though not necessarily peaceful
ones. In an article quoted by Andrew Canessa, Paula Lopez Caballero argues
that although in Mexican state ideology pre-colonial Indian cultures have
been depicted as founders of the nation, later absorbed in its mestizo iden-
tity, the state has at the same time encouraged persistent efforts to define,
through anthropology and sponsorship of indigenist iconography such as
the work of the muralists of the 1920s, what makes the Indian population
different. Lopez Caballero describes a case in which this has come to frui-
tion in the confluence among ‘real-life’ Indians—as distinct from the ideal-
ized imagined Indians of the muralists or the historic Indians of linguists
and archaeologists—of an invocation of their originario status and the steps
they take to mark out differences vis-à-vis their mestizo other. On the basis
of this type of situation, she coins the term altérité intime (‘intimate other-
ness’) so as to capture two faces of multiculturalism, at least in its Mexican
form: a claim for Indian difference to be recognized different symbolically
and institutionally even while also being recognized as ‘the heart of the
national subject’ (emphasis in the original) (López Caballero 2011: 149).
Peter Wade wrote of the inclusionary potential of mestizaje within a
colour-graded hierarchy, because colour resonated as a marker in many
different spheres, for example, music and religion (Wade 2005: 240),
evoking what he calls a mosaic, but what might also be described in three
dimensional terms as a Rubik’s cube. Yet what we may observe here is the
possibility that these movements which appear to be separatist or autono-
mist can also be seen as laying a basis for, or even demanding, inclusion.
This may be in the sense of inclusion in the narrative of a nation’s for-
mation, as in López Caballero’s interpretation of current Mexican mul-
ticulturalism; of institutional inclusion as in the popular or indigenous
justice systems operating under the aegis of the established judicial system;
economic inclusion through access to land ownership; or cultural inclu-
sion through the recognition of a distinct cultural heritage. In short: a
demand for citizenship, which is perfectly compatible with liberal or social
democracy.
 INTRODUCTION 25

But this is not the sort of inward-looking multicultural citizenship out-

lined by Kymlicka (Kymlicka 1995). The claims for recognition, reparation
or affirmative action analysed in this book are not exclusivist: demands for
recognition or even autonomy do not imply a demand for thick symbolic or
institutional walls, nor do they claim exceptions or exemptions from citizens’
general rights or obligations, and claims for special exemptions on grounds
of their cultural heritage are very limited. In this respect, the contrast with
European multiculturalism, in which religion looms so large, is stark.
However, if movements inspired by a claim for recognition succeed,
becoming partners in power or in a modified status quo, they may in the
process pass a point where a discourse of identity which once attracted
sympathy for the downtrodden begins to be seen as a discourse in defence
of a position of power or a niche in the state: the essentialism which is
implicitly forgiven in a discourse of victimhood appears less acceptable in
a discourse of power, as Andrew Canessa insists.
Finally, if social justice as an ideal for society as a whole cannot be disas-
sociated from demands for recognition and reparation, so the same applies
to human rights. In this respect, the question of gender as presented by
Manuela Picq is instructive: on the face of it, she leaves the reader wonder-
ing how the more liberal–individualist concept of rights embodied in the
international human rights apparatus, especially as regards women’s rights,
can be made compatible in practice with the collective rights embodied in
the indigenous judicial arrangements contemplated by the Ecuadorian con-
stitution, and other constitutions. These issues have been dissected from the
point of view of political theory with admirable clarity by Maxine Molyneux
and Shahra Razavi in the Introduction to their edited volume (Molyneux
and Razavi 2002: 5–13), but our account above of indigenous judicial
functioning in Mexico and Guatemala shows that indigenous institutions in
Latin America are by no means incompatible with universal human rights,
and the difficulties they raise are far fewer than those arising from the reli-
gious divergences which mark multicultural provision in Western Europe.

ETHNOGENESIS, RESEMANTICIZATION AND CORPORATISM

Our chapters plug in to these themes from several different angles. Apart
from being situated in different countries and regions, they range from
detailed grassroots and legal-documentary engagement (Boyer, Vázquez,
Boullosa-Joly) to contemporary battles of ideas (Lehmann) and the links
between grassroots mobilization and high constitutional politics (Picq), and
the reshaping of a nation’s power structure (Canessa). Andrew Canessa, in
26 D. LEHMANN

a chapter which should give pause to those who see in Evo Morales and his
Movimiento al Socialismo the standard bearers of a movement combining
anti-capitalism with the indigenous cause, paints a pointed portrait of the
rapidly changing socio-political face of Bolivia. The unique feature is the
emergence of an overarching ‘indigenous’ identity which has attracted a
new contingent of people who might be described as middle class and
who before Morales’ first election would probably not have dreamt of
recognizing themselves in that way. Like previous national popular move-
ments—Peronism and Bolivia’s own 1952 Revolution—it can remake a
national identity through a resemanticization of a foundational idea: in
one case that of the working class, which came to encompass a middle
class and proletarian grand alliance, and in Bolivia, the ex-miners turned
coca-growers and the peasantry. Indigeneity has become a state-sponsored
majority moniker encompassing highland villagers, coca producers in the
semi-tropical yungas areas, and commercially minded sections of an urban
middle class, accompanied by a symbolic refashioning so that in this new
guise, it is linked not to any specific ethnic group but more to the person-
ality of Evo Morales himself.
In his study of Michoacán, Luis Vazquez argues that the combination of
new multicultural legislation in Mexico with the dismantling of the coun-
try’s authoritarian version of corporatism and the opening of land tenure and
agricultural production to market forces has unleashed a destructive mixture
of market competition and institutional unreliability. The politics of recog-
nition are portrayed as an instrument deployed in sometimes unrestrained
pursuit of land and political power: colonial and nineteenth-century land
titles are produced, early and late 20th Presidential dotaciones (conferrals) of
land are contested and even reversed, local power nodes mobilize as owners
of communal title, especially when it comprises land suitable for lucrative
avocado production, and uncontrolled logging provides employment for
those marginalized by these land conflicts. The striking feature here is the
polyvalence of the indigenist claims, deployed by multiple interests in mul-
tiple jurisdictions following multiple agendas. Between the national gov-
ernment’s Focos Rojos (‘Red Troublespot’) Programme, designed to calm
agrarian conflicts, and the intellectuals and public figures looking forward
to a reborn Purhépecha nation, the struggle for political power and land
continues. Not unlike the Bolivian constitution of an indigenous national
project, this one ignores the multifarious origins of the region’s popula-
tion, including those vast contingents of migrant workers from the pre-
dominantly indigenous areas of the South who, having settled in the region,
provide seasonal labour for agribusiness, such as avocado production.
 INTRODUCTION 27

The Argentine case presented by Maité Boullosa-Joly is the most trans-

parent instance of ethnogenesis—the re-emergence of buried identities
or, some might say, their invention (Arruti 1997, 1998; French 2009).
After a depressing history of reverses in their struggles, and continuing
deprivations in their living and working conditions, local leaders in this
high-altitude valley in the province of Tucumán rediscovered themselves
as indigenous people and, inspired by national and international intellec-
tuals and activists, achieved a relative success in building up their institu-
tions and fighting for the return of land lost generations, if not centuries,
ago, as well as for an end to abuses suffered at the hands of landown-
ers, their agents and the state’s political bosses. The conflict, as so often,
is sometimes embroiled in murky local politics and has even given rise
to some violent incidents, and if one of her two cases ended in success,
this owed less to the state’s commitment to indigenous causes than to
the landowner’s unpaid tax liabilities—liabilities which only emerged as a
result of the indigenist mobilization and resulting lawsuits. Nonetheless,
the lesson remains that to transmute socio-economic demands into indig-
enous claims can reap rewards.
In her study of Brazilian Amazonia, Véronique Boyer also describes
land tenure allocations, mostly inspired by NGO activism or state initia-
tives. Here the politics are less tense, but the process produces divisions in
villages and even within families. The theme of the chapter is the encounter
between the villages and communities on one hand and on the other the
state’s extensive apparatus of land management, allocation and realloca-
tion, together with the legislation intended to enable indigenous peoples,
quilombolas (slave descendants, other black rural communities and rural
communities tout court) and ‘traditional people’15 to gain access to land
under multiple provisions, conditions and agencies. Boyer asks why such
an elaborate identity-driven apparatus is needed when a different, needs-
based agenda, or a broad agenda of land redistribution might be a more
direct approach. Her answer is that the process is driven by an ideological
concern with identity and ethnicity propounded by civil society mobiliza-
tion in favour of indigenous peoples, and parts of the anthropological
profession who have found a receptive audience in the state apparatus and
in the national legislature. In the end, some groups are benefitted, but the
rationale why some should be and others not can be obscure.
The contribution by Manuela Picq combines a strong commitment
to grassroots mobilization with a narrative showing that women’s rights
do resonate at the indigenous grassroots. She describes how a group of
28 D. LEHMANN

women from indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian highlands orga-

nized themselves to go to the Constitutional Convention and successfully
made their case for the inclusion of a requirement that the provisions rec-
ognizing indigenous legal systems must respect the equal rights of men
and women. It also depicts a constitutional convention which was recep-
tive to grassroots pressures despite disinterest and discouragement from a
supposedly pro-indigenous lawyer whom her protagonists fruitlessly con-
sulted before taking matters into their own hands.
My own chapter on Brazil follows heated debates about the best way
to enable blacks to gain a more proportionate access to the country’s
state universities. Opponents of quotas proposed what they thought were
technically better solutions which did not require individuals to qualify
on the basis of their (self-assigned) colour identity, but in doing so, they
ignored the driving force of a demand for recognition, whose advocates
set to one side other widely recognized and pervasive issues in deference
to the race-based formulation of the problem of inequality. The Brazilian
political response is interpreted as an example of corporatism, whereby the
state includes leaders and activists from groups who are making effective
new claims within its orbit in the hope of reducing tension and achieving
greater social cohesion, as occurred on a much larger scale with the work-
ing class in the first half of the twentieth century (O’Donnell 1977; Stepan
1978; Schmitter 1989).
All these chapters show that indigenous and race-based mobilization
has undoubtedly brought about significant changes. They may not always
be the changes intended and they may not be particularly egalitarian. Also,
on account of the tight focus on collective rights, the punishment of acts
of racial discrimination remains too often sidelined in discussion of race in
the region. as do acts of violence perpetrated against women of all ages.
For the most part, we witness a politics of inclusion which I have called
corporatist because it brings new groups, or at least their leaders, within
the purview of the state, and creates institutions to cater to their interests
and to open a space for some of their leaders. This is visible in the cases of
Bolivia, Brazil and Mexico, but less so in those of Ecuador and Argentina.
The pressure has been for recognition of collectivities as heirs to a long
history of collective discrimination, and for the inclusion of the leaders of
their movements in policymaking and institution-building.
Some might well ask whether the focus on the corporatist response to
social exclusion has not operated in such a way as to allow governments
to downplay its socio-economic dimension and to formulate the problem
 INTRODUCTION 29

in such a way that the needs of the mass of the excluded populations are
accorded a lower priority than the raison d’état of co-opting the more
active sectors represented by identity-based movements in the name of
social stability. Maybe, but that is hardly a reason for ignoring ancient and
deep-rooted patterns of discrimination whose effects are so visible only
because their causes are so difficult to pinpoint and sanction. And finally,
we can also return to our opening paragraph, reminding ourselves that
Latin America is the only region in the world where governments have
even recognized the existence of a problem.

NOTES
1. Spain, Norway, Nepal, the Central African Republic, Dominica and Fiji.
2. An exception are the Mapuche of Chile among whom one hears of a claim
to re-establish an independent state. The Mapuche in the first part of the
nineteenth century and throughout the colonial period enjoyed political
independence and had an open economic and cultural relationship with
Chilean society—something quite unique in the relationships between the
independent republics and their indigenous populations. But from
Independence and then, after a relatively peaceful interval, from 1860,
their territory suffered murderous military campaigns (Bengoa 1985: espe-
cially Chap. 7). By the year 1998, Mapuche leaders were once again refer-
ring to ‘Mapuche territory’—a word evoking more than just a demand for
land—and confronting the President in person with the cry ‘fuera del ter-
ritorio mapuche’ (‘get out of Mapuche territory!’) (Bengoa 2012: 37).
3. There are multiple websites devoted to the documentation of these trage-
dies; see, for example, the site of the London-based Peru Support Group
[Link]
4. A comparison could be made with the parallel or unofficial justice described
by Deborah Poole for the highland Andes which also does not invoke a
distinctively indigenous system and can be linked to both popular and
landlord powers (Poole 2004). We might then move on to the contested
subject of lynchings (Degregori 2005; Martins 2015). Neither of these
invokes cultural (e.g. indigenous) difference in their interpretation.
5. It is a reflection of the sensitivities which can arise around discussions on
these subjects that I asked myself whether to preserve the quotation marks
around the words ‘indigenous’ and ‘Maya’ in this passage. I decided to
omit them.
6. There are ways of negotiating a modus vivendi on specific issues without a
general incorporation, recognition or adoption of sharia as a ‘system’. In
Israel, Rabbinic courts have authority in carefully circumscribed areas relat-
30 D. LEHMANN

ing to some aspects of marriage, divorce and the administration of dietary

regulations in shops and restaurants, as well of course as conversion and
Jewish legal identity (Lehmann 2012).
7. Hernandez gives the figure of 8735 Mam from the 1990 census, living in
‘scattered settlements’ in the Sierra Madre. Some migrated to the Lacandón
jungle (Hernández 2003: 63).
8. Programa de Formación de Maestros Bilingües de la Amazonía Peruana
(Training programme for Bilingual teachers in Peruvian Amazonia).
I learnt of these issues during fieldwork in Peru in 2010.
9. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary institutional
Party): Mexico’s long-time ruling party which never lost an election at any
level between 1929 and 1990.
10. This is a little exaggerated: intercultural educational establishments have
been set up in the Northern states in Mexico to cater for the children of
people who came there as temporary workers from the South and have
then stayed on and put down roots (Interview: Coordinación General de
Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe, Mexico City, November 2014).
11. Mestizaje is sometimes criticized as a strategy of assimilation encouraged
by states which has had the effect of suppressing or diminishing indigenous
identity, culture, language and heritage; other times it has a positive charge
because its very fuzziness enables people to escape what they might see, or
might have seen, as the negative mark of dark skin or indigenous features;
see among innumerable contributions (Wade 2005).
12. Sennett recalls working in a civil rights office in the early 1960s, where the
office ‘crackled with internal tension’. ‘Learning race’ was coupled to the
questions ‘Why are you helping me? Why are you personally so commit-
ted?’ Any answer that betrayed pity for poor blacks could be taken as ‘con-
descension’ (Sennett 2003: 21).
13. The Regional Indigenous Commission of the Cauca Region, and its
Universidad Autónoma Indígena e Intercultural (UAIIN) (Indigenous
and Intercultural Autonomous University). See its very elaborate website:
[Link]
14. My own experience of political distractions in a research agenda also con-
firms this: in conducting interviews in Intercultural Universities in Mexico
in 2007–2012, I avoided political issues because I thought they would
distract me and my interviewees from the subject of the research, which
was interculturalidad. But after publishing a paper on the subject, I came
to realize that all of them were living a life of economic insecurity vulner-
able to arbitrary decision by State Governors who controlled their universi-
ties and appointed their Rectors and directors. See ‘Mexico no es para
principiantes’, unpublished ms. [Link], and also
(Lehmann 2013, 2015).
15. Povos tradicionais. For an explication, see the chapter by Boyer.
 INTRODUCTION 31

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W.  Assies, G. v. d. Haar and A.  J. Hoekema. Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
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 CHAPTER 2

Multiculturalism as a Juridical Weapon:

The Use and Abuse of the Concept
of ‘Pueblo Originario’ in Agrarian
Conflicts in Michoacán, Mexico

Luis Vázquez León

See Glossary at the end of this chapter for a list of technical terms and
acronyms. This chapter is based on an evaluation of the Programa Focos Rojos
(henceforth the troublespot Programme) commissioned from CIESAS (Centro
de Investigaciones y Enseñanza en Antropología Social) in 2006. The purpose
of the programme was to bring peace to states with significant indigenous
populations suffering from agrarian conflicts, including Michoacán. The author
directed a group of field researchers to undertake this evaluation, which can be
consulted in full at CIESAS. It covers 14 ‘hot spots’ in the states of Chiapas,
Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas and
Sonora. Here, I refer to the sections on Durango-Zacatecas (Macias 2006a, b)
and Michoacán (Vazquez et al. 2006). It is a translation of ‘El multiculturalismo
como arma jurídica: el uso del concepto “pueblo originario” en los conflctos
agro-territoriales en Michoacán’, published in Luis Vázquez León: Multitud
y Distopía, Mexico City, UNAM, Programa Universitario México Nación
Multicultural, 2010. Translation by David Lehmann.

L.V. León ( )
CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología
Social), Guadalajara, Mexico

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 35

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_2
36 L.V. LEÓN

INTRODUCTION: LEGITIMATE AND IDEOLOGICAL

RECOGNITION
Mexico has a long and well-known history of indigenist policies and insti-
tutions, but the contemporary phase represents a departure from the
integrationist purpose of indigenismo in the direction of multiculturalism
(de la Peña 2005). It originates in the passage in 1992 of an amend-
ment to Article Four of the Constitution, which confirmed formally the
‘pluricultural composition’ of the Mexican nation ‘founded in her indig-
enous peoples’. Coming in the wake of the country’s accession to the
1989 International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 169
Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, this
powerful mix of international law and constitutional amendment created
a malleable socio-juridical field which has flexibilized national sovereignty
and ushered in the era of the recognition of identity in Mexico. In the
wake of those changes at the national level, a succession of state-level laws
have been passed, opening the way for a mobilization of the politics of
recognition within the judicial field (Sieder et al. 2005).
This field encompasses not only the political party elites at central and
regional level but also the most radical critics from all sides, who while
they may disagree with the professional politicians with respect to the
scope of the new legislation, do not disagree on indigenist matters as far as
the principle of legal recognition itself is concerned. In general, the critics
argue that Convention 169 has not been fully applied in the granting of
territorial autonomy to indigenous peoples, and some indigenous intellec-
tuals, drawing on the same judicial field, have undertaken the reinvention
of ‘indigenous nations’, on which basis they look to go beyond the purely
legal use of the concept of indigenous peoples. As is the case in other
legal procedures in Mexico, this reinvention goes back to the colonial
period, when the law of nations was a necessary preamble to the prosecu-
tion of a ‘just war’ against rebellious natives. There are some even more
eye-catching usages, as when President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012), the
very President who declared ‘war on drug trafficking’, was proclaimed
‘Presidente Indigenista’ by the Huichol or Wixarika Nation—an entity
which was established only for the purpose of signing the first and only
treaty ever signed between the Mexican state and another such ‘nation’,
the Pacto de Huaxa Manaka, in 2008.
In this political context, in which Mexican multiculturalism is adapted
in highly contradictory ways, one cannot but notice the complete absence
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 37

of anthropological debate on the definition and the concept of ‘indigenous

people’ and its indexical and contextual referents. This debate, started a
long time ago by Eric Wolf, André Béteille and others, was later rekindled
by Adam Kuper (Oldham and Frank 2008: 6), but in the report by the
Mexican anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen on his period as Special
Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms
of indigenous people to the United Nations Human Rights Commission,
such ‘academic’ debates barely rated a mention (Béteille 1998; Wolf 2001;
Karlsson 2003; Kuper 2003; Borshay Lee 2006; Barnard 2007; Konner
2007; Stavenhagen 2008: 38–41).
That is to say, Mexican social thought is dominated by the attribution
of positive qualities to groups and individuals, in the form of morally justi-
fied recognition which cannot be doubted and even less criticized, even
if those qualities tend to be expressed in a contested context (Honneth
2007 [1994]). This subjective predisposition is reinforced by our very
own susceptibility to the ‘seduction of culture’ (Lepenies 2006)—a seduc-
tion which is particularly prevalent in Mexican anthropology’s cultural
turn, with the concomitant disdain for the political, economic and social
context. Likewise, the most serious omission arising from this ontological
fragmentation in the interpretation of Convention 169 is the omission of
international labour markets, and thus, of its intention to protect indig-
enous peoples, like other labour forces, as formally free, capable and avail-
able for work (Standing 2008).
But far from embarking on an exercise in juridical hermeneutics, I want
here to emphasize the abyss which separates current indigenist legal rhet-
oric—a rhetoric which can be traced back to the colonial period but which
is now subordinated to the new jus gentium of contemporary interna-
tional indigenous law—from the social reality of one specific ‘indigenous
people’, the Purhépecha or Tarasco, in the conflict-ridden and very violent
state of Michoacán.
In fact, this tension between reality and its guiding ideas did not pass
unnoticed by the theorists of multiculturalism. Already in his classic essay,
Charles Taylor pointed to the possibility of ‘mistaken recognition’, but it
is thanks to the concept of the ‘material fulfilment criterion’ developed by
critical theorists that a distinction has been drawn between legitimate and
ideological forms of recognition (Taylor 2009; Honneth 2007 [1994];
Fraser and Honneth 2003; Fraser 2000) which require the observer
to approach morally justified recognitions but which nevertheless con-
tain an element of domination. As Honneth writes: ‘As long as we have
38 L.V. LEÓN

no empirical evidence that the concerned parties themselves experience

particular practices of recognition as being repressive, constricting or as
fostering stereotypes, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between ideo-
logical and justified forms of recognition in any reasonable way’ (Honneth
2007 [1994]: 327).
In order to illustrate this reservation, I claim that this distinction
between ideological and legitimate recognition can be documented eth-
nographically with reference to the promise of recognition of the pueblo
indígena Purhépecha (the indigenous Purhépecha people). Of course, it
is common to criticize doctrines which serve particular interests for the
distance they exhibit between rhetoric and reality, but I will take this point
much further by showing that the concept of ‘pueblo originario’ or ‘native
people’ has been instrumentalized in conflicts between indigenous com-
munities over property boundaries. This is a new phenomenon, since the
term is now used not merely as a speech act in social interaction but for the
purpose of ‘inventing a people’, in Edmund S. Morgan’s phrase (1988), as
a political fiction, evidently at odds with its context, which can neverthe-
less bring about consent or acquiescence to the point where minorities can
exercise power over majorities. It would seem that the word ‘people’ pos-
sesses an ideological force such that the greater the divergence from social
reality the greater the effort made to diminish that divergence and so the
greater the domination exercised. It is not therefore by accident that the
expressions pueblo indígena and pueblo originario are constantly invoked
not only by politicians of each and every political party but also by the
indigenous intelligentsia aspiring to join the governing elite in all kinds
of institutions of multicultural recognition. The question then arises: who
are ‘the parties’ to whom Honneth refers?
For this purpose, I have placed the case of the ‘pueblo indígena
Purhépecha’ alongside an unpublished evaluation undertaken by the
troublespots Programme, which was implemented in 2006 with 12 ethnic
groups involved in serious agrarian conflicts. On the basis of this compari-
son, I argue that conflicts between local indigenous communities lead us
to not only question the construction of a presumed indigenous people
but also provide evidence that three political factions from the indigenous
intelligentsia have appropriated the concept of the natural rights of an
‘indigenous people’ in order to extend their territory into neighbour-
ing lands, irrespective of whether these belong to members of their own
Purhépecha ethnic group, thus pointing to a discrepancy with respect to
the juridical notion of an indigenous people.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 39

RED SPOTS: BETWEEN SECURITY AND THE AGRARIAN

COUNTER-REFORM
In Mexico, the term foco rojo is part of the jargon of security and is used
to refer to any conflict which in the view of the state is a threat to govern-
ability. This language of social control came to be applied to rural areas
during the Presidency of Vicente Fox (2000–2006) and was associated
with the indigenous population from the start of his period, due, but only
partly, to the Chiapas conflict (Henríquez and Pría 2000; Hernández
et al. 2004). In 1991, Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994), the self-
same President who had signed ILO Convention No. 169 and intro-
duced the word ‘pluricultural’ into the Constitution, decreed the end of
the Agrarian Reform instituted by the revolution in 1915, and freed new
markets for agricultural products, capital and labour (Favre and Lapointe
1997; Naïr 2003).
One of the first actions in the liberalization of the land market and in
the process of legally guaranteeing the security of land ownership—one of
the oldest demands of Mexico’s more conservative forces ever since the
Revolution of 1910—was to convert the ejidatario population into private
landowners. This privatization was carried out under the provisions of the
Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares
(PROCEDE),1 which was a product of the 1992 Agrarian Law (Léonard
et  al. 2003; Nuitjen 2003; Ferry 2003). Although PROCEDE started
under the PRI and continued during the two PAN administrations, there
are still places, like Michoacán, where many ejidos and communities have
not been subdivided. In 2003, the government ran a campaign under
the banner of ‘legal certainty’ (certeza jurídica) and ‘social peace in the
countryside’ boasting that more than a million ejidatarios and comuneros
(members of agrarian communities) had had 90 million hectares ‘regu-
larized’ (i.e. transferred to private property in their own name, not as
members of an ejido or community).2 But not everyone was included.
The state, adopting the logic of security, dealt with those people who
still invoked the discredited idea of a ‘right to land’ with an iron fist,
first by labelling them criminals and usurpers of private property and then
removing them by force and even imprisoning them. Today, no one can
apply for the expropriation of private property in the name of agrarian
justice without dire consequences, and in this sense, the establishment
of ‘social peace in the countryside’ has been a success. The old agrarian
conflicts are now described as a threat to security, an undesired legacy of
40 L.V. LEÓN

the revolutionary past grounded in a ‘sui generis notion of agrarian justice’

(SRA 2006: 104).
In March 2003, on the instructions of President Fox, a special social
policy was drawn up entitled Focos Rojos or the troublespot Programme,
the troublespots being classified red and yellow according to their ‘acute-
ness of conflict’, that is, governability. None of the neoliberal PRI or
PAN governments were concerned that the institutions they created to
resolve agrarian land conflicts, namely, the Tribunales Agrarios and the
Procuradoría Agraria (Agrarian Attorney) would be in receipt of thou-
sands of disputes between 1992 and 2006 as a result of the judicialization
brought about by PROCEDE (Ramírez 2006: 127–128; Meneses and
Morales 2006: 107–113). That is to say, PROCEDE brought about the
individualization of peasant and communal lands, so that local disputes
would pit families against each other, armed with titles to their newly
demarcated plots, while collective demands from corporate bodies, namely,
ejidos and agrarian communities, went into decline. Authorities would
speak of ‘disincorporating’ such bodies, depriving them of legal status,
in addition to privatizing their lands (Peón 2005). But the troublespots
continue to represent conflicts involving pre-existing corporate entitles,
with collective demands emanating from ejido and community authori-
ties and campesino assemblies—still acting as institutions of government.
According to official sources, in 2003, 288 acute conflicts and 364 less
acute ones were documented, and the last ejido census featured 6158
boundary disputes (INEGI 2008: Table 39). Other sources, meanwhile,
speak of 518 deaths and 208 injured in violent conflicts over land and
natural resources (Ramírez 2006: 129; Hershberger 2006: 15–16; SRA
2006: 114–115). Seeing that these conflicts involved 18 different indig-
enous ethnic groups, the people responsible for PROCEDE and the
Procuradoría Agraria, rushed to apply Convention 169 and to elevate the
concept of pueblo indigena to official status, but as a synonym of pueblo
originario, ‘in the light of the deep-rooted attachment of the native peo-
ples to their environment’ (Cruz 2006: 39; Hershberger 2006: 21).
This natural law interpretation is described by Borshay (2006: 470) as
‘strategic essentialism’, which has implications which go well beyond the
mere question of cultural authenticity as embodied in First Nations or First
Peoples. For Mexico’s government, choosing between ‘peoples’ and ‘com-
munities’ is a language game which on the one hand allows it to ‘unincor-
porate’ local and communal levels of government—notably the ejido and
communal office-holders known as ‘comisariados’ (commissaries)—while
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 41

on the other hand maintaining the fiction of ‘peoples’ and using that to
liquidate ejido and community property through the liberal programme of
conferring landed title on family parcels within the ejidos and communities.3
In this context, the notion of territory becomes useful for those who
might prefer it to the more precise term ‘property’, since it leaves open the
possibility of extending boundaries of a property. A perverse situation then
produces a conflict between the person who is recognized as belonging to
the original people and another who has been expelled and despoiled of
his or her rights to the land because of not belonging in the category of
originario. This is where natural law comes back into play, as the original
peoples become a metahistorical reality by virtue of their cultural heritage
as manifested in shared customs (usos y costumbres) and as these allegedly
‘original’ or more ancient customs bring a moral entitlement which pre-
vails over those conferred by positive law or any prior legal claim.4 All
factual information such as the genetic evidence of pre-historic migrations
to America, the archaeological evidence for the presence of pre-Tarasco
and pre-Tepehuano groups or simply the persistent reliance on colonial
documents to prove a person’s entitlement to appropriate a piece of land
now—all such evidence is discarded in order to recognize whichever claim
refers to the earliest occupancy (cf. Audi 1999: 796–797; Macdonald 1963;
Adams 2003: 129–208; Haskett 2005; Stix 2008; Punzo 2006; Berrojalviz
2006; Cárdenas 2004).
Therefore, it is astonishing that all ambiguities and local conflicts relat-
ing to land ownership are seen as issues relating to ‘traditional property’
of an oppressed indigenous group, leading to the facile presumption that
the recognition of ethnic territory and autonomy is a morally justified act
(Gilbert 2006: 260–261; Roldán 2004: 11–12), even though ‘traditional
property’ is not a legally recognized category. I call this an interpreta-
tion grounded in a revitalization of natural law since it conflates legal and
moral claims (Macdonald 1963).
In the months preceding the implementation of the troublespot
Programme, a conflict occurred which was to serve as a model of inter-
vention in the resolution of agrarian conflicts, at least in security terms. In
this case, which I shall call the Bernalejo Model, after the village of that
name, a series of land invasions were carried out by the ‘pueblo origi-
nario tepehuan’ (the ‘Tepehuan native people’) from southern Durango,
who, to be precise, were members of an agrarian community known as
Santa María de Ocotán and its dependent precincts (anexos), provoking
giving rise to the deployment of police and military forces. In response,
42 L.V. LEÓN

the state ‘reintegrated’ (i.e. restored) 5465 hectares of ‘native land’ which
had themselves been expropriated in 1956 from the Hacienda San Juan
Capistrano and allocated to the Ejido Bernalejo de la Sierra. The positive
discrimination accorded to the indigenous land invaders vis-à-vis the eji-
datarios is evident from the fact that the state never brought any charges
against them. The peaceful mestizos ejidatarios and their families who lost
this land apparently accepted a monetary compensation for the compul-
sory purchase, valued at 52.4 million pesos (c. US$ 4.5 million in 2004)
and distributed among 42 of the 64 ejidatarios.
In the words of President Fox on February 11, 2004, this settlement was
reached ‘in full accordance with the will of the parties involved … The eji-
datarios of Bernalejo de la Sierra have received their compensation in accor-
dance with the law’. Fox then went on, adopting an aggressive but very
multicultural tone: ‘Our commitment with the indigenous peoples is serious
and deeply rooted. We are working day in day out to protect the land of
their ancestors, which is the basis of their livelihood and their traditions’.5
He concluded his speech by offering his blessing as if he was officiating at
a mass or a community mitote6 (Reyes 2007). From Fox’s point of view, he
could count on a clientele of 4000 tepehuanos and huicholes who also saw
his party, the PAN, as their political ally. Unfortunately, much less publicity
was given to the fate of the ejidatarios and their families who were expelled
by force after being subjected to a siege by the invaders who had blocked
the only road leading to their township in March 2003; only then had they
left their properties to take refuge in hostels in the town of Valparaíso saying
they feared for their physical safety. Their account was recorded on video by
a CIESAS evaluation and bears witness to the pain inflicted by what might be
the first case of ethnic cleansing in multicultural Mexico. Nevertheless, the
official evaluation speaks euphemistically of the ‘emigration’ of the victims
(Macias 2006a, b). To be sure, these ejidatarios also considered themselves
to be the ‘original’ of the land, but their crime was to be thought of as mes-
tizos in an area imagined to be exclusively inhabited by a single ethnic group.
Can this reassemblage (reintegración) of land belonging to the
Tepehuanos be morally justified? It was only possible by abstracting the
demands of an ethnic minority by disembedding them from the web of
local relationships 513 indigenous people live in Ocotán, as opposed to
12,400 comuneros who live dispersed on their holdings and are almost
all day labourers. This contrast reflects something which has been forgot-
ten, namely that in 1936, Cardenas’ Agrarian Reform restored 423,139
hectares to the ejido of Santa María de Ocotán. Since then, this forested
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 43

area has come to resemble Indian reservations in the USA. It borders to

the north with Mexico’s Golden Triangle (located between Chihuahua,
Durango and Sinaloa), and has become a no man’s land because the area
has fallen under the sway of the drugs traffic in which the Tepehuanos of
southern Chihuaha are involved (Servín 2008: 86).
Legal multiculturalism aims to extend communal lands with a view
to their subsequent parcellization and privatization: the establishment of
a native pueblo presupposes a fictional territory with slippery property
boundaries, since its members extend them repeatedly. Neither Cardenas’
‘restitution’ nor Fox’s ‘reassemblage’ (‘reintegración’) have sufficed to
satiate the multicultural geographical imaginary and its policy of recogni-
tion of ethnic minorities, as in the case of Tepehuans.7 The Bernalejo de
la Sierra ejido was the first victim. Later, there were new conflicts in the
Santa Lucía and Luis Echeverría ejidos and with a private landowner in San
Juan Capistrano. In the second of these ejidos, the ejidatarios protested
against the invasion of their houses justified by the tepehuanos on the
basis of ‘primordial’ colonial title deeds. In short, the ‘solution of the first
red troublespot’ marked the beginning of endemic conflict in the region.
Compared with the Zapatista ideal of ‘land to the tiller’—which takes a
peasant family to be the basic economic unit of rural development—the
tepehuanos of Santa María de Ocotán have now become large landowners,
a social class which was thought to have disappeared in Mexico.
Finally, in its initial survey of conflict areas, the Land Reform Ministry
(SRA 2003a) chose only 14 high-risk ‘red troublespots’ as their main focus.
The speed with which the conflict in Bernalejo was resolved—only two
months, followed quickly by the Huichol communities of Teponahuaxtlán
and Cohamiata which were also involved in confrontation with ‘mestizo
ejidos’—led them to believe that this example could be applied to all the
other agrarian conflicts throughout the country using the same Bernalejo
Model, including the discretionary use of economic ‘counterpayments’—
that is, compensation. In April 2006, amid much publicity, the govern-
ment announced that 11 of the 14 red troublespots had been settled. But
it also stated that this had cost it 767.3 million pesos (c. US$ 75 million)
(El Universal, 24/04/2006). At the end of that year, the programme
was terminated even though conflicts in Chiapas, Michoacán and Sonora
were still ‘awaiting resolution’. Nevertheless, the programme has been
effusively praised as a genuine contribution to the democratic govern-
ability of the country. In the words of a senior official, the troublespots
Program brings to an end the second stage of the Agrarian Reform: the
44 L.V. LEÓN

first stage, that of redistribution, ended in 1992, the second stage, of plac-
ing rural land ownership on a secure legal footing, ended in 2006, and
in the third stage, the country’s full potential agricultural productivity
would be reached, rendering obsolete all the post-revolutionary institu-
tional apparatus, including all the ‘so-called social forms of ownership’,
in the telling words of Fox at the ceremony conferring title to the new of
lands to the Tepehuanos of Durango (SRA 2006; Hershberger 2006: 13).

THE TARASCAN PLATEAU (MESETA TARASCA): ONE

TROUBLESPOT FOR 58 AGRARIAN COMMUNITIES
IN CONFLICT

The apparent ease with which the troublespot Programme had proceeded
among the Tepehuanos and the Huicholes led to a delay in its intro-
duction in Michoacán, until March 2004, when the first technical field
team was hired, including several people who had worked in Bernalejo.
However, the first shocking information from the ‘Foco Rojo Meseta
Purhépecha’ came in the official confirmation of 122 clashes, 300 dead,
and 1004 injured, over an unspecified period of time—a toll far in excess
of any other troublespot or even of the much-publicized 1994 Chiapas
rebellion.8 If the statistics from security agencies are to be believed, this
resembled a low-intensity peasant war, but one in which victims and per-
petrators belonged to the same ethnic group. Despite the extremely seri-
ous chcracter of the conflicts, an initial diagnosis limited itself to seven
boundary disputes between indigenous communities, in a region domi-
nated by communal land ownership.9 Exceptionally, only in one of the
cases, the dispute between the indigenous community of Ocumicho and
the ejidatarios of Tangancícuaro, was the Bernalejo Model followed from
the outset; but there the ejidatarios refused to sell their fertile land with its
highly productive tomato farms, while in Ocumicho, only one indigenous
faction organized in support of a land claim (Pérez 2003). The efforts by
the programme’s technical personnel to persuade people that they might
‘share in its benefits’—that is, receive financial compensation—produced
meagre results in 2004, but then, in the following year, it awakened finan-
cial expectations among local indigenous leaders, who started to quarrel
over untitled land (known as malpaís—literally ‘badlands’) which, because
of its volcanic character, had no economic value, but which they thought
might bring them compensation from the programme.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 45

So it was that the boundary disputes began to escalate and with the
escalation came the need for more technical teams to resolve them—
reaching a total of five in 2006, and bringing the government of the state
to take charge first in the form of negotiation, then of policing and finally
of military deployment, but creating at the same time a growing suspi-
cion that the whole process would end in failure. Of course, as the pro-
gramme approached its end, so the state government of the Partido de la
Revolución Democrática (PRD) distanced itself from the problem, with
Governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel (grandson of the former President) using
his control over agrarian and municipal indigenous authorities gathered
in the Consejo Consultivo Indígena (Indigenous Consultative Council)
to claim, at a meeting in Sicuicho, that he had settled 55 disputes with
an expenditure of 117 million pesos (c. US$ 11 million) (La Jornada,
1/2/2008). Federal officials of the Procuradoría Agraria, in contrast,
admitted that the programme was still ongoing with two field teams and
36 of the 58 conflicts still unresolved—and indeed in the end, only 22
were ever resolved.10 If the Bernalejo Model was beginning to wear a little
thin as a method of conflict resolution, the concept of pueblo originario
which it embodied continued to whet the appetites of expansionary com-
munities like Pamatácuaro, Chilchota and San Juan Nuevo which are all
the scenes of acute conflict today (2014) and who share a propensity for
making land claims in all directions and against all their neighbours.11
Neoliberal officials always blamed the Agrarian Reform as the cause of
all rural chaos (SRA 2006: 104, 158), discrediting its legality and its proce-
dures. They hold this view even though the Agrarian Reform in Michoacán
was successful in keeping the levels of regional conflict from boiling over,
using more or less stable equilibrium solutions, which although they did
not eliminate the causes of conflict, nevertheless restrained their underlying
cyclical rhythm, through ad hoc responses whenever violence broke out.
Various factors contributed to this equilibrium. For several decades, former
President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–1940) used his enormous author-
ity as a revolutionary leader from Michoacán, long after leaving office, to
cajole conflicting parties into agreement, to propose Solomonic solutions
and to tame the spirits of localism. But this role as caudillo was exercised in
a favourable institutional framework provided not only by the redistribution
of land under the Agrarian Reform but also by a peasant and farmer-led
development path carried forward by a panoply of institutions created to sup-
port it (banks, crop and credit insurance agencies, seed distribution systems,
irrigation works, agribusiness, etc.). This so-called ‘populist’ economic and
46 L.V. LEÓN

social policy began to fall apart in 1965, and today has entirely disappeared,
and with it the farmer and peasant economy and its institutions have also
entered into a slow but inexorable decline (Warman 2001; Romero 2002;
Varo 2002). One aspect of this decline is seen in forestry, which started out
as an industry for indigenous communities and ejidos organized as coopera-
tives, and has ended up in pervasive informality and violence, even in the
most successful case, namely that of San Juan Nuevo Parangaricutiro.
Seen from a geographical and historical point of view, the Tarascan
Plateau is a mountainous region containing mostly temperate woodlands;
its very limited flatlands are apt for farming or animal husbandry only so
long as they are not overburdened by human population, as they have now
become. During the colonial period, the region did not attract big land-
owners or cattle farmers, but rather served as a labour reserve for the mines
and great estates of other regions, and also as a source of labour tribute
and tithes for the Crown and the Church. Colonial resettlement policy did
succeed in concentrating the indigenous population in pueblos and in con-
verting them into peasant farmers on the plateaux which were enough to
provide for the existing population. This economic combination continued
through the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries, and explains
how the indigenous communities retained ownership of their communal
lands. In 1915, at the start of the Agrarian Reform, 82 Tarasco pueblos
had 256,000 hectares, and several of them had more than 10,000 hectares
(Embriz 2001: 238). After that the development of mining and the expan-
sion of the railway network brought a new actor to the region, namely
the forestry industry, which gained control of forests through rental and
purchase. By 1931, when the Agrarian Reform reached the Highlands, it
did not redistribute agricultural land but rather restored control over the
extensive forest areas (220,000 hectares for 20 pueblos) to agrarian com-
munities, whose origins lay in the colonial period and which survived the
reform, thus eliminating foreign investment in forestry. Indeed, the first
experiments in indigenous cooperativism were precisely in forestry, even
before collective ejidos were invented (Ginzberg 1999; Guzmán 1982).
The flourishing peasant economy gave rise to an explosive growth of the
Tarascan population, severely intensifying pressure on the land, especially
in the communities where forestry was most heavily market oriented (Rees
1971). In a single geographical area, between 1800 and 2000, the region’s
population grew from 17,690 to 191,731 (Tanck 2005: 126–127; Serrano
et  al. 2002: 95–98). Horizontal inequalities became increasingly visible
and soon led to communal disputes (Mancini 2008). Where previously
disputes going back as far as 1821 had centred on cultivable flatlands,
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 47

they now revolved firstly around highlands and woodlands, and secondly
around irrigation water and rich soils apt for export-oriented fruit and veg-
etable production. Of all the latecoming experiments in the organization of
‘community forestry enterprises’ in the 1980s, only one, San Juan Nuevo
Parangaricutiro, managed to survive and become a success story, praised
even by the World Bank. But the same assets which enabled them to achieve
such success have today become the object of disputes with neighbouring
indigenous communities, especially Angahuan, over the exploitation of the
woodlands on their boundaries (Guerrero-Murillo 2000; Vazquez et  al.
2000; Acosta 2001; Barton and Merino 2004; Bofill 2005; Vazquez et al.
2006). Another communal enterprise, Santa Cruz Tanaco, fell victim to
internal factional disputes: in its glory days, it had been in dispute with all
its surrounding communities, whom it described as ‘enemies’, but when
its sawmill business collapsed, it came to rely on the informal economy in
the form of night-time incursions by young unemployed men who rapidly
turned to plunder, and to arming themselves against eventual competition.
This pattern of reversion to the informal economy is common to most of
the region, and has led to confrontations with the army in Huécato in
2002 and other confrontations with the Grupo de Operaciones especiales
(Special Operations Police Force) (GOES) police special operations task-
force in Cheranástico 2006 and Carapan in 2008.
The current insertion of the region’s economy is not in the best interests
of its inhabitants because the boom in avocado, tomato, melon, mango
and other export products has been in neighbouring areas. Agribusiness
only offers insecure and low-quality seasonal employment with no prospect
of long-term improvement for farmers and their landless sons and daugh-
ters (INEGI 2005), unlike dollar-earners. Young workers from Tarecuato
now go in search of work in tomato production or picking avocadoes.
Agribusiness draws in up to 100,000 day labourers from among the indig-
enous peoples of Morelos, Oaxaca and Guerrero, illustrating how this lead-
ing sector in the region’s economic development is encouraging emigration
from peasant and indigenous communities which have been left to fend for
themselves since the new agrarian policies came into effect in 1991.

THE PURHÉPECHA: A NATIVE PEOPLE OR AN INDIGENOUS

PEOPLE?
The process whereby indigenous peoples are constituted in Mexico is rep-
licated in many places: first, politicians classify groups among the indig-
enous population so as to target their programmes and actions, then they
48 L.V. LEÓN

draw distinctions between native indigenous (with roots in a territory)

and immigrant indigenous, and then subsequently they tie the status of
‘originalidad’ (‘nativeness’) to an entitlement to political representation
which brings access to preferential treatment in social programmes. This
sequence is exemplified by the case of the Nahua people of Mexico City
(Mora 2007; López 2007), who obtained a recognition of their exis-
tence there ‘since time immemorial’ (even better than being ‘heirs to
the Aztecs’) and on that basis, an ‘unquestionable right to the territory’
(Mora 2007: 27). Despite this search for the past, mention is never made
of pre-existing ethnic groups, of constant population movements, or of
the continuous restructuring of territories in processes lost in the mists
of time. Recent studies also reveal the urban impact of the supposed his-
torical territorial unity of these peoples. We know very well, as a result
of ethnohistorical and archaeological research in Tacuba and Teotlalpan
(Mexico City), for example, that ancient ‘ethnic territories’ were interwo-
ven and even dispersed, that ethnic boundaries were flexible and that the
tributary demands of the pre-Colombian nobility were based on mixtures
of ethnic claims and territorial jurisdictions, apparently shaped by matri-
monial alliances among noble families who might well belong to different
ethnic groups.
Apart from this complexity in the overlapping of ancient ethnic and
territorial jurisdictions, the very terms ‘primordial entitlements’ or ‘first
deeds of ownership’ (títulos primordiales), which form the legal basis for
claims grounded in prior occupancy or antiquity, create confusion. These
deeds consist of a variegated body of documents including codices, wills,
colonial land grants (mercedes de tierras) and regularizations of tenure
(composiciones), which were used to certify property owned by Indian
nobles and Indian pueblos during the post-sixteenth-century popula-
tion resettlements and territorial changes. Modern specialists debate the
meaning of these documents but overall they agree on their legal sta-
tus (cf. Haskett 2005; Ruiz 2007; Roskamp 2001, 2003; Ojeda 2005;
Florescano 1988). Decades ago, for example, Woodrow Borah (1983)
showed on the basis of abundant evidence that Indian pueblos fought
much more among themselves than against the Spaniards, when it came
to the imposition of the new colonial property arrangements. In discuss-
ing the rulings (cédulas) of 1687 and 1695, he described them as ‘power-
ful weapons in these disputes’. Today’s corresponding weapon is the term
‘pueblo originario’.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 49

In Michoacán, the notion of originalidad (‘primordiality’) was also asso-

ciated with the PRD and the pro-indigenous left, as had been the case in the
national capital. In 2002, in the midst of a discussion of a proposed state
indigenous law, the Organización Nación Purhépecha (ONP) proposed a
law governing the ‘Rights of the Native Peoples of the state of Michoacán’.
Although in the end, the proposal failed, it introduced the idea that only four
indigenous peoples would be recognized in the state (Purhépecha, Nahua,
Mazahua and Otomí or Ñhañu) because they ‘were the original inhabitants
of Michoacán lands and of the state’s current territory’ (Ventura 2008: 264).
Quite apart from the pre-historic migrations and the pre-Tarascan popula-
tion who may also claim to be the true ‘natives’, today, some 101,000 day
labourers migrate seasonally to the state, many of them descended from other
‘indigenous peoples’ speaking 42 languages between them and numbering
almost as many as the 125,000 indigenous language speakers among the per-
manent residents: Zapotecas, Amuzgos and many others are also staying on
and settling in Michoacán, albeit stigmatized as outsiders. The implication
is that the main effect of the distinction between natives and immigrants is
to reduce the latter to second-class citizens, while Central American labour-
ers are reduced even further, to non-citizens (Gibney 2008). Thus native-
ness opens the way to the entitlement to rights. Apart from the contrast
between cultural recognition for some and exclusion for others, officialdom
has come to belittle the internal migrants as ‘the other migration’ (COESPO
2007)—‘othering’ them in comparison with the migration to the USA even
though a high proportion of those are also indigenous.
The distinctive feature of the legal notion of nativeness—that is, ‘origi-
nario’ status—in Michoacán with respect to primordial land title is that
those harmed by its application are above all community members from the
selfsame ethnic group, namely the Purhépecha. Setting aside Chilchota for
the moment, there are dubious documentary aspects to the cases of both
San Juan Nuevo Parangaricutiro and Pamatácuaro. Neither has colonial
land grants (‘mercedes de tierras’), which would be the earliest evidence,
having been rather created as concentrations of several different highland
population groups—these had not been pueblos in the meaning prevailing
at the time, but rather dispersed hamlets. It was around 1715–1720 that
a regularization of land tenure confirmed the title of San Juan over three
areas (sitios) for cattle pasture plus three caballerías, amounting to some
5400 hectares, this being its true ‘original territory’; in 1991, this became
a claim for restitution of 21,000 hectares, or about 7000 more than those
recognized in 1715, thanks to the liberal reforms of the nineteenth cen-
50 L.V. LEÓN

tury which had profound effects on the local land tenure system, bring-
ing about the disappearance of the colonial type of community. After the
eruption of the Paricutin volcano in 1944, the state seized lands from the
Hacienda Los Conejos to resettle the whole of San Juan and relocate their
entire township, and their fortunes took a turn for the better: the domi-
nant communal faction at the time embarked on a process of confirmation
of their title in 1949 which finally achieved success in 1972, thanks to the
work of government palaeographers whose certification of the authentic-
ity of the eighteenth-century regularization (composición) conferred upon
it the status of a full land title.
Around this time, the leadership of the faction was strengthened by
a younger and more ambitious group known as the ‘professionals’ (law-
yers, forestry engineers and accountants, later joined by historians and
anthropologists) who saw a profitable opportunity in establishing a for-
estry business on the community’s lands. Their ‘strategic primordial-
ism’ pictured San Juan as a ‘twenty-first century indigenous community’
but with origins dating back to ‘time immemorial’ (Acosta 2001: 142;
Guerrero-Murillo 2000; Gabany-Guerrero 1999). The group mobilized
ties of political patronage, which persist to this day in the PRI and the
PAN, achieving in 1991 a Presidential resolution by Carlos Salinas confer-
ring upon them title to 14,068 hectares. But this was not enough: since
1978, they have spoken of the restitution of 21,106 hectares based on
a new ‘primordial’ document which hangs in a frame on the wall of the
offices of the community enterprise. The document is a map of forestry
potential made for ‘Bosques Mexicanos’, an American-owned company,
in 1907 which, when superimposed on the map accompanying the 1991
Presidential resolution, increases the ‘original’ size of the holding to
23,187 hectares, extending into almost all the neighbouring communi-
ties and several ejidos and private holdings, including the San Juan Nuevo
ejido founded as recently as 1959. It is not hard to see how this imaginary
concept of territory, combined with profitable agribusiness, is a persistent
cause of local agrarian conflict.
In another case, that of Pamatácuaro, the revolutionary laws opened
the way for demands for the return of 28,000 hectares from neighbouring
communities, on the basis of supposed land grants from Hernán Cortés
and Cristóbal de Olid, a contemporary Spanish military chieftain.
Although this document was officially declared to be a forgery in 1950,
it was brought back into consideration by the Agrarian Tribunal in 1997.
So the authorities declared void the restoration of neighbouring lands,
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 51

but left intact numerous smallholdings ‘in the heart of the settlement’.
This recognition provided the basis for the community’s ownership of
14,041 hectares, but its leaders rejected the resolution. In the end, the
neoliberal Agrarian Law of 1992 put a stop to further claims and allowed
the pre-revolutionary status quo to be restored: the forged primordial title
provided the basis for the reconstitution of Pamatácuaro and its adjacent
farms as a pueblo originario as well as supporting the new demand for
‘recovery’ of 28,000 hectares.

THE PUEBLO INDIGENA: A ‘COMMUNITY

OF COMMUNITIES’?

As I said, Chilchota deserves separate treatment because it was at the

forefront of Spanish settlement in the region already from 1542, so
that today, it is hard to describe them as either Tarasco or Purhépecha
(Stanislawski 1950). This demographic aspect of the origin of the inhab-
itants of the municipal seat has always conferred an ethnic dimension on
land conflicts in the Cañada de los Once Pueblos (The Eleven Pueblos
Canyon), a small but highly productive area only 12 kilometres long,
on the north side of the sierra, which in 2006 was the scene of no less
than 17 disputes. Chilchota returned to the forefront after many years
of oblivion, since as of 2001, at least 389 non-indigenous farmers pre-
sented themselves formally as comuneros (community members). This
self-rediscovery (or self-assignment) has been possible thanks to an addi-
tional powerful legal resource, which strictly speaking should not belong
to them, because at the time Carapan, not Chilchota, was the seat: this
is the Carapan Codex which, together with other related primordial title
deeds make up an impressive body of documents dating from the seven-
teenth to eighteenth century, and from which it is clear that the caciques
of the local nobility were trying to portray their pre-colonial status in
exalted terms as if they were ‘another Tzintzuntzan’, that is, a royal
dynasty deserving of the corresponding privileges. Roskamp sees this
use of documents by the colonial indigenous elite as a way of legitimat-
ing their territorial demands in order to shake off their subordination to
the Spanish enclave in Chilchota (Roskamp 2003: 307; Paredes 2008:
8–10). Unfortunately, today the documents have received a different
interpretation: on the basis of the many pictorial depictions in the colo-
nial documents, the enterprising community leaders are convinced that
52 L.V. LEÓN

the only native pueblos to be seen in those documents were Chilchota

and Carapan, and the others were merely subsequent concentrations
of dispersed settlements—‘congregaciones’ without title. Asked by
researchers whether such a well-founded demand would affect the rest
of their ethnic group (non-members of their community) their reply was
telling: ‘we are a native pueblo: the others came later and have to go’.
They learned this concept of nativeness (originalidad) from ideologically
minded officials in the CDI in Cherán, but mainly from one of their own
lawyers.
It is therefore no coincidence that from mid-2006, just at the time
when the troublespot Programme was active on the Meseta and in the
Cañada, the comuneros of Chilchota all together joined the PROCEDE
programme of ejido privatization and land title regularization, which
offered them 8056 hectares, almost 2000 hectares more than the 6248
hectares conferred by a resolution of 2001, and amounting to almost
one-third of the entire municipality. This valuable surplus was a triumph
for them because the land under dispute was only 734 hectares, and it was
gained at the expense of seven other pueblos (out of 11 of the Cañada
de Once Pueblos). It should be recalled that in the last 30 years, only
23 % of the families in this municipality have had access to any land of
their own, and even the communal land was treated like private property
(Ramirez 1986: 130). So today, in the new business-friendly rural order,
the comuneros of Chilchota are enviable certified owners of titled irri-
gated land.
At the time the troublespot Programme withdrew, handing over to the
Agrarian Attorney (Procuradoría Agrario), its head said that it was time for
the ‘third stage in the countryside’ to be started, so as to ‘capitalize social
property’. A year later, conflicts involving resources and properties became
increasingly violent, creating a counterpoint between state violence and
violence among indigenous people. In Cherán, not long before a conflict
inside the municipal government broke out, ending in three deaths that
have never been solved, personnel from the federal police backed by a heli-
copter, ranged through part of the sierra between Tanaco and Paracho,
apparently looking for stolen cattle. A week later, the Agencia Federal
de Investigación (AFI—equivalent of FBI) conducted a similar operation
chasing cattle theft and illegal logging. After the armed confrontation
between comuneros of Urapicho and Arantepacua in late January 2008,
the intensity of boundary disputes decreased throughout the region. That
incident had left one dead and several wounded, but it could have been
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 53

much worse: an incursion by 20 armed men in response to a cattle theft

would have led to a massacre but for the intervention of the Policía Federal
Preventiva (Federal Preventive Police) on the order of an army General.
The protagonists of the conflict between these communities mostly used
roadblocks as their strategy, but their protests never went much further:
they tended to be high-profile rituals of rebellion which, by threatening
to turn violent, attracted the attention of the authorities for reasons of
public order. Thus the decline in armed incidents coincided with the start
two months later, in March 2008, of the army’s ‘Operación Conjunta
Michoacán’ (Joint Michoacán Operation) which began in Apatzingán and
was then extended to other parts of the state including the important
nearby towns of Zamora and Uruapan.
Other disputes in the wake of Chilchota’s success also combin-
ing violence and entrepreneurship, occurred in Nuevo San Juan and
Pamatácuaro, both cases involving avocado producers—the new ‘green
gold’. In September 2007, the comuneros of Angahuan had kidnapped 21
workers for three days from the San Juan community’s forestry company
after catching them logging in their own forests, and freed them only after
the intervention of the state government and the mediation of two priests
from the Meseta’s ‘Vicaría’ or church mission. The resolution led some
to think, mistakenly, that this would bring a permanent settlement to the
conflict, not least because one of the priests had mediated in another dis-
pute 30 years earlier in one of the most violent episodes in living mem-
ory. But despite the consecration of the agreement at a mass, the conflict
reignited in mid-2009 with the kidnapping in Angahuan of ten members
of the Policía Federal Preventiva and a Nuevo San Juan comunero. The
dispute this time revolved around a road to the ruins of the old pueblo of
San Juan,12 a lucrative tourist site for the people of Angahuan. Although
eventually, after laying siege to the community, hundreds of police and
military personnel freed the prisoners, it should not go unnoticed that
the leaders of Nuevo San Juan received the greater share of resources and
attention from senior officials in the Fox administration as well as from the
selfsame troublespot Programme.
Seen with hindsight, the case of Nuevo San Juan seems to show that
the most profitable strategy in this conflict was to divide the community
land into private parcels and keep it that way. As of 2005, the authori-
ties in charge of agrarian matters regarded the conflict between the com-
munity and two influential landowners as settled: the landowners being
linked to the state Secretary of the Interior (Secretario de Gobierno) who
54 L.V. LEÓN

was himself acting as a mediator via the state government’s Subsecretaría

de Organización y Concertación Agraria (Subsecretariat for Agrarian
Organization and Conflict Resolution). Here, the intervention of the
troublespot Programme was of limited importance because the entire
matter was sorted out at a higher level. According to the delegate of the
SRA in Morelia, the Director of the CDI herself, a close associate of Fox,
called the Secretary to arrange the payment to the owners of more than
12 million pesos out of state and federal funds. Out of the 12 million, the
community enterprise contributed 2.5 million pesos of its own, while the
owners also retained the last avocado harvest. The secrecy surrounding
this deal has all the marks of a transaction conducted with public funds.
We found no documentation of the agreement nor did the community
enterprise’s representative seem willing to show it to our team—though
he did not deny its existence. One troubling aspect of this secrecy emerged
later, when the Agrarian Tribunal put an official end to the ‘dispute’ via
a ‘restitution of the property in favour of Nuevo San Juan’, thus going
against the Agrarian Law of 1992 which does not offer a means of con-
verting private property into communal property. This must explain why
the title deeds have been retained in the SRA (SRA 2006: 109; Contreras
and Castellanos 2000).
It is strange, to say the least, that when the SRA was abolished in 2009
the title deeds were not deposited with the official land register. Normally,
once the agreement was finalized and signed by the parties, this tortuous
‘communalization’ would have been registered with the Registro Nacional
Agrario (RNA—National Agrarian Land Register), but five years after the
transaction, Nuevo San Juan continued to appear in the Register as the
owner of the selfsame holding granted by the 1991 Presidential resolution
with no sign of the incorporation of this new holding.13 It follows that the
private holding in question remains the property of someone in Nuevo San
Juan but on the basis of internal arrangements, which is a common practice.
This is relevant because it fits with the tacit agreement among the 1229
comuneros that the orchards and the cattle remain their personal property,
only leaving their holdings in the higher forest lands to the joint enterprise
which can exploit the timber resources industrially for cellulose, furniture
and composite wood products. From outside, this is not well seen. As
an Angahuan comunero put it, the ‘expansionist vocation’ of Nuevo San
Juan community enterprise is clear. Such frank statements cropped up in
Pamatácuaro, but this time, they came from leaders of the faction in con-
trol of the communal institutions. ‘We are just loggers’ said one of them.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 55

He was referring to the 35 family-owned sawmills who send for trees to

be felled on hillsides in neighbouring communities and used as raw mate-
rial with which to survive in the informal plunder economy. One of the
leaders spoke of recuperación de propiedades when describing their plan
to re-establish their original territory. The expression was a more accurate
reflection of the dispute than the more politically correct ‘reintegración de
tierras’ used by ex-President Fox at a time when he was promoting himself
as the standard-bearer of native peoples—since ‘reintegración’ refers to
the reassemblage of land being returned to its originario owners. By using
the expression ‘recuperación’, the leaders were signalling the—doubtless
illicit—combination of land privatization and the highly profitable devel-
opment of avocado production, a process occurring throughout the area,
leading to radical changes in the landscape, in the use of woodlands, and
above all, in the pattern of land tenure. In order to follow this path, the
indigenous comuneros had to engage in acts of violence and expulsion and
they had to appropriate land in accordance with their imagined territory. It
is in addition striking to see how many armed men stroll around the more
insecure precincts, where the primordialist rhetoric of one of the PRD fac-
tions has been gaining most followers since February 2005.
This combination of desperation and entrepreneurial ambition which
we find among the comuneros is not unusual on the frontier between the
highland sierra and the Bajío region around Zamora and on the frontier
with Jalisco, because ever since colonial times, indigenous people were
interacting with haciendas, farms and Spanish settlements. The people
in localities closest to the avocado areas also happen to be most inclined
to seizing orchards by force, unlike those in more distant farmsteads who
scrape a living as day labourers and loggers. But their strategy is the same
one which two decades ago led to the recovery of 170 hectares from Carlos
Pardo, an avocado-grower from Tingüindín. Pardo’s lawyer explained to
us that the ‘recovered’ lands were distributed among the invaders, but
some sold them on or rented them to landowners, as has occurred in the
rest of the orchards which have been invaded in Tingüindín and else-
where: in other words, as soon as invaders seize an orchard, they divide it
up and share it out. This is not a social movement, as one municipal officer
described it to us, but rather a faction of some 200 people led by a law-
yer who (as some orchard owners described him) has an eye for avocado
orchards located on land held with dubious title, enabling advantages to
be gained from land invasions and extortion. Although he has not held
office in the municipal government since 2008, his political career has
56 L.V. LEÓN

flown high boren along by left-wing rhetoric: protected by a federal dep-

uty close to the Cárdenas family, he has hosted Subcomandante Marcos
and has acted first as a spokesman for the Consejo Consultivo Indígena
(Indigenous Consultative Council) and then as one of the seven advisors
to the state Secretariat for Indigenous Peoples. With the return of the PRI
to power, however, these indigenist connections have lost political weight,
thus weakening the local faction in Pamatacuaro.
The aim of ‘recovering fully our ancestral territory’, in the more refined
words of the leader of Pamatácuaro, has been pursued in other ways,
which have little to do with the unification of the Purhépecha Indigenous
People. At one point, in March 2006, Tarecuato leaders proposed to
Pamatácuaro the creation of a unified indigenous municipality, along lines
proposed by an ethnic organization inspired by academic activists which
is highly influential among the schoolteachers of Tarecuato (Rivera 1998;
Ventura 2003; ONP 2001), but disagreements returned when it came
to deciding the seat of the municipal government: neither leader would
agree to submit to the leadership of the other. Those same activists also
failed to mention that since 2008, in parallel with the parcellization of the
orchards, the unified municipality proposal fitted very well with their idea
of a native pueblo, which would not be under the jurisdiction of a munici-
pality, nor of any neighbouring indigenous community. A comparable case
occurred with a proposal known as ‘municipio 114’, which would have
had its seat of government in Santa Fe de La Laguna, but there too the
purportedly united indigenous communities opposed this ethnic utopia.14
This is important because it was leaders from Santa Fe who promoted
the ‘Purhepecha Nation Decree’ (Sarmiento 1998: 67–70) first pro-
claimed on December 5, 1991, and modified much later, in August 2001.
Initially, this document was signed by leaders from seven communities,
one tiny locality and three hamlets, and it affirmed that unified action of
our three pueblos, ejidos and communities was ‘obligatory’, decreeing
the ‘Purhépecha People’s Territory’, and stating their ownership of ‘First
Title’ as ‘native peoples’ (‘pueblos primeros que somos’). This calculated
reproduction of the words of the 1992 resolution of President Salinas de
Gortari was to a large extent a reaction against the President’s changes to
Article 27 of the Constitution which had opened the way to the undoing
of the Agrarian Reform, but in the local context, it signalled the assump-
tion of egregious powers, for example, to expel comuneros ‘who person-
ally sell their ejido plots or land’ to outsiders. The territory in question
covered all the existing communities and ejidos, but the proclamation still
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 57

faced the difficulty of forging a community of communities to make up

the Purhépecha nation out of an area plagued with so many conflicts. The
case of ‘municipio 114’ already showed the difficulty of establishing an
institutionalized power to be exercised in the name of a people when there
is so much fragmentation at the base.
Communalism has intrinsic weaknesses as a basis for ethnic nationalism
among Tarascans (Mácha 2009). This can be seen clearly in the creation
of the Indigenous Consultative Council (CCI) under the governorship of
Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, and in its predecessor the Coordinating Body for
Indigenous Pueblos and Communities (Coordinación Interinstitucional
para la Atención a los Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas del Estado
de Michoacán—CIAPCIM). Both these state institutions resented the
authority wielded by indigenous communities by virtue of their status
as corporations. Their clientelistic ties were of limited help because the
delegates to the CCI were elected by local community assemblies, who
themselves were riven by factional competition. Nevertheless, the state-
level CCI was far more representative than the CDI’s National Indigenous
Consultative Council, on which all the so-called representatives of the
indigenous peoples were chosen directly by the Director General of the
CDI itself and never by an ‘assembly of the people’, or by community
assemblies as in Michoacán. Likewise, ethnic organizations like the ONP,
or its more radical breakaway the Nación Purhépecha Zapatista, and many
others, never succeeded in acquiring local community legitimacy because
they were not community representatives emerging from established local
procedures, but merely individuals who claimed to speak ‘in the name
of the Purhépecha people’. By moving from the CIAPCIM to the state
Secretaría de Pueblos Indígenas (SPI), these leaders retained their own
self-perception as ‘the people’s representatives’, circumventing the issue
of community representation but gaining official recognition. They saw
no contradiction in these positions, but theirs was an indigenist rhetoric
propagated from the seats of power.
Communities are also divided by different worldviews. From our
very first interviews with schoolteachers and later with younger genera-
tion Purhépecha intellectuals (Gonzalez 2000, Gonzalez 2006; Hummel
2005; Mácha 2009), it became clear that local fragmentation coincided
with the fragmentation of ethnic ideology because of the absence of
shared thinking among a leadership capable of taking the lead in decision-
making. Nonetheless, the co-optation of many leaders of the ever-weaker
ethnic organizations, and their appointment to positions in the state gov-
58 L.V. LEÓN

ernment’s Secretariat for Indigenous Affairs might give reason to believe

that, despite the accusations of betrayal by more radical neozapatista lead-
ers, this route may be the way to create a leadership cadre able to speak
‘in the name of the divided indigenous people’, even though such an elite
would be ever further from the masses and ever closer to the holders of
power. Let us not forget that the organizational basis of the SPI were ‘14
project leaders’ who were not community leaders but rather were staff
stationed in communities selected by the SPI.15
In this period, leading up to the launch of the Drugs War in 2008,
intellectuals tended to blame external forces for violence between commu-
nities. Thus for the writer Ismael García Marcelino logging ‘threatens the
sense of community’. At the time of the confrontation in Cheranatzicurín
on March 14, 2006, in which a member of the GOES died at the hands of
a sharpshooter who turned out to be little more than a child, he said: ‘We
are in a situation where all men of conscience, who do exist, and who do
have a profound sense of ethics, organize fragmentarily to move ahead in
an unknown direction, and thus as indigenous people we fall prey to any
tendency which cares to label us anti-communitarians’. The fragmentation
is recognized, but is no one’s responsibility. A similar case is that of Efraín
Chávez, a radical leader, speaking in his home locality, who did not hesi-
tate to accuse ‘the loggers from Capacuaro, Tanaco, Huecato and other
communities’ of destroying the ‘forests of our indigenous communities’,
as if the loggers were not themselves indigenous.
A more authoritarian line of argument was heard from Bertha Dimas
Huacuz, a biologist and sympathizer of the Zapatistas, who viewed the
violence as a consequence of a collapse of governability, and in the face of
a lost paradise, her solution was an autonomous, indigenous ’communal
government’ and a ‘new social pact between the State and the Indian
pueblos’; but even she did not see how to bring an end to repression,
‘a trap from which, up to now, no escape has been found’. Some people
interpreted her words as a justification of the violence. Another interven-
tion, less radical but equally committed to finding a way to overcome the
divisions among communities was that of Rocío Próspero, an artist and
the organizer of the Purhépecha New Year celebrations, who called for a
cultural renewal to ‘staunch wounds, hatreds and fratricidal rancour’, and
in this way to truly rebuild the Purhépecha people, even if after 26 years of
community celebrations in as many localities, including Nuevo San Juan,
unity is still far from being achieved.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 59

But it was those closest to the events who provided the most simplis-
tic interpretation: on March 21, 2006, 12 priests from the Vicaría of the
Purhépecha Meseta (the Catholic Church’s pastoral agency for the Tarascan
Plateau) published a letter calling on 50 communities involved in disputes
to join in a fraternal dialogue.16 Two years later, one of their number,
Prebendary Francisco Martinez Gracián, well known for his public posi-
tions in support of Indian autonomy, for officiating at the New Year mass,
whom we have already mentioned, mediating a communal conflict and
consecrating its resolution at mass, ritually consecrated their reconciliation,
still proclaiming his faith in the ethnic utopia of a ‘community of communi-
ties’. Keeping to their present path, he said, the Purhépecha people would
not go far. ‘The Meseta can no longer cope with the pressures of private
parcellization of community lands, of individualism, of the capitalist classes
and above all of the inter-community conflicts … This is what lies behind
the disintegration of the Purhépecha People as a Nation, the atomization of
their territory and the innumerable agrarian problems. How can autonomy
be achieved, how can peace be obtained, how can the Meseta survive, if
most of its communities are consumed by problems of land tenure?’17

CONCLUSION
The cases of ideological and to some extent mistaken recognition in this
chapter illustrate how Taylor and Honneth’s concepts need to be extended
and modified as a result of a tension between their ideas and the social
reality in which those ideas are applied. Already in 1675, Baruch Spinoza
raised the problem of the relationship between the design of ideas and the
imperfections of reality. In the situations which I have described, universal
conceptions of multiculturalism are juxtaposed with a contradictory and
conflict-ridden reality for which solutions have been sought over many
years—solutions which in their turn are in conflict with new-fangled insti-
tutional innovations formulated in ignorance of the historical background.
The idea of recognition itself, usually regarded as progressive and post-
modern, has become backward-looking and prone to accentuate con-
flicts. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the colonial period in Mexico
(1521–1810) was witness to a certain type of indigenism and still some-
thing resembling explicit recognition of nations, peoples and Indian com-
munities, as well as of groups of widely acknowledged noble status. Their
existence has been well established in their wills, in their properties, in
lawsuits heard in the Juzgado General de los Indios (Borah 1985) and in
60 L.V. LEÓN

Book Six of the ‘Recopilación de Leyes de Indias’ (the Transcription of

the Laws of the Indies). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
modern indigenists introduced new legal forms of limited recognition,
creating a type of land ownership reserved for the surviving indigenous
tribes: one of these was the ejido, but the other was the ‘comunidades
agrarias’, which achieved ‘juridical personality’ in 1971, enabling them to
act as autonomous corporate agents in legal matters. This mixed ancient
and modern judicial heritage explains the reappearance in several conflicts
of procedures and forms of property thought to belong to the distant
past, and the new laws inspired by multiculturalism, finding no compat-
ibility with them, have sought instead to abrogate them. As a result, new
conflicts have arisen in a legal order previously shaped by the Agrarian
Reform.
To be sure, multiculturalism has led to a notable increase in recognition
of indigenous peoples. But these changes have taken place principally in
the spheres of law and culture, leading to a change in the social standing
of indigenous groups, but not to change in the distribution of wealth since
no consideration was given to their integration within social, economic
and political institutions, giving rise to new contradictions and conflicts
because the failure of integration undermines cultural and legal recogni-
tion. As a result, far from being assuaged, conflicts have proliferated in an
ethnic form.
The ethnography presented here shows that the building of a
Purhépecha people faces many challenges, several of which are violent
and bloody and of their own making. Victims and perpetrators all speak
Purhépecha. The greatest obstacle to the building of a community of actu-
ally existing communities, arises from the agrarian problems which divide
them. We have seen that not all these disputes are as harmful to govern-
ability in themselves as is sometimes claimed. One common feature is that
they break out precisely when the neoliberal state creates a programme
to respond to their needs and compensate them for losses occasioned by
privatization. Rural violence arose at crucial moments from rival claims
over uncultivated put potentially productive land. The sierra’s ecologi-
cal features were such that these conflicts went through a cycle, breaking
out when the same piece of land was found to be suited to different uses.
Otherwise, an equilibrium prevailed which could be broken or could sur-
vive for years while the various factions found ways of justifying their hold
on power by sharpening inter-community differences rhetorically. So long
as there was a supreme authority ready to impose salomonic solutions,
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 61

some sort of equilibrium survived, but when the neoliberal state aban-
doned this institutional responsibility, disputes multiplied even around
lands with no value at all.
The situation is quite different when the land in dispute can be profit-
able for logging, whether by family enterprises or by agribusinesses, or
can be put to profitable use with agroindustrial development. The scale of
forestry conflicts went far beyond that of typical peasant disputes. Because
they are exploiting a finite resource, timber, the pressure of demand from
family-owned sawmills is such that it generates constant conflict between
communities and owners of forest lands, communal or not. We listened
for ourselves to comuneros in despair about the fate of the young unem-
ployed who have no prospect of a productive life. Very frequently, military
service was mentioned as the only alternative to these informal activities,
for no one any longer thinks in terms of a community-based development
which would overcome the unregulated competition of informality. The
most worrying feature of these interviews is the message they carried that
communities identified as dangerous on account of their involvement in
the informal economy find their ethnic belonging denied. But then, those
who engage in commercial practices which destroy the natural resources
are equally denied their affiliation even though they operate in the formal
sector. The neighbours of Nuevo San Juan and Chilchota do not miss an
opportunity to deny them the denomination ‘ethnic’. Nonetheless, unlike
those of Chilchota, the leaders of Nuevo San Juan present themselves as
indigenous and their enterprise as a model indigenous community. They
may not be recognized as such by their neighbours but the state and
international development agencies do accept them. The same is not true
of Pamatácuaro, even though its leaders identify with Nuevo San Juan’s
entrepreneurial success. In the final analysis, every individual can be a min-
iature enterprise, and a small avocado orchard can be the way to follow
that path.
In all these cases, I have shown how the idea of a pueblo originario con-
stantly recurs. Colonial documents described as ‘primordial title deeds’ are
the best way both of legitimating one’s claims to recognition in the face
of neighbouring communities and also of grabbing their already tenuous
holdings. These conditions create unending sources for conflicts driven by
a type of capitalist depredation.
As a leader from the Cañada told us, his community has grown out
of inter-community conflicts. One can see here how long-term conflicts
change their meaning over time. An obvious case is that of Carapan, which
62 L.V. LEÓN

goes back to the sixteenth century, and, having started out as a dispute
between nobles, became one between comuneros, and finally provided
the arena for confrontations among agricultural entrepreneurs. In the cur-
rent situation the increasing intensity of these conflicts does not make
the idea of a Purhépecha people any more real, at least not if by that is
meant a people free of divisions and problems. The constant invocation
of a Purhépecha people who can overcome their internal contradictions
and try to structure themselves from above, under the aegis of an elite
protected by state power, might be the way to overcome these conflicts
so as to render them less destructive. But there is no such leadership and
pacification has come from the militarization of the state, forcing to one
side conflicts for which no one has a solution and for which there will be
no solution.
Even if the community conflicts of the Meseta are repressed by force,
they have led to the burial of Purhépecha nationalism, and they have dem-
onstrated that the abuse of the native people (‘pueblo originario’) concept
has been a very successful strategy for groups and individuals who com-
bine their indigenous identity with their business interests and use it as a
juridical weapon for the purpose of despoiling other people of their land,
encouraged by the circumstances of low-intensity warfare. Such strate-
gies are unfortunately, and unintentionally, consistent with the populariza-
tion of multiculturalism in Mexico; they show how the granting of special
treatment by the state exclusively on the basis of a morality of difference
with limited regard for other issues like socio-economic inequality, envi-
ronmental sustainability and the politics of corporatism and clientelism,
can produce a distorted politics of recognition.

GLOSSARY AND ACRONYMS

Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI) The criminal investigation agency
created in 2001 but replaced in 2009 by the Policia Federal Ministerial
(PFM).
Anexos (precincts) These exist in some Agrarian Communities with an
indigenous population. It is a status reserved for hamlets that belong
to one community, and may be the remnant of an Indian institution
describing localities as ‘Altepeme’ or ‘Altepetl’ for tributary purposes.
CCI (Consejo Consultivo Indígena) Created at national level by the
CDI and in Michoacán by the Governor. Members in both cases are
appointed by the head of the CDI and by the Governor.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 63

CDI—Comisión Nacional de Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (formerly

INI, National Indigenist Institute) A multicultural institution, now in
slow decline.
CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Enseñanza en Antropología
Social—Research and Teaching Centre in Social Anthropology) A
major postgraduate and research institution with units in the capital
and six regional centres.
Composición Procedure for regularization of tenure, very common in the
land tenure reforms from the late eighteenth century.
Comuneros Members of a comunidad agraria.
Comunidades agrarias This term illustrates the importance of Colonial
title in land disputes up to this day. It is usually employed to refer to
a group of people and a territory over which they claim ‘primordial’
or ‘colonial’ title. This is not the same as private property - rather it
is an entitlement enabling communal authorities to oversee or coor-
dinate the property of the comuneros. For example, this was the basis
of Zapata’s claims in Morelos. In contrast, the ejidos are based on land
which has been granted by the state without reference to indigenous or
colonial claims. There have been cases in which indigenous groups have
petitioned for and received ejido land, and mestizo groups have claimed
and obtained recognition as comunidades agrarias. (The terms ‘indig-
enous’ and ‘mestizo’ should not of course be thought of as denoting
hard and fast categories.) In the comunidades agrarias, some land is
cultivated and also exchanged on an individual or family basis and other
land, including forests and mines, is jointly exploited by the members.
Ejido The form of ownership instituted after the Mexican Revolution
for lands granted to beneficiaries of the Agrarian Reform (ejidatarios).
Ejidatarios are entitled to lifelong usufruct rights over ejido land, which
was inalienable until the Agrarian Reform was terminated in 1991–1992.
Estancia (literally cattle farm) Applied by the Spanish colonizers to small
populations for the purpose of levying tribute.
GOES Grupo de Operaciones especiales (Special Operations Police Force).
Merced de tierras Colonial land grant conceded by Crown or Viceroy.
Usually, in recognition of services rendered to the Crown, and linked
to membership in the Indian nobility.
PAN Partido Acción Nacional - the party which won Presidential elec-
tions in 2000 and 2006.
ONP Organización Nacion Purhépecha (a movement for the recogni-
tion of the Purhépecha as a nation).
64 L.V. LEÓN

Policía Federal Ministerial Criminal investigation agency attached to the

office of the Attorney General (Procurador General de la República).
Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP) One of the many central police corpora-
tions, now under a Unified Command separate from the Gendarmeria
(Gendarmerie), Fuerza Rural (Rural Force) and Fuerza Ciudadana
(Citizen Force).
Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP) Federal Preventive Police.
PRI the Partido Revolucionario Institucional - the party which ruled
Mexico for 70 years until 2000 and returned to power in 2012.
PROCEDE (Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación
de Solares—Certification Programme for Ejido Entitlements and Land
Titles) Special programme for the regularization of private title in the
now-extinguished ejido land sector.
Procuradoría Agraria (Agrarian Attorney) Institution created after the
end of the land reform (1915–1991) to attend to property rights in
the rural areas.
Programa Focos Rojos Red Troublespot Programme to attend to rural
conflicts arising around property boundaries.
Pueblo originario (Native or Autochthonous People) Either indigenous
people whose authenticity is based on occupation of a place since ‘time
immemorial’. In natural law, this means an entitlement or property over
the place of origin; or a small urban settlement established for Indians
by the Spanish colonial regime—known as ‘originario’ because it has a
foundational title.
Rancho (hamlet) A rural locality with 2500 inhabitants or less, as defined
by the Mexican statistical authorities.
Registro Nacional Agrario (RNA) National archive of documents related
to Ejidos, Communities and Colonias in each state.
SPI. Secretaría de Pueblos Indígenas—an institution of the Michoacán
state government, abolished when the PRD lost the election to the PRI
in 2012
SRA Secretaría de Reforma Agraria (Agrarian Reform Secretariat). Once
an all-powerful Ministry for the implementation of Agrarian Reform
and the oversight of ejidos and land tenure, the SRA was charged with
technical and juridical issues connected with winding up the ejido sys-
tem, and was eventually dismantled in 2009.
Tribunal Unitario Agrario The Unified Agrarian Tribunal, one of several
institutions established to oversee the dismantling of the ejido system
and resolve resulting disputes.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 65

NOTES
1. ‘Certification Programme for Ejido Entitlements and Land Titles’.
2. As of 1991, the Agrarian Reform authorities recognized 27,664 ejidos and
2278 agrarian communities comprising a total of 103.9 million hectares,
but in the latest, Censo Ejidal (Ejido Census) counted 31,518  in total
(Hershberger 2006; INEGI 2008).
3. The intervention of PROCEDE in ejidos and indigenous communities
began in 1994 in the Rarámuri (Tarahumara) ejido in San Ignacio Arareko
(municipality of Bocoyna, Chihuahua) and from there advanced to other
areas. It is worth noting that this did not settle the situation, since Arareko
is now a ‘yellow trouble spot’ on account of its involvement in a dispute for
a private rancho (Oliva and de Gortari 2002: 185–187; Gayosso et  al.
2002: 189–192; Salgado 2007).
4. The principle ‘Prior in tempore, prior in iure’, (‘an earlier right prevails
over a later one’), still holds in Mexico, and serves as the basis for legal
actions such as the restitution of community assets to their original owners
in the agrarian communities. It also applies to the first pueblos. It has been
forgotten that it was first formulated in canon law by Pope Boniface VIII
(1294–1303) in his 87 rules of natural law. Analytic or sociological juris-
prudence has demonstrated the dangers which can arise from unilateral
claims based in natural law without consideration of the interests of others
who lack comparable rights (Finnis 2011a: 207, 2011b).
5. [Link] Consulted
09/10/2007. The true model of Agrarian Reform, prior to Bernalejo, was
implemented in Chiapas in the wake of the Zapatista uprising and the colo-
nization of the Lacandon jungle, when 300,000 hectares were redistrib-
uted. But this could not be a model because it is contrary to the 1992
Agrarian Law repealing the Agrarian Reform itself (Eisenstadt, 2011).
6. A celebratory dance.
7. The state has defined rancherías as localities having 2500 inhabitants or
less. The most recent Censuses (2000 and 2005) give a figure for the
Tepehuanos of Durango as 21,720 persons (separate from the Odami or
Tepehuanos or Chihuahua). Santa María Ocotán is merely the political
centre, having 514 inhabitants, but with 22 anexos and innumerable ‘ran-
cherias’ with 12,400 community members together, many of whom are
day labourers in tobacco, tomato and apple picking. The entire municipal-
ity of Mezquital, to which Santa María belongs, has 14,138 tepehuan
speakers and a total population of 27,512 (Serrano et  al. 2002: 84);
[Link]
asp, downloaded 27/08/2008.
8. This outbreak of violence occured immediately before the unleashing of
the War on Drugs in Michoacán, whose toll is unknown.
66 L.V. LEÓN

9. Such quantification depends on how regions are defined. The Agrarian

Reform Secretariat adopted an extensive regionalization covering 17
municipalities (not all in highlands and not all with a significant Purhépecha
population) with 120 ejidos and 64 communities. The interesting point is
that the SRA admitted that 49 of the 64 communities were involved in
disputes and only 12 had had their property certified by PROCEDE. In
fact, the problem may be more serious because the 11th Ejido Census in
2007 documented 394 boundary disputes in the state of Michoacán as a
whole (INEGI 2008; SRA 2003b).
10. Later, officials in the state government of Leonel Godoy (2008–2012)
(also from the PRD—by 2014, the state had passed into the hands of the
PRI) recognized that there were still 45 ongoing disputes in Michoacán of
which 35 were in the Tarascan Plateau. See ‘Persisten 45 conflictos
agrarios’, Cambio de Michoacán, en [Link],
downloaded 11/08/2008.
11. During the ‘War on Drugs’ (under President Calderón), it looked as if
agrarian conflicts were dying down. Now that Michoacán has been brought
under control by the army, the marines, the federal police and the rural
police (formerly unofficial paramilitary self-defence forces), conflicts have
flared up again, pitting Carapan and Tacuro against the ejidatarios of
Zacapu. Another case which has re-emerged is that of Sevina, against their
neighbours.
12. Hence the name of the modern settlement Nuevo San Juan.
13. See the information on Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro in the Padrón e
Historial de Núcleos Agrarios (PHINA—the Register and Documentary
Record of Agrarian Settlements); [Link], downloaded
18/11/2009.
14. For the cases of ‘communal autonomy’ in Tarecuato and Nurio, and also
the efforts to return Paracho and Tangamandapio to municipal status, see
Ventura (2008). For the return of the Cañada de los Once Pueblos to
municipal status, and the case of ‘municipio 114’, see Ramirez (2007).
The latter never got beyond a proposal from a PRD member of the
Michoacán State Legislature (PRD 1998).
15. The SPI was abolished when the PRD lost the election to the PRI in 2012.
The PRI faced a serious municipal crisis and also lacked the means to sus-
tain the clientelistic relations with local leaders. This is the context in which
community police and self-defence groups arose.
16. ‘Carta de la Vicaría de la Meseta a 50 pueblos. La iglesia católica llama a las
comunidades al diálogo’, La Jornada Michoacán, 23/03/06.
17. Francisco Martínez Gracián ‘La Meseta no aguanta más’ (I and II), en
[Link] downloaded
27/07/08.
 MULTICULTURALISM AS A JURIDICAL WEAPON: THE USE AND ABUSE... 67

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 CHAPTER 3

Paradoxes of Multiculturalism in Bolivia

Andrew Canessa

INTRODUCTION
Bolivia is a clear example of a country which has put multiculturalism at
the very heart of its political ideology: not only does the current Morales
administration endorse the politics of multiculturalism but the very prin-
ciples of a multicultural and pluriethnic nation are enshrined in the new
constitution. This chapter explores some of the paradoxes at the heart of
this multicultural nation where the new language of indigeneity—through
which many of multiculturalist ideas are articulated—serves to liberate the
subaltern masses but also excludes others with less access to discourses of
power. In Bolivia, multiculturalism is rooted in a recognition of indige-
nous cultural difference but there is a tendency to prefer some indigenous
identities over others as well as to project a homogenized version of indi-
geneity as a lived experience. Multiculturalism can thus serve to obscure
the ways some groups are excluded despite the celebration of indigenous
people’s position and status.
To illustrate this argument, we must return to July 2011, when a group
of people representing the ethnic groups of the Tsimanes, Moxetenes and
Yuracarés left TIPNIS, an officially recognized indigenous territory and
national park in the Bolivian tropical lowlands (the Territorio Indígena

A. Canessa ( )
Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 75

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_3
76 A. CANESSA

Parque Nacional Isiboro Securé).with the intention of marching to the

capital city of La Paz in order to protest the construction of a road across
their territory. On September 25, the marchers were prevented from con-
tinuing by police on the grounds that they could not guarantee their safety
from groups protesting in favour of the road, and a violent confrontation
ensued. Such marches and protests have become almost commonplace
in Latin American countries in recent decades as national governments
continue to build roads and drill for oil in indigenous territories. What is
surprising in this case is that it occurred in a state which is led by a presi-
dent celebrated as an indigenous leader—not only nationally but glob-
ally—and who has embraced multiculturalism, placing indigeneity at the
very centre of the legitimacy of his rule and explicitly creating a series of
very public rituals to match his rhetoric as the founder of an indigenous
state. In 2009, his administration introduced a new national constitution
giving recognized indigenous communities the right to manage their own
resources and to be consulted on development projects. The confusion
surrounding TIPNIS is compounded by the fact that those marching in
favour of the road were coca growers of unambiguous indigenous descent
and staunch supporters of the President, whose union frequently argues
against coca eradication through a discourse centred on the place of the
coca leaf in indigenous culture.
In this chapter, I discuss some of the contradictions at the heart of
the new politics of multiculturalism in Bolivia. Article 1 of the 2009
Constitution describes Bolivia as ‘intercultural’ and ‘based on political,
economic, juridical, cultural and linguistic pluralism’. The ‘intercultural’
here indicates that there should be an exchange of ideas and practices
across groups. The pluralism is evidenced in the turning away from the
idea of mestizaje as a foundation for national identity. Mestizaje as a
nationalist ideology has its roots in the Mexican Revolution whose even-
tual ideologue Vasconcelos spoke of creating a new ‘cosmic race’ out of
European and indigenous roots (Vasconcelos 1925). Mestizaje, in fact,
dominated national ideologies in Bolivia and elsewhere for much of the
twentieth century; but even though indigenous history was celebrated,
indigenous cultures of the present were seen as anachronistic. Today, how-
ever, rather than thinking of the nation as a melting pot, cultural difference
is celebrated and contemporary indigenous peoples and cultures are seen
to have a role. Thus, in Bolivia, this ideology of mestizaje has been explic-
itly replaced with one that officially imagines the nation as multinational
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 77

and pluricultural, commonly and colloquially shortened to the ‘multipluri’

society, a term which can easily be glossed into English as ‘multicultural’.
The historical precedence of indigenous people, however, continues to
be underlined. This is reflected in the Constitution where Article 2 rec-
ognizes the ‘precolonial existence of the indigenous native (originario).
and peasant (campesino).nations and peoples and their ancestral dominion
over their territories’. Here and elsewhere the Constitution goes further
than simply recognizing differential cultural rights, placing indigenous
people at the very centre of how the nation state is imagined historically
and contemporarily. It is worth pointing out that in Bolivia, ‘campesino’ is
a common euphemism for ‘indian’ and, in fact, after the 1952 Revolution
it was officially declared that there were no longer indians in Bolivia but,
rather, campesinos. To talk of originarios and campesinos makes little sense
in precolonial terms but is very relevant in the twenty-first century where
there are clearly tensions between different ideas of what it means to be
‘indigenous’.
One way of understanding this emphasis is by redressing the harm
inflicted by 500 years of colonization and marginalization. In this con-
text, a more favoured treatment of historically oppressed groups seems
perfectly reasonable. However, whereas it would seem clear that a positive
element of any policy of multiculturalism is the recognition of indigenous
cultures, we must equally recognize the concern raised by a number of
scholars (e.g. Béteille 1998; Gledhill 1997; Kuper 2003a, b; 2005) that
there is an arbitrariness in distinguishing between one set of marginal peas-
ants and another on the basis of some putative condition of indigeneity
or a history of marginality. This is complicated even further when people
identified as indigenous are highly differentiated among themselves. Some
may certainly be occupying historical territories in endangered forest hab-
itats; others, however, may be cash crop cultivators, and can be found
among the urban poor, merchants, lawyers and well, yes, presidents of the
republic. At the very least, if multiculturalism is to be seen as a framework
through which power and resources are to be distributed in new ways, and
indigenous identity as the keystone of the resulting policies, then the dif-
ferentiation between indigenous people becomes significant. That is, these
concerns cease to be merely theoretical when the state not only recognizes
indigeneity but adopts it as a language of legitimacy and governance. For
governance means allocation of power and resources, and thus, decisions
about who qualifies for the resources allocated by multicultural policies.
It therefore raises the uncomfortable issue that some indigenous people
78 A. CANESSA

may have greater access to the symbolic capital of indigeneity than others;
and this difference can lead to serious conflict, as happens today in Bolivia.
There can be no doubt that discourses of indigeneity can contribute
very significantly to the empowerment of marginalized peoples who oth-
erwise would not have access to international courts and global mobiliza-
tions of interest groups, or what Tanya Murray Li (2000) has called the
‘indigenous people’s slot’. NGOs have had a considerable role in creating
such alliances and developing politically engaged discourses of indigeneity
as otherwise disempowered groups make claims for justice against, typi-
cally, the states in which they find themselves, and, as such, indigenous
movements are often seen as essentially progressive (Escárcega 2010; Li
2000; Sieder 2002).
Nevertheless, the impulse to be strategically essentialist (Spivak 1988)
is sometimes difficult to resist when such a discourse is required by inter-
national funding agencies (Laurie et  al. 2002) or by the very nature of
national political discourses (Canessa 2007; Wade 1997). That is, people
may express rather complex historical differences in very simple terms and
talk of ‘millenarian peoples’ or ignore centuries of cultural and physical
mixing. In some sense, this is demanded of them by Western discourses that
are concerned with issues of ‘purity’ and may also have strong expectations
about a particular relationship to the environment that indigenous people,
not rooted in Enlightenment discourses of nature and culture, may simply
not have. These strategic essentialisms may, for example, do nothing more
than offer a language of political engagement such as making sure land
rights issues are articulated in terms of protecting the Earth Mother. They
may not, however, always be so unproblematic and a number of anthro-
pologists, particularly those working in Africa and Asia (e.g. Kuper 2005;
Geschiere 2009; Shah 2010) have noted that filling the ‘indigenous slot’
is not always conducive to progressive politics and, moreover, may actu-
ally harm the interests of the people they are supposed to serve. That is,
indigenous discourses may not always serve to improve the conditions of
the most marginal but sometimes may serve to dispossess them; and even
as they may be liberating for some people, they may very well turn out to
be oppressive for others. After more than two decades of fieldwork among
Aymara-speakers in the highlands, and more recently in the lowlands, I
have been impressed by the diversity of the experience even within this
linguistic group among whom discourses of indigeneity, while certainly
empowering for some, may also marginalize those less able to articulate
official discourses; and when these highland Aymara migrate to the low-
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 79

lands, indigenous discourses can be used to dispossess other indigenous

peoples. Thinking of indigeneity in terms of discourses of the postcolonial
dispossessed is simply unhelpful in navigating these contradictions.
The contradictions arise from an inherent tension between the univer-
sality of indigeneity as a powerful and enabling globalized context and its
application in specific cultural and temporal contexts. These frictions and
tensions are not only creating new hierarchies among indigenous peoples
but expose contradictions at the heart of the nation state and create con-
flict between people who one might otherwise expect to be in alliance.
The ambiguities involved in defining indigeneity may not matter very
much when we are talking about the efforts of a culturally distinct peo-
ple who speak an indigenous language, occupy a clearly defined territory
and find themselves in a struggle against a state controlled by people of
European descent. They begin to matter when indigenous people are argu-
ably the majority of the population and the faces in the cabinet, including
the President’s, look indigenous; they begin to matter even more when
the state proclaims indigeneity as the source of its own political legitimacy.
In what follows I will explore the example of Bolivia where discourses
of indigeneity have been deployed as central elements of statecraft and
governance and examine the apparent paradox of the strong opposition
by some indigenous communities to what would appear to be the most
pro-indigenous government in the nation’s—and quite possibly the con-
tinent’s—post-Conquest history. Perhaps even more paradoxical is the
spectacle of multiculturalism falling back on old colonial and nineteenth-
century tropes of civilization and barbarism as well as creating a national-
ism that would appear to owe more to nineteenth- and twentieth-century
homogenizing or mestizo nation-building projects than to a politics based
on mutual recognition. First, I will outline how indigeneity has become a
tool of statecraft and governance in Bolivia.

EVO MORALES AND THE INDIGENOUS STATE

There can be little doubt that Bolivia is an exemplary case of what has
been described as indigenous awakening in Latin America (Albó 1991;
Bengoa 2000; Brysk 2000; Stavenhagen 2002; Wearne 1996) and that
Evo Morales’ winning of the 2005 presidential election was both a prod-
uct of this ‘indigenous awakening’ and a contributory factor in setting
social and political conditions for the increasing acceptability of indige-
nous identity not only in political discourse but also in official national and
80 A. CANESSA

international and juridical documents. It is important to note, however,

that even though mobilization by indigenous people increased following
neoliberal reforms in the 1990s,1 many of the people mobilizing were not
doing so as indigenous people per se but, rather, as Bolivian citizens who
happened to be indigenous (Postero 2007:221).
This is an important point because it marks a significant shift away
from the position in which indigenous people existed on the margins of
the nation state and, at best, might hope to be represented by mestizos
and creoles, to a position where they are increasingly considered best able
to defend not only their own interests but also the national patrimony.
This shift was shrewdly manipulated by Evo Morales who, in about 2002,
started to adopt an indigenous rhetoric positioning indigenous people as
the moral guardians of the nation state, best able to defend its natural
resources.
Morales has certainly been a master at deploying indigenous rhetoric
but in what ways is it meaningful to think of Bolivia as an indigenous state?
It is constitutionally a multicultural and plurinational state but the new
constitution privileges certain citizens over others, in particular the kind of
citizen described in it as ‘native peasant indigenous’ (‘naciones y pueblos
indígenas originarios campesinos’—Article 2 and again in Article 3). I will
come back to this definition of a citizen in a moment, but first I want to
outline the ways in which the Morales government has placed indigeneity
at the very centre of its self-presentation to its citizens.
The first and most obvious way was the manner in which Evo Morales
downplayed the official ritual of his Presidential inauguration ceremony,
remaking it as an indigenous ceremony at the country’s premier archae-
ological site, Tiwanaku, and thus, explicitly claiming legitimacy from
the authority of the indigenous people and cultures he represented. In
his second inaugural speech in 2010, after the proclamation of the new
Constitution, he denounced ‘the State which is now disappearing, the
State which now dies. A colonial State which permitted the permanent
plunder of natural resources from this noble earth, a colonial disciplining
State, a colonial State which has always seen us, the indigenous people of
the world, as savages, as animals. I don’t know how much we will change
but we need to change, because the colonial State brings no hope for the
peoples of the world’.2 And so, among his first moves, he abolished the
Department of Indigenous Affairs because from now on all national affairs
were indigenous. But in Tiwanaku, he also directed his rhetoric against a
world capitalist system and raised the banner of struggle in defence of the
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 81

earth and humanity against capitalism: ‘The peoples of the world on their
feet, not kneeling before capitalism. This is an historic battle, a millenarian
battle of our ancestors’,3 and he further outlined his ideas of ‘living well’,
or ‘vivir bien’ in which communitarian, indigenous values were raised
above the capitalist imperative of extraction and growth. In Tiwanaku, he
outlined the values of ‘vivir bien’ as follows: ‘To live well means to live in
harmony with everyone and everything, between humans and our Mother
Earth; and it consequently implies working for the dignity of all. And
nowadays it is more important than ever to know how to share, to know
how to distribute wealth equitably. What belongs to the people is for the
people. To democratise the economy. That is why we nationalise natural
resources: in order that these resources return to the Bolivian people.’ In
fact, the promotion of ‘vivir bien’ is presented as a state responsibility in
Article 8 of the Constitution.
Evo has returned to Tiwanaku many times to renew his mandate and
to celebrate the ‘Aymara New Year’, the winter solstice on June 21. This
celebration, which dates from the late 1980s, has now spread to many
communities. Most recently, as the work of Anne Ebert (2013, 2015) has
shown, the Morales administration is dispatching ministers to all depart-
ment capitals to celebrate the solstice—the indigenous New Year—and so
this Andean-invented tradition is nationalized and celebrated as part of
statecraft in departments and provinces far from the mountains where it
originated. This is not simply an andeanization of the state or of indig-
enous culture but surely an attempt to create a new national culture based
on indigenous principles. It is thus somewhat reminiscent of the nation-
building movement of many Latin American States, starting with Mexico
after the Revolution, which attempted to create a new national culture
based on mestizo people, culture and values. In this case, the nation is
imagined as indigenous. That is, although the ideology of mestizaje has
been replaced, the new ideology shares a common central aim: the per-
ceived need to create a national culture, even as it simultaneously and
sometimes contradictorily, celebrates diversity. Whereas in the past, indig-
enous culture was reduced to folklore such as the dances that could be
performed out of cultural context in schools and festivals by all citizens,
today the state endeavours to create a new indigenous national culture
that can be accessed by all. In both cases, cultural difference is celebrated
in forms that are universal rather than particularistic.
One of the more unusual manifestations of this new statecraft is the
President’s participation in mass marriage ceremonies4 (Perreault and
82 A. CANESSA

Green 2013; Postero 2011). At the first of these, conducted in May 2011,
with over 350 couples in an ‘ancestral’ and ‘traditional’ ceremony with the
President as sponsor, was intended to be ‘a radical process of depatriar-
chalisation of the colonial, liberal and neoliberal family’: the head of state
was presenting himself as the indigenous godfather of the nation.
As Nancy Postero (2011) points out, the state is creating a ‘tradition’
which does not conform to any particular indigenous culture and, in
particular in its assertion that marriage is enacted in a single event, goes
against the understandings of the highland cultures it is most closely sup-
posed to represent. The central point is not, however, that this state, as
every other, invents tradition but rather that it is working on creating a
national indigenous culture. If much of the politics of multiculturalism is
about difference and recognizing the cultural and other rights of minor-
ity groups, Evo Morales’ government is asserting a very different vision: a
homogeneous national culture for the majority. The politics of the 1990s
seemed to be about a celebration of diversity and the multiplicity of indig-
enous cultures, to wit: the formation of a plurinational and multicultural
state. Evo Morales is returning to a much older pattern of ethnic relations
where indians were believed to occupy a structurally distinct position, be
they as the defeated in conquest, a fiscal category, a racial group or a social
class. Seen from this historical perspective, Morales seems to be trying to
create a new kind of relationship between indians and the state. A state
where the indian is privileged rather than disadvantaged (cf. Blackburn
2009), to be sure, but nevertheless he inherits a long tradition of seeing
indians as essentially a homogeneous category; one where they share a
political positioning but also a set of traditions and beliefs.

INDIGENOUS CITIZENSHIP
In my ethnographic research in highland Bolivia in the province of Larecaja,
I recall Aymara-speaking merchants, whose parents had themselves been
campesinos, comment that the rural indians ‘did not have citizenship’.
The rural indians, for their part, agreed: they felt discriminated against
by police and judges for being indians and did not even participate in the
national Independence Day Celebrations in their cantonal capital, deem-
ing these of interest only to whites and mestizos. As an Aymara-speaking
friend told me, ‘That time of the 6th of August was when the whites and
mestizos brought the government of Bolivia into existence. Since then the
6th of August has existed’. But now this sense of exclusion, of non-iden-
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 83

tification with the nation, is far less prevalent. There is no question that
across Bolivia people have been empowered by Morales’ election night
cry ‘Now we are all Presidents!’ and what this implied for indigenous
Bolivians (cf. Grisaffi 2013).
In Bolivia, the language of political indigeneity has clearly been used
by various groups as a vehicle for the critique of neoliberal globaliza-
tion (Canessa 2007; Maybury Lewis 2003; Sieder 2002; Van Cott 2002;
Postero and Zamosc 2004; Yashar 1998), but it has also been used to
argue for a new relationship with the nation state as well (Nancy Postero
2007: 17; Goodale 2008), that is, a new sense of citizenship and entitle-
ment. This citizenship, however, is clearly not evenly distributed in Bolivia.
Certainly, some groups are able to mobilize in a creative way to form new
relationships with the state (Escobar 2010; Gustafson 2002), but not all.
Most celebrated are the coca growers who were able to articulate a ‘lite’
(Grisaffi 2010:433) version of indigeneity which focused on relations with
the state symbolized by the coca leaf as a metonym for a broader set of
colonial and postcolonial injustices. Nicole Fabricant’s work with land-
less peasants in the eastern lowlands (2012) offers a comparable analysis
of mobilized groups who use land as an indigenous banner for politi-
cal engagement. In these two latter cases, social movements have forged
new relationships with the state and have also become very closely allied
with the state. Not all groups have such privileged access, however. Esther
López’s (2014) work among the Tacana in the eastern lowlands docu-
ments conflict between indigenous groups, with some highlanders being
seen as having privileged access to the state machinery at the expense of
others.
The neoliberal reforms of the 1990s introduced the idea of a multi-
ethnic and plurinational Bolivia. What we are seeing today is a rejection of
mestizaje as national ideology and something rather closer to the ‘indig-
enous citizenship’ proposed by María Elena García (2005:165) which
is, however, better understood as citizenship for indigenous people. In
Bolivia today, not only are indigenous citizens recognized as citizens of
the nation—they also enjoy a privileged position vis-à-vis the state (cf.
Postero and Zamosc 2004: 5–7). Indigenous citizenship in this sense is
not simply a new model of citizenship for indigenous people but a new
model of citizenship per se.
The Bolivian Constitution thus introduces a new political subject, the
indigenous ‘originario’ peasant. It begs the question, however, as to why
such a clumsy term was used. As Fernando Garcés has described it (2011),
84 A. CANESSA

this term emerged from a coalition of groups known as the Pacto Unido
working towards constitutional change. It brought together lowlanders
for whom the term indígena was a term of mobilization, and settled high-
land peasants with precolonial histories tied to the land they currently
occupy—originarios. As Garcés points out, ‘both indigenous peoples and
originary nations referred to those who embraced indigeneity as a central
category of self-identification’ (2011:51); that is, both terms are folded
into a single portmanteau ‘indigenous’ category even if the contemporary
social reality is that they have quite different identities. These two groups
were uneasy about the inclusion of peasant organizations with whom they
have a conflictive relationship compounded by differences of identity.
Peasant organizations are distinguished from originario peasant groups on
the grounds that they have migrated recently to the lowlands, argued for
inclusion on the basis of having maintained cultural forms and, ‘as such,
they maintained a claim to indigeneity despite their reterritorialisation in
new geohistorical spaces’ (2011: 51–2). That is, they may have been born
in highland originario communities but wish to retain some indigenous
identity even as they reject any identification with lowlanders whom they
generally consider to be inferior. No such discussion, of course, is included
or hinted at in the Constitution and the phrase appears with no commas
as if it were a single term, leaving rather open the relationship between all
three.
Current tensions in Bolivia are often seen in simplified terms between
highlanders and lowlanders but in fact the real tension is between what
we might call territorialized indigenous groups—be they in the highlands
or the lowlands—and deterritorialized groups, some of whom are col-
onists while many others live in cities. For the former, indigeneity is a
discourse relating more closely to autonomous control over and identifi-
cation with land, whereas for the latter it is much more about a national
identity which includes them at the centre and, moreover, as the prime
beneficiaries of the exploitation of the nation’s natural resources. Both
groups may stand to benefit from ideologies of multiculturalism but they
are positioned very differently. The territorialized indigenous articulate
their concerns through a multiculturalism that recognizes the multiple
ways of being Bolivian and indigenous and they stress ancestral rights to a
specific territory or community land. The deterritorialized indigenous use
multiculturalism in very different ways, much more as a way of challenging
the white and mestizo elites for political power and economic resources on
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 85

the basis of ancestral rights to the nation. It is not difficult to see how the
interests of small groups defending their resources may conflict with much
larger groups seeking a redistribution of the nation’s resources for all the
subaltern peoples of the nation.
We need, then, to consider in what ways cultural diversity is cele-
brated for, if the neoliberal reforms changed the way people related to
the nation state, that is, they transformed what Deborah Yashar describes
as the ‘citizenship regime’ (Yashar 2005), the recent constitution has
changed it once again. The new constitution defines 36 indigenous
nations and languages and explicitly aims at establishing indigenous val-
ues if not people at the centre of the nation state. The 36 indigenous
nations and languages are a clear nod to a celebration of diversity but, at
the same time, the Constitution defines a set of shared common indig-
enous values rather than recognizing a diversity of values amongst indig-
enous groups.
Article 8.1 of the Constitution explicitly ‘adopts and promotes as
ethico-moral principles of a plural society’ a set of epithets from the
three principal indigenous languages of Bolivia (Quechua, Aymara, and
Guaraní) that encapsulate these indigenous values: ama qhilla, ama llulla,
ama suwa (do not be lazy, do not lie, do not steal), suma qamaña (live
well), ñandereko (a harmonious life), teko kavi (a good life), ivi maraei
(earth without evil), y qhapaj ñan (a noble life). This is explicitly framed as
a celebration of cultural diversity as explained in an appendix (p. 170) but
these are quite clearly moral principles that anyone could easily espouse—
whatever their culture of origin. There is certainly nothing challenging
here. Once again, the celebration of diversity and, in this case, the recog-
nition of different moral frameworks is, in fact, an attempt to universalize
indigenous culture.
Despite recognizing 35 indigenous cultures, the government, when it
comes to spreading indigenous practices, is much more keen on celebrat-
ing highland values than lowland ones, as exemplified by the government’s
insistence on promoting and sponsoring the celebration of the Aymara
New Year across the country. On a more concrete level, this is expressed
by the support or even active encouragement by the state of colonization
of lowland areas by highlanders, thus distinguishing some kinds of indig-
enous citizens from others.
86 A. CANESSA

DIFFERENTIATED INDIGENOUS CITIZENS

The collapse of mining in the 1980s began a massive movement of popu-
lation from the highlands to the lowlands. Some of these were to the
traditional coca-growing areas of the yungas, but very large numbers of
migrants went to areas such as the Chapare region and began cultivating
coca leaf. In this period, there were very few viable opportunities for poor
Aymara and Quechua people from the highlands. The Chapare was known
as a frontier territory but it was not uninhabited. In the 1950s and 1960s,
the residents of Cochabamba lived in fear of these ‘wild indians’ from
the lowlands but by the 1980s they were being displaced by Aymara and
Quechua colonists from the highlands who treated them little differently
to the way lowland indians have been treated historically. They talked of
them as ‘savages’ who ‘didn’t know how to work’ and their displacement
or engagement as wage labourers for the colonists was seen as a civilizing
mission. The colonists, after all, were teaching them the virtues of labour.
Little seems to have changed in recent years. I have heard from a number
of people working in the Chapare region that highlanders said the locals
did not know how to work and that they were teaching them. In my own
research further north in Rurrenabaque, a number of my Aymara inter-
locutors offered the identical view and ascribed to themselves the civilizing
role of teaching the natives how to work and progress.
It is in the Chapare that Evo Morales has his political base and it is here
that his political vision was forged. The communities of the Chapare are
not the kinds of historically territorialized communities one gets in the
highlands or in the lowlands, with a long history of settlement and com-
plex rituals which bind people together, but rather, a set of new communi-
ties focusing on an economic activity which for decades has been subject
to military, including US military, intervention.
Unlike other Aymara and Quechua peasants, the coca growers from
this and other regions are engaged in cash crop monoculture: they make
money. And despite the problems with law enforcement, these areas con-
tinue to attract temporary and permanent migrants in search of cash.
Coca growers are thus one of several groups of people—landless peas-
ants, urban people, highland colonists in the lowlands—whose origins lie
in ‘traditional’ indigenous communities and who have an historical con-
sciousness of racism and injustice but who nevertheless do not identify
closely with the lifeways and cultural values of their communities of origin.
In times past, such economically dynamic people would have been on
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 87

their way to becoming mestizos and accepting the value of dominant mes-
tizo–creole society. That model of assimilation, however, is largely defunct
and what we find are large numbers of people who see themselves neither
as mestizos nor as jaqi or runa, the Aymara and Quechua words for peo-
ple who follow a particular traditional lifestyle. In urban areas, people are
developing an ‘indigenous cosmopolitanism’ (Goodale 2008), while the
new rising middle classes are increasingly unlikely to identify as mestizo,
choosing rather to identify as indigenous or cholo even if their lifestyles
would seem to be more consonant with urban middle classes (Wightman
2011).
Urban people, coca growers and highland colonists in the lowlands
form a majority of those people identified as indigenous in the 2001 cen-
sus.5 In fact, it is quite possible that such people constitute an absolute
majority of the Bolivian population. It should not be surprising then that
the dominant mode of indigeneity in Bolivia today is one that speaks
to a dynamic population engaged in market activities seeking economic
growth, rather than one which seeks to sacrifice economic growth in
favour of ‘vivir bien’.
This leads us to a fundamental contradiction in Bolivia’s politics of indi-
geneity wherein the government argues for the rights of indigenous peo-
ple and the protection of the environment, prioritizing ‘living well’ over
economic growth, leading to Morales being declared a ‘World Hero of
Mother Earth’ at the 2009 United Nations General Assembly (Munckton
2009: 14) even as his government pursues an aggressive policy favour-
ing resource extraction (Bebbington and Humphreys Bebbington 2011;
Farthing 2009; Gudynas 2011; Ströbele-Gregor 2012) and monocrop
agriculture in the form of coca.
This contradiction raises two points. The first addresses the concerns
of small indigenous groups who need protection from agribusinesses and
extractive industries, while the second pleads for a development of these
industries in favour of small capitalist farmers and the urban poor. The
issue is not so much whether or even what kind of economic development
there should be, but rather, who should control it and how the resources
will be distributed.
The constitutional insistence that indigenous people have control
over their recognized territories and may choose to refuse exploitation of
resources on their lands comes into conflict with the perceived need for
economic growth based on extractive industries and intensive agriculture.
One of the clearest political problems facing the government is not that
88 A. CANESSA

there is oil production in the lowlands but that there is oil production in
the lowlands in areas of greatest political opposition to the government.

INDIGENOUS COLONISTS
The globalized concept of indigenous people explicitly presents them
as victims of colonization and many scholars have argued for a pro-
ductive engagement with concepts of indigeneity precisely because it
is a means through which relatively powerless people can make jus-
tice claims. Justice and powerlessness are, however, contested concepts
when interpreted from different viewpoints, and there is a danger in
assuming that indigenous people are always and everywhere in the
right or even that they are always the colonized and never the colo-
nizers. Historians of Mexico (Frye 1996) and Guatemala (Matthew
2012) have noted that some groups allied with the Spanish conquista-
dors in conquering northern Mexico and Guatemala, respectively (cf.
Luis Vázquez in this volume). In both these cases, these indian groups
were awarded the status of mestizo, not so much as an ethnic label
but in recognition of their exemption from tribute and corvée labour,
though this does not necessarily mean they didn’t suffer discrimination
in subsequent historical periods. Frye’s work is particularly instruc-
tive here because the descendants of the Tlaxcaltecs cannot claim an
indigenous identity in Mixquitec where they now live because of their
historical status as allies of invaders. To be recognized as indigenous
by the state they need to renounce their Tlaxcaltec heritage and adopt
a Chichimecan identity, the Chichimecs being the local indians they
subordinated almost 500 years ago. These issues are salient in Luis
Vasquez’ paper in this volume.
In commenting on Frye’s work, López Caballero (2012:19).notes that
one can be Indian, that is a member of a subordinated group in a particu-
lar region, without being indigenous (in the sense of being a native of the
region, or originario). Such a formulation depends on a particular sense
of scale where indigeneity is defined regionally. López Caballero further
notes that when indigeneity is scaled up to the level of a national identity,
this formula gets turned on its head: in Bolivia and Mexico today one can
be indigenous: that is, one can identify as a descendant of the original
inhabitants of the nation, the pueblos originarios without being indian—a
member of a locally recognized subordinated group with identifiable cul-
tural traits.
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 89

The Indian anthropologist André Béteille (1998:90) hints at precisely

such a problematic when he asks: ‘Is there now such an essentialist view of
indigenous people in which they carry their identity with them wherever
they go and whatever they do?’ How does such a rhetorical question shed
light on the situation in Bolivia? The first issue to consider is whether an
indigenous identity travels, and surely it must: if the state is going to rec-
ognize indigenous citizens, it is logically compelled to do so whether they
live in the jungle or in the suburbs in the same way it recognizes other
minorities; and, following from this, surely one is indigenous whatever
one does.
The history of Bolivia can easily be described as the history of the
oppression of the descendants of pre-European populations in the service
of a white-dominated oligarchy of landowners and mine owners. There can
be surely no issue in celebrating the taking of power from the white elite
by a government which represents the indigenous majority. The problem
arises, however, when the concept of indigeneity obscures internal dif-
ferentiation and, to take a specific Bolivian point, when highland peasants
arrive as indigenous citizens to occupy land that is ‘unused’ or ‘underused’
in the relatively sparsely populated eastern lowlands. Unused, that is, from
the perspective of the colonists; not exactly unused from the perspective of
the equally indigenous people who live there. That is, it is not enough to
assert that ‘indigenous people are better understood as those who are dis-
criminated against; they are rarely the ones discriminating against others’
(Kenrick and Lewis 2004), because it leaves us with no critical perspective
to understand when indigenous people do discriminate against others.
On a trip to the lowland town of Rurrenabaque in 2011, I spoke to
many Aymara and Quechua migrants who arrived mostly since the road
to La Paz was built in the 1980s which opened the area up for settlement.
Today, Rurrenabaque is dominated by Aymara and Quechua traders.
Aymara shopkeeper Rubén told me what it was like: ‘I have been here
for twenty years. When I first came there was nothing, nothing: just one
road and no electricity. It was quiet then, simple, you know. Now it is
busy; I liked it more then … These people, you know, didn’t know how
to do anything. We [the migrants] have made Rurrenabaque what it is
today. The people here don’t know how to work, we have civilized this
place.’ The idea that Aymara and Quechua migrants civilize the lowlands
is a consistent theme across the region.
Another trader, Marcelino, gave me another, fairly typical account, but
with an important added gender element: ‘Oh yes, I have a wife. She is in
90 A. CANESSA

Santa Cruz but I also have a wife here, a young girl. She is 22 (Marcelino
is 45). I have a child with her. The people here are very simple. Before I
came twenty years ago there was nothing here. We have brought civiliza-
tion. They don’t understand. In those days they would just give you a
woman for twenty pesos. [Laughter] It is very easy to take a woman here.’
The juxtaposition of colonization and the taking of indigenous women
is not coincidental; is has, in fact, been both an image and a practice of
conquest since the arrival of the Spanish (Canessa 2012b). The difference
here is that it is an Aymara who is invoking this kind of relationship, insert-
ing himself into a colonial relationship as colonizer rather than colonized.
As we will see below, the President himself is by no means immune from
this kind of language. It is not, however, simply a matter of language: mar-
rying into an indigenous community will give access to land rights as well.6
The argument that being indigenous entails a right to settle in indig-
enous territories, whether or not one is from that particular region,
highlights the need for a legal or even conceptual distinction between
indigenous groups. This example also demonstrates how certain indig-
enous groups are perceived—whether by themselves or by others—to have
more legitimacy and power than other groups. Thus, in overlooking fun-
damental differences between indigenous groups, the state is not only fail-
ing to recognize the hierarchy of power between indigenous cultures but is
actually exacerbating it: ‘recognition by power can, and increasingly does,
involve as many problems as the neglect and marginalisation that comes
from an absence of state interest’ (Dombrowski 2002: 1071).
It also points to an issue of scale when considering indigenous issues
and identity. Clearly, in some contexts highlanders are adopting the view
that they are indigenous wherever they may be in the country and that,
as indigenous people, they assume the right to occupy and cultivate land
when they consider it unoccupied. This is both illegal and resisted by local
people, but there are numerous opportunities to get away with it. The idea
that lowland indigenous people are sitting on vast tracts of unproductive
land is shared by President and colonos alike and both show little patience
for the views of lowlanders. This is compounded by globalized definitions
which define indigenous people principally in terms of the nation state. If,
for example, one can recognize an indigenous person living in a city, and
few would want to argue that they do not exist, then why not recognize
the same person as indigenous throughout the country? This quandary
points to a conceptual deficit in distinguishing between different indig-
enous peoples within the nation state.
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 91

THE TIPNIS CASE

The recent TIPNIS case with which I opened this piece has exposed ten-
sions within the government, which has notoriously impaled itself on its
own contradictions. The surprise, perhaps, is that it took so long for these
tensions to emerge.
The road is part of a continent-wide infrastructural investment largely
funded and built by Brazil. From a more local perspective, the road is
important because it connects the Chapare, the coca growing area, with
Brazil, without having to go through Santa Cruz, which is the prime locus
of opposition to Evo Morales. The road through TIPNIS will also open
the area for further colonization by coca growers from the Chapare. This
colonization is illegal but the state is already unable or unwilling to stop it.
There is no doubt that local people understand that intensive colonization
will be the first major consequence of the road. In the light of the coca
growers’ enthusiastic support, it is not surprising that Morales declared
on June 30th 2011, ‘Like it or not, we are going to build this road’. The
representatives of TIPNIS, citing the Constitution argued that the road
could not be built against their wishes, but Morales responded forcefully
in October (Los Tiempos 13 October, 2011): ‘They want the consulta-
tion to be binding. That’s impossible; it’s non-negotiable. The constitu-
tion and international law mandate prior consultation, and we will always
respect that, but letting a group of families tell us what to do would mean
paralyzing all our work on electrification, hydrocarbons and industries.’
As a way of getting out of the problem of the bad publicity he sug-
gested a wider consultation, including people from outside TIPNIS such
as the Chapare. For Morales’ part he appeared to think he had consulted
with indigenous people, just not those living in TIPNIS. His government,
in any case, represented the majority of indigenous people in the coun-
try and it appears that his political miscalculation (he eventually had to
announce the road would not be built) rests on his confusion of the place
indigenous citizens have in the state he leads and the constitutional right
of small groups to resist the state in defence of their rights, even if the
government is legitimized by the support of an indigenous majority.
But Morales has not changed his underlying conception of the rela-
tionship with the lowland peoples: in August, echoing the vision of col-
onization expressed by Marcelino in Rurrenabaque, complete with the
sense of sexual entitlement, he was reported as asking the residents of the
Chapare to convince the indigenous people of TIPNIS to give the green
92 A. CANESSA

light to the construction in the following terms (La Razón, August 1,

2011): ‘You, compañeras and compañeros, need to explain, to guide the
indigenous compañeros. Their own mayor is moving to convince them not
to oppose [the road] … If I had time I would go and woo the Yuracaré
compañeras and convince them not to oppose. That is, young men, you
have instructions from the President to seduce (conquistar) the Yuracaré
women so that they won’t oppose the building of the road. … Approved?’
In response, the assembled followers broke out into applause.

CONCLUSIONS
As Charles Hale pointed out some time ago (2002), there is potentially a
menacing aspect to multiculturalism. In that work, he was focusing on the
ways multiculturalism can be used to support neoliberal reforms of the state
and act to further oppress indigenous people, even as it may nevertheless
open up some opportunities for indigenous people. We can certainly see
numerous examples in countries such as Mexico and Colombia—as well
as Guatemala—where respect for minority cultures offers governments a
way of divesting themselves of responsibility for indigenous people. The
problematic multiculturalism in Bolivia does not come from a neoliberal
elite agenda but from an explicitly socialist one, arising not out of the
fracturing of the state but from an attempt to shore it up and recreate it.
In Bolivia, the politics of multiculturalism are at the centre of the state-
building project because recognition of cultural diversity is the first step
in wresting power away from the traditional elites and it follows that in
a country with proportionately the largest indigenous population in the
hemisphere, multiculturalism will adopt the language of indigenous iden-
tity in general, rather than that of any particular indigenous group.
But who benefits most from the new identity politics? Alpa Shah (2010)
notes that even in the indigenous state of Jharkand in India, the people
most easily identified as indigenous are the ones least likely to benefit from
the indigenous state. I would make the very same argument for Bolivia
and there are striking similarities between these two indigenous states.
This should not, however, surprise us: once an indigenous discourse is
broad enough to include a majority of people it is surely inevitable that
some groups will have more access to indigenous capital than others. It
may occur even in situations when the majority of the population is not
identified as indigenous, but nevertheless a state founded on a narrative of
pre-Colombian autochthony, like Mexico, provides a legitimacy for such
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 93

dynamics. This is seen in Luis Vazquez’s paper in this volume on the sub-
ject of bitter and enduring land conflicts, and also in work already cited
by Paula López Caballero, who describes how peasants in central Mexico
use discourses of indigeneity, authenticity and primacy to create legiti-
macy and exclude others, including indigenous people, from other parts
of Mexico (López Caballero 2011).
As I have argued elsewhere (Canessa 2014), one way of understand-
ing current tensions between indigenous groups in Bolivia is in terms of
different rights claims made on or against the state. Coca growers and
urban indigenous people see themselves as victims of exclusion on the
basis of their indigenous ancestry and exclusion from economic and politi-
cal power by a white and mestizo elite and, in no small measure, global
capitalism. In the previous century, as urbanizing and upwardly mobile
people, they would have been on their way to becoming mestizos them-
selves. Today prosperous farmers and the educated professional children
of rural migrants eschew mestizaje for a different identity that is broadly
indigenous, although a plethora of other terms and euphemisms will be
used as well.
For these groups, the discourse of indigeneity provides them with a lan-
guage of justice and fair redistribution, which translates into access to new
lands for cultivation in the tropical lowlands, as well as exploiting lithium
in the highlands—despite the resulting ecological damage. For this group
the politics of multiculturalism are about their rights and their place within
the nation state, rather than a recognition of diversity, especially if it is not
colourful and impedes economic growth. This discourse of indigeneity,
rooted in symbols and expressed in festivities rather than in community
life or ritual practices, lends itself well to a discourse that can manipulate
symbols such as the coca leaf or the Pachamama without necessarily incor-
porating them into their daily life. These indigenous peasants are seeking
a relationship with the state which favours them as iconic citizens. From
the government’s point of view, they are seeking to articulate an ecumeni-
cal sense of indigeneity that applies to a majority of citizens, if not exactly
to all of them. It is for this reason that Evo Morales goes to such efforts
to nationalize the Aymara New Year and develop a set of indigenous sym-
bols with the widest possible appeal. If in the twentieth century the state
tried to create a national culture based on mestizaje, in the twenty-first,
the Morales government is seeking to create a national culture based on
indigenous culture. Paradoxically, with this national indigenous culture
comes a very real risk that marginal indigenous groups will be excluded.
94 A. CANESSA

The dream articulated by Morales is one of a Bolivia for the kinds of

people we might call the deterritorialized indigenous: urban people, coca
growers and landless peasants who have been suffering from poverty at the
hands of large enterprises controlled by a predominantly white economic
elite. Oil production in departments not controlled by the eastern white
elite, the expansion of coca growing into the eastern lowlands, a road that
bypasses Santa Cruz, the economic and political capital of the east, are
ways in which the state furthers the interests of the small farmer or the
urban migrant—often people who were born in marginal communities
on the fringes of the capitalist economy but who now see themselves on a
path to economic advancement. People, incidentally, who do not usually
like being called indigenous, and who clearly look down on others they
describe as indigenous, and not just lowlanders. They are happy with cer-
tain symbols of indigeneity—their originario status which gives them land
and other economic rights, a discourse on the coca leaf as an indigenous
symbol—but most certainly not an embrace of rural highland people who
are poor and marginalized or lowlanders who occupy large tracts of land
and do ‘not know how to use it’.
Much of the recent debate in Bolivia has divided the country into high-
lands dominated by Aymara and Quechua peasants, the ‘natural’ support-
ers of Evo Morales, and lowlands dominated by a white landowning class
and including a large number of small, diverse and marginalized indig-
enous people (but see Perreault and Green 2013). National political divi-
sions often do run along these lines but such a schema obscures important
differences. Many highland groups are also excluded from national indi-
geneity in similar ways to lowland peasants, as illustrated by the case of
Jesús de Machaca where I conducted fieldwork between 2008 and 2011.
The people of this area have a long history of resistance to the state and
they played a significant role in the many blockades and mobilizations that
ultimately culminated in Evo’s election. Yet even these people, with their
politicized background, struggle with the new national indigeneity in their
attempts to maintain their political autonomy (Orta 2013; Canessa 2012a;
Cameron 2010). Despite passing a law on Indigenous Autonomy in 2009
the government put enormous pressure on them to reject a local referen-
dum seeking recognition as an Indigenous Autonomous Community, on
the grounds that the state was already indigenous and such an act would
merely risk division between the state and its natural allies. The referen-
dum narrowly passed, but people continue to be wary and worried at what
they see as government bullying.
 PARADOXES OF MULTICULTURALISM IN BOLIVIA 95

Other highland communities, such as that of Wila Kjarka where I

have conducted fieldwork since 1989, also exhibit a certain ambivalence
towards the new indigenous state. Although enthusiastic supporters of the
Morales government, they are bemused by some elements of its statecraft.
It is other people, many of them mestizos, who are best positioned to
invoke the abstract symbolization of earth deities and indigeneity in the
broad ecumenical sense and are most able to extract resources from the
state. I was very surprised recently to hear a mestizo peasant from a com-
munity well known for its historical antipathy towards Indians describe
himself to me as an Aymara, just as I was to witness the enthusiasm of
creoles and mestizos for celebrating the Aymara New Year. The Aymara
peasants surrounding the town of Sorata in the province of Larecaja do
not celebrate the Aymara New Year, are puzzled by some of the descrip-
tions of the Pachamama as the national symbol of struggle for natural
resources and are perplexed when a national politician such as the radical
indigenous leader, Felipe Quispe, describes natural gas as her fart (inter-
view with author). It cannot be assumed that even in the highlands those
who are most rooted in traditional rural lifeways will be the most com-
fortable with national indigeneity; in fact, it speaks most clearly to a very
different constituency.
There can be no doubt that in Bolivia today the politics of multicul-
turalism has had an energizing and liberating effect on a number of sub-
altern peoples. But it has also demonstrated the capacity to exclude and
those most excluded are the ones least able to embrace and articulate an
ecumenical national sense of indigeneity. It is deeply ironic that in the
celebration of cultural diversity, the ones that suffer the greatest exclusion
are those whose cultures are most different.

NOTES
1. Most salient of these were, at the time very unpopular, reforms of
Participación Popular, which gave more power and responsibility to munici-
palities. One of the direct results of this were that local people—who hap-
pened to be indigenous—gained experience of local government. Many
later left the organizations of the national parties and became active politi-
cally qua indigenous people. See Albó (1994), Calla (1999).
2. ‘El Estado que se va, que muere. Un Estado colonial que permitió el saqueo
permanente de los recursos naturales de esta noble tierra, un Estado colonial
disciplinador, un Estado colonial que siempre nos ha visto a los pueblos
96 A. CANESSA

indígenas del mundo como salvajes, como animales. No sé cuánto cambiare-

mos pero hay que cambiar, porque el Estado colonial no trae ninguna espe-
ranza para los pueblos del mundo’.
3. ‘Los pueblos del mundo de pie, nunca de rodillas frente al capitalismo. Esta
es una lucha histórica, una lucha milenaria de nuestros antepasados’.
4. [Link]
parejas-indigenas_0_475752608.html
5. In fact, 51 % of those identified as indigenous lived in urban areas. The cen-
sus asked for identification either with a native people (pueblo originario).or
as indigenous.
6. Whereas in the past, having a non-indigenous father brought certain advan-
tages, now the opposite is often the case since it is through the Indian
mother that one can acquire land rights. In many cases, the same people
remain in power (López 2014), but instead of legitimising their positions
through their fathers or grandfathers, they do so through their mothers.

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 CHAPTER 4

The Ethnicization of Agrarian Conflicts:

An Argentine Case

Maité Boullosa-Joly

INTRODUCTION: NATIONAL CONTEXT

The indigenous population of what is now Argentina suffered probably
more violence after Independence than during the colonial period. The
dispossession of their lands accelerated through the nineteenth century
as the country constructed its national identity with no regard for its
indigenous population, to the point where it considered itself a ‘Nation
without Indians’. The 1833 and 1880 campaigns of extermination of the
Indian population, which formed part of a strategy of territorial expansion
across the pampa known as ‘La Conquista del Desierto’ (‘The Conquest
of the Desert’) came to form the basis of the building of the Argentine
nation (Quijada et  al. 2000), and also of extirpating ‘barbarism’, as in
Sarmiento’s notorious formula ‘civilización o barbarie’, developed in his
account of the chieftain of the hinterlands, Facundo (Sarmiento first pub.
1845). The ‘Indian’ was associated with the ‘Savage’, whose nature had
to be tamed, just as the idea of a ‘desert’, referring to the vast expanse
inhabited by Indian groups betrayed the denial to the Indians even of
the status of ‘persons’ (Quijada 2003: 147), and the refusal to recognize
them as full citizens, qualifying their status as ‘Indios argentinos’ (Gordillo

Translation by David Lehmann.

M. Boullosa-Joly ()
Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 101

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_4
102 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

and Hirsch 2010: 29). Fiercer perhaps than any comparable repression in
South America in the Independence period, this was a campaign to ‘clear
the land’ and also to create a labour force.
If Argentina has been thought of—and has thought of itself—as a
nation without Indians, how can one explain the renewal of identity which
is taking place today? In the pages which follow, we will go back over 40
years of the territorial and social struggles of the Indians in north-west
Argentina who claim recognition as Diaguita-Calchaquies. We shall also
see the strategies used by local landowners to undercut the case put for-
ward by Indian organizations. The cases exhibit marked contrasts and are
characterized by varying degrees of violence and much factional politics,
but through them we can see the achievements which brought about the
passage of indigenist legislation, its consequences in the positive recogni-
tion of Indian identity and the new rights which the movement has been
able to demand, while also noting its ambiguities and its limitations.
These events form part of broad pattern of indigenous resurgence and
ethnogenesis in Argentina in the past half century and especially since the
passage of the Indigenous Policy Law in 1985.1 In a territory the size of
India, Argentina exhibits many regional histories with divergent patterns
of indigenous occupation, eradication, survival, assimilation and now,
resurgence, ranging from Andean populations in areas adjacent to Bolivia
(Salta, Jujuy) to Araucanian Mapuche populations in the vast pampa plains
to the west of the Andes and further groups in Tierra del Fuego. A survey
in 2004–2005 gave a number of 600,000 people identifying themselves
either as members or as first-generation descendants of native peoples
(‘pueblos originarios’) out of a population of 38.65 million at that time
(Gordillo and Hirsch 2010: 19).
After the rise of Perón, an epic march on the national capital known as
the ‘malón de La Paz’ (the 1945 ‘Peace Festival’) was organized in 1946
by ‘campesinos Kolla’ who marched from the remote provinces of Salta
and Jujuy in 1946. The government did not know quite what to make
of this, and they were packed into trains and sent back to their prov-
inces (ibid. p. 24). Nonetheless, Peronism included the Indians as citizens,
though not as a distinct ethnic group, through its wage and social welfare
legislation and the famous Estatuto del Peón Rural, promulgated in 1944
when Perón was still Minister of Labour under a military government,
which established uniform rural wage and social entitlements, at least in
principle.
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 103

After Perón’s overthrow by the military in 1955, various specialized

agencies were established with different names to handle indigenous mat-
ters, though to little effect, but there was a renewal of activism in the
feverish Peronist-democratic interregnum of 1973–1976. Gordillo and
Hirsch note that this was marked among indigenous leaders by divisions
between some who gained positions in the state apparatus and others who
were more concerned to preserve their autonomy (2010: 27). The sub-
sequent military regime (1976–1983) brought repression for some and
co-optation for others, but also a cascade of economic crises in the country
as a whole, seriously affecting the cotton and sugar industries in the north-
west and north-eastern provinces of Tucumán, Salta and Jujuy with their
significant indigenous minority.
One response of those who have lost out as a result of these develop-
ments, and failures of development, has been to take part in movements of
ethnogenesis among both rural populations living and working in deterio-
rated circumstances and also urban dwellers struggling to survive on the
peripheries of provincial towns. Since 1990, there has been a constant pres-
sure of indigenous activism from the north-east to the extreme south. The
objections of those who say that they are not proper Argentines because
of their family links in Bolivia and Paraguay, or (alternatively) that they
are not ‘real’ Indians because they do not speak an indigenous language
or ‘dress like Indians’, have been brushed aside. Gordillo, in a striking
case study in Salta and Jujuy, tells of different ways in which people who
have undergone proletarianization and who may not even have known the
lands of origin from which their parents or grandparents were expelled by
force or by economic necessity, have organized to reclaim or even seize
lands to which they claim entitlement as originarios, that is, as native
inhabitants and as heirs to colonial land grants (‘mercedes de tierra’—see
also Luis Vázquez in this volume) (Gordillo 2010, 2011). This makes it
sound very different from some stereotypes of Latin American indigenous
claims because the places where the protagonists live bear little resem-
blance to the forms of land tenure, self government or ritual cycles usually
associated with those stereotypes, and they have largely lost touch with the
rituals and language which they claim as theirs—although there are many
cases in the north-east of Brazil, for example (Arruti 1997, 2013), and in
Southern Chile (Bengoa 1985), of which the same could be said.
But the claims have found a way forward in the Argentine legal and
political system, and although they rarely get full satisfaction, they do
make headway thanks to the indigenist legislation and, perhaps more
104 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

importantly, to politicians who resist at first but end up making conces-

sions. In a case study in the north-eastern province of Salta, Schwittay
describes prolonged peregrinations around legal, bureaucratic and politi-
cal arenas by a group of Kolla Indians in a claim going back to 1946.
Alluding to ‘a certain European fascination with indigenous people’, the
author also mentions a twinning arrangement with a city in Luxembourg,
which provided funding for their campaigns and travel to Europe and
other parts of Latin America (Schwittay 2003: 137). That campaign even-
tually achieved an expropriation in 1993, but the group had to wait till
2011, after an extra law had been passed in the National Congress, for
definitive titles to 19,000 hectares to be finally handed over. The report of
the ceremony carried all the hallmarks of political clientelism: the presence
of the national director and other senior officials of the National Institute
of Indigenous Affairs (INAI) and mention of the personal intervention of
the President.2

LOCAL CONTEXT
‘Volveré y seré millones’.3 Thus spoke Tupac Amaru II in 1781 as he
was about to be executed. His words have also been attributed to Tupac
Katari, executed a few months later in what is now Bolivia. And then
in 1952, it was the turn of Evita Perón, who is reputed to have uttered
the same words as she lay dying, prophesying the renewal of the struggle
of Argentina’s working classes, and the same prophecy was repeated to
me in 2000 by Lalo Nieva, a local leader in north-west Argentina. For
him, the Indians, who had been almost invisible in his country, were now
returning to demand their rights. And indeed, his prophecy seems to be
coming true: since the 1990s, the number of Indian communities has
multiplied in spectacular fashion: in the year 2000, when I arrived in the
province of Tucumán, the only communities to be recognized as indig-
enous were Amaicha and Quilmes, but since then another 20 have also
achieved the same status, and in 2005, they joined together to form the
Unión Diaguita Calchaquí.
All this amounts to a significant case of ethnogenesis, helped by the
legislation passed since the late 1980s conferring cultural, social and ter-
ritorial rights on native populations. The opportunities offered by these
laws have contributed to the replacement of classic peasant or agrarian
demands (for improvements in wages and living standards or changes in
the terms of tenancy) by Indian demands for historic rights over the land
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 105

on which they live and work. Agrarian conflicts, here as elsewhere, have
thus gradually become identity-based conflicts, resulting in a massive eth-
nicization of claims.
We start with the cases of Amaicha and Quilmes, whose inhabitants
were the first in the province of Tucumán to claim Indian community
status and demand rights over the land which they were inhabiting and
working. Although the two communities are only 20 kilometres apart,
they have very different histories: the people of Amaicha are a unique
case because ever since the colonial period, they have managed their lands
collectively, whereas the people of Quilmes, like many others, have lived
as sharecroppers under the sway of landowners. Unsurprisingly, the ter-
ratenientes (landlords) have not accepted these demands passively, and we
shall see the strategy which they have adopted in order to discredit the
arguments of pro-Indian organizations.
In this chapter, we will recount the history of 40 years of social strug-
gles and land conflicts, before turning to more recently recognized neigh-
bouring Indian communities who have been involved in struggles over
similar issues. The cases exhibit much variation, especially in the level of
violence, but they also show that there has been much progress: the indig-
enist legislation laid the basis for a growing recognition of Indian identity
and for rights-based demands to be met; but at the same time, there are
also ambiguities and limitations.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Colonial Period and Independence

The Calchaquí Valleys where the events described in the first part of this
chapter took place have a very dry climate and semi-desert landscape
located at an altitude of 2000 metres. Above the valleys, the mountains
rise through several ecological niches, from subsistence crop production at
the lower levels to highland pastures between 3000 and 4500 metres. The
rainy season in January–February brings a greener colour to the Valleys,
and water storage systems are managed by community institutions.
During the colonial period, the vast areas inhabited by Amerindian
populations lay beyond what were known as ‘internal frontiers’. At
Independence, these frontiers represented an imaginary line from east to
west, starting to the south of the city of Buenos Aires and extending as
far as the Andes. To the south of the line lay the ‘desert’, a euphemism
106 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

denoting the complete absence or sparse presence of ‘white’ inhabitants,

and a refusal to recognize the Indian groups as worthy of being treated as
human beings at all (Quijada 2003). A second internal frontier lay to the
north and included the Chaco region where Indian groups succeeded in
preserving their autonomy until the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the north-west of the country, the population was brought under the
institutions of the Spanish colonial regime, but settlers ignored legisla-
tion governing the Spanish colonies which forbade the seizure of Indian
community land. They justified this on the basis of the very small num-
ber of Indians in the region, and so removed them to more fertile lands
where they would be obliged to work for encomenderos4 as a type of labour
tribute. Once deported, the Indians could no longer reclaim their land
because it was now legally the property of others. Thus, they eventually
became mere tenants (arrendatarios) providing labour rent to their land-
lords plus having to comply with arbitrary landowner demands.
The Calchaquí Valleys are the site of the most prolonged Indian resis-
tance against the Spanish conquerors, lasting 130 years until their last
stronghold was defeated in 1640. The archaeological site with the ruins
of their settlement has been a symbol of resistance nationwide ever since
the nineteenth century (Guideccelli 2011a). There were rebellions against
forced labour in 1562, in the period 1630–1643, and in 1659 (Isla 2009:
68). Settlers adopted the same strategy as that used by the Incas in put-
ting down rebellions, namely, population removal. Quilmes is famous for
having undergone exemplary punishment: most of its inhabitants were
forced to walk 1500 kilometres to the outskirts of Buenos Aires, whence
the name of the town of Quilmes in Buenos Aires province. Much of the
land in the Calchaquí Valleys was granted to conquistadores as encomiendas
de indios, under which the Indians were rounded up and had to work for
an encomendero. Other lands were given the status of pueblos de indios
(Indian villages) and their inhabitants had to pay tribute to the crown,
with which came the right to own and manage their lands in common. In
1716, a Cédula Real conferring land title to what are said now to be some
60,000 hectares was awarded to the pueblos de indios. The autonomy did
not last forever though, because although in the nineteenth century the
Indians, with the disappearance of the category of Indian and the acces-
sion to formal citizenship, ceased to have to pay the labour tribute, the
autonomy of the ‘pueblos de Indios’ also disappeared, being considered
a relic of colonial rule (Rodriguez 2013). In this region, unlike the pam-
pas, there would be no ‘Conquest of the Desert’: the north-west of the
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 107

country experienced a more peaceful evolution than the south, but even
so, the situation of the native peoples left much to be desired. Thus, they
were deprived of their inalienable rights and their collective entitlement
over the land, which was now considered vacant, allowing the liberal state
to sell it. At the time, it was argued that the Indians were not ‘civilised’
enough to work the land properly, and so it was better to leave it in more
capable hands.

Land should pass into more industrious and reliable hands; this should be
the main concern of governments so that the country may progress and
avoid the enormous problems which exist in the deserted regions where it is
owned in part by Indians who have been brought up in laziness and neglect.
(López 2006)

In this new formally ‘egalitarian’ and liberal context, the Indians disap-
peared as an ethnic, juridical and fiscal category. But the denigrating rep-
resentations inherited from the colonial period persisted, and since no new
statutory instrument emerged to protect their title to the land, they lost
independent means of livelihood as the country moved from the colo-
nial to the Republican regime (Guideccelli 2011b; Rodriguez 2013).
However, the image of sudden disappearance of the Indian population
in the nineteenth century has to be nuanced: Indian representatives did
bring lawsuits and did contest the official description of their lands as
‘unoccupied’. There are six cases in the archives in which Indians from the
pueblos remind the authorities that they are still there and have not disap-
peared (López 2006). As we shall see, the community of Amaicha would
be the only one to obtain collective title to its land. The community mem-
bers claim that they still have the Cédula Real in their possession, but they
refuse to show it to outsiders. It is also claimed that a ‘protocolización’,
or certification was obtained in ‘the cabildo of Buenos Aires’ dated 1853
(Isla 2009: 148–9), after representatives of Amaicha won their case against
the landowner who wanted to seize hold of their land. However, research-
ers have not found their title in the provincial land register, despite claims
by people in the Amaicha community that it was registered there ‘before
1892’. But in any case, as Paz points out, the ‘cabildo’ of Buenos Aires
had been abolished 30 years before 1853. Paz speculates that the story is
an invention, that the colonial title probably does not exist, at least not
physically, and that the date of 1853 was chosen because it is the year of
Argentina’s Constitution (Paz 2006).
108 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

Concurrently with the loss of their recognized status, the nineteenth

century saw a process of subordination of the Indian population to capital-
ist production, as the development of maize, wool and leather production
increased the demand for labour by large-scale producers who mobilized
the state so as to tighten servile conditions: the institution of the conchabo
required people in the Valleys to register as workers on estates and to
return the following year on pain of imprisonment, although the effective-
ness of this mechanism may be in doubt, since at the end of the nineteenth
century there were more than 11,000 missing workers (Isla 2009: 77).
Ultimately there was a large outflow of people from the valleys to the
state capital of Tucumán and to Buenos Aires, and many estates became
unproductive rentier properties earning an income only from tenants. By
1960, local people were relying heavily on Government employment and
on development projects linked especially to irrigation. The population of
the locality comuna of Amaicha were not very committed to the rebirth of
their comunidad it was people from ‘distant hamlets who were to be the
driving force behind what became the Comunidad de Amaicha (Isla 2009:
83). However, the involvement with the state also brought involvement in
clientelistic politics, which was to affect the development of the project to
reconstruct the indigenous comunidad.

TWO CONTRASTING SITUATIONS: AMAICHA AND QUILMES

Amaicha: A Special Case

Amaicha’s special features have made of it an emblematic case in the
north-west of Argentina. During the Calchaquí Wars, the Valleys’ inhab-
itants were somewhat ambivalent with regard to the conquistadors. The
Cédula of 1716 had granted them collective rights over their land, and
subsequently, at different historical moments, some of their leaders played
important roles in defending those rights (Rodriguez and Boullosa Joly
2013). Elsewhere in the region, however, former Indian lands were dealt
with quite differently. Those belonging to the Quilmes Indians passed
through various hands after the end of the nineteenth century, the inhab-
itants were reduced to living as tenants and their living conditions varied a
great deal, depending on the status and the behaviour of their landowner.
Although the Estatuto del Peón Rural imposed limits on the mistreat-
ment of rural workers, the Peronist model of the time followed the prin-
ciples of the then prevalent Latin American indigenism, which meant the
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 109

integration of Indian populations into the homogeneous, or ‘undifferenti-

ated’, dominant culture of Argentina (Serbín 1981). Questions of ethnic
and cultural distinctiveness were not considered, and all the emphasis was
on the improvement of social and working conditions: the eight-hour day
replaced a working day which previously went from dawn to dusk, and a
legal right to a monetary wage and a pension was established. But in these
distant places, there was little chance of obtaining a remedy if laws were
flouted.

Quilmes and Its Bosses

In Quilmes, a series of landowners have been, and still are, present in
its 14 localities spread across 40 square kilometres. According to Delfín
Jerónimo, born in the area and one of the very first to organize in defence
of Indian rights, now aged over 60, who at the time of our conversation
was working at INAI, properties in the Quilmes area were divided into
strips (franjas) extending up through several different ecological levels
giving owners access to different types of land, from the river up to the
top of the mountains. In Chañares, where he grew up, the landowner was
a doctor, and Director of the Hospital in Santa María, a town some 20
kilometres away. Here the situation was not as oppressive as in neighbour-
ing villages: ‘of course we had to pay the “third”: one third of the harvest
and of the cattle. If you had ten animals you have to give three. In the
Chañares strips the landowner was not so nasty: he would administer his
oppression with a smile and did treat people with a minimum of consid-
eration.’ He then recalls the doctor’s brother-in-law, who was responsible
for the management of the property: ‘he was more prone to give him-
self airs. He would pass by our house on his way to the mountains. My
father would offer him board and lodging. The guy strutted around with
a rifle, a revolver and a knife in his belt. That image has stayed with me—a
guy on horseback and armed.’ But in neighbouring villages, the situa-
tion was much worse: ‘the landlords were much more brutal: they would
throw people out of their houses. In El Paso, a few kilometres away, if you
couldn’t afford the rent, they’d take you to court. They would arrive with
the police, because the judge and the police were on their side. They used
the whip on people. In Chañares it was not so bad, but El Paso was domi-
nated by large-scale cultivation, and people there were very frightened.
Delfín continues to describe yet another locality, 15 kilometres away:
‘On the Chico Cano family’s property it was even more brutal. Unlike
110 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

the owners of Chañares and El Paso, who lived in town in Santa María,
these lived on the farm, next to the church and the school—all power was
concentrated in one place. Until the 1960s, quite apart from the one third
payment, there were additional obligaciones: tenants had to go and work
in their fields without pay, or send their daughters to work as servants in
their house. It was more difficult to get out from under that system and
rebel against it and it lasted a long time.’
Delfín’s account shows how life could vary significantly from one prop-
erty to another: the tenants’ conditions depended on how productive the
land was and on whether the landowners lived on the spot. They also
depended on the landowners’ own temperament and behaviour. While
some treated their tenants with a degree of respect, others behaved like
feudal lords and could count on the complicity of the local police and
judiciary.

WINDS OF CHANGE
The early 1970s and 1980s in Argentina were the years of dictatorship
(1966–1973) and then of the return of Perón, followed by further military
intervention and the dark period of the ‘dirty war’ (1976–1983). Those
years were also marked by severe economic crises, by erosion of workers’
rights, and by repression and authoritarianism throughout society and in
the cultural sphere. Tucumán province had already been badly hit since
the 1960s by the crisis of the sugar industry. Many men and women from
the Calchaquí valleys would migrate seasonally to work on the sugar-cane
plantations which were central to the local economy. The closure of most
of the refineries caused a serious crisis which still affects the region. This,
combined with the authoritarian policies applied in the province, led to a
wave of large-scale mobilizations and labour and political conflict. On the
pretext of eliminating guerrilla groups in the Tucuman jungle, General
Antonio Bussi set up the ‘Operativo Independencia’ to put an end to these
movements.5
Side by side with these political events, Indian organizations began to
emerge in the country. Their emergence was linked to the establishment
in Buenos Aires of a ‘Coordinating Commission of Argentine Indigenous
Institutions’, which acted as an information centre for migrants from
the provinces. Intellectuals influenced by liberation theology and by the
1968 movements in the USA and in Europe, played an important role in
this movement to challenge discrimination in pursuit of emancipation.
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 111

Between 1970 and 1975, four Indian federations were established, as

well as numerous local organizations. It is also during this period that
indigenous parliaments were set up by the Mapuche in Neuquén and the
Wichi in the Chaco region, and an indigenous confederation grew up in
Tucumán.
Mobilization got under way in Quilmes in the late 1960s: the demands
centred on local people’s rights as cultivators of the land on which they
worked, and on the improvement of their quality of life (health care,
roads, communication, education and so on). The Indian question was
not yet on the agenda. When the first indigenous census was conducted
in 1965, the north-west of the country was considered to be a mestizo
region. Tucuman was not even included, since it was not believed to have
an Indian population (Garbulsky 1991–1992).
When in 1973 the first “Indigenous Parliament of the Calchaquí
Valleys” met in Amaicha, Quilmes’ Indian organization joined the move-
ment and demanded the expropriation of the large landholdings (Pierini
2011). It was a very important event whose memory lived on, and its
40th anniversary was celebrated in March 2013. It was at that Congress
that the people from Quilmes decided that they would no longer pay their
rent (arriendo) on the basis that they considered themselves the rightful
owners.
When people recall the time of this first indigenous Parliament, the
name that always comes to mind is Santana. After describing life under the
regime of the terratenientes, Delfín Jerónimo began to portray this highly
influential figure in the Indian mobilization in the region:

He was a trade unionist who had been formed in either the port or the
railway unions. He connected up with the indigenous movements and then
he recognised himself as an indigenous person. He wasn’t from a particular
community and in fact he had been born in the lowlands of Tucuman, but
so what? He recognised his indigenous identity. And he was the leader of
the whole movement.
Santana aroused in us the awareness that we were Indians and that we
had a right to the land. People were very submissive and they needed some-
one with a strong personality to stand up to the terratenientes (landlords),
to stop paying rent and to stop complying with the obligaciones’

Santana only lived in the valley from 1972 to 1975, but his role in the
ethnicization of local agrarian conflicts is reiterated by the words of Mario
112 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

Quintero, another leader, who told me that Santana had ‘sown the seed of
the Indian question and of resistance in Quilmes’. But even if he led the
operations, as Delfín would later explain, ‘behind him there were people
who had been organising for a long time in the area’. In fact, his father was
the president of the conference held in Amaicha in 1973. Like other repre-
sentatives in each locality, he knew people well and had a strong influence
on those around him. So it was thanks to Santana but also to all the local
leaders that the movement was able to get going in Quilmes.

THE MOVEMENT DURING THE DIRTY WAR: 1976–1983

The decision to stand up to the landowners and stop paying their dues
intensified the level of conflict and violence. Then, with the beginning
of the 1976 dictatorship, most of the inhabitants had no choice but to
return to a posture of submission to the landowners. Because of the guer-
rillas of Tucumán, there was a strong military presence in the region and,
according to people, present at the time the latifundistas took advantage
of this. Several of them were appointed mayors of their localities (delegado
comunal) by the military authorities in the province and used the office
to denounce their tenants, accusing them of failing to pay their rent. The
prohibition of any type of demonstration or social mobilization meant
that meetings of local inhabitants seeking to recover their land rights were
considered acts of subversion. The regime followed a neoliberal ideology
and so any threat to the interests of large landowners was considered a
threat against its principles, and therefore a ‘justification’ for repressive
action. As a result, many people were imprisoned and tortured.
The hero of this period was Don Jesús, an inhabitant of Quilmes. He
continued to refuse to pay his arriendo, and as a result received an expul-
sion order which led to a nine-year-long trial. He was regularly subjected
to torture, including being hung upside down by his feet. The electric
shocks administered on a wet mattress sent his body flying to the ceiling.
His wife, Doña Rosa, now aged 85, went to Buenos Aires in search of help
from law school students, and one of them, a native of the region, offered
to work on a voluntary basis, leading to a very long trial. With the sup-
port of his defence lawyer, Don Jesús eventually won his case in a federal
court at the end of the dictatorship. It emerged that the landowner who
had brought the case did not possess proper title to the land. This was a
turning point for the people of Quilmes, and after that they stopped pay-
ing arriendo. So it was also that Don Jesús became an example for other
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 113

activists, and the courtyard of his house became the headquarters of the
Indian organization and its struggle for 20 years.
Back during the dictatorship, it was very difficult to sustain the strug-
gle. Some young people migrated to Buenos Aires in search of work, like
Pancho who later became the Cacique of the CIQ—the Comunidad India
de Quilmes founded in the late 1980s. Delfín recounts how ‘in Buenos
Aires I worked in construction, in sales, in all sorts of areas … I met other
Diaguita people … and I already had some ideas about the Indian cause.
I met Pancho who was meeting with Eulogio Frites, a Kolla lawyer who
was very well informed and was at the head of the movement.6 This was
the height of the dictatorship and it was impossible to hold a meeting,
but a Methodist church nevertheless allowed us to meet in a back room,
and it was there that we founded the Asociación Indígena de la República,
which became important nationally and was the first Indian organisation
to obtain legal recognition as a civil association.’
The transition to democracy in 1983 opened the way for a renewal of
the movement which had first arisen in the 1970s. Migrants like Pancho
and Delfín returned home. Delfín tells how the economic crisis at the time
did not encourage him to stay in Buenos Aires, and that he missed his
birthplace, so he decided to go back and make his life there. An examina-
tion of their life histories shows that many local leaders, like Pancho and
Delfín, had spent long periods in the city. It was there that they made
contact with indigenous politics, and in some cases went to university.7
As a result, they made of their Indian belonging a source of pride and not
of shame, unlike so many of the other villagers. Having spent a long time
away, they also could distance themselves from the local system of domi-
nation. It was therefore easier for them to shake off the conformity which
held others in its grip (Boullosa Joly 2013).

LEGISLATION IN SUPPORT OF NATIVE POPULATIONS:

FROM THE INTERNATIONAL TO THE LOCAL ARENA
The return to democracy brought a national debate about Indian com-
munities, heavily influenced by the proposal in Geneva in the 1980s of a
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (eventu-
ally adopted in 2007). The first Argentinian law in support of indigenous
communities was passed in 1985, recognizing that there was a national
interest in providing help and support to native peoples and indigenous
114 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

communities, and establishing their rights to land ownership. In the early

1990s, Buenos Aires witnessed a high level of indigenous mobilization,
demonstrating the need for a more thoroughgoing debate on indigenous
rights and for those rights to be enshrined in the Constitution. It was dur-
ing this period that the INAI was created, and in 1994 the Constitution’s
provisions on the status of Indians, which had remained unchanged since
1853, were amended. The 1853 Constitution had granted to Congress
the power to ‘oversee the security of the frontiers; continue peaceful deal-
ings with the Indians, and promote their conversion to Catholicism’. Now,
under pressure both internationally and from Indian organizations, and in
parallel with many other Latin American countries, Argentina changed
its constitution, so that, in the words of the official English translation, it
formally recognized the ‘ethnic and cultural pre-existence of indigenous
peoples of Argentina’ (Section 75, paragraph 17), ‘respect for the iden-
tity and the right to bilingual and intercultural education’, and ‘the sta-
tus of their communities as legal entities, and the community possession
and ownership of the lands they traditionally occupy’.8 Thus, Argentina
adopted international indigenist rhetoric and became a ‘multicultural’ and
‘pluriethnic’ country.
But for all the fine words and agreements, indigenist laws are not
always applied in practice in favour of the populations they are supposed
to defend, because states are under no real obligation to implement them:
they create powers and principles but do not stipulate measures govern-
ments are obliged to undertake. Some even say that these reforms are
designed more to appease international public opinion than to improve
the lot of their poorest citizens (Schulte-Tenckoff 1997: 36; Le Bot 2006:
166).
Even so, these provisions do represent a new departure, especially
in Argentina. Furthermore, they would become an important focus of
demands from marginalized populations entangled in agrarian conflicts
with no access to juridical instruments for their defence. In Quilmes, the
CIQ was set up during this period in the mid-1980s, took for itself the
name of the brave Quilmes warriors who fought for the defence of their
territory against the Spanish conquerors, and was granted legal recogni-
tion as an association (personería juridica) in 1984.
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 115

AMAICHA AND THE RECOGNITION OF LAND TITLE:

THE INDIAN REDEFINED
The idealized representations of Indians which had become common
currency internationally and especially at the United Nations began to
circulate in Argentine media during the 1980s, as the case of Amaicha illus-
trates. As we have seen, this community has managed its lands collectively
since the colonial period, their periodic redistribution9 being directed by
a cacique together with a delegate from the comuna (local government).
This is a much less conflictive situation than in Quilmes and other places
dominated by large landlords. Nonetheless, the history of the land which
ultimately was designated indigenous community land was quite volatile:

Despite the apparent success of the mid 19th century protocolización [legal
certification] of the Cedula Real, various donations and transfers were in
fact made in the first half of the 20th century to the church, which then pro-
ceeded to convert the donation into urban building plots for some houses
for families from the state capital (making it look rather like a ‘laundering’
transaction in which the church’s involvement disguised the true benefi-
ciaries). The Supreme Court in the 1950s prevented the community from
transferring land for a post office on the grounds that there was no such
thing as community ownership and that the plot could not therefore be
transferred by a community. The community, or its members, had usufruct,
but ownership lay with the state, which did indeed transfer the plot to the
post office. Later during the Democratic interlude of 1973-76, a new law
was passed in the provincial assembly (Senado) which restored the recogni-
tion of the original colonial land grant, but this law, significantly, stipulated
that the rights of third parties should not be affected: therefore the previous
transfers of land to private property remained unaffected. An administrative
decree in 1976, shortly before the military coup of that year, nevertheless
enabled the executive to transfer plots held in usufruct to absolute property
of the people concerned. This arose from a distribution of private ownership
of individual parcels to members of a cooperative among whom there were
both members and nonmembers of the indigenous community. Further title
deeds were distributed by the notorious General Bussi in 1977. (Isla 2009,
Chap. 4)

Successive institutional devices in Amaicha were used by claimants to gain

formal control of land including a civil association, a cooperative (just
mentioned) and eventually a campaign to gain recognition as a recognized
indigenous community. This last device was also linked to a plan for an
116 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

integrated rural development project to be funded by an Italian agency,

but it was riven by accusations of corruption involving the cacique Miguel
Pastrana, who had been designated, amid some controversy, as lifetime
president (Isla 2002, 2009: 120–125). Isla says that Pastrana was skilled
at managing relationships with local elites and provincial politicians and in
obtaining the certification from the INAI. As he pursued the case through
the state apparatus, Pastrana received help from a Peruvian-born activ-
ist, Daniel Flores. Pastrana had met Flores at a meeting of the INAI in
Buenos Aires, and asked him for advice about how his village could gain
official state recognition as an Indian community, and so it came about
that Daniel Flores became his ‘Secretary of Culture’ and went to live in
Amaicha from 1988 to 1990. The story is taken up by Maria Balderrama,
a schoolteacher in Tucumán and specialist in intercultural education, and
also an opponent of Pastrana’s—who was later accused in the regional
press of misappropriation of his association’s funds. She told us with some
amusement how the cultural identity of the village was redefined at this
time and she described the role of Daniel Flores in that process. During
these two years, she explained, Flores taught ‘courses in identity’ for the
local inhabitants:

Flores appeared in 1988. I heard him for the first time on the Valley’s only
FM station – Radio Chango… since this was the local radio station Pastrana
would speak on it every day to broadcast his message. One day he appeared
together with Flores and started to talk about ‘amaicheña culture’, about
the Amaicha people, their intelligence and their superiority, how they were
superior to the Quilmes and all the other indigenous groups of the valley,
and how they had a language of their own, land of their own… in fact how
everything was their own. So if the Amaicha had been leaders in their hey-
day, how could they not have their own laws today? I said to myself ‘Where
on earth has this personage come from?’

Maria has a clear recollection of Pastrana’s words on that day:

He claimed that the Amaicha Indians existed, whereas for my part I can’t
say with any certainty that there have ever been any Indians called Amaicha.
That is the name of the place but I don’t know if there were ever any Indians
known as Amaicha or Ampimpa [the name of a hamlet] as he said. All the
places in the area have quechua-derived names, but for him they referred to
one or another group of Indians.
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 117

Maria went on to talk about the mysticism which Daniel Flores also
introduced:

He would say that there were Amaicha ceremonies conducted by shamans

meeting in secret places. I had to explain to my grandmother, who was
listening with me, what a shaman was. A shaman, I told her, was a witch
doctor in Inca culture. But there weren’t any Amaicha shamans, not by the
remotest possibility, or at least any shamans of the sort which he was talking
about.

After this radio appearance Flores became a familiar figure around the vil-
lage because he lived in Pastrana’s house and accompanied him everywhere:

as ‘Secretario Flores’ he was Pastrana’s right-hand man. He would open

every meeting, every assembly with an invocation of Inti, the Inca sun, call-
ing down who knows what, sacred destinies and things like that, so that the
gathering would pass peacefully.

From then on representations of the Indians were reformulated, and the

reformulation was done so that the inhabitants would fit in with the new
juridical framework. Indian society was represented as the opposite of the
plunder and pollution perpetrated by Western society: they venerated their
ancestors, they were independent and spiritual and they preserved all their
traditions (Bensa 2006; de l’Estoile 2007). In this narrative, recounted
by Flores to the Amaicheños, 500 years of colonization, evangelization
and exploitation had left them untouched, living apparently in a parallel
world. Not that his listeners necessarily identified with the people of his
fantasy, as Maria’s account shows. But the pathetic image of their ancestors
which they had internalized, inherited from the colonial period, began to
change. Thus, Indian identity now became the unified platform for mul-
tiple demands, and among activists, the appropriation of these very poetic
representations became fashionable as part of a campaign in support of
quite concrete social and territorial rights.
And so in 1995, Pastrana obtained collective title to the Amaicha lands,
and in 1998 he was invited to Geneva to represent Argentina’s Indian
communities at the United Nations.
118 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

THE QUILMES ORDER IS TURNED ON ITS HEAD

An Indian Organization Gains in Stature

Although the people of Quilmes have not obtained ownership of the land
which they work, power relationships with the landlords in the area have
changed substantially in the last 20 years. In spite of their very limited
resources, through continuous struggle, travel, media appearances and
national and international alliances, their leaders have acquired ever more
visibility and legitimacy in their dealings with the landlords.
Pancho, the cacique of CIQ, the Quilmes community’s organization,
was elected when CIQ was founded and has been re-elected every five
years ever since. I interviewed him at the time of my first fieldwork in 2000
and he described to me what it would take for a cacique to stand up to
the local landowners. For him, the priority lay in establishing his authority,
and he told me how the media helped him to achieve this:

If someone in the community has got problems I go to the police station,

and now they listen to me. They listen to me because I’m on the television,
I’m in the newspapers, I’m everywhere. If the television networks run in
to me at a festival they mention that I’m there and ask me for a comment.

When a reporter points the microphone at him, Pancho told me, he lists
the injustices inflicted on his people, raising issues of land and water sup-
ply, and regularly denounces police and judges. This exposure is then very
helpful to him locally:

If the police turn up because of some problem or other, I go along and they
don’t take people away. And this is not because we are friends or because
they like me. They listen to what I have to say because otherwise I will get
angry and go off to criticise them in the newspaper or somewhere… You
don’t get heard because people like you but because they believe that you
might be dangerous.

There is no doubt that journalists’ interest in the Indian cause has helped
to raise the profile of the CIQ’s campaign. As a result Pancho, has gained
recognition both locally and beyond and his media exposure has become
an instrument of pressure, while the Quilmes landlords have lost much of
their former power.
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 119

The decline of the landlords’ power is also the result of the decline
in their economic position. Land in this semi-desert region is not very
productive, and one of the leading families has, for decades, been torn by
internal disputes among its numerous members concerning the division
of inheritance. Furthermore, their title deeds are apparently not in order,
and they have decades’ worth of unpaid taxes, all of which weakens their
position vis-à-vis the CIQ.
Recently, in December 2013, I interviewed one of the members of this
family, Manuel Martinez, and he told me the history of his family and of
their land, and gave me his views on the Indian organization and its cam-
paign to gain ownership of the land.

Quilmes’ Landowners on the Defensive

Martinez is about 40 years old. Born in Quilmes, he grew up in the city
of Tucumán where his mother was a lawyer. He is widely travelled, and
lived for a few years in Israel. He is qualified as an English teacher but
has not got a teaching job, and occasionally works in the tourist indus-
try. People often speak of him as a hippie, living a Bohemian lifestyle on
a meagre income like many others in the region. He told me that he
was born in San José, eight kilometres south of Santa María, and that his
great-grandmother used to trade with Bolivia, travelling by mule. She sold
leather, salt and all the other goods of the time, which enabled her to buy
30,000 hectares of land.

I am not the son of a settler who massacred everyone before seizing the
land. No, the rule of law has existed in this country for 200 years. My great
grandmother worked and bought this land, unlike these supposed Indians
who want it for free… They only claim ancestral origins because they want
to steal the land. It is theft. What does it mean to cite a royal decree pub-
lished by a foreign power in 1700 as a legal document? It means that the
rule of law in Argentina, in fact all the country’s laws, do not exist.

Manuel Martinez was here invoking the right to private property and noted
that it too is enshrined in the Argentine Constitution. Agrarian conflicts
have sharpened in recent years ever since the land has been declared suit-
able for viticulture, as in the neighbouring province of Cafayate. Manuel
Martinez now wants to return to his family farm to establish a vineyard,
and so there have been several conflicts with the Indian organization
120 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

which, he says, wants to grab his entire property. Martinez said that he
had offered 150 hectares to Pancho a few months before but had not
received any response.
Although Martinez agreed that ‘in part the land should go to those to
work it’, there is also another story behind his offer, namely that it aims
to avoid his vineyard project being destabilized by Pancho. Also, later in
the conversation, I learned that the land being offered has been in dis-
pute with other heirs for 40 years, and that his title deeds are not clear.
This might well explain why Pancho has not responded. Furthermore, to
accept a gift of land from a landowner would be to recognize the legiti-
macy of the landowner’s ownership.10
Thus, we can see how the Quilmes CIQ has grown in strength and
legitimacy even while the landowners have lost influence. The inhabitants
also now call themselves comuneros in the image of those in Amaicha who
manage their land collectively.

THE ROLE OF THE ‘HUMAN RIGHTS INDIANS’

While the situation in Amaita and Quilmes has significantly improved,
other places tell a different story and the situation of some of them is remi-
niscent of that described by Delfín in Quilmes in the 1970s. For exam-
ple, in 2002, in Chasquivil, a village high in the mountains of Tucuman’s
humid zone, neighbouring the Calchaquí Valley, the situation was par-
ticular worrying for the early twenty-first century. Houses were protected
from the elements by makeshift plastic sheets; the inhabitants were unable
to get straw to repair their thatched roofs and the landowner forbade
them from using tinplate instead because it was not picturesque enough.
The ‘obligations’ the inhabitants had to fulfil included ten days of unpaid
labour per month, with no food provided, which for people who lived far
away meant nine nights every month sleeping on damp ground; in addi-
tion, they were expected to give half their cattle, which far exceeded its
annual yield. Timoteo, a man of 63, complained that the previous year ‘el
doctor Martín’ had demanded ten animals: ‘where on earth will we find
10 animals if we haven’t even got enough to eat?’ He then recounted the
punishments: ‘if we couldn’t pay he would summon us to what he called
“meetings”. He would call us together and then call us into another room
one by one to punish us. Punish us? Was he our father? How can anyone
do such a thing? He frightened us stiff. Gradually, over the years, people
started to leave … some died.’ If the inhabitants wanted to cultivate their
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 121

parcels they had to ask permission, and occasionally the owner would seize
the crop. Hunting and fishing were forbidden. They could not even collect
firewood to cook and heat their dwellings. If a villager wanted to receive a
visitor, a written request had to be submitted three days in advance and it
would probably be rejected. Timoteo was in despair: ‘Forty years ago we
lived peacefully, but then the land was sold with us included, like animals.
Since then life has become unbearable.’
Another inhabitant of Chasquivil, Simona, told of a foreman who
would hide behind rocks and call ‘el doctor Martín’ on his cellphone to
inform him of any misdemeanours: if someone disobeyed they could be
expelled. A 30-year-old man, Cayetano, told of the case of someone who
had failed to pay his debts ten years earlier and had been expelled. His
house was burnt down and he lived for years in a grotto with his wife and
children. It killed him. Since Cayetano’s own household was also threat-
ened, he made some inquiries about the villagers’ rights and got help from
Miguel Condori. Condori, who lived in Amaicha but had been born in
Chasquivil and had himself had experience of the regime there, helped
them in their inquiries. With his pick-up truck he came several times to
run ‘secret meetings’ with activists who had some legal connections. It
turned out on inspection that Doctor Martín’s title deeds were not in
good order—a situation which usually is due to years of unpaid taxes and
can render the title invalid. The inhabitants began to watch the erosion of
the landowner’s authority.
This was the time when activists and an NGO called Abogados
del Noroeste Argentino en Derechos Humanos y Estudios Sociales
(ANDHES—Northwest Lawyers for Human Rights and Social Studies)
were devoting themselves to these issues: they would inform the inhabit-
ants of the region of their rights and help them with their inquiries. One
woman described them to me as ‘the human rights Indians who came to
help people who lived on landlords’ land’.

INDIAN COMMUNITIES PROLIFERATE IN THE REGION

Thus it came to pass that places where the Indian origin of the inhabit-
ants had been hidden from view began to demand recognition as Indian
communities, and after 2002 they began to multiply among people who
had been living in the same place for generations, often in very insecure
circumstances. The wave of demands was further stimulated by Argentine
122 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

ratification in 2001 of ILO Convention 169, which provided the platform

for Indian communities to organize.
With the proliferation of communities in the province of Tucumán,
local leaders came together in 2005 to create the ‘Unión de los pueblos
de la Nación Diaguita’ (Diaguita Peoples Union). Today it represents 20
villages and has a website.11 Every month, representatives of the groups
organize assemblies, and one of their victories has been the inclusion of
article 149, on the rights of indigenous peoples, in the 2006 reform of the
provincial constitution of Tucumán. Another successful campaign arising
from this mobilization was the achievement of a degree of legitimacy for
the Quilmes organization, despite the internal conflicts which weakened
its effectiveness. Chasquivil has been another success story: since 2002,
their Indian organization has brought about the invalidation of the title
deeds of ‘Doctor Martín’, and the inhabitants of this remote settlement
can now live in peace.

THE LANDOWNERS’ RESPONSE

For their part, the landowners have not been inactive, and they have orga-
nized themselves against demands for the restitution of land which they
believe to be their rightful property. They created an online magazine
pointedly entitled pueblo originario (native people) in which they take on
for themselves the rhetoric of the Indians who base the legitimacy of their
demands on the claim that ‘they were there first’. They claim to be the
true ‘native people’ and present themselves as victims. Their strategy is
indeed a surprising one, and with its name and its discourse their web page
could easily be mistaken as belonging to an indigenous organization. But
of course it is devoted to a rebuttal of the land claims of the ‘so-called’
indigenous organizations.
Here is the email they sent out in November 2012 announcing the
creation of their website:

We, landowners of Tucumán, wish to publicise our situation in relation to

the attacks against private property perpetrated by pseudo-Indian commu-
nities, which have been directed against us since 2005. The purpose of our
newspaper is to inform, and to tell the truth about what is happening in
our province. Private property is a human right, enshrined in the constitu-
tion. We have posted on Facebook all the articles published in our online
magazine. Thanks to Facebook you can also get in touch with all the people
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 123

who have been supporting us from the beginning, and you can share these
contacts with your friends. Today we have 2156 followers. You can also
recommend our magazine to other people so that they can support us in
our struggle. We will continue to publish research on property documents
and on the true history of Tucumán. Please feel free to get in touch with
us and to send us material on these issues, even when they concern other
provinces. Thank you.12

The post shows how those who are normally labelled perpetrators can
also present themselves as victims. They too can invoke human rights
and go in search of support. Thus, Manuel Martinez recalled his great-
grandmother’s native origins, and how she had purchased land at the
end of the nineteenth century. On the other side of his family, his father,
who was of Spanish and Italian origin, came from Buenos Aires, leading
Manuel to complain of the discrimination he was suffering: ‘I was born
half-gringo. That is why they call me a terrateniente, a white man … with
this renaissance of indigenism, I have become the last living Spanish con-
quistador, for that is how they see me. So when you go on Facebook and
you read about the terratenientes, you will know that it’s me they’re talk-
ing about …’.
It is fairly clear that in the discourse of CIQ activists, the use of the
dichotomic formula ‘Indian/White’ has increased significantly. This was
brought home to me in my two fieldwork periods conducted between
2000 and 2002. In 2000, Gustavo, a young man deeply involved in Indian
organization, described the oppression suffered by the local indigenous
populations without using the word blanco, but in the second conversa-
tion in 2002 he used it 21 times. This dualistic approach is certainly useful
in promoting their demands; the celebration of identity is an important
stage in enabling a movement representing people with a long history of
exclusion and stigmatization to raise its profile and representativeness.13
But Manuel Martinez sees this binary categorization as another type
of discrimination and attacks the ambiguity of the Indian identity claimed
by local inhabitants. ‘They call me terrateniente, white. But if you call
them kollas, they get angry.’ Here he puts his finger on problems of self-
recognition which do indeed trouble many of the inhabitants. The words
indio and kolla have indeed, for a very long time, been terms of abuse,
and still today they retain their pejorative connotations inherited from
the colonial period, as described by Cynthia Alejandra Pizarro for the
neighbouring province of Catamarca (Pizarro 2006), and this contributes
124 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

to contradictions in the proliferating claims for identity in the region

(Boullosa Joly 2013). Martinez uses them to undermine the legitimacy
of their struggle. And he then goes on to elaborate on the stereotypes
implicit in the juridical classifications which activists would have to follow
if their demands were to be consistent: ‘If you say that you are descended
from Indians, then you shouldn’t use Nike trainers, you shouldn’t speak
Spanish, you shouldn’t pray to God—then you would indeed be con-
sistent with your demands!’ The non-correspondence between the local
inhabitants of today and their representation of their precolonial ancestors
has led many to accuse them of being pseudo-Indians, indios truchos, as
we saw in the opening message sent out by the landowners’ organization.
And the long-standing idea which has been so deeply rooted in Argentina
since the nineteenth century, that there are no Indians left in the country
and that they have disappeared from its territory, also contributes to this
suspicion aroused by the newly created communities. Manuel Martinez
finishes by saying, ‘They just invoke their ancestry in order to steal our
land’.
So the landowners see themselves as victims in the face of native claims,
and indeed in some cases, depending on their economic and political
resources, they were finding themselves in difficulty.

CONTRASTING STORIES: FROM VIOLENCE TO IMPUNITY

If in Quilmes and Chasquivil local inhabitants have gradually been able
to affirm their rights, they have done so in part by violence. For the most
part, activists took many risks before gradually extending their rights.
Furthermore, in several cases, the situation remains very conflictive, and
not everywhere has progress been encouraging. Once again much depends
on the positions of landowners and on the economic and political issues
at stake.
The Trancas region, the most fertile part of Tucumán province, is a case
in point. One of its most influential landowners is a law professor at the
University of Tucumán: in addition, he belongs to the provincial oligarchy
and was a member of the National Constitutional Assembly in 1994. Since
most of the lawyers in the region have studied under him, and his sons
are also lawyers, he is in a position to protect his fellow-landowners and
also influence significantly the conduct of justice in the province. His fam-
ily therefore combines their ownership of some very productive agricul-
tural enterprises (soybean production and cattle-raising) with substantial
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 125

political influence. Like other owners of these kinds of hacienda, his aim is
to develop ever larger holdings and to remove the people who have been
living on their land for generations so as to open up more cultivable areas
to his own production. Numerous cases of people being expelled have
been denounced by the Indian organizations, but if they cannot challenge
the power of the latifundista, then there is not much they can do.
For example, a particularly violent confrontation occurred between a
landowner, Dario Amin, and the inhabitants of Chuchagasta, who, in their
attempt to seize control of his land, set up a roadblock to prevent him
from entering a quarry. Eventually, the landowner arrived, accompanied
by Luis, also known as ‘el niño Gomez’, a former police officer. Both men
were armed and Amin also had a video camera. He filmed the henchman
killing one of the people there, Javier Chocobar. The video was posted
online on October 12, 2009, and was widely resent on the Internet; it was
posted by the newspaper La Gaceta and carries the caption: ‘Los instantes
previos al asesinato de Javier Chocobar’, referring to the victim as ‘el caci-
que Chocobar’.14 Despite this evidence and many protests by the region’s
Indian organizations, the crime has remained unpunished for six years.‬‬
In the video, Amin says to his henchman, noticing that the protesters
had cameras, ‘let them take pictures: in any case in court no one will take
any notice of them’. (The Spanish original uses more colourful language:
‘nadie les dará bolas al tribunal’.) And indeed, in this case, he was right: no
one took any notice of the victims.
This crime became known in the province as ‘the Chocobar affair’,
but no amount of demonstrations, websites and press statements could
change a justice system which seemed to have ground to a halt, and took
no notice.‬‬
In an open letter to President Cristina Fernandez de Kirschner, intel-
lectuals, academics and journalists protested against the situation.15 Apart
from Chocobar, the letter lists the numerous crimes committed against
the Qom people in the province of Formosa whose perpetrators have
remained unpunished, naming murders committed since 2010. They
lament the escalating violence and the apparent incapacity of the state
to mediate in these conflicts. They note that these violent abuses of
power are taking place in the most economically dynamic regions of the
country where there is significant growth in agriculture, oil and tourism,
and they also note that armed groups follow the orders of businessmen
with impunity, and that no authority is bringing them to account. The
statement concludes as follows: ‘If the provincial government are unable
126 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

to free themselves from their local structural constraints, then it falls to the
national state to undertake the necessary changes. If a country like ours,
inhabited by dozens of indigenous peoples who are our fellow citizens,
allows them to continue to be killed without placing all the necessary
resources and instruments at the service of the truth, then the human
rights policies which the majority of society encourage support and moni-
tor, will be under threat.’16

CONCLUSION
Indian identity has been defined and redefined at different times, but it
is clear that ‘to be an Indian’ is always tied to a juridical framework relat-
ing to the ownership of land or its despoliation. Throughout the nine-
teenth century, in Argentina, the native populations, quite apart from the
overwhelming violence perpetrated against them in the pampas, became
invisible by their exclusion from public debate and legal classification.
Reclassified as criollos—that is as people of mixed but ill-defined ances-
try fitting the description of an average Argentine—they were left with
no rights to the land on which they lived and which they worked. It is
only at the beginning of the 1970s that Indian demands began to be
heard, and only with the transition to democracy in 1983 did they reach
a broader public. Against this background, the passage of multicultural
legislation was obviously a crucial milestone. But these changes at the
national level must also be related to the international context and to the
United Nations declarations and conventions on the rights of indigenous
peoples. The language of these documents had a very strong influence
on the redefinition of identities both nationally and locally. Groups who
claim recognition as Indians are not at all cut off from the wider world,
as is evidenced by the external actors who provided a crucial induction
into the ways of indigenous struggle at various points—among them
Santana in Quilmes, Daniel Flores in Amaicha or the Tucumán human
rights lawyers in neighbouring villages. With the help of these outsid-
ers the local leaders came to master the text of the multicultural laws
and also learnt the language which was needed to advance their demands
successfully. The ethnicization of agrarian conflicts which previously had
either lain dormant or been formulated in purely socio-economic terms,
became possible as a result of the work of the external agents and the local
leaders. These ethnic movements therefore should not be analysed from
an essentialist point of view, but rather as social movements fighting to
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 127

change power relations in postcolonial contexts characterized by severe

and persistent discrimination (Abercrombie 1991; Canessa 2007; Bosa
and Wittersheim 2009).
The role of the media and of social networks has also been extremely
important. Activists are helped in their struggle by journalists, while web-
sites, electronic newspapers, Facebook and Twitter enable them to pub-
licize their demands widely and campaign for support. The example of
the Cacique in Quilmes, Pancho, showed how he could disseminate his
demands to promote the movement and protect his followers in the face
of local power structures.
But we have also seen how this promotion through the media, or media-
tization, can contribute to the reification of stereotypes. Differential rights
and the rhetoric which accompanies them can have a polarizing effect. The
binary formula opposing Indians and whites is developed in the discourse
of the Indian movement and becomes deeply rooted by being repeatedly
invoked in struggles which ground the rights they demand in identity.
The definition of an Indian is regularly questioned in Argentina, and this
questioning is used by land owners to undermine the claims of villagers by
criticizing them for not behaving like their ancestors.
This case study, therefore, has shown the double-edged character of
government measures in support of Indian rights, and of the issues of
identity-based classification which they raise, as well as the complexity of
the process in a country whose national identity was built on the denial
of the very existence of its native population from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards. Those measures have opened the way for marginal-
ized peasant populations of Indian descent to stand up and demand their
rights, even if these advances have been limited. The achievements of the
movement vary according to local conditions and also according to the
productive potential of the land involved: it is perhaps sad, but not surpris-
ing, to note that where landowners possess substantial economic means
and political influence, progress in the recovery of land by native popula-
tions can be severely impeded.

NOTES
1. Ley sobre Política Indígena y Apoyo a las Comunidades Aborígenes, no.
23,302, September 1985.
2. ‘Expropiación al ingenio y refinería San Martín de Tabacal permite resti-
tución territorial’ reproduced by Argentina Indymedia [Link]
[Link]/news/2011/08/[Link]
128 M. BOULLOSA-JOLY

3. ‘I will return and there will be millions of me’.

4. The Spanish colonial regime conceded to encomenderos the labour tribute
owed to the crown by the indio population—so they received free, quasi-
slave, labour.
5. Antonio Bussi (1926–2011) was named military governor of the province
of Tucumán in 1976 and during his two years as governor more than 1000
people are said to have disappeared at the hands of the security forces in
‘Operativo Independencia’. Eventually in 2003, he was convicted of the
disappearance of one single person, but in the meantime, as a skilful prac-
titioner of clientelist politics, he had been elected to various positions on
eight occasions.
6. Kolla refers to the inhabitants of the higher plateaux of Northern Argentina.
In the past it has had a pejorative ethnic connotation, but with the indig-
enous renewal it has become a source of pride for people involved in the
movement.
7. This fits in with accounts of native militancy in many parts of the world; see
Bosa and Wittersheim (2009).
8. See the legal website: [Link] The original
Spanish reads as follows: Reconocer la preexistencia étnica y cultural de los
pueblos indígenas argentinos. Garantizar el respeto a su identidad y el
derecho a una educación bilingüe e intercultural; reconocer la personería
jurídica de sus comunidades, y la posesión y propiedad comunitarias de las
tierras que tradicionalmente ocupan; y regular la entrega de otras aptas y
suficientes para el desarrollo humano; ninguna de ellas será enajenable,
transmisible ni susceptible de gravámenes o embargos. Asegurar su partici-
pación en la gestión referida a sus recursos naturales y a los demás intereses
que los afecten. Las provincias pueden ejercer concurrentemente estas
atribuciones.
9. All traditional collective land institutions have a system of periodic redistri-
bution to reflect demographic changes, migration, family size as well as
shifts in local power structures.
10. The sensitivity of this matter is illustrated by an internet exchange concern-
ing a landowner who gave some land to a municipality: in the communica-
tion, the word ‘give’ is placed in quotes and a tweet from the Indian
organization Unión de los Pueblos de la Nación Diaguita contests the
implied legitimate ownership.
11. Cf.: [Link]
terratenientes-donan-territorio-indigena-a-la-municipalidad/
12. [Link] The Facebook page entitled
‘Pueblo Originario Kilmes’ however seems to be defunct, or at least
inactive.
 THE ETHNICIZATION OF AGRARIAN CONFLICTS: AN ARGENTINE CASE 129

13. The discourse of these CIQ leaders bears a resemblance to that of Indian
leaders in the USA described by Dean MacCannell. In order to emphasize
their difference, they drew attention to the moral and cultural decadence
of whites and at the same time proclaimed the superiority of Indians
(MacCannell 1992: 162).
14. The moments immediately before the killing of Javier Chocobar. http://
[Link]/watch?v=xZq_mzJSO5M
15. [Link]
periodistas-a-la-presidenta-por-la-inaccion-del-estado-frente-a-la-repre-
sion-y-asesinatos-de-miembros-del-pueblo-qom/
16. The comuniqué denounces 13 killings in the northern and north-western
provinces of Formosa and El Chaco, plus that of Javier Chocobar.

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 CHAPTER 5

Inventing Rights of Our Own: Women

Transcending the Opposition Between
the Indigenous and the Universal

Manuela Lavinas Picq

INTRODUCTION
Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution received much international praise for creat-
ing one of the world’s most progressive legal frameworks. It granted rights
to Nature (Art. 10), recognized the human right to water (Art. 12), and
adopted the Indigenous concept of sumak kausay (living-well) to guide
public policy (Arsel 2012; Radcliffe 2012). Yet nobody took notice that
Ecuador’s Constitution also recognized the rights of Indigenous women
within culture. Collective rights must follow ‘conditions of equality and
equity between men and women’ (Art. 57), and Indigenous justice must
‘guarantee the participation of and decision-making by women’ (Art.
171). This story merits attention not only because it established unprec-
edented legal rights, but also for its far-reaching implications for thinking
about the practice of plurinationality.

M.L. Picq ()

Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 133

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_5
134 M.L. PICQ

Latin American legislation has expanded Indigenous rights to self-

determination since Colombia first constitutionalized Indigenous judicial
autonomy in 1991. Most of the major Latin American countries have recog-
nized their Indigenous heritage and the rights of their Indigenous peoples
to the extent of ratifying ILO Convention 169; many have redefined them-
selves as ‘plurinational’ or ‘pluricultural’, and Indigenous movements in the
Andes have gone a step further and pressed forcefully for the redefinition
of the state altogether. In 2008 and 2009, Ecuador and Bolivia declared
themselves plurinational states. Colombian recognition of Indigenous legal
arrangements was followed by Bolivia and Ecuador in 2008 and 2009.
These notable legal achievements, however, did not explicitly define
the rights of Indigenous women. Gender is often invoked across the
region, and various countries have defined the crime of feminicide. But
Indigenous rights continued to be treated as requiring no gender-specific
treatment. With the exception of the theoretical debates discussed further
on in Sect. 3 of this chapter, Indigenous women’s rights are overlooked
across Constitutions, and gender concerns are dismissed as foreign to
Indigenous politics. It is the 2008 constitutional reform of Montecristi,
in Ecuador, that first enshrined Indigenous women’s rights in national
law. Ecuador was therefore a pioneer in creating the first Latin American
Constitution to explicitly guarantee the rights of Indigenous women
within collective rights.
Indigenous women’s rights were an achievement of their own mak-
ing. A small group of Kichwa women from the highlands of the prov-
ince of Chimborazo lobbied for gender parity within collective rights to
self-determination. Their core motivation was to bridge the profound
gender gaps that undermined women’s well-being in their communities,
countering Indigenous forms of justice described as ‘benevolent to men
and pernicious to women’ (Cucuri 2007). They were not involved in the
wider political activism of social movements, and few benefited from prior
political experience outside their villages. In fact, most were illiterate and
had never left the highlands; many had never seen the ocean. The trig-
ger which propelled their claims to national prominence was the conver-
gence of local and national contexts. In 2008, President Rafael Correa
called for an open, inclusive constitutional process and invited all sec-
tors of the citizenry to submit proposals (Becker 2011). It was an unex-
pected opportunity for gender rights advocacy beyond the confines of
their communities. The Red de Mujeres Kichwa y Rurales de Chimborazo
(REDCH) lobbied during the Constitutional Assembly in Ecuador for
a clause on gender parity within collective Indigenous rights, and as a
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 135

result Ecuador’s Constitution establishes constitutional rights defending

the rights of women within rights to culture, notably in the administration
of Indigenous justice.
The constitutional achievement mentioned above merits attention
firstly because it indicates the relevance of groups largely marginalized
in high politics. Second, the creation of gender requirements within
collective cultural rights has far-reaching implications for concepts of
justice. Kichwa activists proved that individual women’s rights and col-
lective rights to culture are neither incompatible nor exclusive but can
be articulated in new forms of inter-legality. Their calls for ‘democracy
with diversity’ contribute a notion of differentiated rights to plurinational
states and global human rights. My analysis contributes concrete insights
on how Indigenous women engage with international norms to consoli-
date their rights in  local contexts. I show what inter-legality looks like
when Indigenous worldviews blend with universal rights. As Boaventura
de Sousa Santos (1995) notes, inter-legality is about not only identifying
different legal orders but especially tracing the changing relations among
them. Inter-legality escapes the logic of dichotomization of ‘either/or’
to propose a ‘both/and’ approach in which plural legal systems interpen-
etrate. Indigenous women’s struggles show complex relations between
customary law, state law, and international norms. Their demands may
be local to Ecuador, but by setting a legal precedent they make remark-
able contributions to global women’s rights. Not least, they reconcile old
debates on the tensions between gender and multiculturalism and propose
a differentiated practice of universal rights.
In what follows, I analyse Kichwa women’s successful advocacy for gen-
der parity within culture in four steps. A first section retraces the inven-
tion of these new rights, emphasizing the origins of legal claims at the
intersection of gender and ethnicity. A second section details the legal
achievements in the 2008 Constitution of Montecristi, and a third sec-
tion discusses the conceptual implications of bringing women’s rights into
collective rights. Finally, I analyse the idea of ‘differentiated’ rights for the
consolidation of plurinational states.

INDIGENOUS WOMEN INVENTING RIGHTS

In the Montecristi debates, the Kichwa women united around one prac-
tical concern: women’s well-being in their communities. They worried
about health and income, but were particularly concerned about domestic
136 M.L. PICQ

violence. Their mobilization intensified in the wake of the Remache case,

involving the Indigenous congressman and President of Ecuador’s National
Human Rights Commission, Estuardo Remache, who was charged with
severely beating his partner (Picq 2012). The victim denounced abuses to
the Comisaría de la Mujer (the police department established to respond
to women’s issues) three times, documenting severe bruises on her face
and reporting tales of intense abuse, yet she received no protection. The
perpetrator never presented himself to the relevant police authorities,
claiming instead that this was a matter for Indigenous justice, so as to
avoid prosecution. After being subjected to repeated marginalization in
her community, including the forcible removal of her children and the
sacking of family members from their jobs, the victim was left with little
option but to drop all charges.
The Remache case shed light on the widespread problem of conju-
gal violence in Indigenous communities. The fact that the perpetrator
was a public figure exacerbated the level of impunity, but the case was
overall emblematic of the legal vulnerability faced by Indigenous women.
On the one hand, they have little access to state justice. The Comisarías
de la Mujer y la Familia are the core of state policy to address domes-
tic violence, yet their distribution is strikingly unequal. As of 2008, 31
Comisarías were spread across 19 provinces mostly clustered in larger cit-
ies. In 2014, there were 36 Comisarías, four of which were located in
Amazon provinces. Only 11 % of women who used the Comisarías resided
in rural areas. Chimborazo, for instance, with a large rural Indigenous
population, has only one Comisaría located in the province’s capital,
Riobamba. The police, ill-equipped to address cases of domestic abuse
in urban areas, are not even stationed in the vicinity to protect women in
the rural highlands. To make things worse, many women fear denouncing
their aggressors, and police officers themselves make them aware of poten-
tial problems they might face in the aftermath of filing a complaint. Over
40  % of married women report domestic violence, but less than half of
them seek institutional help (ENDEMAIN 2004). Statistics explain their
silence. Only 8 % of the cases brought to the Comisarías nationally result
in conviction, and only 2 % of victims get compensation (Camacho and
Jácome 2008). Taking cases of domestic abuse to ordinary justice is largely
considered a waste of time, money, and energy.
On the other hand, cases of violence against women brought to
Indigenous community justice tend to be judged by men in accordance
with patriarchal structures. Important cases are taken to a broad general
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 137

assembly open to the community. Community assemblies exercise oral,

free, and fast rulings led by leaders, who are generally men. Cases deemed
less important are solved within the extended family, for instance, by god-
parents (compadres) (Guartambel 2015). Women frequently denounce
cover-ups of men by men that result in the violation of their rights
(UNIFEM 2009). It is the norm for cases of violence against women and
girls to be ignored in community affairs or for a community to punish the
victim instead of the aggressor. Far from finding protection, women are
shamed as ‘bad wives’ (Sieder and Sierra 2010), and violence is dismissed
as a problem to be resolved at home (Pequeño 2009). Mariana Yumbay,
once the only Indigenous female judge in the (non-Indigenous) Supreme
Court for the province of Bolívar, worries that problems of adultery make
up a disproportionate amount of justice rulings among Indigenous com-
munities (Interview, June 14, 2010). Like culture, justice is socially con-
structed, entwined with, and part of processes of power. The problem is
not customary justice itself, but who defines the customs, and for what
purposes. Indigenous justice does not have jurisprudence nor do judges
receive any training; rulings follow customs and judges exercise autonomy
like in religious courts. In other words, Indigenous women have no good
options available when it comes to justice.
In 2006, the REDCH took the Remache scandal as an opportunity to
launch a series of rural community workshops. Their goal was to document
the extent of violence against women and identify solutions. REDCH’s
workshops collected over 250 polls in communities across the province,
and published the findings in a book (Cucuri 2007). Women’s accounts
confirmed that widespread violence was the major impediment to their
well-being. The dominant presence of men among judges was a recurrent
complaint. All workshops called for one solution: women wanted to par-
ticipate in judicial procedures and decision-making within their commu-
nities. ‘We should do justice … women organizations should call out on
men who rape … cut men’s hair …; and women should actively participate
in the application of Indigenous justice’ (Cucuri 2007:48). They added
that ‘Indigenous justice is not separate from the law, they have to go
together … Community leaders must know the law; we cannot do what
we please just because we are a community. If some cases are beyond the
community’s ability to reach an outcome, then external authorities should
intervene’ (Cucuri 2007:48). Women wanted to be decision-makers in
their own community councils.
138 M.L. PICQ

So when President Correa called for a constituent assembly in 2007,

the Kichwa women of Chimborazo were ready to draw up an agenda of
their own. Correa promised the most inclusive constituent process in his
country’s history and called on all sectors of society to contribute propos-
als, pledging the incorporation of traditionally marginalized sectors like
Afro-Ecuadorian and Indigenous peoples. It was a unique opportunity
to bring Indigenous women’s voices to the national stage. They would
advocate a proposal, demanding that gender equity be included within
Indigenous justice in the Montecristi Constitution.
They sought legal advice with the wording of their proposal, consult-
ing Ximena Endara, a prominent Quito lawyer specialized in Indigenous
rights, to whom they explained their collective demands. To their surprise,
the lawyer rejected their demands as impossible. Endara declared that no
gender clause could be introduced into Indigenous rights. Indigenous
rights were collective rights, she argued, and as such fully autonomous
rights within exclusive rights to culture. Extraneous standards like gender
norms could not be imposed on them. She explained that gender parity as
an individual human right was antithetical to concepts of collective rights
to culture, and that women’s rights were individual rights irreconcilable
with principles of Indigenous autonomy. Disconcerted, the women asked
why women’s rights could not be enforced within their communities. They
questioned the lawyer about the origins of international women rights.
The lawyer delved into the long history of Western women’s struggles,
explaining the gradual construction of rights from the suffragettes to the
1979 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This was Cucuri’s ‘eureka’
moment: ‘we Indigenous women want to invent rights to live better too’.
Like the women in Europe, she said, Kichwa women are determined to
defend new rights that address their realities, so as to pursue better lives
within Indigenous communities.
The sceptical lawyer’s denial of their case only strengthened their deter-
mination. REDCH looked for inspiration outside Ecuador. In Mexico, the
Zapatista Women’s Law was a powerful inspiration, but it was a declaration
by rebellious groups not recognized by the state. Bolivia’s newly drafted
plurinational Constitution symbolized the expansion of Indigenous rights
under the Presidency of Evo Morales, yet it made no explicit mention
of Indigenous women’s rights. REDCH’s legal advocacy ended up rely-
ing most heavily on international norms. CEDAW provided the frame-
work for advocating women’s human rights. For Indigenous rights, they
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 139

relied on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed

that same year. Article 44 is concise, but constitutes an explicit safeguard
in international law: ‘All the rights and freedoms recognized herein are
equally guaranteed to male and female Indigenous individuals’. This short
Article became the focal point of REDCH’s strategy to push forward an
agenda on gender parity within collective rights. Kichwa women were not
making outlandish demands: they were simply asking for the local vali-
dation of rights already recognized internationally in instruments which
Ecuador had ratified. The proposal demanded the incorporation of ‘gen-
der parity’ and the ‘full participation and decision-making of women’ in
collective rights law.
Kichwa women lobbied for their demands virtually alone. Both feminist
and Indigenous pressure groups tend to see the demands of Indigenous
women as secondary, in one case secondary as Indigenous and the other
secondary as women. After the Remache case, the Kichwa women had
little hope of finding support within the Indigenous movement, which
they skipped altogether. They tried instead to collaborate with the national
women’s movement. Yet multiple instances revealed the secondary sta-
tus given to their demands. First, they were not considered serious par-
ticipants at the national women’s preassembly meeting, and then their
requests did not make it into the national plan officially presented to the
Constitutional Assembly. Indigenous women’s voices were drowned out
by the broad, universalist approach to women’s rights. The group of about
100 women mobilized for more than a year on their own without signifi-
cant support from larger civil society organizations.
REDCH presented their proposal to the President of the Constitutional
Assembly at its opening ceremony. They were able to reach the Justice
Committee, eventually winning the support of some legislators. Despite
the resistance of certain Indigenous leaders and the lack of public sup-
port from the women’s movement, however, their lobbying strategy led
to fruitful negotiations that resulted in new laws.

SHAPING MONTECRISTI: WOMEN’S DECISION-MAKING

IN COLLECTIVE RIGHTS

The 2008 Constituent Assembly of Montecristi was a unique experience

in popular participation. It began as the most democratic process in the
history of Ecuador, as promised by President Correa. Rather than ask who
140 M.L. PICQ

participated, one should ask who did not. There were shoe-shiners’ associ-
ations and small business owners, anti-mining and student groups, provin-
cial Chambers of Commerce, and rural sectors. All social sectors mobilized
for Montecristi, submitted proposals, and distributed pamphlets. Feminist
movements demanded sexual and reproductive rights. Indigenous groups
called for a halt to extractive projects on their territories. The powerful
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador pushed for the
consolidation of plurinationality, while small communities demanded
access to water as a human right. The Constituent Assembly process gen-
erated unprecedented political enthusiasm throughout Ecuador because
it symbolized the foundation of the government’s ‘citizen’s revolution’:
a broadly inclusive promise of social justice for traditionally marginalized
social groups (Becker 2011).
Montecristi was a milestone, with implications that went beyond broad
popular participation. On the one hand, the Assembly established a new
political paradigm in its effort to build a Constitution in minga—the
Andean term widely used to describe cooperation in agricultural tasks and
house-building. On the other hand, Montecristi had an all-encompassing
mandate with extraordinary powers, capable of overturning a judicial
sentence or even revoking the presidential mandate. At first, President
Correa supported the Assembly from the outside. However, as tensions
intensified he attempted to influence it from within. In Montecristi’s final
stages, the President expressed increasing discontent with the ecological
dimension of the new Constitution, especially concerning the rights of
Nature. Assembly members, in turn, grew worried about the concentra-
tion of power in an executive branch which pressed for the preservation
of its rights to bypass legislation when convenient. The governing party,
Alianza País, had won a majority of seats and had the upper hand in the
final stretch of the deliberations. Weeks prior to the closing of the Assembly,
President Correa pressured Alberto Acosta to resign as President of the
Montecristi Assembly and replaced him with a right-wing ally from the
traditional elites. Many issues brought to the Assembly stayed under the
radar, either because they were diluted in the multitude of themes under
discussion or because they were overshadowed by the polarization which
developed in the final stages. The demands of Kichwa women went rela-
tively unnoticed in the broad scheme of Montecristi.
It was no easy task to take REDCH’s demands through the lobby-
ing process. Logistics were strenuous. Montecristi is a coastal town eight
hours away from the Chimborazo highlands, and REDCH members had
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 141

difficulty in interrupting their agricultural, household, and care respon-

sibilities in order to attend. To embark on long bus trips to the coast,
women needed help to cover their chores at home and in the fields. This
often required new organizations for family and community support,
which in turn, implied a broader recognition of women’s goals. For about
a year, women participated actively in Montecristi advocacy, in person, by
phone, and at times through the Internet. They presented their demands
on the floor of the Constituent Assembly, taking turns in their travels to
assure REDCH’s regular presence among legislators. The two main coor-
dinators, Cristina Cucuri and Sara Sayay, travelled at least once a month in
Montecristi, permanently on duty. It was all worthwhile.
REDCH members had drawn up multiple documents, insisting on the
legal language they wanted to see adopted. An initial letter calling upon
the Assembly’s responsibility to abide by Article 44 of the UN Declaration
was followed with more technical memoranda, explaining why it mattered
to include gender rights in Indigenous justice and what specific legal lan-
guage should be added to existing laws. They wanted collective rights
to adopt wording ‘guaranteeing the participation and decision-making of
women’. When the Montecristi Assembly finally approved a constitution
comprising 494 articles, three of them explicitly guaranteed Indigenous
women’s participation. The only formal request that failed to go through
was the one presented to the Assembly Secretariat requesting specific
wording on the ‘participation in conditions of equality and equity of
women and men in all the economic, social, political, and cultural realms’.
Every other Kichwa demand was turned into law.
The law for which REDCH fought most fiercely. Article 171 of the
2008 Constitution established women’s participation and decision-mak-
ing in Indigenous justice:

Article 171. The authorities of the Indigenous communities, peoples, and

nations shall perform jurisdictional duties, on the basis of their ancestral
traditions and their own system of law, within their own territories, with
a guarantee for the participation of and decision-making by women. The
authorities shall apply their own standards and procedures for the settlement
of internal disputes, provided that they are not contrary to the Constitution
and human rights enshrined in international instruments.
The State shall guarantee that public institutions and authorities observe
the decisions of Indigenous jurisdiction. These decisions shall be subject
to monitoring of their constitutionality. The law shall establish the mecha-
142 M.L. PICQ

nisms for coordination and cooperation between Indigenous jurisdiction

and regular jurisdiction.

Article 171 thus reaffirmed Indigenous autonomy in the administration

of justice and the obligation of ordinary justice to recognize Indigenous
jurisdiction. As before, the Supreme Court remained the only legal
instance with higher authority to appeal cases administered by Indigenous
justice. The main change in the 2008 Constitution is the addition of a
third external restraint to Indigenous jurisdiction. If until now Indigenous
justice was required not to go against criminal law and international human
rights norms, now it also had to guarantee the equal and full participa-
tion of women in decision-making. In theory, Indigenous women could
from now on appeal to the Supreme Court if they were not represented
among judges. This gender clause added a powerful normative leverage
and weight to women voices.
Language on gender parity was amended for all constitutional law
defining collective and cultural rights. REDCH had made a specific
request to the Constituent Assembly to integrate language on gender par-
ity and equality in six articles dealing with collective rights (Arts. 1, 9, 10,
16, 17, 22). It had proposed CEDAW-inspired language for ‘eliminat-
ing all forms of discrimination and violence against girls, teens, and adult
women’ within culture (Art. 26). The law already specified it was ‘without
discrimination’, but that was not enough. Like the women who fought for
the equal rights of men and women in the 1945 Charter of the UN (Skard
2008), Indigenous women wanted their inclusion to be stated explicitly.
Collective rights became enshrined in Article 57, Chapter IV, which is
entitled ‘Derechos de las comunidades, pueblos y nacionalidades’ (Rights
of communities, peoples and nationalities):

Indigenous comunas, communities, peoples and nations are recognized and

guaranteed, in conformity with the Constitution and human rights agree-
ments, conventions, declarations and other international instruments.1

Twenty-one sub-articles detail collective rights ranging from natural

resources and flora to education and the media, including the protection
of territories where people live in voluntary isolation. Gender-specific lan-
guage comes up twice. Sub-article 10 explicitly integrates language from
CEDAW into collective rights to justice: ‘To create, develop, apply and
practice their own legal system or common law, which cannot infringe
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 143

constitutional rights, especially those of women, children and adolescents’.

The long Article 57 ends with one last statement, not numbered as a sub-
article yet separated as a free-standing statement at the end of the text:

The State shall guarantee the enforcement of these collective rights without
any discrimination, in conditions of equality and equity between men and
women.

REDCH’s activism successfully resulted in new law. The new

Constitution guaranteed women’s participation within collective rights
to justice. It was also successful because a small group of marginalized
Kichwa women from the highlands of Chimborazo had found a sense of
political agency.
This political journey was a transformative experience. Their efforts
before and during the Montecristi Assembly crystallized a political agility
they themselves did not think they possessed. The invisible marginalized
peasants from poor highlands had become assertive, confident advocates
of women’s rights in front of an audience of legislators. They had man-
aged to leave their homes, families, and fields to engage in public policy in
distant places. The Montecristi journey transformed who they were, how
they perceived themselves, and, not least, how they were perceived.
Yet if the advocacy process resulted in a heightened sense of self-worth
for those women, it has yet to have significant impact in the daily lives of
Indigenous women. The gender clause laws remained as invisible as the
women who advocated them. Kichwa women achieved powerful change,
yet continued to be treated as peripheral. The 2008 legal reforms were
overlooked like they themselves were. The introduction of Indigenous
women’s rights in constitutional law was nevertheless a major legal inno-
vation. The legal reform was not only a powerful tool for improving the
lives of Kichwa women. It constituted a conceptual milestone for the artic-
ulation of Indigenous and women’s rights. In particular, this conquest
introduced universal women’s rights within collective rights to culture,
thereby providing for diversified practices of democracy.

RECONCILING CULTURAL JUSTICE WITH WOMEN RIGHTS

The feminist literature on multiculturalism has expressed concern with the
reliance on ‘cultural tradition’ when legitimating crimes against women.
Securing a role for women in Indigenous justice shattered any remaining
144 M.L. PICQ

assumption about the incompatibility of gender with culture. It recon-

ciled age-old debates opposing gender and multiculturalism by showing
that individual women’s rights and collective rights were not mutually
exclusive but could be articulated to design inter-legalities that benefited
gender equality. The existence of legal pluralism in national law creates
a legal flexibility that permits the mixture of Indigenous particulars with
gender universals. The resulting cross-pollinations can form inter-legalities
that affect the practice of law.
Susan M. Okin’s (1999) influential essay ‘Is Multiculturalism bad for
Women?’ marked the polarized debate on tensions between gender parity
and multiculturalism. On one side, feminist critics argued that multicultur-
alism tended to be detrimental to women: scholars posited collective and
women’s rights as ‘conflicting equalities’ (Deveaux 2000) and analysed
how cultural defence was used against women in courts (Phillips 2003).
Such perspectives denounced jurisdictional exceptions in the name of cul-
ture that undermined women’s (universal) human rights. They argued
the rights of minorities within minorities should be negotiated with plural
liberal states, dispensing with culture to favour an agency-centred multi-
culturalism (Deveaux 2007; Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005; Phillips
2007). On the other side of the debate, scholars concerned with minor-
ity rights defended cultural claims in struggles for redistribution and rec-
ognition (Benhabib 2002). Multicultural citizenship, they argued, served
to redress historical inequalities embedded in histories of state violence
and intervention. Exclusive rights were indispensable to protect ‘cultural’
groups and ethnic minorities discriminated against in colonial processes.
On the policy front, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against
Women launched the 2007 campaign ‘Violence is Not Our Culture’ in
an attempt to move beyond the polarization. Despite the nuances and
grey areas of what constitutes now a vast literature, the rights attached to
gender and culture were often portrayed as antithetical.
Often theoretical problems get resolved in the practical world. This
story suggests that Kichwa women’s politics resolved in practice some of
the theoretical tensions between culture and gender rights. First, their
advocacy showed that Indigenous women want both universal women’s
rights and collective rights to self-determination. They shifted away from
an either–or dilemma to claim the complementarity of gender with culture.
Indigenous women validated both gender and culture, while fixing short-
comings on both sides of the debate. Second, when they articulated the
international women’s rights listed in CEDAW within Indigenous rights
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 145

to self-determination in Ecuador’s Constitution, they offered a concrete

example on how to translate universal rights within local, cultural con-
texts. Third, they disavowed scholarly tensions by claiming culture as a
tool for greater gender equality. Far from antithetical, gender and culture
can feed off each other to build better justice systems.
The first thing that emerges from Kichwa women’s advocacy is that
cultural boundaries can be misleading. When the women sought to invent
rights of their own, they approached Indigenous culture as a political,
purposive construction, not an eternal essence. Their politics were rooted
in the understanding of culture as a historical process, not a fixed entity.
Cultures are dynamic, unbounded, heterogeneous, often fragmented,
and always contested, especially when experienced from within. Kichwa
politics illustrate Sarah Song’s (2007) interactive view of cultures in which
majority and minority cultures constantly permeate each other.
The 2008 gender clause for Indigenous rights reflects an awareness that
cultures are in permanent interaction, mutually constitutive and loosely
joined together. This matters for understanding the formation of so-called
Indigenous cultural traditions. Majority cultures all too frequently impose
gendered norms onto minority cultures. Patrilineal rules of membership,
for instance, often originate in the dominant culture before becoming a
‘cultural’ trait. The US Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 denied matrilineal
forms of political belonging to Native-Americans who wanted to acquire
citizenship. The ‘civilizing’ process imposed gender patterns upon Native
cultures, creating gendered membership rules in various communities like
the Santa Clara Reservation, New Mexico (Song 2007). Marc Rifkin sug-
gests that heterosexual patterns have been imposed on Native Americans
as a tool of colonization. For him, the US government’s relationship to
Native Americans can be understood as an organized effort to impose het-
erosexual norms intended to detribalize entire groups and break up their
territorial governance (Rifkin 2011).
Cultural preservation is, at best, muddy terrain. The condemnation of
cultural practices in minority groups obfuscates gender hierarchies in the
majority culture by naturalizing them. As Anne Phillips (2003) pointed
out in the case of British courts, cultural defence arguments are no less
detrimental to women when they echo gendered sensibilities in the major-
ity culture. Deference to cultural arguments is often driven less by respect
for cultural difference than by the congruence of patriarchal norms across
cultures. This would demystify the recurrent ‘clash’ between cultural
arguments and feminist rhetoric. The repression of women’s rights is
146 M.L. PICQ

often due not to cultural difference (the ‘other’) but to cultural same-
ness. The gender inequalities that affect Indigenous communities cannot
be disentangled from the gender inequalities that affect Ecuador’s non-
Indigenous society.
Kichwa women’s politics echo the wrestling of many political theo-
rists with universalist perspectives. If feminist scholars validated universal
claims, others like Immanuel Wallerstein (2006) decried them as European
rhetoric of power, noting that a truly universal universalism would resem-
ble more a multiplicity of universalisms. Kichwa women, in turn, signal
that practices of universal and cultural claims are more imbricated than
often assumed.
Gender has been a central tenet of universalist rhetoric. Euro-centric
cultures invoke feminist principles as pretexts to assault ‘dangerous’,
‘other’ men (Bhattacharyya 2008) and veils are depicted as emblems of a
cultural otherness incompatible with Western modernity. In Turkey, veils
have been embedded in recent women’s struggles for political agency but
veiled women are seen by secularists to embody ‘religious’ cultures inca-
pable of secular universalism (Göle 1996). In France, the 2004 ban for-
bidding Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in public schools claimed
to be defending universal (secular) gender equality. Far from securing
women’s rights, however, Joan Scott (2010) saw the law as symptomatic
of racist, intolerant policies against North African immigrants. Claims to
‘universal women’s rights’ are embedded in Europe’s lasting tutelage over
cultures it has considered unready for secular modernity (thus unable for
example to become fully French). In such a context, gender is an unsuit-
able ally for minority claims because it tends to be misused by the defend-
ers of dominant cultures for discriminatory purposes more than to actually
promote women’s well-being.
Women in minority groups rarely feel represented by universalist agen-
das that all too often disqualify their claims and ask them to adopt mod-
ern, European norms as a solution to their problems. They see universal
rights as historical constructs that ignore their lived histories. Who defines
universalism? Feeling unrepresented, minority women often seek rights
within cultural autonomy. Ecuador’s 2008 case is interesting because
Kichwa women did not discard universalism altogether. Instead, they used
it to strengthen cultural diversity. Kichwa women articulated how this
works during the workshops in Chimborazo.
Kichwa politics seek to expand definitions of universalism. The gen-
der clauses represent an effort to adapt universalism to Indigenous con-
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 147

texts. Universal rights are not used to assimilate minority groups within
the majority culture. Instead, they are brought into Indigenous culture
to legitimate difference, to validate Indigenous systems of justice whose
autonomy from the state is clearly defined. Kichwa women worked to
diversify what constitutes the universal and where it is located.

DIFFERENTIATING RIGHTS IN PLURINATIONAL STATES

Kichwa gender politics offer a differentiated approach to universal rights.
Cucuri (2007), one of the REDCH coordinators, explains their advocacy
as a quest for ‘democracy with diversity’. Different women live different
lives; she said, some women are single mothers in cities while others care
for large families in rural areas and work fields in the highlands. They all
face gender-based violence, but the solutions need to be differentiated to
account to their specific realities. Different places call for different solu-
tions. For REDCH, policy approaches to gender-based violence can only
be successful if they speak to women’s local contexts. Rural women, for
instance, gain much more protection from violence by owning land titles
than from the creation of police stations or gender quotas, which are use-
ful in other contexts. Some women need, in the words of Virginia Woolf’s
novel, a ‘room of their own’, others fields of their own (Agarwal 1994).
Remedies should be adjustable to various cultures and legalities.
Calls for diversity within democracy resist homogenization. They
echo Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (2001) notion of intersectionality. Women
are oppressed by multiple, intersectional identities. In the USA, for
instance, undocumented immigrants who suffer domestic abuse cannot
get, or do not dare to seek, police protection for fear of being deported.
In Ecuador too, Indigenous women victims of domestic abuse do not
trust the police who permanently discriminate against them. Indigenous
and non-Indigenous women may equally suffer from domestic violence,
yet solutions to redress or prevent wrongs in each case will most likely
involve distinct mechanisms. In addition to the lack of access to a police
station, for instance, Indigenous women cannot leave their fields to escape
domestic violence, being tied to daily agricultural chores that limit their
movement. To access justice they need more than distinct institutional
mechanisms. Once we recognize that women’s experiences are not all the
same we can cater to their needs.
Kichwa politics confronted state homogeneity to complement a dif-
ferentiated approach to justice. They address gender-based violence from
148 M.L. PICQ

cultural—and corporal—geographies as they are experienced. Indigenous

justice is the best system of justice for Indigenous women because it is the
most responsive to the way they live their lives. It is more readily adapt-
able to their needs than other systems of justice, and thus constitutes the
most valuable terrain to pursue legal politics. Indigenous justice is a new
politics of rights, what William Roseberry (1994) called a ‘language of
contention’, providing opportunities for different actors to experiment
with new possibilities. Ironically, Indigenous claims have been rescuing
universal rights from their much-criticized eurocentrism by differentiating
them in practice.
Calls for ‘democracy with diversity’ open the way to a strategic inter-
legality. Legal orders are always interacting with and rearranging each
other. International, national, and local legal orders are not self-contained
entities operating in isolation from one another, but rather they interact
and interpenetrate each other. The term inter-legality signals a legal poros-
ity that results in mutual influencing. In the case of Ecuador, international
norms permeated Indigenous systems of justice. The gender laws embed-
ded international rights as prescribed in CEDAW into community-level
justice. It was their way of expanding mechanisms of accountability for
women’s rights in  local communities. Indigenous justice was previously
held accountable to national and international human rights: the 1998
Constitution recognized Indigenous justice as long as it did not go against
Ecuador’s criminal law and respected international human rights treaties.
Since 2008, Indigenous autonomy has also become accountable to inter-
national women rights.
The anthropologist Anna Tsing (1997) offers a useful way to think
this through when she writes that ‘universalisms, ironically, are a flexible
medium for translation’. Her confounding the opposition between par-
ticulars and universals means that they are available for strategic appro-
priation in the ‘service of specific goals and local systems of alliance’ (ibid.
266). At the same time, there is feedback in this process that continually
rewrites the meaning of the universal. To put it more accurately, since the
universal can only be realized in and through concrete particularities, new
meanings for those universals are constantly produced. The integration
of gender norms within Indigenous justice in Ecuador is one example of
particular universals in the making. For Tsing, the process of translation
is a negotiation between universals and particulars, not as opposites, but
in a ‘heterogeneous continuum’, undermining any notion of the purity or
stability of the original term (ibid. 253).
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 149

The diffusion of international law has been studied at length, but little
attention has been paid to bottom-up dynamics. A vast literature exam-
ines the mechanisms that lead international norms to be incorporated in
national contexts. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) described
the alliance of civil society with international actors to pressure govern-
ments in respecting global human rights as a ‘boomerang effect’. Later,
Thomas Risse et al. (1999) came up with the ‘spiral effect’. This model
delineates an ideal process of socialization to international norms in five
stages. States go from repression to denial, then make tactical concessions,
adopt human rights norms on a prescriptive basis, and eventually move
to a rule-consistent behaviour. This model of socialization is based on
the assumption that states seek to increase their international status, and
that international society promotes norms to its members. Following a
similar line of inquiry, Sally Engle Merry (2006) grappled with the pro-
cess of enacting international law locally. She suggested that international
women’s rights must be framed in local terms to efficiently tackle gender
inequalities. These approaches have contributed valuable insights on the
mechanisms of norm diffusion, yet they share the perspective that inter-
national law is enacted locally. Local cultures do not shape global human
rights but appropriate them locally to contest vernacular hierarchies. In all
scenarios, international human rights law is diffused from the global to the
local. Human rights emerge internationally to then spiral down to local
contexts, which are implicitly less ‘universal-ready’, assumed to lag behind
on civilizational projects.
It may be useful to bring Song’s interactive view of cultures to
inter-legality. Local sensibilities can affect dominant legal orders too.
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) concepts relating to the ‘pursuit of happiness’
are said to have been incorporated as founding principles of American
democracy (Johansen 1982). Norway reshaped state law to accommo-
date Sami legal perceptions (Svensson 2005). Aboriginal interventions in
Canadian criminal courts affected national law in philosophy and practice
(Proulx 2005). There are many more cases when Indigenous legalities are
incorporated into dominant legal systems. André Hoekema (2005) calls
this bottom-up influence an ‘inter-legality in reverse’. In such cases, ‘cul-
tural’ laws bring a slight intercultural tone to majority law. This chapter
has analysed the legal advocacy of Kichwa women in Ecuador to argue
that Indigenous legal sensibilities do more than add intercultural perspec-
tives to national law: they disrupt the homogeneity of international law.
Kichwa women’s advocacy is an example of inter-legality in reverse. It is a
150 M.L. PICQ

valuable case study for its insights into the translation of local diversity into
global universalism. Kichwa women were concerned with securing wom-
en’s rights in local cultural contexts as much as with validating Indigenous
realities within the international women’s rights framework.
Kichwa demands for differentiated rights signalled a reversed pattern of
adaptation to international norms. Scholars have explained the diffusion
of human rights norms in local contexts as ‘boomerang effects’ (Keck and
Sikkink 1998) or ‘socialization’ processes (Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999),
depending on whether states abide by international norms under pressure
from below or from a decision of their choosing to fully join the interna-
tional community. Regardless, the diffusion of norms is portrayed as com-
ing from the international. In this case study, the international is a means
or channel for strengthening norms created within. REDCH did not
merely seek to implement international women’s rights in local contexts—
which would have been uncontroversial for feminist movements. Instead,
they deployed or instrumentalized international norms with the objec-
tive of bolstering the autonomy of Indigenous legalities. They made legal
autonomy within an overarching national framework a tool for the realiza-
tion of international women’s rights. Indigenous women did not simply
pressure the state to respect existing international norms. They crafted
specific rights of their own, based on the logic of laws that may have been
implicit but had not previously been framed in such explicit terms. They
used international normative frameworks to pressure legislators, enacting
international law in local contexts as Merry (2006) predicted. They also
reversed patterns of socialization by consolidating Indigenous autonomy
in Ecuador’s Constitution. And, very unusually, they did so without mate-
rial support from an international or national NGO.
Kichwa women’s creative contestation suggests that gender equality
and cultural autonomy can feed off each other to build better societ-
ies. Their advocacy echoes Greta Gaard’s (2001) distinction of ‘ethical
contexts’ and ‘ethical contents’. Indigenous women endorse the ‘ethi-
cal contexts’ of judicial autonomy with the ‘ethical contents’ of inter-
national women’s rights. Across Latin America, Indigenous women’s
movements have tried to blend global ethical contents into local ethical
contexts. In Peru, women in rural areas favour the Rural Nuclei for the
Administration of Justice when courts have women delegates (Faúndez
2009). Mapuche women in Chile have long organized to engage feminist
identities, although their agenda is strongly anchored in ethnic emanci-
pation (Richards 2004). The case of Ecuador echoes a regional trend in
 INVENTING RIGHTS OF OUR OWN: WOMEN TRANSCENDING... 151

which women defending practices of autonomy strategically integrate a

feminist ethic. It is this articulation of autonomous ‘contexts’ within uni-
versal rights ‘contents’ that makes Indigenous gender clauses such a rel-
evant case study for approaching international politics.

CONCLUSION
I have argued that Kichwa women were pursuing local justice in
Chimborazo. Their claims were inspired by daily aspirations, not theo-
retical controversies. They nevertheless offer practical insights for ongoing
scholarly debates. Their advocacy was neither anti-cultural nor accepting
of gender inequalities. Rather it engaged international rights but contested
their homogenizing tendencies. Refuting any purported incompatibility
between gender rights and cultural autonomy, they made women’s rights
and cultural autonomy mutually accountable. Concomitantly, Indigenous
claims to gender within collective rights marked a step towards decolo-
nizing feminism. Kichwa women articulated their initial demands within
their own cultural systems, thus challenging Western feminist practices
that reproduce an ethnocentric universality. Moreover, these women chal-
lenged gender violence within their own communities. In a nutshell, they
strengthened Indigenous self-determination by holding it accountable to
international human rights. Universal rhetoric for gender equality and
cultural diversity were deployed as complementary claims to frame dif-
ferentiated rights.

NOTE
1. ‘Comunas’ refers to municipalities.

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Women and Men Included in the Charter of the United Nations?”. Forum for
Development Studies 1: 37-60.
Song, Sarah (2007). Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Svensson, Tom (2005). “Inter-legality, a Process for Strengthening Indigenous
People’s Autonomy: The Case of the Sámi in Norway.” Journal of Legal
Pluralism and Unofficial Law 5(51): 51-77.
Tsing, Anna (1997). “Transitions as translations.” Transitions Environments
Translations: Feminisms in International Politics. Scott, J., Kaplan, K. and
Keates, D. (eds). New York, Routledge.
United Nations Development Fund For Women (UNIFEM). (2009). Mujeres
indígenas y justicia ancestral. Quito, UNIFEM.
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2006). European Universalism: the Rhetoric of Power.
New York: New Press.
 CHAPTER 6

The Demand for Recognition and Access

to Citizenship: Ethnic Labelling
and Territorial Restructuring in Brazil

Véronique Boyer

INTRODUCTION
In an ideal world, collectivities would live at peace with one another. Their
unique characteristics and the richness of each one’s culture would be rec-
ognized as much by their neighbours as by the state. Each group would
make its voice heard in the public sphere through effective channels of
representation. They would all receive equal attention and equal protec-
tion, enabling them to develop along their chosen path. No group would
have any reason to fear direct or indirect external pressures from others
who covet their land, or inappropriate interventions in the management of
natural resources in their territory. And finally, they would all benefit from
healthcare designed to respect their traditional practices and an education
designed with due regard for their outlook on the world.

Translated by David Lehmann.

V. Boyer ()
Mondes Américains, EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Socialies),
Paris, France

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 155

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_6
156 V. BOYER

This is the purpose enunciated by the Brazilian state in committing

itself to the defence of minority populations whose numbers have today
been severely reduced and who possess very limited political bargain-
ing power. Under the new constitution promulgated in 1988, the state
possesses the powers it needs to make amends for the harm inflicted on
them during centuries of colonialism and slavery. Setting out the orga-
nization and functioning of the state after more than 20 years of dic-
tatorship, it therefore contains articles devoted exclusively to the Indian
population and the quilombolas (descendants of black maroons or fugitive
slaves, living and gaining their livelihood on land assumed to have been
occupied by those ancestors)1. In 2007, a further decree recognized the
existence of ‘traditional peoples and communities’, located implicitly, but
not necessarily exclusively, in lowland Amazonia and defined as ‘cultur-
ally differentiated groups who recognize themselves as such, possessing
distinctive forms of social organization, who live in and draw their liveli-
hoods from territories and natural resources necessary for their cultural,
social, religious, ancestral and economic reproduction, using knowledge,
innovations and practices derived from and transmitted by tradition’.2 It
is therefore clear that political concerns to achieve social justice have been
acted upon in the legal sphere, providing the basis for an array of actions
in the crucial areas of health, education and the protection of territorial
rights. As a state concerned to preserve ethnic diversity, Brazil has com-
mitted itself to ensuring that historically marginalized populations should
have access to elementary social entitlements, but it should be remem-
bered that lack of such access affects most of the country’s rural and even
its urban population.
The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the distinctive approach taken
by the Brazilian state to solving these problems, especially that of restor-
ing or distributing land to populations who have historical grievances or
who claim an entitlement to cultural and economic survival. The state’s
approach is much more than a redistribution of land—it is a mode of
governance in which the state supports them as part of its administra-
tion of a national territorial space divided into closed and clearly identified
sub-spaces. It is by virtue of the demarcation of the land and the certifica-
tion of the resulting boundaries by government agencies that collectivi-
ties who live on and from the land can gain access to the legal resources
needed to defend themselves against external threats.3 Once enshrined
in law, the multiplicity of official rules and regulations opens the way to
legally defined distinctions between groups, which are invoked in all sorts
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 157

of circumstances and thus, contribute to the institutionalization of differ-

ence. Through the continuing subdivision of tasks among institutions and
the association of new legal categories with specific land tenure regimes,
the state gives ever more credence to the idea that populations who com-
pete to be benefitted or protected by one or other of these regimes are of
their essence different from others who opt for different regimes, and that
each one has particular needs requiring tailor-made solutions. Thus, the
circular character of arguments concerning ‘cultural difference’ becomes
quite evident, as does their openness to many different interpretations.
This has been acutely observed by Jean-François Véran: ‘taken together,
these cultural manifestations go to make up at once a right, an object of
conservation, a subject of development and an object of public policy’
(Véran 2013: 81).
On the basis of a broad definition of multiculturalism as a diversity
policy, we can see that in Brazil it has translated more into land policy
than into cultural policies strictly speaking, or rather that the latter has
taken the form of the former. Given the self-evident cultural difference
of Amerindian societies, Brazilian indigenist thinking focused on the land
question, setting out the principle of Indian reserves. This model was then
applied to other groups (e.g. quilombolas or communities possessing a
particular relationship with the environment) whose cultural distinctive-
ness was also recognized, thus entitling them to grants of land under dif-
ferent legal forms. So in addition to national holidays to celebrate the
various groups which make up the country’s population, and to quota
places set aside for them at universities, the most concrete benefits for these
populations of the country’s diversity policies have come from changes in
the land tenure regime. Nevertheless, we are obliged to observe that the
results of the land policies have fallen far short of expectations. Nothing,
or very little, has really been done to achieve the objective of inclusion
proclaimed by the state. Social movement activists, who themselves had
brought as much pressure as they could muster in support of the multi-
cultural project, do not hide their disappointment, especially on the sub-
ject of the restoration and demarcation of land. That disappointment is
evident from the title of an article on the website of the NGO ‘Comissão
pro-Indio de São Paulo’: ‘Quilombola land: the Dilma government has
only granted title to nine properties and in all cases only partial title’.4
This and other articles, all highly critical, are widely published on websites
and email lists run by quilombola support groups. Nor do they adopt a
158 V. BOYER

more conciliatory tone when evaluating government policies in support of

Indians and traditional peoples.5
As of 2014, according to José Heder Benatti, former President of
ITERPA—Instituto de Terras do Pará, the institution responsible for the
agrarian policy of Pará state—426 pieces of Indian land had been fully
demarcated and titled, 14 still awaited final Presidential signature, 66
awaited the publication of an order by the Ministry of Justice and 129 still
awaited the necessary expert anthropological evaluations (laudos).6 The
situation of the quilombolas was worse still: as against 40 definitive prop-
erty titles granted between 1995 and 2014, 63 groups were still awaiting
the expropriation of de facto occupiers of the land which they claimed,
89 awaited an order for the inspection of lands in dispute and 169 were
awaiting approval of the demarcation report. A total of 1290 had not even
reached the first stage of the procedure. In other words, almost 25 years
after the new constitution set out a legal framework which is supportive
of ethnic minorities, giving rise to high hopes for a better life, the over-
whelming feeling is one of disappointment, and local populations know
that they have to continue doggedly to press their demands if one day they
are to achieve the demarcation of their lands.
Government officials usually argue that the ever-growing number of
communities identified as Indian or quilombola, and of claims for recogni-
tion received by government agencies, makes it difficult to process them
within a reasonable time period.7 Although this may be true, for activists
it is not an excuse for the extreme slowness of the institutions. From their
point of view, more personnel and more financial resources are required if
cases are to be satisfactorily resolved. There is no doubt from the shortage
of resources that the state is more interested in making well-intentioned
declarations than in implementing effective targeted policies, reflecting
the gulf separating the NGOs from the state.
But the paradox of the official discourse of respect for cultural dif-
ference coexisting with a very limited land redistribution policy cannot
be explained simply by the state’s immobilism. For it cannot be denied
that since the promulgation of the new Constitution, Indian and quilom-
bola lands have been demarcated, and vast land reserves have been created
for traditional populations. Nor is it enough to fall back on generalized
criticisms grounded in the theoretical principles of multiculturalism, as
expressed in its very wide-ranging institutionalized or activist version.
Instead, it is necessary to examine what happens on the ground when this
theoretical principle is applied to populations shaped by values of their
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 159

own and operating in a quite different social dynamic from that assumed
by the legislation. We need to look carefully at the juridical framework
with its assumptions and the procedures for each of the legal categories
involved, as well as the definitions of target populations. We also need to
set the logic of the state side by side with the interpretations and expecta-
tions of the latter.
In this way, we can pinpoint the conversations at cross-purposes
between the state and local populations, as well as the new constraints
imposed upon the latter by the application of state policies, demonstrat-
ing the advantages of in-depth research, conducted independently of the
state’s own representations and projections, on the relationship between
the populations concerned and the territory in which they live.

AN ETHNO-TERRITORIAL MODEL FOR THE DEFENCE

OF THE WEAKEST

Under pressure from social movements and NGOs who proliferated dur-
ing the process of democratization in the 1980s, the state adopted their
discourse on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Such was
the impact of these ideas on the 1988 Constitution, with its postulate of
inclusion based on notions of identity, of ethnicity and of culture, that it
led Jean-François Véran to describe it, rightly, as ‘anthropological’. Indeed
in the text of the Constitution, culture no longer appears as an ensemble
of practices and symbols which the entire nation is expected to follow and
with which it is expected to identify. In contrast to earlier periods, this
new notion of culture is less normative, and is usually used in the plural
so as to express a proper regard for the cultures of ‘the groups which
participate in the national civilizational process’ (Article 215, paragraph
1). Among the bearers of these cultures, mention is made of the Indians
and quilombolas, and then through the 1990s and after 2000 other cat-
egories emerged—seringueiros (rubber tappers), riverbank inhabitants
(ribeirinhos), women coconut breakers, fisherman and so on—until they
were all brought together under the broad heading of ‘traditional popula-
tions’ (Carneiro da Cunha and de Almeida 2000: 12; Lima and Pozzobon
2005). However, the initiative to translate these entitlements into effective
access to resources and government support depends not on government
but on local mobilizations, and an important aspect of this is that only a
minority of those who might be entitled will ever be effectively mobilized.
160 V. BOYER

One of the innovations of the 1988 Constitution was the establish-

ment of a right to difference, a right which, as Ana Beatriz Vianna Mendes
points out, requires not only ‘recognition’ but also ‘protection’. The
right to difference has certain unique characteristics, for it assumes ideally
the existence of separate cultural or ethnic compartments each operat-
ing according to its own rules (in contrast, of course, with the principle
of equality among all citizens). Once this principle has been established,
no issue, be it social, economic, political or related to land tenure, can be
discussed without reference to its cultural context. The system of justice,
therefore, requires not only effective instruments enabling it to rule on
any situation involving encroachment on rights or property; it also has to
have at its disposal specially designed instruments which take into account
the functioning of different social formations. In other words, the system
will have to identify the ‘nature’ of those whose rights have been violated
before it can decide what legal framework it is operating in and what solu-
tions it will propose.
‘The institutional framework for this emerging governance/citizen-
ship milieu is multifaceted’, reflecting the role of ‘difference’ as a guiding
principle of political action’ (de Castro 2012: 44). The state has classi-
fied populations of what it sees as different types (indios, quilombolas,
‘traditional peoples’) and created separate agencies belonging to differ-
ent parts of the government to be responsible for them in different ways
with different rights, responsibilities and purposes. Thus, the National
Indian Foundation (FUNAI) was created in 1970 within the Ministry
of Justice to replace the discredited Serviço de Proteção do Indios. The
Fundação Cultural Palmares, created in 1997, comes under the Ministry
of Culture since its purpose is to promote respect for black culture and
its manifestations, including the quilombolas. Since 2003, however, the
demarcation of land claimed by, or allocated to, the quilombolas is the
responsibility of the Agrarian Reform and Colonisation Institute (INCRA),
a vast apparatus located within the Ministry of Agricultural Development.
Finally, responsibility for traditional populations has been allocated to the
ICMBio (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade—
Chico Mendes Institute for Conservation and Biodiversity within the
Ministry of the Environment, named after the man who gained interna-
tional respect as leader of the rubber tappers’ union and was murdered for
his pains in 1988) (ibid. p. 45).
These agencies undertake identical tasks, but each on the basis of
separate legal instruments. For example, the provisions relating to the
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 161

regularization of land tenure vary in significant respects, depending on

which category of the population is concerned. Thus Article 231 of the
Constitution states in the official English translation that ‘lands tradition-
ally occupied by Indians are intended for their permanent possession and
they shall have the exclusive usufruct of the riches of the soil, the rivers
and the lakes existing therein’ (§ 2); yet in the next paragraph it states,
almost in contradiction, that ‘hydric resources, including energetic poten-
tials, may only be exploited, and mineral riches in Indian land may only be
prospected and mined with the authorization of the National Congress’
(§ 3).8 Quilombolas, on the other hand, receive quite separate treatment:
in the Temporary Constitutional Provisions Act passed by the constituent
assembly at the same time as the passage of the Constitution, article 68
stipulates that they will receive ‘final ownership’, and Decree 4887 (2003)
further provides that the corresponding title deeds shall be ‘collective and
‘pró-indiviso” ‘(Article 17) and shall include a clause prohibiting them
from being sold, mortgaged or transferred on account of abandonment’.9
The case of traditional populations is technically even more complicated
because the National System of Conservation Units (Sistema Nacional de
Unidades de Conservação) established in 2000 by law 9985 makes them
the object of several different juridical formulae. Even though they are
all based on a concession contract, allowing effective rights of usufruct
on public lands—rights which therefore can be revoked if its provisions
are not observed—these territorial regimes exhibit substantial variation:
the Extractive Reserves (Reservas Extrativas—Resex) and the Sustainable
Development Reserves pertaining to the Union (i.e. the Federal
Government) or to the States, are collective concessions.10 While the
‘Projetos Agro-extrativistas’ (relating to rubber-tapping), the Projetos de
Desenvolvimento Sustentável (PDS—Sustainable Development Projects)
and the Projetos de Assentamento Florestal (PAF—Forest Settlement
Projects), relating to various environmentally friendly ways of developing
tropical forests, are more like settlements.11 Clearly the territorial status
associated with each of these legal categories consists of a specific combi-
nation of three elements: final or temporary rights, a family or collective
unit as beneficiaries and full ownership or usufruct as the property regime.
Even while recognizing that certain groups have very special charac-
teristics, I would like to argue that the bases of current state actions in
these areas can be interpreted in quite contradictory ways. Of course it
is possible to see in the creation of a wide range of property regimes evi-
dence of the lawmakers’ sensitivity to the country’s diverse forms of social
162 V. BOYER

organization, as well as of an admirable commitment to social improve-

ment. Thus, aware of the ‘differences’ which exist between populations
and of the desirability of measures attuned to a variety of local conditions,
they could be seen to have established a diversity of forms of land tenure
and to have entrusted their application to suitably specialized agencies.
Unfortunately however, the many restraints which the law imposes on
some categories of people seem to reflect a certain reticence on the part
of the authorities to grant to those ‘others’ full property rights over land
certified as theirs or granted to them, and even a lingering suspicion that
they are not capable of managing it appropriately. Examples of this tute-
lage include instances where only temporary contracts are granted for the
occupation or exploitation of land, and/or where official restrictions con-
strain beneficiaries’ exploitation of natural resources. The claim, therefore,
that the legal framework for these policies arises above all from an uncon-
ditional recognition of the cultural value of these social formations and of
their right to difference, is a little disingenuous, for it is also clear that the
state will retain important prerogatives.
It might nevertheless be argued that a rule whereby distinct popula-
tions should receive distinct treatments and that each should be looked
after by a dedicated state agency, is simply a reflection in law of the social
reality. In this view, the multiplicity of regulations, resulting in an ethno-
territorial mosaic of quilombo lands interspersed among indigenous lands,
extractive reserves and so on, can reveal the diversity of social formations
and develop their potential. But at the same time it has to be noted that
this proliferation of land tenure arrangements creates a highly competi-
tive institutional environment. Federal agencies have links to ministries,
and these in turn pursue their own interests, encouraging rivalries which
underlie a system of collaborations and partnerships (de Castro 2012).
The picture becomes even more complex when it is realized that states and
even municipalities have agencies of their own involved in the regulariza-
tion of land tenure, each anxious to defend their prerogatives and their
sphere of authority.
Targeted public policies can thus be seen as a mode of governance, and
as regulatory instruments for the shaping of society. This phenomenon
resembles the establishment of a ‘new relationship of [collectivities] with
the land’ described by João Pacheco de Oliveira Filho as ‘territorialisa-
tion’, and which he relates to ‘the incorporation [of these groups] within
a colonial situation’ (Pacheco de Oliveira 1998: 77). Although I prefer
to use the French expression ‘encadrement territorial’—the establishment
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 163

of a system of governance—rather than ‘territorialisation’, so as to distin-

guish between, on one hand, the effects of the actions of the state on a
population and, on the other, the relationship between a population and
the area which they occupy (see below), Pacheco’s concept does have the
merit of drawing attention to the implications of the changes brought
about by all this legal and administrative activity.

TERRITORIAL OVERLAP AND INTERNAL CONFLICTS

The matching of the ethnic classification of populations with territorial
demarcation is not an easy matter, and indeed is likely in itself to pose
problems. One unintended consequence of the policies of ethnic recogni-
tion has been the many examples of ‘overlapping territorial claims’. These
are not conflicting claims between privately owned land, held more or
less legally by its owners, and claims to collective ownership by Indian
groups, quilombolas or traditional populations: in those cases there
exist procedures for compensation and/or for the ‘removal of intruders’
(desintrusão), designed to restore the properties concerned to their cor-
rect boundaries. Rather we are concerned with the partial or total overlap
between lands claimed by groups who have been ethnically classified in
different ways.
In 2010, there were 70 cases, mostly in the Amazonian region, of such
overlap between lands under juridical forms designed for traditional popu-
lations and Indian lands (64 cases) or quilombo lands (6 cases) (Abirached
et al. 2010). Abirached and his co-authors did not find any cases of overlap
between Indian and quilombola lands, but they did not exclude the pos-
sibility that such overlap might eventually appear. Thus, in a micro-region
of the state of Pará where I have been doing research for several years, con-
flicting territorial claims have been advanced by Indians and quilombola
groups to the same area.12
The proliferation of these territorial overlaps and their potentially disas-
trous effects on the populations involved are matters of increasing concern
among anthropologists and legal experts. The first workshop on the sub-
ject, held at the University of Campinas in 2012,13 was organized because
of a concern that in all these situations relations between the actors, be they
traditional’, ’Indians’ or quilombolas, can become quite tense. These are
not usually conflicts setting vulnerable populations against powerful exter-
nal actors bent upon seizing their lands. Rather they have come to involve
populations of comparable socio-economic status. In other words, these
164 V. BOYER

conflicts arise between ‘little people’—‘os pequenos’ as they sometimes

describe themselves—of differing ethnic affiliations, if indeed they have
any at all, who are deeply divided as to the legal status of land they occupy.
Evidently the prospect of these rival mobilizations within the lower strata
is a source of some discomfort for anthropologists who no longer know
which side deserves their sympathy and support (Pantoja 2013). In these
circumstances, the anthropologist will have great difficulty in undertaking
an analysis with the required degree of detachment, and may well hesitate
to publish the results of research, on account of the fear that they could
be manipulated by those who spread stories of ‘fraud’ and accusations of
‘inauthenticity’, as has occurred in the Brazilian press.14
To challenge these simplistic allegations, whose purpose is to discredit
impoverished and marginalized populations, requires painstaking docu-
mentation and analysis of these new types of conflict, a task all the more
urgent because they seem to derive from the underlying assumptions of
the State’s own actions—assumptions which clearly suffer from three
major misunderstandings.
The first of these misunderstandings consists in the idea that ethnic
identity has to be the dominant mode of expression of self-awareness or
of collective belonging, and furthermore that it coincides with officially
established categories. On this basis, it is enough to inform populations
that it is open to them to publicly declare their identity, or to ‘recognize
themselves’15, for them to act accordingly. But this hardly ever happens.
As is well known, reference groups vary according to the interlocutor
(who could be a kinsperson, a political ally or an outsider), the context
(a private conversation, a public meeting) and the scale of the location in
question (a village, a region), and the terminology of self-description has
little correspondence with the legal categories in play.16 If these catego-
ries are to be grasped by the population, they have to be translated into
a language which they can understand, and this is frequently undertaken
by external actors such as the the Catholic Church and NGOs. Although
this has so far not been widely studied, there is no doubt that they have
a significant role in conveying information about legal categories and the
land tenure regimes associated with them.17 For example, in a case drawn
from my own field research, the arrival of a historian and a biologist with
links to the movimento negro18 tipped the balance in certain Amazonian
villages towards a decision to opt for quilombo status, just as, only a few
kilometres away, visits by a Franciscan friar played a decisive part in the
unanimous decision to go for indio status.19 The reason for this is that
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 165

external actors who operate independently of the state can help their lis-
teners to relate abstract categories to their everyday experience, and can
also explain the rights to which these categories may entitle them. For the
state, but not only for the state, these categories are also ‘identities’ which
are lying ‘dormant’ and could one day be awakened. Nevertheless, once
the phase of mobilization in pursuit of landownership has passed, people
tend to drop their use of these institutional terms. Jean-François Véran
has, for example, shown how peasants describing themselves as quilombo-
las stopped using the term once the title had been obtained (Véran 2003).
A second mistake is to take it for granted that there are clear differences
between social groups classified in one or another legal category, even
if they are neighbours. It is on account of this assumption that differ-
ent groups are assigned to different land tenure regimes—yet the ethno-
graphic evidence shows that this is far from being always the case. In the
same region of the Brazilian Nordeste, José Maurício Arruti and, in later
work, Jan Hoffman French (Arruti 1997; French 2009) studied groups
living near each other, one of which described itself as quilombola, and the
other as Indian. Whereas Arruti underscored the lack of formal evidence
for a distinction between the two, French emphasized the dynamics of
the construction of otherness, describing the reshaping of foundational
narratives and local cultural practices in accordance with the choices made
by the people involved to take on one or another legal category. In many
parts of Amazonia (e.g. the Middle Solimões, Acre and other parts),
groups who formerly considered themselves to be very similar have con-
currently chosen to follow diverging identity paths and to claim different
land tenure arrangements. In another case, Florencio Vaz has described
groups organized as Indians who sought to distinguish themselves from
their neighbours on the basis that they had previously been mistakenly
‘confused’ with them—these claims being advanced at the same time
as a move to create an Indian reserve (Resex), which encroached on a
part of the Tapajós-Arapiuns extractive reserve (Vaz 2010). I myself have
described how contrasting ethnic arguments were advanced in closely
located villages which were seeking state support for their claims to the
same piece of land, one on the basis that it was Indian land, the other that
it was quilombo land (Boyer 2015).
The last mistake lies in the supposition that collective subjects share a
communitarian ideal (an idea which owes much to Liberation Theology20)
and that they can therefore be assumed to agree on their choices. Once
again this is far from being the case: unanimity in decision-making is
166 V. BOYER

hardly the rule in highly factionalized social formations, and where kinship
terms are euphemisms referring to relations of dependency or domination
(Araújo and Schiavoni 2002). Divisions within villages or between neigh-
bouring villages connected by kinship links have to be interpreted in the
light of these obervations when it comes to their opting for one or other
legal category. My findings in Amapá show that the conflict within the
quilombo community arose from rivalry between two kin groups within
a single lineage, attempting to preserve their position of leadership over a
group of much lower status (Boyer 2014b). Although the one supported
it and the other opposed it, the new language of ethnicity provided a way
in which both groups could present themselves as acting in the general
good and not just in defense of personal interests. Likewise, my conver-
sations with both an Indian group and quilombolas in the state of Pará
quickly demonstrated that their disagreement had less to do with ethnic
tensions than with access to fishing domains and cultivation areas essential
for their subsistence. Examples such as these show how the issues at stake
in local disagreements and disputes can remain hidden from the state and
from the outside world.
In the matter of ethnic claims, the study of territorial overlap and inter-
nal conflicts has therefore little to gain from a discussion around ‘iden-
tity’, and even less from attempts to disentangle truth from falsehood, or
sincerity from instrumentalization, which are always doomed to fail. To
follow this road would mean judging claims of identity on the basis of our
own personal criteria, based on inner feelings, on stability and on people’s
faithfulness to themselves. To suppose that these sentiments are universal
and shared by the entire group would be to introduce an ethnocentric
bias and, by making of the analysis a matter of subjective judgment, would
render it immune to debate. Nevertheless, even though we know full well
that adherence to a bureaucratic category does not necessarily have impli-
cations for lived identity, the deployment of identity labels by the Brazilian
state does draw those affected or benefitted into a primordialist mindset.
By conferring legal status on these labels and associating them with defi-
nite rights over demarcated land areas, the labels become more than mere
instrumental resources and contribute to the reification of ‘identity’ as a
sort of stand-alone agent.21
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 167

TERRITORIAL DESIGN AND TERRITORIALITIES: LOCAL

POPULATIONS AND EXTERNAL ACTORS
Understanding these situations requires a grasp of the consequences of
land management plans based on ethnic classifications as well as the vary-
ing conceptions of their relationship to the land held by the different
actors involved.
The main consequences have been starkly enumerated by Ana Beatriz
Vianna Mendes: ‘once [a social group] has been recognised as indigenous
[or quilombola] none of the territory demarcated for it thereafter can
be appropriated, at least not legally, by anyone who is [perceived as] an
outsider’ (Mendes 2008: 16). In other words, once legal recognition as
an ethnic group has been obtained, other inhabitants, even long-standing
ones, can be asked to leave on the basis of the desintrusão mentioned
above. In these situations of conflicting rights, some (namely those of
the Indians and quilombolas) are seen to carry more ‘weight’ than others
(namely those of traditional populations and of mere unattached inhabit-
ants). In this respect, my own research provides an exemplary case, of the
increasingly common practice of invoking the legal framework in relations
between different villages (Boyer 2014b). Inhabitants of villages which
have declared themselves to be Indian did not explain the decision with
reference to a particular ethnic ‘identity’, by, for example, providing doc-
umentary sources or pointing to the richness of their ancestral culture.
Rather they did so as a response to claims by neighbouring settlements
for State recognition as quilombos, which endangered their own access
to hitherto jointly exploited natural resources. In their search for a way of
correcting, in one fell swoop, a shift in the balance of power which had
gone against them, they decided for the Indian option because, in the
words of their leader, ‘the Indian comes before the Black’, and thus the
Indians’ rights will prevail. As this shows, these conflicts raise issues, relat-
ing ‘at once to the administration of land tenure and to the protection of
special rights’ (Mendes 2008: 2). The outcome of such conflicts is all the
more worrying because so far they have not received any solution, and this
is because the courts do not have a legal instrument, enabling them to cre-
ate areas of joint usufruct on lands of differing juridical status. In the case
described here, the authorities were paralysed in the face of these compet-
ing claims, as a result of which no property rights could any longer be reg-
istered and both Indians and quilombolas found themselves in a stalemate.
168 V. BOYER

Identity-based claims often appear in other contexts where they seem

less related to the ‘ethnic’ choices of neighbouring villages than to the
land tenure regimes under which these populations live once they have
decided to recognize themselves as belonging to a juridical category. This
is because, again according to Ana Beatriz Vianna Mendes, the restrictions
imposed by some of these regimes, especially in conservation areas, ‘can
themselves be thought of as the cause of protests and of a range of social
and political responses to the new socio-juridical reality’ (Mendes 2009:
12). For example, in the face of rules and regulations which they find too
restrictive, groups who initially opted for the ‘traditional’ category may
then change their mind and present claims to be classified as Indians or
quilombolas (Santos de Arruda 2014).
Finally, groups may come to adopt this strategy if in their view the
benefits received are not of the order expected or if they find that the lead-
ership is monopolizing resources derived from the state. Taken together,
all these cases lead one to ask whether these territorial overlaps arise not
on account of a mistaken identification of the frontiers of a given area
but rather as a result of the partial or full legal reclassification of groups
of inhabitants. Claims for reviews of judicial rulings are certainly conceiv-
able because, whereas the demarcation of land tenure regimes is relatively
precise, characterizations of the groups who may be included in ethnic
categories are for their part very flexible (Castelo Branco Silveira 2007).
To refuse such reviews would risk accusations of essentialization, or of
infringing on the principle of self-assignment adopted in Brazil as the basis
of individual or group belonging. This is why for each ethnic category
official documents only mention in the vaguest terms their relationship
with the land, with specific forms of social organization or with particular
traditions.22
We come then to an apparently paradoxical observation. On the one
hand, these populations are closely involved with the state, since they call
upon the state’s representatives to demarcate their land in accordance
with their Constitutional rights. But on the other hand, their relationship
with the legal categories is highly ambivalent, since if they wish, they can
change their assignment. This paradox can nevertheless be circumvented
once one remembers that these groups are woven into socio-political pro-
visions which can be reshaped in the light of negotiations between the
various actors involved. It can therefore be understood that new alliances
can lead actors to change their political positions.
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 169

The ‘meaning’ of the legal categories is ‘constructed’ not only in

response to their ‘projection’ by the state on to the groups to which they
are applied (Mendes 2009), but also in response to their projection by
translators of official discourses and actions and/or mediators between the
groups and the state agencies.23 Despite their occasional disagreements,
the representatives of the state and of the NGOs coincide on one point:
their shared conception of territory as bounded space. For the former, the
protection of vulnerable groups requires prior demarcation of the bound-
aries of the land which they inhabit. As for the NGOs, some of them orga-
nize so-called participatory cartography workshops in which villagers are
asked to depict their living space, marking on sheets of paper the points
which they consider of importance: school, crop production areas, hunt-
ing areas, sacred spaces and so on. In this way, they hope that groups will
be better equipped to document and achieve their territorial rights.
Now ‘strategic legal cartography’ encounters limitations in the many
interpretations to which a geographical space may lend itself (Wainwright
and Bryan 2009). The process has been taken to absurd lengths in the
Amazonian case I have mentioned: I attended a meeting in one of the
self-declared Indian villages whose purpose was to draw a map of the land
they were claiming, yet the NGO which organized the meeting had, some
10 years previously, published a dossier in which the same area was associ-
ated with quilombola communities. What could better illustrate how the
power to map and to name is closely related to the power of possession
and control (Offen 2009)? For in the earlier publication, concerning the
quilombolas, the lands of villages which later were to claim Indian status
appeared as areas in dispute, leaving the reader to conclude that this might
be a dispute with a large landowner, since that is the default understand-
ing of land disputes in Brazil. When the map began to give the advantage
to the quilombolas, reclassification of their neighbours as Indians opened
the way to the institutional formalization of their ethnicity-based dispute
and created an impasse in the process of land tenure regularization. The
conclusion seems to be that, with a varied set of actors all agreed on the
definition of a unit of ‘territory’, the groups who are advancing their
claims have no choice but to adopt this language, which means ‘demon-
strating’ how different they are and setting down clearly the boundaries
of a territorial unit.
But in any case, despite the patchy nature of our knowledge, it is per-
fectly clear the land on which they are established is not perceived by
populations in Amazonia as ‘a fixed spatial entity’, but rather as ‘a collec-
170 V. BOYER

tion of territorial units inhabited by the domestic groups who form part
of it’ (Stoll 2014: 476). In her recent study of the Lower Tapajós (Pará
State), Emilie Stoll shows that what the state describes as a territory is
conceived principally by those who live there as a space of relationships
modelled on kinship relations, expressed in terms of filiation, marriage
alliances or co-parenthood. She also shows that these networks enable
people living in different places to gain access to different ecosystems.24
The important point to retain from Stoll’s research in the context of the
present discussion is that in the course of a contested process of ethno-
genesis among Indians and traditional populations, there has even been a
translation of inherited binary oppositions into phenotypical oppositions:
the classic binaries, varzea/terra firme,25 cattle ranchers/cultivators, rich
people owning fertile land/poor people owning the infertile ‘land of hun-
ger’, are now associated with the phenotypical opposition of ‘big blond
people/poor blacks’: in Stoll’s view, these oppositions, once thought of in
terms of graduated differences, now tend to be presented as derived from
‘intrinsic features’.
Stoll has presented quite a convincing argument that Indian land claims
tend to come from weaker residential groupings who want to take advan-
tage of the new legal instruments to contest the power of dominant groups
previously not perceived as possessing these kinds of essential distinguish-
ing features.26 This analysis, which coincides with my own observations
on the conflict between Indians and quilombolas, should act as a warning
to observers to carefully take into account local processes driven much
more by temporary and renegotiated territorial arrangements than by a
territorialized ethnicity as propounded by the state. In contrast, actions of
the state tend to lead to a thickening of social frontiers and spatial bound-
aries and also sometimes to the outbreak of conflicts opposing different
groups among the lower strata—the ‘little ones’ (‘os pequenos’) in local
parlance. One social effect of the fencing in of land is a reinforcement of
the sedentarization which has been imposed on these populations and an
impairment of the role of migration in conflict resolution, since now the
children of growing families have little choice but to join the ranks of the
landless (Stoll, op. cit.: p. 121).
It is clear from these ethnographies that we cannot exaggerate how
the land tenure regulation undertaken by the state not only takes little
notice of the existing system of land management but also weakens it. Just
as landowners seek to prevent ‘people who depend on them for favours’
from becoming ‘true citizens as of right’, so also the state does not take
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 171

into account the terra vestida—the fact that the land is already being man-
aged actively by its inhabitants, or ‘vestida’ (‘dressed’) in the words of a
villager aptly quoted by Natalia Ribas Guerrero (Ribas Guerrero 2012:
194).

CONCLUSION
From the preceding pages, we can conclude that Brazil has adopted an
ethno-territorial model on the basis of new concepts which the popula-
tions concerned (quilombolas, Indians and others) are expected to adopt
as their own, that the intervention of the state follows technical and juridi-
cal norms unknown to those populations, and that the application of these
norms is based on assumptions which do not necessarily fit in with the
social reality which they are trying to shape. Most prominent among the
effects of these targeted public policies are the promotion of contrast-
ing ‘identities’ and the construction of exclusive regimes of socio-spatial
management, in which one or another identity has exclusive control. This
takes place in a political context in which social justice tends to be inter-
preted in terms of the right to difference, and in which the language of
rights which is most internationally accepted (by states, NGOs, churches
and the like) is that which is couched in terms of ethnic identity and clearly
demarcated territorial boundaries. It will not however have escaped the
reader’s notice that the many juridical formulae which have been created
share a common purpose, namely to solve a problem affecting the rural
population as a whole: the lack of proper land titles, illegal appropriation
and exploitation of land and of natural resources, expulsion of inhabitants
and much besides.
Like other types of social struggle, it is useful to approach these ethni-
cally driven mobilizations in terms of the ‘institutionalisation of an arena
of conflict’ in which numerous actors meet and different levels of con-
flict are compressed (Mendes 2008: 5). Alliances and negotiations form
the basis of multiple institutional deals whose effects can be observed in
the management of land tenure. But a unique feature of this case is that
although the claims to join an ethnic category are made with the deploy-
ment of a narrative about groups composed of networks of relationships
operating in precisely demarcated geographical spaces, the claims have also
been implicitly, and emphatically, signposted during a dialogue with exter-
nal partners. This comes to light when a conflict erupts between neigh-
bouring villages whose inhabitants all occupy subordinate positions in the
172 V. BOYER

social structure but classify themselves under different labels. No sooner

has a conflict broken out than any trace of a shared history is obliterated,
to be replaced by narratives emphasizing the development and promulga-
tion of their differences. In other words, the legitimacy of control over
territorial space is propelled away from its source in the fabric of local
relationships, and comes to depend exclusively on the legal framework
developed at the national level.
Finally, it is worth pointing out the persistent high-profile polarization
of public debate between the defenders of targeted policies—adopted in
the name of respect for the Other and of the Other’s culture—and their
critics—arguing on the basis of a defence of universalism or, more prosai-
cally, of the market—even while research undertaken and published away
from the spotlight in specialized academic mediais clearly advises nuance
and caution. Anthropologists are tasked with asking themselves painful
questions about the possible disastrous consequences of their interven-
tion for populations who, in the end, are principally concerned to protect
the conditions of their own survival. Some anthropologists, unwilling to
betray the solidarity which they feel for the claims of marginalized popu-
lations, may be tempted to set aside ethnographic findings which do not
fit in with all aspects of official grand narratives, or they may water down
their contributions to discussions about the loss of tradition.
To admit that official labels do not denote autonomous—and thus
clearly separate—societies, who may well become the object of targeted
policies, does not imply that the universe in which their inhabitants evolve
is necessarily either ‘modern’ or ‘western’. The capacity of these Amazonian
populations to dialogue with state agencies is evidence enough of their
prolonged exposure to the most diverse external influences, ranging from
NGOs to the market, and yet both those populations which have been
classified and others which have yet to be, seem able to retain a range of
options of which Schmitz’s ‘geometric state’ is unaware (Schmitz 1986).
It might therefore be preferable to think of them in terms of ‘specifici-
ties’ observable in the light of the diversity of situations arising from the
region’s history, environment and resources, rather than in terms of ‘dif-
ferences’, a word used in ways which hide similarities. One such specificity
could be the conception of the sharing of a single space by human beings
and supernatural entities known as encantados, a phenomenon which
remains poorly understood. Likewise, there is a vast population who, lack-
ing a self-assigned generic name, are designated only by the name of a
river branch on which they live and, nowadays, the ‘community’ to which
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 173

they belong. Probably this is why, never having accepted the word caboclo,
a relational and usually demeaning term commonly applied to them (Lima
1992; Nugent 1993), they are regarded as people who, unless they declare
themselves Indians or quilombolas, are without an identity, and it may also
explain why they seem to have little difficulty in adopting new names.
Furthermore, they are also present at the heart of Amazonian towns where
many rural inhabitants keep a dwelling. It would evidently be a major chal-
lenge for multiculturalism to find a way of conceptualizing their presence,
and of recognizing rights for this ‘minority’ who in fact account for the
majority of the Amazonian population.
Only on the basis of painstaking ethnographies like those quoted here
is it possible to build up a solid knowledge base about the representations
and practices of these populations, and thus shed light on phenomena
which are hard to grasp at first sight, such as, to take one example among
many, the existence, within a single kinship group, of people claiming
different legally defined identities. These ethnographies enable debate
to transcend the fruitless opposition between the idea that identities are
being manipulated and the idea that they are unchanged, and to engage
more coherently with the non-correspondence of local logics with the
logic of the state. However that may be, we may conclude by suggesting
that if the action of the state has in the past been central to the disappear-
ance of both the Indians and the quilombolas, it is now opening the way
for their resurgence.

NOTES
1. This was the conception of quilombolas at the time of the passage of the
constitution. Since then it has been widened. For the official English trans-
lation of the constitution see the sites of Jus Brasil and of the Federal
Supreme Court. [Link]
2. The original text reads as follows: ‘grupos culturalmente diferenciados e
que se reconhecem como tais, que possuem formas próprias de organiza-
ção social, que ocupam e usam territórios e recursos naturais como
condição para sua reprodução cultural, social, religiosa, ancestral e
econômica, utilizando conhecimentos, inovações e práticas gerados e
transmitidos pela tradição. Decree no. 6040, 7 February 2007, which
establishes a National Sustainable Development Policy for Traditional
People and Communities.
[Link]
[Link]
174 V. BOYER

3. The exception is FUNAI, which has exclusive responsibility for the Indian
population.
4. ‘Terras Quilombolas—governo Dilma titula apenas nove terras, todas par-
cialmente’. 19 November 2014. Note that strictly speaking quilombos are
the communities and quilombola is used both as adjective and to refer to
the inhabitants or members of quilombos.
5. See, for example, ‘Indígenas vivem em garagem abandonada da Funai há
mais de três anos, sem serviços básicos’. published on the website
‘Amazônia’ on November 18 2014.
6. These data were provided by José Heder Benatti in a lecture given at the
Université AgroParisTech in 2014 on the subject of ‘Land Regularization
of Traditional Communities: The Experience of Pará (Brazil)’. In the
absence of systematic official collection of such information, this is the
most authoritative source available.
7. The number of quilombola communities is estimated at between 3500 and
5000. According to the Brazilian Statistical Agency (IBGE—Instituto
Brasileiro de Geografía e Estatística), the indigenous population numbered
817,963 in 2010. According to the government’s agency for the protec-
tion of the Indian population, FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio), ‘the
number of Brazilians who considered themselves indigenous grew by 150%
in the 1990s; this is a growth rate six times higher then the population as a
whole’.
[Link]
cionais/quilombolas
[Link]
[Link]
8. The translation is taken from the official English translation of the
Constitution on the website of the Brazilian Supreme Court http://
[Link]
9. ‘A titulação prevista neste Decreto será reconhecida e registrada mediante
outorga de título coletivo e pró-indiviso às comunidades …com obrigatória
inserção de cláusula de inalienabilidade, imprescritibilidade e de
impenhorabilidade’.
10. These variations are far from clear for non-specialists. In the explanation
offered by Benatti it seems that the definition of a Resex is grounded in the
use of natural resources by the relevant population, while the sustainable
development reserve is grounded in the occupation of a certain territory.
Both are created by environmental agencies (Benatti 2011).
11. The first of these is designed for populations already resident as well as oth-
ers who might be brought to settle in a particular area; the second con-
cerns activities which are already in existence and others which might be
 THE DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION AND ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP: ETHNIC... 175

established in an area, and the third is designed for forest areas above all in
the north of the country.
12. This research has taken place in some 10 localities, each of which has
between 40 and 70 families, and all of which are involved in claims based
on a range of identities. Since the federal agencies concerned have still to
pronounce on these claims for recognition, I do not offer any details about
their location.
13. A thematic outline of the workshop is available on the ‘Etnico’ website
which exists to host discussion about recognition policies in Brazil and
Latin America.
[Link]
[Link]
territoriais/
accessed 12 February 2015.
14. In an article published on 5 May 2010, entitled ‘Opportunistic anthropol-
ogy’s field day’, Veja, the weekly magazine well known for its right-wing
opinions accuses the anthropological profession, as well as political and
religious (i.e. Catholic) activists, of drawing up ‘false evidence in support
of the demarcation of land for ethnic minorities. Veja’s account, evidently
written with a bias in favour of the interests of agribusiness, claims that the
demarcation of Indian and quilombo lands takes land away from ‘Brazilians
who want to produce’. Such charges continue to appear. Thus on 13
December 2014, a federal judge, in a decision which may well become a
precedent, dismissed a claim lodged by Indians from the Tapajós region on
the pretext that they were ‘pseudo-Indians’ (‘Indios falsos). See the article
on the website of [Link]: ‘Indígenas protestam contra sentença e
ação missionária’, 13 December 2014.
15. The Brazilian term is ‘asumir’; it is used as much in these movements as in
the more urban black movement (see the chapter by David Lehmann in
this volume), and refers to the subjective recognition by individuals of an
existing identity which, in the view of activists and committed intellectuals,
has previously been denied or ignored.
16. This refers to widely used expressions such as ‘os pequenos’ (‘the little
people’), ‘pobres’ (the poor), ‘daquí mesmo’ (people from around here)
and ‘de uma familia só’ (members of the same family).
17. A full analysis of their role in the movements and their relations with state
institutions lies outside the scope of this chapter: for one case involving the
actions of Franciscans in the north-east Brazil, see the book by Jan French
(French 2007).
18. The black movement—a congeries of ginger groups, NGOs and political
initiatives which campaigns against discrimination and in favour of affirma-
tive action. See David Lehmann’s chapter in this volume.
176 V. BOYER

19. Since the case is still under consideration, I cannot reveal the identity of the
locality concerned.
20. Roberto Araujo was the first to undertake a critical analysis of the ideology
and action of Liberation Theology in Brazilian Amazonia. His research
based on fieldwork on the trans-Amazonian highway is fundamental also
for the understanding of the Amazon River (Araujo 1993).
21. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this phrase.
22. Some anthropologists see clear advantages in this lack of precision, because
it allows for the number of eventual beneficiaries of these new policies to
be expanded to the maximum. I have published a critical analysis of this
‘resemanticisation’ in Boyer (2010).
23. I speak here of a range of people who fall under the heading of ‘non-state
external actors’, who have on several occasions proposed solutions to the
conflict dividing the two groups with whom I have been working, such as
a lawyer who suggested to an Indian cacique that his ‘community’ should
become a quilombo—a suggestion immediately rejected with the follow-
ing words: ‘we have nothing to do with quilombolas, and we’re not going
to have an anthropologist come and tell us what to do’.
24. Of course, this does not mean that the inhabitants of Amazonia have not
changed their conception space over time and with the intervention of dif-
ferent actors.
25. Vàrzea forests are floodplain forests which flood seasonally. Unlike swamp
forests, vàrzea forests have relatively rich soils from the annual replenish-
ment of nutrients from whitewater rivers. Terra Firme literally means
“solid ground” and refers to rainforest that is not seasonally inundated by
flooding rivers. This forest is noticeably taller and more diverse (>400 spe-
cies/hectare in some areas) than igapé or flooded forest. It is found only
on dry, well-drained soils and is characterized by such species as Brazil nut
trees, rubber trees, and many tropical hardwood trees (drawn from the
article on Tropical forests on [Link]).
26. ‘by adopting for their own purposes a system of administrative classifica-
tion… which reflected the conception of the territory of the Brazilian state
rather than that prevalent among the local population, [the people who
were demanding recognition as Indians] both legitimated indigenous land
in the eyes of the state and brought about the veritable disintegration of
existing community institutions’ (Stoll 2014: 476).

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 CHAPTER 7

The Politics of Naming: Affirmative Action

in Brazilian Higher Education

David Lehmann

Ces images étaient fausses pour une autre raison encore; c’est qu’elles étaient
forcément très simplifiées; sans doute ce à quoi aspirait mon imagination et
que mes sens ne percevaient qu’incomplètement et sans plaisir dans le présent,
je l’avais enfermé dans le refuge des noms; sans doute, parce que j’y avais accu-
mulé du rêve, ils aimantaient maintenant mes désirs;
Marcel Proust: Du côté de chez Swann, Paris, Gallimard Folio, 1954,
p. 460.

One purpose of this book has been to draw together two themes which
social scientists tend to treat separately, though of course they are not
unaware of the connections between them—namely, multiculturalism and
social justice. Multiculturalism is a politics of recognition which takes the
form of public policy, notably in the spheres of education and law, and
also of a more intangible set of initiatives designed to redress the bal-
ance between hegemonic cultures and the lifeworlds, languages, belief sys-
tems and cultural heritage of subordinate populations, in Latin America
notably indigenous people. Its substance was admirably set out for Latin
America in Rachel Sieder’s 2002 volume (Sieder 2002) and the normative

I wish to thank A. Francis, Andrew Canessa, Luisa Schwartzman and Peter Fry
for their help in writing this paper.

D. Lehmann ( )
University of Cambridge, London, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 179

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_7
180 D. LEHMANN

philosophical aspects have been widely discussed, for example, by Charles

Taylor, Seyla Benhabib, and Anthony Appiah (Taylor 1992; Benhabib
2002; Appiah 2005).
This chapter shifts the focus from multiculturalism to affirmative action,
and to the Brazilian campaign for quotas for black students in public uni-
versity admissions. The campaign arose in the 1990s and culminated in
2012 with a Supreme Court ruling that the racial classification required by
quotas were in keeping with the 1988 Constitution.
Affirmative action can, in theory, be contrasted with multiculturalism in
that it aims to open up access for excluded groups to racial composition of
the educational and employment opportunities either by creating reserved
places or by providing supplementary education which would reduce the
disadvantages of ‘chance contingencies’, in the language of John Rawls. I
mention education and employment because those are the most frequent
areas in which it is applied, but its application has been discussed in Brazil
in other spheres such as the judiciary and the police; outside Brazil and the
USA it has been more often for the purpose of redressing gender imbal-
ance perhaps—as far as race is concerned—less with the cause of social
justice and more with achieving diversity by making institutions more rep-
resentative of the racial compositoon of the society in which they operate:
this can apply to political institutions, to educational ones or to businesses
(Htun and Jones 2002; Lipson 2008).
In this chapter, though, we see that if affirmative action is considered
solely as a matter of opening up opportunity, as a policy which can be fine-
tuned technically to even out life chances, it is liable to ‘miss the point’: by
this I mean both that it risks overlooking the demand by excluded groups
and their leaders that society should recognize their history of exclusion
and the specifically racial character of that exclusion, and that this recogni-
tion should find symbolic as well as material expression through their pres-
ence in major institutions and also in the media in other than stereotypical
roles. Thus, affirmative action also returns us to the more symbolic empha-
sis of multiculturalism: as was said in the Introduction, it is not enough
to create programmes to equalize opportunities for historically excluded
populations unless there are public and permanent expressions not only
of the worth of their products, as Taylor would have it (Taylor 1992:
70), but also of respect for their intrinsic being, as expounded by Richard
Sennett (Sennett 2003). The reader will see that although the opponents
of quotas in Brazilian universities may have ‘had a point’, on account of
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 181

their dislike of officially recognized racial classification, they also ‘missed

the point’ because they overlooked the demand for recognition underlying
the demand for opportunity and its corollary in the symbolic importance
for the society of the presence of black faces in institutions where they
were a rarity. The darkening of the student population in prestige universi-
ties can be defended independently of the numerics of its contribution to
equalizing opportunities either for the black population or in society as a
whole. Even if affirmative action produces no discernible improvements
in the statistics of racial exclusion or overall social inequality it can still be
defended because of the signals it sends out. (If the colour of the teach-
ing staff were also to darken that would be an even greater revolution.) In
the same vein, imagine the repercussions if, in the wake of findings that
the policy had not brought satisfactory statistical changes, it were to be
abandoned on technical grounds. (The prospect could in theory become
a reality since the Supreme Court in 2012 approved the constitutional-
ity of quotas in public universities only for ten years.) Furthermore, the
underlying, if not necessarily always articulated, purpose of the campaign
for race quotas was not to equalize opportunities so much as to get more
black people into the country’s elite. This explains the black movement’s
insistence on quotas in prestige universities and also provides a context in
which the opponents, or dissidents’, insistence on métissage can be put
into perspective: métisssage, after all, will of its nature predominate in the
middle and even upper middle classes, whereas almost by definition it dis-
appears in the elite strata which are the movement’s target. The objection
to racial classification on the grounds that métissage makes it unfeasible
would leave the colour of the elite unaffected, and so is seen as a bad faith
defense of the status quo.
The term affirmative action has a different meaning in Brazil from else-
where. In the US adoption by some universities of quotas for black students
was famously reversed by the Supreme Court ruling in Bakke (1978), and
today reserved places or quotas are all but taboo. Instead admissions offi-
cers may search for signs of racial disadvantage in applicants’ backgrounds
and take them into account in reaching their decisions (Sander and Taylor
2012). US legislation, however, mandates attention to the colour com-
position of employees in numerous situations, for example, in firms con-
tracted by the federal government. In Brazil, by contrast, the term is used
in the plural (‘affirmative actions’) and refers only to straightforward quo-
tas in student admissions and in some hiring by the federal government.
The two policies differ fundamentally in that one aims for inclusion first,
182 D. LEHMANN

while the other aims to improve the conditions which perpetuate it, in the
hope eventually of achieving grater equality of opportunity.
I therefore analyse the arguments used for and against race-based quo-
tas in universities in the context of the massive expansion of university
education (see Appendix), the development of Brazil’s middle class and
within it of a black middle class and the indispensability of a university
education for access to a stable middle-class income. The protagonists in
the sometimes virulent debates are positioned in terms of their contrasting
concepts of social justice and meritocracy, and in relation to generational
changes and concomitant shifts in the class location of a rapidly expanding
academic community. Towards the end of the chapter it is explained that
the debates themselves and the quotas policy begin to appear almost as
a sideshow when we cast our eyes in the direction of bigger political and
economic stakes in education: these can be seen in the massive growth of
private for-profit higher education of dubious quality subsidized by the
state through tax breaks, and through a student loans system which, while
favouring high-achieving black and low-income students, also provides a
significant subsidy to the for-profit institutions themselves.

SELF-ASSIGNMENT AND OFFICIAL CLASSIFICATION:

FROM BRANQUEAMENTO TO ENNEGRECIMENTO?
In an elegant, amusing and incisive article (Schwarcz 2012), Lilia
Moritz Schwarcz quotes a household survey undertaken in 1976 by
Brazil’s statistical agency (the IBGE—Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia
e Estatística), which asked respondents to describe their own colour: the
responses famously produced no less than 136 categories.1 Such prolif-
eration must reflect a search for and heightened awareness of intermedi-
ate categories, or mestiçagem (métissage), and her interpretation, among
other things, is that it reflected an inclination to take advantage of the
opportunities offered by branqueamento: that is, by nuancing so many
categories, respondents were ‘lightening’ their dark features. In a recent
sample survey ‘nearly 90% of respondents chose one of four categories’,
of which three were ‘the traditional census categories of branco, pardo
and preto’ (Moraes Silva and Paixão 2014: 187). In everyday life the
words negro or preto denote blackness, and if in the past preto had been
used to refer to the blackest of black skin, by now the two have become
almost interchangeable, with negro being used far more widely. There is
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 183

little indication that this usage has any significance other than changing
fashions. At the other extreme there is branco, white, and in between
moreno and pardo. Pardo is used for official purposes, including in the
Census’ closed-end questions asking people to assign themselves, but in
everyday life, moreno (which is not used by the Census) is very common,
as well as hyphenated versions of moreno: the 1976 survey quoted by
Schwarcz produced 17 of these.
Three decades later, a new survey by the same institution of 15,000
households in six states produced a simpler scheme: 49 % of the respon-
dents chose ‘branco’, 21 % chose ‘moreno’, 13.6 % pardo and only 7.8 %
negro. But this survey also asked interviewers themselves to classify the
respondents, and reported discrepancies which made it appear that many
people incline to whitening. Something similar is found in Table 4.3 of
Edward Telles’ book of 2004, on the basis of a Datafolha2 survey of 1995,
which showed that when interviewer and interviewee disagreed about a
person’s classification (on a three-way choice of preto, pardo and branco)
this was usually because the interviewee’s self-designation was lighter than
that given by the interviewer (Telles 2004). However, as we shall see later,
there is a growing preference, or maybe fascination, for the negro category,
especially among the younger generation.
One way of interpreting the polysemic colour palette of Brazilian
Portuguese, is to make a distinction between colour and identity. Brazilians,
like people in other countries, may use different colour-based terms to
describe themselves, and the way they describe their identities may well
change as they grow older, as they shift between different social milieux,
as well as in response to different interlocutors and to differences in the
way questions are phrased, and official form-filling also may introduce
variation, as we shall see. A person’s sense of racial identity may vary with
their income level, but also with their origin or ancestry, even with their
political posture.
By drawing a distinction between colour and identity we are saying
that a person may respond differently to the question ‘What are you?’
and to the question ‘What is your skin colour?’ This may be unlikely if
the two questions are asked in quick succession, but it is more likely if
they are asked in different parts of a questionnaire, or in different con-
texts, notably if they are asked in the context of an official application or
questionnaire (see the article by Schwartzman discussed below). Ancestry
can be referenced in different ways: a person may refer to their parents’
184 D. LEHMANN

or grandparents’ skin colour and in doing so may say that whereas they
themselves appear to be white, the fact that they had a dark-skinned grand-
mother ought perhaps to lead them to describe their own identity as black.
Schwarcz quotes the well-known thesis of Oracy Nogueira in the 1950s,
distinguishing between colour prejudice (‘preconceito de cor’) as it occurs
in Brazil from classification by origin, or ancestry, associated with the USA
(‘preconceito de marca’). But that contrast may need revision: the evident
African origins of probably the majority of Brazilians has become the sub-
ject of public debate as well as of pride, even if a person may not invariably
welcome allusion to their slave ancestry. The African authenticity of pos-
session cults, the cultos Afro, has become a matter of common acceptance
as part of the country’s heritage, and not only among their adepts. So
origin may be becoming a pollutant, but it is a source of identity for many
people, and not only those who can trace an African background.
This pattern is not very different from that described by Peter Wade in
distinguishing between ‘symbolics of origins’ and ‘symbolics of mixture’
(Wade 2005: 245), thus separating out a disposition which would seek a
single source of a person’s belonging from one in which they are more
likely to be just describing what they look like, while possibly alluding to
a social hierarchy of skin colour, and secondly because, influenced by his
long-term research in Colombia, Wade speaks repeatedly of a ‘mosaic …
which can be embodied in a single person or within a complex of religious
practices, as well as within the nation’ and which ‘allows the permanent
re-combination of elements in persons and practices’ (Wade 2005: 252).
The vocabulary of race, colour and origin is deployed in multiple con-
texts—for example, fashion, music, slang—to different purposes, send-
ing signals in socializing and on the street, or conveying information on
official forms. Some contexts are definitely more benign than others, and
individuals’ dispositions may be framed by reflexivity, self-mockery or ritu-
als of debasement.
There are now many indications of a broad-based black political awak-
ening. It has a public voice in the form the Movimento Negro. This is a
loose network of public intellectuals, NGOs, prominent black academics
and (a few) political supporters who have gained recognition as the movi-
mento’s voices: it is not a mass movement, it rarely puts thousands on the
street, and it does not have a single leading figure or organizational hub.
It could be said to operate as a brand, and if the brand has slogans, they
are ‘quotas’ and ‘affirmative actions’. The movement owes its effective-
ness to the skills shown by leading figures and activists in shaping policy
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 185

in universities and in government, especially at the federal level, and in

placing its people in positions in government agencies. But there is a long
way to go before its voice is heard more than fitfully in the mass media, in
business or in sport.
Nonetheless, the awakening has spread rhizome-like in parts of soci-
ety: people on the borderlines of blackness, whose self-image as mestiços
or morenos is a way of demarcating themselves from the negros and
the pretos, might begin to look at themselves differently and demarcate
themselves more emphatically from the population while lowering their
resistance to drawing closer to the negros. They may so to speak look
at themselves again in the mirror and think ‘Maybe I am black after all’.
In this they would be harking back to a friend of the famous sociologist
and literary critic, Antonio Candido, who, on reading Gilberto Freyre’s
Casa-grande e senzala at the time of its publication in 1933 remarked:
‘Acho que sou mulato’ (‘I guess I am mulatto’) (Lund and McNee 2006:
10; Lehmann 2008: 208). Changes in self-assignation by race or colour
may be perfectly authentic reflections of individuals’ trajectories, especially
when it is remembered that we are speaking of young people of university
age. Individuals who feel their few chances of university education are lim-
ited because the dice are loaded against them, because they are too poor,
because they study in the wrong sort of school or mix in the wrong sort
of circles, may resign themselves, or may protest, but when they hear the
denunciations of racism, or maybe when they hear of the openings cre-
ated by race-based entrance quotas, they may well begin to ask themselves
whether the loaded dice are not also something to do with their colour—
something perhaps they had not thought about, or not wanted to think
about, before. It would be too facile and patronizing to pass a verdict on
such cases labelling them as opportunists, let alone ‘fraudsters’ looking to
take advantage of affirmative action openings.
It is becoming commonplace to observe, on the basis of surveys and
qualitative research, that ‘high-status and darker skinned persons are
especially likely to choose negro today’, leading to the view that ‘usage
of negro is … likely to continue growing if levels of educational attain-
ment continue to increase for the general population’ (Bailey and Telles
2006). Already in the 1995 national survey by Datafolha, Telles tells us,
people with higher education were almost three times as likely to describe
themselves as ‘negro’ as those who had only attended primary school, and
those who had attended middle school were twice as likely to do so (Telles
2004: 97 and Tables 4.5 and 4.6).3 This could be seen as the inverse of the
186 D. LEHMANN

once-popular idea that intermediate categories between black and white

(‘mulato’, ‘pardo’, ‘mestiço’, ‘moreno’) were an ‘escape hatch’4 or, from
another point of view, a safety valve, operating as an obstacle to the devel-
opment of a black protest movement. Now, in contrast, we see the black
movement acting to convince those people that their escape is possible
only thanks to activism in the cause of the black population which includes
them and somehow denies or relativizes their status as moreno, pardo or
mulato. They may also be people who, while readily admitting there is
racial discrimination or injustice in their country, never have thought that
it was of concern to them personally, but are now changing that view.5
This, however, depends on who counts as occupying one of these
intermediate categories: Telles presents data from the same 1995 survey
indicating, surprisingly, that people who described themselves as pardos
but were reclassified by interviewers as brancos, had a significantly higher
income (26 % higher) than those who were classified both by themselves
and by interviewers as pardos: he takes this as evidence that the economic
positions of pardos and negros are more similar than data based only on
self-assignment might indicate (Telles 2004: Table 6.3). Another group,
who self-classified as pardo but were judged to be preto by interviewers,
earned 12 % less than the ‘consistently described’ pardos. These people,
far fewer in proportion than the self-described pardos who were reclas-
sified as whites, might be thought of as ‘whitening’—that is, presenting
themselves as lighter-skinned than their income might warrant (though
that is a somewhat judgemental, if not tendentious, way of making the
point). Overall, these findings are supportive of the view that a strategy of
whitening does not usually help to raise one’s income. At the same time,
however, they do not fit well with the attraction of blackness to the less
disadvantaged, so it is hard to offer a one-direction interpretation of the
race relations regime as it has evolved in recent decades.
But we should be cautious in drawing conclusions: for example,
responses tend to differ depending on whether respondents are offered
open or closed choices. In Telles’ recent PERLA Study, the Brazilian chap-
ter, based on a nationwide survey, found a substantial degree of agreement
between interviewers and interviewees: a rate of over 80 % (Moraes Silva
and Paixão 2014: 192–3) and also found that only 10 % opted for negro
in an open-ended question. This is slightly below the number of pretos
in the 2010 census (ibid. 186): but since the preto has a stronger, darker,
connotation than negro, this survey might call for caution in estimating
the growth of negro identification in the country.
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 187

The unbundling of race mentioned above, which fits well with Peter
Wade’s image of a mosaic, seems to go in parallel with the wide acceptance
of race-based terminology to sum up resentment against inequality. Where
once observers voiced their frustration with a public discourse which
seemed enamoured of ‘racial democracy’ and impervious to the reality of
racial discrimination, now some of them, like Bailey (Bailey 2009), may
understandably be frustrated by the effectiveness of race as a multi-pur-
pose simplifying cipher for all sorts of inequality. But for politicians, and
activists, the resulting simplifications are a providential gift.

THE BUREAUCRACY OF NAMING

Opposition to quotas for black students has been based, among other
things, on concerns about the acceptability of formal, official racial clas-
sification of a mixed-race population, though the concern is not shared
by the country’s Supreme Court, whose members, when they came to
rule on the matter in 2012, took the view that any reservations about
racial classification should be subordinate to the greater cause of reducing
discrimination and racial inequality. Opponents also prophesied that stan-
dards would fall in the country’s best universities and/or that the pres-
sures of additional teaching would undermine any chance they had of
joining the elite of the world’s research universities. Few people deny that
there is a problem of racial exclusion and those who do resist racial clas-
sification ask ‘why not adopt socio-economic classification as a proxy in its
place, since there is a recognized correlation between colour and wealth?’
but that is fiercely opposed by the Movimento Negro. Their response is
expressed as a flat rejection, not as a technical discussion, for they see all
such technical arguments as devices to deny their demand to be named—
to be recognized first and foremost as blacks or Afro-descendants. Those
who redefine them as ‘poor’ do not ‘get the point’: they belittle their cam-
paign for recognition that blacks are subject to specifically racial exclusion.
The concept is also statistically misleading because a correlation between
a and b and b and c does not offer a basis for believing that a and c are
likewise correlated, as even the most statistically innumerate are aware. It
becomes even more misleading when, as is often the case, it is proposed
that quotas be reserved for graduates of public schools as yet another
proxy for colour, because public education is assumed to be chosen only
by those who cannot afford private schooling. But above all this notion
misses the point, and may even be regarded as patronizing by followers
188 D. LEHMANN

of the movement and by aspiring students because they are not poor and
certainly are unlikely to wish to be seen as poor: on the contrary, if they
were poor in the stereotypical popular image of poverty, they would not
be knocking at the doors of the university, and they would not be wor-
rying that the colour of their skin deprives them of recognition as part of
the middle class.
The Brazilian state, as in all Latin American countries, accepts that when
required for official purposes individuals describe and classify themselves
racially or colourwise on the basis of self-assignment. But the advent of
affirmative action has made this into more than a matter for census admin-
istrators and academic researchers, by posing a question whether self-
assignment is a reasonable basis for the distribution of public resources. If
substantial resources are allocated to removing disadvantage among indig-
enous and black populations, is it enough to allow people to decide their
own eligibility, especially for university places where there is competition
for those resources? Yet the self-assignment only tells part of the proce-
dure, because the state sets the rules, categories and terms. If the allocation
is not to be arbitrary, some sort of classification, some sort of imposition
of categories by an administrative authority is likely to be necessary, even
while avoiding the imposition of a race or colour label on individuals, such
as type of schooling, family income, neighbourhood, qualifying standard
and so on. In addition, it has to be recognized that a blanket categoriza-
tion is a very blunt instrument: if the policy is to effectively target the
‘truly disadvantaged’, to use Wilson’s phrase (Wilson 1987), should it not
pinpoint the way in which each individual’s family and social background
has impinged on their ability to realize their potential?
A pure, technocratic, welfare-oriented policy of equal opportunities—
in the image of the universalist concept of citizenship evoked at the begin-
ning of Véronique Boyer’s chapter—should be based on an estimate of
the extent to which a person’s socio-economic situation is the result of
structural or cultural conditions outside his or her control. Those charged
with achieving social justice would be expected to improve the chances
of those adversely affected and so must apply technical criteria—which
means explaining why people who classify themselves in certain ways are
in a situation of disadvantage. The argument in favour of such a highly
bureaucratized technical procedure is that it provides an assurance that the
distribution of resources will not be the product of clientelism, backroom
deals or favouritism. However, when it comes to the effects of a history of
race-based exclusion, professional expertise itself may be regarded as biased,
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 189

as representing a pretence or façade of impartiality which is designed to

circumvent or straightforwardly reject the underlying demand—a demand
which is as much for gestures and policies in recognition of past wrongs
suffered by an entire population as it is for carefully calibrated entitlements
such as scholarship programmes. The political philosopher Iris Marion
Young (Young 1990) made such criticisms a centrepiece of her attack on
Rawls’ idea of a ‘veil of ignorance’ (ibid. Chap. 4) and on the principle of
equal treatment, or at least its ‘mechanical application’ (ibid. Chap. 6): for
her, the measurement of ‘all against some universal standard’ denies non-
mainstream groups the legitimacy of their specificity ‘in their own terms’
(ibid. 166), and we also see it in the movimento negro’s denunciation of
the superficial universalism of the Brazilian state, which is claimed to treat
everyone equally and to reward merit but has done little to equalize their
opportunities.
Whatever the context, impersonal procedures, for example, to assess
the extent to which individuals are held back by ethnic and other inherited
features, can never be completely immune to the charge of social or cul-
tural bias. Educational achievement, which might seem objective, is noto-
riously subject to conflicting and incommensurable assessments. A person
may graduate top of the virtuoso class at the Julliard School of Music but
her playing may be derided as over-technical or soulless; another person
may write very expressive English but be marked down for poor grammar
(like James Joyce, etc.). There is no shortage of research documenting
class bias or cultural bias in educational tests routinely used by states to
assess pupils and teachers, and obviously when culturally driven disadvan-
tage is at stake these points are all the more sensitive. But there are ways of
correcting such biases: recently in Brazil, the national ENEM exam6 which
is used to rank high school graduates in the competition for university
entrance, was changed to reduce the weight given to prose composition
in Portuguese: the effect was to help state school students who, because
of the deficiencies in their education, tend to have a poorer command of
the written language than their private school counterparts. (The question
which then arises, but which receives only limited attention, is whether,
once they reach university, students who have benefited from this sort of
relaxation of criteria will get remedial teaching to bring their command of
the language up to a satisfactory standard).
The gap in language and worldview between the outcasts of society
and the dominant ‘habitus’, is not by any means necessarily (let  alone
exclusively) a matter of indigeneity or ethnic specificity: as a long line
190 D. LEHMANN

of psychologists and social scientists including Basil Bernstein and Pierre

Bourdieu have taught us, class inequalities also have a strong cultural
dimension, so that even in the absence of explicit ethnic differences, there
is little value in remedies which are so desiccated, so bureaucratic and so
insensitive in their procedures that they perpetuate the exclusion which
they are designed to overcome.
In the context of the campaign for quotas, the demand for recognition
cannot be met by exclusively socio-economic considerations, even if the
inequalities in question are rooted as much in those causes as in a legacy
of racial discrimination and exclusion: behind the technicalities and the
arguments about reparations for past injustices and the rival explanations
of present inequalities is a demand to be named, to be visible not only on
the margins but throughout the social hierarchy.
This consideration is particularly relevant because the campaign of
Brazil’s movimento negro is led by middle-class people demanding for
themselves and the black population, access to the elite and to recog-
nition by elite institutions. Notably, and in contrast to the USA, there
is no demand for the establishment of separate curricula or departments
devoted to Black Studies (Rojas 2007), though the demand to include the
history of Africa in public school syllabuses was met in 2003. They are of
course not opposed to social justice in a universalist sense, but this is pre-
dominantly a dispute about inclusion and about naming.

CLASSIFICATION, AWARENESS AND IDENTITY POLITICS

In 2003 the University of Brasilia (UnB), following a precedent set by
the State University of Matto Grosso do Sul (Universidade Estadual de
Matto Grosso do Sul—UEMS) established a body which quickly became
known as the ‘Tribunal Racial da UnB’—the ‘UnB Race Tribunal’ (Alves
Cordeiro 2007). Although this sparked a wave of mockery, in the context
it made sense. The University had started a programme of quotas for black
students, setting aside 20 % of places for those self-described as ‘negro’,
with no ‘pardo’ alternative, but, like the UEMS it was concerned that
people who were not ‘really’ black would apply. So it established a Review
Committee (Comissão Avaliadora) composed, inter alia, of ‘experts in race
issues, anthropologists and people with a history of involvement in the
Movimento Negro’ (Black Movement). Unlike the UEMS, the UnB kept
the membership and meetings of the committee secret. All applicants had
to submit photographs and the committee inspected those cases where
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 191

the administration had a doubt about the authenticity of a candidate’s

self-assignment (Maio and Ventura 2005). Thereafter, a rejected applicant
had the opportunity to appeal. Predictably, there was widespread criticism
of a procedure which evoked dark memories, and of the co-option of
the discipline of anthropology in seeming contradiction with its aversion
to official certification of race, and by 2010 the procedure was changed,
being replaced by one which obliged every applicant to the quota system
to attend a personal interview, so the anonymity of the committee was
abandoned.
For its defenders, however, the protests against the Commission were
disingenuous because they overlooked the real issue, which is not the
colour of a person’s skin but their status as a victim of racialization (da
Silva, Duarte et al. 2007: 199). Furthermore, in reply to those who were
offended by the separate queues for quota and non-quota applicants when
handing in their documentation at the UnB—in the days before internet-
based applications—they pointed to the racial profiling by security staff
at middle-class venues like shopping malls which are supposedly ‘generic,
impersonal and non-racialized’ (quotes in the original to denoting sar-
casm), but where black people are in fact victims of explicit discrimination,
aggression, exclusion and humiliation (ibid. 198). The implication was
that since impersonal and supposedly neutral devices like queues are often
a cover for racist ill-treatment, then bringing racial classification to the fore
is a way of denouncing its surreptitious use. In this activist perspective, one
purpose of the selection process is consciousness-raising, and the require-
ment that people seeking to benefit from affirmative action declare them-
selves to be black is part of their awakening to their status as the products
of discrimination. ‘Activists have never said that a black person is one who
makes the corresponding self-description, but rather they agree that it is
the duty of victims of racism to declare themselves black’ (ibid. 200).7
Another defence of the consciousness-raising role of affirmative action
came from the anthropologists Jose Jorge de Carvalho and Rita Segato,8
who had drafted the proposals on which the UnB based its plan (Plano
de Metas) to change the racial complexion of its student body. In a small
book devoted to the issue, Carvalho dissociates himself from the secrecy
of the Evaluation Committee, and also from the photograph test. The
purpose of the policy was not only to change the social composition of the
university and combat racism, but also to push applicants towards choos-
ing the radical category ‘negro’ by removing the intermediate colour cat-
egory of ‘pardo’, which he regarded as a ‘soft option’ enabling applicants
192 D. LEHMANN

to duck the pressure to recognize their black skin colour (Carvalho 2005:
186–9): a kind of ‘coming out’ though he does not use that expression. In
his view, entrusting an anonymous Committee with deciding who is and
who is not black and thus removing the responsibility from the applicant,
‘depoliticizes the process of affirming black identity in Brazilian academia’
(ibid. 188).9 In this reasoning, the word ‘pardo’ offers an opportunity for
both deception and self-deception: on the one hand it could allow many
people to qualify who are not true victims of discrimination, that is, not
‘really’ black, while on the other it offered an escape for those who, in
Carvalho’s view, did not want to admit to themselves that they are, and
are thus side-stepping the political challenge of standing up and saying,
or admitting, they are black. This argument is evidently vulnerable to the
rejoinder that such policies are supposedly intended to equalize oppor-
tunity, not to raise consciousness, let  alone to punish ‘false conscious-
ness’. But Carvalho seems not concerned about that point, and in any case
tends, like others, to see his opponents’ arguments about procedure and
transparency as a cover for perpetuating privilege and exclusion. His argu-
ment illustrates well the problems which arise from ignoring the difference
I have drawn between identity and colour-based classification.
Carvalho may have seen the bureaucratic process as an adjunct to politi-
cal consciousness-raising, but he also said he would have preferred to rely
on real confrontation, unmediated by Review Committees. In response
to the criticism of the separate queues formed by quota-based and other
applicants to the UnB, he remarks that a light-skinned person standing
in the ‘wrong’ queue would certainly be called to account ‘by word, ges-
ture or a sideways look’ from his or her ‘phenotypically black’ fellow-
applicants, leading to an incident, an inquiry and possibly the exclusion of
the applicant from the entire process. In contrast, the then current proce-
dure merely obliged the applicant to withdraw from the quota competi-
tion and join in the general competition with no other sanction (Carvalho
2005).
While it is easy to moralize about impostors as racists ‘stealing a place
from someone who is truly a victim of discrimination’ (ibid. 189), Carvalho
does not consider genuine cases of doubt, like that of the young man who,
having been turned down by the Review Committee, was quoted in the
press as protesting that ‘my grandfather was as black as the night’. (The
reply from the University came immediately: the quota system is designed
to combat discrimination based on colour, not on origin, see Estado de São
Paulo, 26 May 2004.)
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 193

We also have detailed survey-based studies which show both the uncer-
tainty of self-designation among students when faced with official forms
to fill in. One is by two economists at the University of Brasilia, who had
access to a socio-cultural survey voluntarily completed by applicants to
the UnB at the same time as they applied for admission and conducted a
post-admission survey with 2286 observations, 748 photos and a ques-
tionnaire with 200 items. (Francis and Tannuri-Pianto 2012). The data
and the analysis are complex, but my interpretation is that they show a pat-
tern whereby the introduction of quotas may have encouraged a climate
of opinion in which people who thought of their skin colour as ‘brown’
(‘pardo’), when faced with a stark binary choice, would be more likely to
adopt the ‘darker’ black identity—though this is only a tendency. This
pattern is reinforced by the paper’s Table 10, based on the ‘third party’
assessment of skin colour by a panel who were shown the photographs:
among the quintile with the darkest features those counting themselves as
negro rose from 57.1 %, among those applying before quotas were intro-
duced, to 77.1 % afterwards. Put another way, while before quotas were
introduced 43 % of those who would be intuitively assigned by a notional
average member of the public (i.e. the panel) to the darkest fifth of the
population in skin colour terms were not describing themselves as black,
this proportion declined to 23 % afterwards. Again, agreeing with Bailey,
it seems that the ideology of ‘whitening’ which, we are told, convinced
generations of Brazilians that it was best to look lighter-skinned or to have
children with a partner of lighter skin, is losing some of its hold and may
be ceding some ground to an ideology of ‘ennegrecimento’ which values
black identity—though the cautionary observations of Moraes Silva and
Paixão referred to earlier (p. 182) should not be forgotten.
This accords with Luisa Schwartzman’s account of ‘before and after’
data from Rio, Brasilia and Bahia: using large-scale data from student sur-
veys conducted at the time of university entrance and then in the students’
third year, and surveys later in their careers, she found a growth in the pro-
portion self-defining as negro and, unlike the Brasilia survey, found few
who by their third year had redefined themselves as pardo (Schwartzman
2008)10.
In a separate paper, this time using interviews with students at the State
University of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro—
UERJ) after the introduction of quotas there in 2001, Schwartzman deals
with the question of tactical self-designation (Schwartzman 2010). But
her interviews showed that rather than wily, the students may have been
194 D. LEHMANN

just puzzled by categories which did not fit into those they used in every-
day life: hence her contrast between ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998) and
‘seeing like a citizen’. On one hand, her data show something like tactical
choices, especially among private school applicants who would have been
excluded from a public school quota but might qualify for a black quota:
among these, 30 % of those who classified themselves in a socio-economic
questionnaire as pardo, subsequently classified themselves as negro in the
application form for university entry, while only 15 % of pardos from pub-
lic schools made the same ‘darkening’ shift (Schwartzman 2009: 231).
But it could also be said that the campaign to expand the scope of the
negro category to encompass as many non-whites as possible has encour-
aged pardos to write themselves down as negros without renouncing their
sense of themselves as standing somewhere in between.
Schwartzman then explains that there is much second-guessing among
respondents about the quotas and their purpose: ‘are quotas for me?’, they
ask. That is, they sometimes ask themselves what is the purpose of the quo-
tas in order to decide which box to tick, second-guessing or reinterpreting
the formal language in the light of what they hear on the street, on social
media and so on. There is also a very frequent and unavoidable incongru-
ence between ancestry and colour, as in the case of the respondent who told
her that despite her ancestry and not having ‘good hair’ she did not tick the
‘ black’ box simply because she did not feel discriminated on account of her
colour (ibid. 239). The fact that her grandmother had been negra did not
shake her belief that she was too well-off to apply for the quota.
It is rather curious—though understandable—that from the very first
affirmative action initiative, at the UERJ in 2001 the issue of fraud should
have been a preoccupation of scheme managers. Since the question of
‘what am I?’, or ‘what is my colour?’ hardly invites a straightforward
answer, how can fraud be determined? Nonetheless, UERJ inserted the
intimidating phrase ‘sob as penas da lei’11 into its application form, giv-
ing applicants for quota places a stern warning that their sworn statement
about their colour was answerable in a court of law. Thereafter the UnB
in Brasilia instituted its ‘Race Tribunal’. Given the subjective nature of the
declaration, the threat of legal action seems surreal, but there have been
reports of applicants being put off applying when faced with that forbid-
ding phrase, even though there has been no news of such a prosecution.
Apart from the heavy hand of bureaucracy and legal advisors behind such
provisions, and the insensitivity they reflect, they express the assumption
that a person cannot change their self-assigned colour. Yet it is perfectly
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 195

possible that individuals will genuinely change their views over time and
indeed, is that not the purpose of the consciousness-raising agenda pro-
pounded by Carvalho or by the Espaços Afirmados programme funded by
the Ford Foundation for a couple of years at UERJ?12
Nevertheless, there are significant ethical implications in the shifting of
the decision about self-assignment onto the students: the state is stretch-
ing out a hand to help a disadvantaged category but is forcing the benefi-
ciaries to make a decision which for some may not be a matter of serious
concern, but for others involves a commitment to an identity, and in some
cases perhaps an identity they had never thought about in moral, let alone
legal, terms. In any case, the querying of students who either cross or
do not cross the pardo-negro boundary was rendered pointless when the
2012 Quotas Law (Lei das Cotas) came into effect because it simply cre-
ated a single category of ‘pretos, pardos e indigenas’ qualifying for places
under the race-based quota.
There are also students who, in advance of entering university, may
anticipate a stigma on cotistas—something that probably varies between
courses and institutions. Research at UERJ revealed interviews in which
medical students took it more or less for granted that cotistas in their
course were exclusively strategic while those in the less competitive but
politicized social science and philosophy courses were more inclined to
express a commitment to their black identity (Pinto 2006)13. The quota
system imposes often complex second-guessing about which courses
will have more or fewer of their peers applying, and which might be the
courses, or institutions, for which they would be better advised not to
take the quota path, while they or their families have to decide whether
to invest in private schooling which may well improve their performance
in the national school exams or university entrance examinations but may
exclude them from any quota, as explained in the description of the 2012
‘Quotas Law’ in the Conclusion below. Data in the UnB study just quoted
by Francis and Tannuri-Pianto showed that for high-prestige courses
(medicine, engineering, law) the threshold mark for cotistas was almost
the same as for the open competition, while for the least competitive like
Education it was barely worth applying through the quotas because entry
was so uncompetitive. These observations do place a question mark over
the egalitarianism of this quota arrangement, since it would appear that
quotas may not increase the proportion of blacks in those highly com-
petitive courses significantly—especially since after 2012, the 50 % quota
is applied on a combination of socio-economic and race-based criteria.
196 D. LEHMANN

However, in addition to contextual effects such as the expanding middle

class, the quotas may have increased the proportion of black students by
encouraging more blacks to apply than previously whether or not through
the quota track.

DISPUTES ABOUT BINARY AND OFFICIAL CLASSIFICATION

It is the promotion and sometimes imposition of a binary scheme of racial
classification, together with the foregrounding of race in spheres of life
where it had previously been silenced, though hardly absent, that has caused
the most bitter polemics over issues of principle. The anthropologist Peter
Fry, in one of his polemical writings about racial classification, quotes indig-
nantly the words of Sueli Carneiro, a leader with a long trajectory in defence
of the cause of black women in particular, and founder of the well known
São Paulo NGO Geledes, which focuses on race and gender in employ-
ment: in the quotation she says that ‘we’ (i.e. the black population) ‘are 45%
of the country’s population but only 2 per cent of us gain access to univer-
sity’ (Fry and Maggie 2005: 314).14 Apart from being a gross understate-
ment of the presence of negros and pardos in universities, the phrase also
plays down the country’s racial mixture, as did the academic study of race
relations in Brazil, adopting the terminology of the Movimento Negro and
following the sociologist Carlos Hasenbalg. Hasenbalg adopted the bino-
mial division of the population into white and non-white (not white and
black) in place of the triple formula ‘bronco-pardo-negro’ in his doctoral
thesis (translated into Portuguese in 1978). The thesis, wirh Hasenblag’s
observation that the significant differences were above the pardo line, after
many years of obscurity, became an influential exercise in the quantification
of racial inequality in Brazil (Hasenbalg 2005 (1978)).
But in the late 1990s and after racial statistics and their simplification
became a popular industry, the statistical work which came to be most
widely quoted among activists was a Working Paper published by the gov-
ernment’s think tank Institute for Applied Economic research (IPEA) by
an economist, Ricardo Henriques (Henriques 2001). Originally prepared
for the 2001 UN Durban Conference against Racism, through a project
funded by the UNDP, which like the Ford Foundation has been an active
sponsor of research promoting affirmative action in favour of blacks, the
paper is available without charge from IPEA’s website.15 It is a highly con-
densed (48-page) account of inequalities in income, education, and labour
markets, explaining them exclusively in terms of race. Although the author
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 197

is careful to state at the outset (pp. 2–3) that it is not offering an explana-

tion or even a description of inequality in general, but rather a description
of the disadvantages suffered by blacks in comparison with whites, its tone
and content cannot but draw the reader to the view that race is a major
determinant of inequality in Brazil: other variables like education, region
and gender are brought in only to illustrate the thesis further rather than
as alternative explanations or possible intervening variables, and it is writ-
ten in such a way as to encourage the idea that where race is correlated
with anything then that is enough to denote a causal relationship. It seems
to me that this sort of exercise encourages the misuse of statistics. Not that
better statistical analysis would soften the race-based explanation: Edward
Telles’ book does precisely undertake such more sophisticated exercises
and his Tables 6.1 and 6.2, which provide probabilities of social mobility
by the social status and race of the interviewee’s father, give very strong
reasons to believe that race, or skin colour, however construed, does have
a significant independent effect on inequality (Telles 2004). A Portuguese
translation has only been available since 2012, and can be accessed on the
author’s Princeton website, which obviously draws fewer Brazilian read-
ers than IPEA’s. Telles published an earlier book based on similar data in
Portuguese in 2003, but it is out of print (Telles 2003).
The Henriques paper has several features which place it in the category of
state-sponsored activist literature. It starts out with the threefold categori-
zation including ‘pardos’ as in standard IBGE usage, but suddenly on page
15 switches to the binary classification. It also repeatedly and unusually
describes Brazil’s race relations regime in terms of the noun ‘raças’ (races)
rather than colour or ethnic groups, thus downplaying métissage. Brazilian
usage, even in activist literature, tends to employ ‘racial’ as an adjective and
rarely depicts the society baldly as composed of two or three races.
The text also uses the word ‘discriminação’ very frequently, thus giv-
ing the impression that racial disadvantage is the result of purposeful dis-
criminatory actions. Curiously some of the tabular material presented by
Henriques seems to show that skin colour—as self-assigned—is not pre-
cisely correlated with disadvantage: for example, the incidence of poverty
in Southern Brazil appears to be greater among ‘pardos’ than among ‘pre-
tos’ (p. 12). Another intriguing passage is that which states that it is the
black–white gap among the wealthiest 5 % which seems to be responsible
for the overall income gap between whites and blacks, and that if the
top 5 % are removed income is more unequal among blacks than among
whites. These figures, which might well undermine the main message of
198 D. LEHMANN

the document, are left uninterpreted. Whatever their basis, or their inter-
pretation, my purpose here is mainly to note that this document’s usage
and tone is that of an activist document, written for and published by
a government research agency, reflecting the penetration of movimento
negro ideas in some niches of the federal government.

CRITIQUE OF UNIVERSALISM
In an interview with me in late 2008 with Sueli Carneiro criticized both
feminism and the Movimento Negro itself: both, she said, operate with a
‘universalizing’ conception which excludes the specificity of black women’s
condition. In saying this she was reflecting prevailing usage in Movimento
Negro circles where the word ‘universalista’ is often used pejoratively or
sarcastically to describe universalism as a confidence trick, designed to
mislead black people into thinking they were getting a fair deal and were
living in a meritocracy when this is evidently far from true. But is it true
even in principle that a universalist approach to social policy does not take
specificity or difference into account? To understand this point, it is neces-
sary to distinguish between the treatment of specificities or particularistic
affiliations and identities in the legal and bureaucratic implementation or
enforcement of policy and their treatment in the purposes of policy.
The universalist treats discriminated individuals, like everyone else, as
rights-bearing citizens. The approach is called proceduralist because it means
all are treated equally in procedural matters, being entitled to legal repre-
sentation, for example, and having the same conditions of access to goods
and services in the gift of the state: health care and education are obvious
examples, but so would be sewage treatment, street lighting and public
transport. This short list of state provision shows that universalism is much
less straightforward than might at first appear, but note that its basis is not
that everyone should have equal access to these goods and services, rather
that they should be provided on equal terms, and this means compensating
for initial disadvantage or for unfavourable social or environmental circum-
stances. A universalist cannot condone a situation where a reliable supply of
water and electricity varies with the income or location of an area. Likewise,
variations in the quality or quantity of educational provision by the state are
not compatible with universalism, so measures to correct them are.
However, these examples are enough to illustrate the artificiality of the
separation between the formal and the substantive and we shall see that
in any case the foremost proceduralist, John Rawls, cannot be invoked
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 199

against distributive or (moderately) egalitarian policies. However, it is

worth saying that bureaucracies, legal apparatuses, prisons and security
agencies, are notorious loci of unequal treatment of citizens, not least
those whose socio-economic or racial exclusion render them vulnerable
to everyday authoritarian abuses, great and small, as we noted in quoting
Iris Marion Young. If the description of security checks at Brazilian malls
also quoted earlier is correct, then at those locations difference-blind pure
universalism would already be massive progress.
Rawls is hardly soft on inequality: his model of justice famously starts
out by asking what arrangements would be chosen by people who have no
idea where they will be placed in the social order. That introduces a bias
against inequality from the start: it also introduces a strong element of
impersonal equity, or fairness, and is thus led to a radical version of defend
equality of opportunity.
To many Rawls’ concept of fairness and his proceduralism do mean, that
the state is ‘difference-blind’ in the sense that it does not take account of
claims on resources or on institutional attention based on subjective differ-
ences like religion and race. Disability, income, age and gender are for the
most part impersonal attributes and chance contingencies which even the
most extreme version of the difference-blind approach would accept for the
purposes of social policy—and such factors are fully incorporated in Rawls’
schema. After all, according to one of the few articles on Rawls and affirma-
tive action, his ideal society—and that is mostly what he wrote about—does
require ‘substantive equality of opportunity’; the minimal formulation of
equal opportunities still requires that ‘all citizens must be guaranteed a fair
chance to compete for offices and positions in the basic structure of society,
regardless of social circumstances (e.g., class status or family background)’
(Taylor 2009: 480); the article quotes Rawls as saying that ‘those with
similar skills and talents should have similar life chances’, and by ‘talents’ he
must include an individual’s innate potential as it would be unimpeded by
disadvantages arising from the social environment. In addition, Rawls states
that in order to achieve fairness, the state must prevent ‘excessive accumula-
tions of property and wealth’ and sustain ‘equal opportunities of education
for all … [T]hose who are at the same level of talent and ability and have
the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success
regardless of their place in the social system’ (Rawls 1972: 73). For as he
says, a ‘system of natural liberty’—that is, with minimal state interference—
does engender ‘obvious injustices’, as when ‘it permits distributive shares
to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point
200 D. LEHMANN

of view’, and those factors are ‘social circumstances and such chance con-
tingencies as accident and good fortune’ (ibid. p. 72).
In short, although Rawls seems to have avoided public and written
statements on the subject of affirmative action, he can hardly be invoked
to oppose measures to unblock the barriers preventing any group marked
out by their colour or origin from realizing their talents. However, the
measures must satisfy his other requirements, which are quite complex
and demanding, such as that they must be to the benefit of all, not only
of those directly targeted, and also that they conform to his individualist
and proceduralist requirements. Here the phrase ‘to the benefit of all’
means both that the fewer unjustified inequalities there are the greater
the benefit to society in terms of peacefulness, social cohesion and the
like, but it also implies that there may come a point where the cost to the
rest of society, for example, in deprivation of liberty or property, becomes
too high. The dividing line between procedural and substantive also gets
very blurred once everyday realities of queuing and inhuman bureaucratic
cruelty against the voiceless are taken into account.
The other major contemporary contributor to a liberal or social demo-
cratic theory of justice is Amartya Sen, whose capabilities approach, devel-
oped in his ‘search for a better perspective on individual advantages than
can be found in the Rawlsian focus on primary goods’ (Sen 2009: 231),
argues in favour of ‘an orientation towards freedom and opportunity, that
is, the actual ability of people to choose to live different kinds of lives,
(ibid. p. 237). If the system is biased against people, and is hard to change
fundamentally, then it is necessary to enable them to exercise the freedom
to develop their potential and also to place the resources necessary within
their grasp. This must mean that building capabitilities is more than a
technocratic agenda, but requires the action of social movements as well
as formal politics.
It seems clear that these approaches are universalist and that they are
also compatible with certain sorts of affirmative action. However, Rawls
would surely have difficulty with the self-classification which is unavoid-
able in the Brazilian context, since at least in principle the subjective ele-
ment it introduces undermines the impersonality and technical expertise
embodied in his proceduralism. Rawls opposes methods which pre-empt
the outcome, but instead supports policies which, to use an English crick-
eting expression ‘level the playing field’—that is, to say they remove the
structural disadvantages which place those suffering from initial or inher-
ited social exclusion at a disadvantage. This would require a far more rad-
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 201

ical approach to inequality of opportunity than the current affirmative

actions in Brazil.
On the face of it, Brazil seems addicted to universalism especially in
the state sector, if by that is meant the use of examinations in appoint-
ments to secure positions. There is a veritable industry of competitive
examinations which are sat by tens of thousands hoping to obtain a post
in a state agency, presenting an appearance of almost obsessive fairness.
To prepare for exams there is a further industry of profit-making courses
and handbooks (apostilas).16 All these exams may sound universalist but
they do nothing to correct unequal access determined by class, race and
highly uneven schooling, as the critics of universalism rightly point out.
The role of the vestibular has changed since the ENEM was established
as a universal gateway to all public universities but its functioning offers
an instructive insight into the inequities and even perversity of a superfi-
cially impersonal examination system: each university sets its own exam;
until recently students had to attend the university in person to take the
exam, making it expensive for those living too far away to go home at
night; the exam carried a fee, cherished by Rectors because it was one of
their few sources of revenue from outside of government budgets. But
the most important inequity of the vestibular arose from the advantage
of candidates from the private schooling system. Apart from usually (not
absolutely always) benefitting from a better basic education than students
at public schools, less disadvantaged students will have paid to attend the
courses (cursinhos) designed to train them for the vestibular. Without that
training, it is hard to get sufficiently high marks to gain a place in one’s
chosen course, for although many achieve a pass, only a minority of those
who pass do well enough to get one of the fixed number of places. Many
universities, especially the more competitive, still use the vestibular to
select those, far too numerous, who have qualified by their ENEM marks,
but the fee has been removed or softened and it is now possible to take
the vestibular at a distance. The University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
website, for example, states that students from low-income families who
have studied in public school throughout their education are exempt from
the fee, and its exam is sat in numerous venues across São Paulo state as
well as in Brasilia.17
A universalist might respond by arguing for affirmative action which,
for example, provides supplementary funding or tuition to people disad-
vantaged by their background on account of skin colour or other chance
contingencies arising from ancestry or environment. To select people on
202 D. LEHMANN

the basis of these disadvantages is not the same as selection on the sole
basis of self-assigned skin colour. The universalist approach is ultimately
individualist because it looks to the personal circumstances of individuals
to decide on their eligibility and suitability for preferential treatment—
and this distinguishes it most clearly from the more corporatist quotas
approach under which entitlement depends on membership of a racial
group.
This mismatch in the meaning of ‘universalist’ parallels the mismatch in
the usage of the term affirmative action. Leading opponent Peter Fry has
told me quite clearly that his problem was with quotas and not with affir-
mative action itself: for example, he fully supports the provision of low-
cost or non-paying pre-vestibular courses to ‘negros e carentes’ (‘black
and people of low-income) to help them prepare for university entrance
exams. Such courses have been established by universities and by non-
profits and movimento negro organizations, but they are not the subject
of a concerted government policy at federal or state level. It is the offi-
cial classification he abhors, but that is inseparable from race-based quota
allocations. However, this refinement did not find its way into the highly
polarized polemics, in which the mere word ‘quota’ became emblematic
of any sort of affirmative action.

THE LEGITIMACY OF ‘RACE’ IN PUBLIC POLICY

Once the campaign for quotas got under way, the anthropologist Yvonne
Maggie was shocked by what she saw as an attack on Brazil’s modern-
ist heritage, dating back to the historic cultural festival, the Semana de
Arte Moderna, which took place in São Paulo in 1922 (Maggie 2008).
Leading figures of that generation, were looking to encapsulate Brazilian
distinctiveness, defining the country as a civilization in its own terms, not
in terms of what she labelled as ‘lack, absence and emptiness … in com-
parison with so-called civilized societies’ (ibid. 41). The implication was
that the introduction of a binary system of racial classification, especially if
inscribed in official documents and practices, is an alien transplant.
For Maggie and Peter Fry, the purpose of the quotas campaign was to
undermine Brazil’s hybridized race relations in which mixture and métis-
sage play a central part, and shift it in the direction of a binary system.
Fry, like most social scientists educated in the marxisant atmosphere of
the 1960s and 1970s, had once upon a time been a critic of Gilberto
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 203

Freyre18, the grandfather of the concept of hybridity in the interpretation

of in Brazil’s race relations and the man who most eloquently sang its
praises, but now he and Maggie invoke positively his use of ‘hibridismo’
(Fry and Maggie 2005). They do not invoke the other much criticized
phrase closely associated with Freyre, namely racial democracy (Lehmann
2008), which is the compulsory object of criticism in all writings on the
subject, and they do not deny for one moment the reality of racial dis-
crimination in Brazil, but they opposed fiercely the implantation of official
recognition of a binary system, which is what they saw as the purpose of
the quota campaigns—a purpose confirmed, as we have seen, by one of
its foremost proponents, José Jorge de Carvalho. Fry was convinced, hav-
ing done field work in Zambia as a graduate student,19 and having later
worked in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, that official sanction produces
polarization, and does not simply reflect an existing reality. They regarded
the 1996 National Human Rights Programme (the first ever such pro-
gramme in Brazil) as a disavowal of the longstanding ideology of a ‘racially
mixed Brazil’ with its ‘infinite shades of colour’, in favour of a ‘taxonomy
prevalent in other parts of the world, notably South Africa and the United
States’ (Fry and Maggie 2005: 309). Maggie, who has spent her entire life
and career in Brazil and writes a weekly column in the newspaper O Globo,
takes the view that even to use the prefix ‘multi’, as President Cardoso
had done in 2000, is to deny the country’s hybrid character: for her, to
describe the nation as ‘multiethnic, multicultural and mestiço’ is a ‘con-
tradiction in terms’ (Maggie 2005, 2008), because it denotes a nation of
separate groups and even cultures.
Fry defends the ‘Brazilian model’ or ‘Brazilian sociological intelligence’.
‘To do otherwise’, he continues, ‘would be to renege on the tenets of my
discipline and … to capitulate to the inevitability of the “racialization” of
the world’. The Brazilian model, ‘with all its ambiguity and internal con-
tradiction, is far more difficult to grasp intellectually, let alone as a base for
political action’ and the anti-racist intelligentsia and activists have tended
to apply the ‘American model’ which has the ‘political and epistemologi-
cal advantage of simplicity and consistency’ (Fry 2000: 111, 2005: 240).
Fry and Maggie and others who think similarly, have to some extent been
the victims of a contradiction already discusssed in the Introduction to
this volume, which affects the discipline of anthropology in the UK and
the USA in particular, namely the difficulty of reconciling a denunciation
of ‘essentialism’ and the description of racial identities as ‘constructions’,
204 D. LEHMANN

with support for ethnic and race-based movements across the globe. They
have chosen the less popular solution to the dilemma.
But their posture is hard to argue in the public square, however coher-
ent it may be, for if they are agreeing that racism is endemic in the society,
why are they arguing against policies and benefits designed specifically to
improve the opportunities of racially discriminated groups, and why are
they saying that race ‘does not exist’?
The dispute became at some stages unpleasantly personal. Peter Fry has
found himself in severe disagreement with ‘friends and colleagues, includ-
ing those in the thick of the antiracist struggle’ and has been the object of
‘accusations of “neo-Freyreanism”’—as if this was some sort of crime—
representing white privilege or even ‘being unconcerned with racism and
“racial” inequality’ (Fry 2000: 111).
Like much else in Brazilian politics, none of this makes sense in terms
of ‘left’ and ‘right’. Neither ‘side’ has considered in any detail the experi-
ence of the USA. Beyond polemical uses of US Supreme Court decisions,
there is little public discussion of the persistence and changing shape of
racial inequality in the USA since the passage of the Civil Rights Act,
since affirmative action began to be introduced and later diluted, or of
the important interventions of William Julius Wilson constantly remind-
ing his readers of the persistence of class inequality (Wilson 1978, 1987,
2011). Supporters of quotas are content to leave a caricatured version of
the US experience in the background as a positive precursor. Opponents
on the other hand, who though by now more liberal or social-democratic,
tend to be from a generation of Latin American social scientists formed
in a period dominated by Marxist approaches, decry the foreign origin of
these ideas, yet find themselves classified as conservative or right-wing. To
add to the ironies, the notoriously polemical sociologist Loïc Wacquant,
together with his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, wrote one of the most intem-
perate papers ever, denouncing the reduction of social inequalities to race
as a far-reaching US-based neoliberal conspiracy and citing Brazil as an
example, with special reference to the influence of US-based foundations,
notably Ford and Rockefeller (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999).20 The
article might have been even more forceful had the authors realized the
full extent of the involvement of the Ford Foundation in the campaign
for racial quotas in subsequent years. It elicited a predictably indignant
response from John French, author of many works on the São Paulo work-
ing class (French 2000).
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 205

The polemical style and content of the collective book Divisões peri-
gosas (Fry et  al. 2007) to which many prominent opponents of racial
classification and quotas contributed, did little to build bridges. There
is a patronizing tone, and an element of ‘talking down’, in some of the
essays, whose authors seem to say ‘we know the classical philosophers, we
know the history of Rwanda, Liberia, and the USA’.21 Several of the con-
tributors are at pains to point to the over-simplification of a history which
ignores the vast diversity of Africa, which reinterprets the Zumbi episode
in the late seventeenth century22 as a modern-style revolt (a representa-
tion described as ‘sequestro intelectual’—an intellectual kidnapping—by
the anti-quota polemicist Demetrio Magnoli); there are several allusions
to the importation of alien notions and practices of race division mod-
elled on the USA; and there are some irate references to Nazism and the
Holocaust, and to raciología or ‘raciology’.
In a lengthy critique of Divisões Perigosas (Feres Junior 2008)23, João
Feres, who has published a succession of papers in English and Portuguese
on the subject of affirmative action in Brazil and elsewhere, has responded
in detail. This in itself is unusual because partisans of the different views
tend mostly to ignore one another’s writings. Although he unfairly criti-
cizes the authors for defending the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy he
states, quite reasonably, that many of the fears expressed in the book about
the impending ‘racialization’ of Brazilian society remain unfounded, even
if the experiment is in its infancy. Likewise he criticizes them for their
view that a quota system, because of the binary system of racial classifica-
tion it brings, will cause a crisis in Brazil’s national identity, saying that
there may well be such a crisis but it predates the introduction of quotas,
which could be seen as an effect rather than a cause thereof (ibid. 67–8).
Echoing the critique of universalism which has been discussed already, he
also engages with the claim that racial classification and the distribution of
benefits to particular racial groups violates the principle of republican citi-
zenship and equality before the law. Feres argues that in that case the same
could be said of benefits for people of low income, for graduates of state
schools and so on, and from there he goes on to label the dissenters with
the tag of ‘neoliberalism’, as if it was some kind of moral or intellectual
felony. In response, one might say that no one in Brazil has ever claimed
that republican citizenship is incompatible with welfare provision for the
socio-economically or demographically defined groups he mentions, but
that it does—as we saw in the discussion of Rawls—raise specific issues in
relation to race-based interventions. This is because republican citizenship
206 D. LEHMANN

does mean, to many, that the state is ‘difference-blind’ in the sense that it
does not take account of claims on resources or on institutional attention
based on subjective differences like religion and racial affiliation. Disability,
income, age, gender and the like are taken to be impersonal attributes24
or chance contingencies which are part and parcel of the difference-blind
approach to social policy—and thus fully incorporated in Rawls’ highly
egalitarian schema.
However, the notion that race is a category excluded by ‘difference-
blindness’ is hard to defend, since in so many cultural settings it is taken
for granted by individuals as they go about their daily business and clas-
sify one another (Brubaker et al. 2004). It is possible that Rawls, living
all his life in the USA, took it for granted that race was just as impersonal
a characteristic of individuals as their age or their gender. It is certainly
a ‘chance contingency’. The case against its use in Brazil is partly one of
principle, but rests also on the country’s chromatic race relations regime
under which fixed classifications are open to change especially when they
are used for official purposes. Yet in the country’s elite, that is the worlds
of banking, diplomacy, top government and business decision-makers,
TV presenters, public intellectuals, the chromatic regime fades into ‘pure’
white—as is implied by the chromatic idea itself, which fades into unam-
biguous categories at the extremes. I have already noted that Ricardo
Henriques’ IPEA document provides evidence in this respect.
These disputes did also carry a class undertone, illustrated by the mani-
festoes signed exclusively by academics, published in 2006 and 200725.
The June 2006 manifesto in support of a proposed ‘Quotas Law’ had 421
signatories (excluding students) of whom only 79 (18.8 %) were from five
high-prestige universities in the ‘magic triangle’ of Rio, São Paulo and
Brasilia: the Universities of São Paulo (USP),26 Campinas (UNICAMP)
and Brasilia, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the
UERJ. In contrast, there were two opposing manifestoes, both signed by
113 people, though they were not exactly the same ones: a short one to
the National Congress to protest the draft Estatuto da Igualdade Racial
(Racial Equality Statute—eventually passed in 2010) and a longer one to
the Supreme Court, which was considering the constitutionality of admis-
sions quotas in a test case arising from the UnB quota system (see the
Conclusion to this chapter). These dissenting manifestoes had respectively
40.7 % and 42.5 % from those institutions. Both lists of signatories were
heavily dominated by social sciences and the humanities. It is a very rough
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 207

criterion, but the contrasting percentages do surely tell us that the sup-
porters of quotas are more likely to come from the social and economic
periphery, and from universities relatively less involved in research.27 The
authors of the pro-quota manifesto themselves had no doubts as to their
opponents’ position in the social hierarchy: they describe the ‘113’ as
‘members of the elite of a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society with a
recent history of slavery and systematic genocide’, and belonging to ‘elite
institutions’. (The words ‘elite’ and ‘elitizado’ have almost become terms
of abuse in Brazilian political debate.)

SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS: RACE AND THE MIDDLE

CLASS
In an article published as early as 1996, the sociologist Antonio Sergio
Guimarães takes many positions which would appear to place him in the
camp of the dissenters: he opposes attacks on universalism and individ-
ualism, described by him as values which underpin Western democra-
cies; he opposes a ‘proportionalist or collectivist project which has no
basis in concrete reality’, and he does not think that opponents of quo-
tas are closet racists hiding behind an individualist screen. He empha-
sizes the requirement that affirmative action policies be ‘anchored’ in
policies of universalization and educational improvement, thus oppos-
ing the standard rhetoric which polarizes affirmative action and uni-
versalism. Without these anchors ‘affirmative action policies cannot be
formulated’(Guimarães 1999: 187). In other words, he also reconciles
affirmative action and social justice.
But at the same time, Guimarães also recalls that the core problem in
Brazil is that ‘discrimination is rooted in an assumption of natural privi-
lege accrues to certain groups of people’. In line with the well-known
formulae of Roberto da Matta (Matta 1986, 1991; Hess and Da Matta
1995), he writes: ‘racial inequalities are naturalized and people are sub-
sumed within their networks of connections, while the rights of individu-
als are subordinated to property rights’, and these are the decisive forces
blocking opportunity for blacks.28 It is therefore a travesty to offer ‘for-
mally equal treatment to people when, in practice, they are treated as if
they belong to an inferior station’.29 The use of the word ‘equal’—and of
the Portuguese ‘igual’—is misleading because it is used to signify both
‘the same’ and ‘socially equal’. Maybe there is a wordplay here, but it
208 D. LEHMANN

muddies the waters, because it gives the impression that the differential
treatment offered to some sectors, which aims to compensate them for
their disadvantage, is somehow a violation of the idea of equality, whereas
if anything the reverse is the case, as explained above. His criticism could
be rephrased as follows:

on account of a myriad of small interstitial or capillary pressures and inter-

ests, the state maintains social institutions and habits of social relations
which perpetuate, through economic and cultural mechanisms, a hierarchy
of unequally distributed symbolic, social and material capital. Yet, in spheres
where people of different status and influence compete formally (like in
university entrance exams, or in the bureaucracy), the apparatus inverts the
assumption and omits or forgets the assumption of inequality.

The practice of offering undiluted formal equality of treatment is

inherently unjust because only the privileged have the resources to take
advantage of the most attractive resulting opportunities. Later in the
same passage, however, Guimarães makes it clear that he regards the
adoption of measures to correct the effects of everyday subordination
of a vast contingent of people as extremely exceptional: ‘for this, and
only this reason, it is necessary at certain times and in some quite spe-
cific spheres of society, to accept the treatment of the underprivileged
as privileged people’.30
In other writings, Guimarães makes clear his view that after the 1988
Constitution, rights-based claims for blacks were concentrated among
the ‘new black middle classes’ who focused for the first time on ‘affirma-
tive actions’ (Guimarães 2003). In the face of the poor quality of public
schooling, young blacks who were advancing in the education system,
were finding that to earn a qualification they had to attend private schools
and universities, which in addition to being expensive, were also, with
some elite exceptions31, offering a poor-quality education and low-status
qualifications—which were not regarded as equivalent to those received
at state institutions (de Almeida 2014). (The state, in its universalist for-
mality, may not discriminate between, e.g., medical degrees from ‘top’
and other universities, but patients and employers do.) Thus, having com-
pleted their schooling and worked their way through university, they were
then faced with further obstacles, and Guimarães notes that although
broad swathes of the lower middle class—the generously defined ‘new
middle class’32 much trumpeted by Brazil’s recent Presidents and by the
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 209

economist Marcelo Neri (Neri 2010, 2011) who has charted their emer-
gence—were affected by this squeeze, it was only those who identified as
negros who took up a fight. Thus, we can see how these cohorts of school
graduates would be well disposed to the call to black self-awareness, espe-
cially if their actual or potential middle-class status could be undermined
by racial prejudice.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND CRONY CAPITALISM

Quotas can be defended on the basis of a social engineering argument that
for the sake of social cohesion or simply a modicum of social peace at least
on the ‘race front’, it is necessary to facilitate the entry of blacks into a mid-
dle class. In addition, there is also the project of their inclusion in the elite;
because the total absence of blacks from the elite is a scandal which must
be confronted. Such a goal is not very expensive from the government’s
point of view, and certainly nothing like as expensive as, for example, a
wholesale reform of the education system, and so does not present a seri-
ous conflict with other policy objectives, especially in the context of an (up
to 2015) expanding higher education sector. However, this argument is
rarely put forward and even in Guimarães it is more implicit than explicit.
The arguments of the supporters of quotas, at least as articulated in pub-
lic debate, are to do with reparation for historical wrongs and the low
representation of blacks in general among university students, to which
sometimes is added their almost total absence among academic staff. The
opponents for their part look to the defence of academic standards and to
the potential harm which might come from official and binary racial clas-
sification. But one might well return to the question ‘what is a university
for?’, which Guimarães raised at the end of his 2003 paper, when he asks:
‘are they only for the most competitive and capable students? Or only for
the poorest students? How can a perverse association be avoided between
competitiveness and income levels, or between competitiveness and racial
identity?’ (Guimarães 2003).
If the state could act in the educational sphere with one voice or apply
consistently a single set of priorities, one might be able to present it with
such questions, but its interventions are not consistent and in some aspects
are quite perverse. These are observable notably in the enormous role
played by subsidized education for profit especially, but not exclusively, at
the post-secondary level. In 2010, 4,736,000 students were studying in
210 D. LEHMANN

private institutions of higher education, compared with 1,644,000 in the

public sector (federal, state and municipal). The figures have since shifted
in favour of the public sector, and also, although they are taken from the
Censo da Educação Superior produced by the Ministry of Education’s own
research institute (INEP), their proper interpretation would require much
closer inspection and a detailed knowledge of the ways in which such sta-
tistics are assembled. For example, they do not take into account the dif-
ference between daytime and night-time courses, or between part-time
and full-time study, so they are just vague orders of magnitude. But what
does this co-existence of for-profit, non-profit and state provision mean?
As is well known and widely recognized, public higher education in
Brazil is structured in a socially perverse way: access is heavily biased in
favour of students whose families have been able to afford a private primary
and secondary education, and the cursinhos, but under the Constitution
public universities are prohibited from charging fees. All commentators
on Brazilian education agree that people whose schooling has been exclu-
sively in the state sector have great difficulty in achieving the examination
results necessary to get into university. The quotas help, but they still need
to qualify on the basis of their ENEM marks. Hitherto the vestibular exam
has in effect acted as a social filter because people had great difficulty in
getting high enough marks in it without attending a cursinho. So, in the
race for post-secondary qualifications, the private sector has filled the gap
between a rationed supply and massive demand.
Made up predominantly of for-profit establishments, including two
of the largest educational corporations in the world (Kroton and Estacio
de Sá), the private sector has benefited ever since the 1960s from gener-
ous treatment by the government, including tax breaks and undemand-
ing certification requirements. While debate about quotas for students in
public universities was raging the Lula government established a very large
quota programme, ProUni, to enable black and low-income students to
attend for-profit and non-profit private universities (the latter being mostly
Catholic universities). The Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in coop-
eration with the Franciscan social entrepreneur and leading quotas advocate
Frei David, had already been in the vanguard of this type of initiative, but
now it became a major state undertaking, and according to a government
statement, by July 2011, 174,500 beneficiaries had graduated since the
scheme’s inception, and another 464,500 were studying with its support.
The scheme pays the fees of students who, apart from qualifying on the basis
of their family income and racial assignment, also have to compete on the
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 211

basis of their exam results. It has not gone unnoticed that the racial quota
for ProUni never attracted the polemical attention which surrounded the
same principle when applied to the prestige universities of the state sector.
As described in detail by Wilson de Almeida (de Almeida 2014), ProUni
has also been advantageous financially for the profit-making sector of edu-
cation, which is highly influential in Brazilian educational policy through
its representatives on the National Educational Council (which certifies
degree courses and diplomas) and also through an apparently enduring
and faithful band of parliamentarians (Cunha 2003, 2006, 2007). One
factor behind of ProUni was the private universities’ massive tax and social
security debts. The government agreed to treat them leniently in exchange
for the opening of these free places. The cost to the government therefore
was represented by what has in effect become a write-down of those debts.
In addition, the government created a student loan scheme (FIES), which
lends at low interest rates and, importantly for the private universities, pays
the fees directly to them (so there is no leakage or time lag as the funds
pass through beneficiaries’ bank accounts). FIES expanded substantially
and also lowered its interest rates under Dilma Roussef but, significantly,
when the Finance Ministry imposed stricter conditions on it after her re-
election, Kroton’s and Estacio’s previously soaring share price collapsed.33
We are thus reminded of the rather narrow focus of the debate, which
has not called into question the vocation of universities or government
policy towards higher education as a whole. For example, the intellec-
tual and social abyss separating high from low-prestige courses; the small
numbers of student places in public universities, especially in the most
competitive courses; and more recently the precarious situation of recently
founded public institutions reported in the press.

CONCLUSION: AN OLD-STYLE POLITICAL COMPROMISE

In the end, despite their cultural and social capital, the dissenters did not
win the battle. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the
quotas policy of the University of Brasilia did not contravene. However,
the dissidents constitutional provisions on equality and non-discrimina-
tion. They could be said to have held the line to a significant extent since
the 2012 Quotas Law (no. 12,711) passed shortly after the Court deci-
sion, combines race with socio-economic criteria based on both students’
household income and their type of schooling (which has to be public). It
allocates a quota of 50 % of undergraduate admissions to federal universi-
212 D. LEHMANN

ties exclusively to public school graduates, and within that 50 % half are
reserved for people from families with a per capita income of less than 1.5
minimum wages and half are not subject to that ceiling. Then, within both
of these last two categories, places will be reserved for ‘pretos, pardos e
indígenas’ corresponding at least to their proportion in the relevant state’s
population as registered in the Census. So the binary formula is in effect
maintained because ‘pardos’ are placed in the same category as ‘pretos’
and ‘indigenas’. The ‘preto, pardo e indigena’ formula, for its part, is
adopted not for any ideological reason, but because they are the terms
used in the Census. At the same time the socio-economic criterion is not
only maintained, it is enhanced, in the form of both the reservation of 50 %
of places for public school graduates and within that of an income ceiling.
The law applied only to the country’s 63 federal universities and a host of
Federal Education, Science and Technology Institutes (Institutos Federais
de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia) which numbered 160 in 2008,34 but
the many State public universities have adopted a similar policy, with the
exception of the University of São Paulo and many had already adopted
them before. UNICAMP, in contrast, instituted in 2014 an affirmative
action programme under which state school students received extra marks
in the vestibular entrance exams and black, brown and indigenous can-
didates received even more. In 2015 30.2% of those admitted were from
state schools rising, astonishingly, to 51.9% in 2016 with percentages
above 60% in Medicine (88.2%), Architecture (86.7%), Communications
(70%), Biology (60%) and Civil Engineering (62%). (Statement published
by UNICAMP, 12 February 2016). The court, aware that quotas were an
exceptional measure for an urgent problem of public concern, had stated
that its decision would hold for ten years, in the hope that in that time
the exclusion of black students would be overcome. But the prospect of a
court decision putting an end to quotas in 2022 is unimaginable.
In an interview in 2013, a SEPPIR official who had previously worked on
the Law as an advisor to a Congressman said that in the wake of the positive
Supreme Court decision they had to seize the moment and this involved
making concessions—namely, the combination of socio-economic and race-
based criteria. He did not seem troubled by that nor did other people whom
I interviewed at the time. The campaign had moved on: the big issues now
in education concerned the teaching of African and black Brazilian history
in schools, and in the wider society debates about race focused more on the
endemic pattern of racialized police violence affecting young urban black
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 213

people in the context of a shockingly high rate of deaths at the hands of the
police—and also deaths of police at the hands of gunmen.
It is not entirely inappropriate that this interpretation of the quotas cam-
paign ends on a somewhat deflating note, for it reminds us that these issues
of identity which have come to obsess social scientists working on Latin
American countries may not be terribly important to the elites which gov-
ern them, and may even have a limited effect on their overall development,
or lack of development. This in turn may explain why, despite the shrill
tone of multicultural advocacy and of calls for racial justice, government
and parliament in the end seem to have made quite substantial concessions:
it now remains to be seen what their longer-run effect will be.

APPENDIX
Expansion of the Brazilian Federal Higher Education System, 2002–2012.
Data from a report published in 2012 (MEC 2012)
Number of federal universities: 2003: 43; 2014: 63.
Number of campuses and units belonging to the Federal universities:
2003: 148; 2014: 321
Undergraduate Student vacancies for admission: 2003: 109,184; 2011:
231,530*
Undergraduate Students registered: 2003: 527,719; 2011: 842,606*
(* excludes distance courses and students)
Postgraduate student registrations: 2003: 52,000; 2011: 99,294
Full-time teaching staff (‘docentes efetivos’) 2003: 49,851; 2012:
71,637
Budget of Federal universities (in constant reais): 2003: R$ 10.3 bil-
lions; 2010: R$ 24.8 billion
Budget for Student Financial Support Programme (PNAES): 2008: R$
126 m.; 2012: R$ 504 m.
Number of grants from PNAES: 2008: 198,000; 2012: 1.078,000**
(** Not necessarily the number of students benefitted since many may
have derived support on several different occasions.)
214 D. LEHMANN

NOTES
1. For readers familiar with Portuguese, I reproduce a sample: ‘verdes, roxos,
cor de burro quando foge, cor de rosa, cor de ouro, laranja, chocolate, café
com leite, encerada, enxofrada … ou até azul marinho. … Amarela, verde,
azul e azul-marinho, branca, bem-branca ou branca-suja, café ou café com
leite, chocolate, laranja, lilás, encerada, marrom, rosa e vermelha’ (Schwarcz
2012: 52).
2. Datafolha is an survey research company belonging to the newspaper Folha
de São Paulo.
3. See pp.  80–81  in the Portuguese translation, posted on the internet on
Telles’ Princeton website, as O significado da raça na sociedade brasileira.
It is also published in Portuguese as Racismo à Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro,
Relume-Dumará 2003).
4. A phrase originally coined by Carl Degler, the US historian, in comparing
Brazil and the USA (Degler 1971).
5. There is a longstanding finding that Brazilians tend to deny that they
themselves are victims of racism even while recognizing that racism exists
in the society (Sheriff 2001). It is confirmed by findings of the recent
PERLA study Pigmentocracies, coordinated by Edward Telles (Telles
2014), which shows the disparity between people who have experienced
discrimination and people who have witnessed it. Nevertheless, in their
table, 30 % of black respondents had experienced it, compared to 43 % who
only said they had witnessed it (Moraes Silva and Paixão 2014: 212).
6. Examen Nacional de Ensino Medio.
7. ‘Os ativistas negros jamais afirmaram que é negro quem se declara negro,
mas que os negros, vítimas do racismo, deveriam se declarar negros’.
8. Segato is a prominent anthropologist who has taught and acted as consul-
tant in numerous projects and initiatives concerning gender, violence and
indigenous rights throughout Latin America.
9. ‘ retira a responsabilidade da pessoa que se apresenta e com isso despoliti-
ciza o processo de afirmação de uma identidade negra no meio academico
brasileiro’.
10. The paper is posted on Schwartzman’s personal site at the University of
Toronto.
11. ‘cognizant of the possibility of legal sanction’ would be the nearest transla-
tion. The phrase appears in the ‘Instruções específicas para os candidatos às
vagas do sistema de cotas’ for 2008, in accordance with Rio de Janeiro
State Law (Lei Estadual) n° 4151/2003.
12. Espaços Afirmados (‘Spaces of Affirmation’—ESAF) provided a space set
aside for black students, mentoring, funding for books, theatre and film
workshops and the like. ESAF also encouraged them to develop political
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 215

initiatives by, for example, funding a state-wide gathering of black stu-

dents: ‘Encontro Estadual de Estudantes Negros’ (dos Santos 2006).
13. See also Paulo Gabriel Pinto’s more explicit conference paper written with
Paulo Eugênio Clemente Júnior: Políticas Públicas e Políticas Identitárias:
uma etnografia da adoção das cotas na UERJ. [Link]
[Link]/isp_imagens/Uploads/[Link]
14. The comment had been posted on a site called ‘Caros Amigos’ in July
2002.
15. IPEA is the Institute for Applied Economic research and has a vast staff. It
is not like a small NGO which needs to go to the UNDP for funding, so
there must have been a special reason for the involvement of the
UNDP.  Later IPEA established a unit of its own monitoring affirmative
action—the Coordenação de Igualdade Racial. Brazil’s participation in the
Durban Conference, the preparation of the country’s position paper, and
the sending of a large delegation of more than 300 people, mostly civil
society figures, marked a turning point in the posture of the Brazilian state
with respect to racial discrimination.
16. The Foreign Ministry’s affirmative action programme consists of a compe-
tition to award scholarships to enable successful candidates to prepare for
the highly competitive entrance exam to the Diplomatic Service. The
scholarship pays a subsistence allowance plus the fees to follow a course
set-up as a profit-making venture by retired diplomats.
17. [Link]
18. The criticisms focused and still focus on Freyre’s idealization of the (pre-
dominantly sexual) racial mingling in the plantation society of the
Northeast of Brazil, and also on his projection of the Northeast as repre-
sentative of the country as a whole. Freyre’s classic work is The Masters and
the Slaves (Freyre 1986, 2002).
19. Since his PhD at University College London in the early 1970s, Peter Fry
has lived and worked in Brazil and has been a very prominent figure in
social anthropology there, holding leading positions in the Brazilian
Anthropological Association (ABA). He also worked for the Ford
Foundation office in Rio and in Southern Africa, based in Zimbabwe. It is
worth stating that although I have heard extremely fierce attacks on his
views on the issues discussed here, I have never, ever, heard anyone refer to
his foreign origin. Yvonne Maggie has spent all her career in Brazil. Jose
Jorge de Carvalho gained his PhD in Ethnomusicology from Queen’s
University Belfast.
20. It was so scandalous that one of the Journal’s own editors wrote a piece in
the same issue immediately following the Bourdieu–Wacquant article
‘challenging a number of assumptions and generalizations in the article by
Bourdieu and Wacquant’ and seeking ‘to encourage a debate towards
216 D. LEHMANN

establishing a more fruitful agenda for understanding the complex relays

between identity, power, governance, globalization, capitalism’ (Venn
1999). Somehow, the editors managed to both decide to publish and
simultaneously to be embarrassed by it.
21. Almost all the articles reproduced in it appeared originally as opinion pieces
in leading newspapers, especially O Globo, regarded by race activists and
people of the left as ‘conservative’, and so the polemics are to be expected,
João Feres’ analysis of coverage of the quotas debate in O Globo in fact
show that despite its clear editorial hostility the newspaper gave quite sub-
stantial space to those in favour in its op-ed pages (Feres Junior 2013).
22. Zumbi dos Palmares is the official icon of black activism: his name was
taken by the government institution established by President Sarney to
support black or African culture—Fundação Cultural Palmares—and the
national Día da Conciencia Negra (Black Awareness Day), established as an
official holiday, is the anniversary of his execution in 1695. He seems to
have led something like an independent state in Northern Brazil, ‘ruling’
over an archipelago of communities and populations, which has been pop-
ularly reinterpreted as a fugitive slave community—João Reis casts a scepti-
cal eye over the evidence in Reis (1995–96).
23. The text is available on the website of GEMAA—Grupo de Estudos
Multidisciplinar da Ação Afirmativa [Link]
24. It is well known, of course, that not everyone today regards gender assign-
ment as an impersonal ‘given’.
25. The manifestoes can be read at the following sites: [Link]
[Link]/folha/educacao/[Link] and [Link]
[Link]/2009/10/[Link]
26. The University of São Paulo has been the most resistant of all Brazilian
universities to the pressure for affirmative action, limiting itself to some
outreach programmes in schools and financial support for students, but
with no racial dimension (INCLUSP).
27. USP was in 2012 on the verge of joining the top 200 world universities
compiled by the London-based Times Higher, but remained outside that
category in 2014. UNICAMP ranked between 301 and 350 but was 28th
in the rankings of universities under 50 years old.
28. ‘discriminações baseadas no pressuposto de privilegios naturais para grupos
e classes de pessoas … a naturalização das desigualdades raciais, a subsun-
ção das pessoas a suas redes de relações, a subordinação dos direitos das
pessoas ao direito de propiedade’ (ibid. 195).
29. ‘não podemos continuar a dispensar um tratamento formalmente igual; aos
que, de fato, são tratados como pertenecentes a um estamento inferior’…
(ibid. 195).
 THE POLITICS OF NAMING 217

30. Por isso, e só por isso, é preciso, em certos momentos, em algumas esferas
sociais privilegiadas, que aceitemos tratar como privilegiados os desprivile-
giados’ (ibid.).
31. For example, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and some business-
oriented institutions like the Fundação Getulio Vargas and the recently
created business school INSPER.
32. According to Ricardo Paes de Barros, at that time a senior official in the
government’s Secretariat for Strategic Affairs (and author of an important
earlier study of Brazilian income distribution for the World Bank) the gov-
ernment after an extensive study of 30 different criteria, established three
strata of the middle class, based on per capita family income: the lower
middle class (R$ 291–441; the middle middle class (R$ 441–641) and the
upper middle class (R$ 641–1019) (Announcement dated 24 July 2013).
See also (Barros et al. 2010). As of writing the exchange rate was R$4 to
the US dollar: in November 2014 the rate was R$2.5.
33. A decree appeared in the official gazette prohibiting students in receipt of
a full-fees PROUNI grant from simultaneously receiving a FIES loan or, if
they were on a half-fees grant, from receiving a loan in a separate institu-
tion or separate course (Diario Oficial da União, 29 December 2014;
Financial Times, 6 January 2015). The implication is surely that the pro-
gramme provided opportunities for students to multiply their access to
loans granted on very favourable terms by registering simultaneously for
multiple institutions and courses. The share price of Kroton collapsed by
one-third between early December and mid-January, and the other leading
company in the sector, Estacio Participações, fell even further, as compared
with a 10 % decline in the São Paulo stock index.
34. See [Link]

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 INDEX

A governance/state policies;
affirmative action, 3, 4, 24, 176n18, institutional framework, 160;
180, 181, 184, 188, 191, 194, targeted policies, 172;
196, 199–202, 204, 205, 207, territorial model, 145, 163;
208, 216n28 territorial regime diversity, 161
Agarwal, Bina, 147 local populations; conflict between
Amazonia neighbouring villages/
constitutional rights; cultural overlapping territorial claims,
policies, 157; 163–6; diverging identity paths,
institutionalization of 165; internal conflict, 163–6;
difference, 157; land security, partial or full legal
39; legal resources, 156 reclassification, 168; self-
ethnic and cultural classification; declaration as a legal right, 194;
Indians, 14; quilombola, 6, 27, territorial arrangements, 170
156–61, 163, 165–71, 173, racial and colour classification, 188
173n1, 174n4, 174n7; Appiah, Anthony, 2, 13, 180
traditional populations’, Argentina
158–61, 163, 167, 170 Abogados del Noroeste Argentino
external actors; anthropologists, en Derechos Humanos y
163; Church, 164; NGOs, 164; Estudos Sociales (Northwest
role of mediation, 169; role of Lawyers for Human Rights and
translation, 169 Social Studies - ANDHES), 121

Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to endnotes.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 223

D. Lehmann (ed.), The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1
224 INDEX

Argentina (cont.) 109, 110; Quilmes, 104–6,

Amaicha Indians and Community, 108–20, 124, 126, 127;
105, 107–12, 115–19 Trancas region,
Bussi, General Antonio, 110, 115, 124
128n5 Perón, Evita, 102–4, 110
Cabildo de Buenos Aires, 107 Perón, Juan Domingo; Minister of
Calchaquí valleys, 105, 106, 110, Labour 1944, 102; Overthrow
111 1955, 103
Calchaquí Wars, 108 provinces; El Chaco, 129n17;
colonial land tenure; Cédula Real, Formosa, 125, 129n17;
106, 107, 115; encomienda, Tucumán, 27, 103–5, 110,
106 122, 124, 128n5
Comunidad India de Quilmes Pueblos de Indios, 23, 106
(CIQ), 113, 114, 118–20, 123, pueblos originarios, 88, 102; Unión
129n14 de Pueblos de la
Constitutional Amendment of 1994, NaciónDiaguita, 122, 128n10
114
Constitution of 1853, 107, 114
criollos, 126 B
Diaguita-Calchaquí Indians, 102; Bailey, Stanley, 11, 185, 187, 193
Unión Diaguita-Calchaquí, Bolivia
104, 122, 128n Aymara, 3, 79, 86, 87, 89, 90,
Estatuto del Peón Rural (1944), 93–5
102, 108 cholo, 87
Indigenous Parliament of the colonization, 77, 85, 88, 90, 91
Calchaqui Valleys (1973), 111 highlanders and lowlanders, 84
Instituto Nacional de Asuntos indigeneity, 10, 15, 26, 75–80, 83,
Indígenas (National Institute of 84, 87–9, 94
Indigenous Affairs - INAI), originario nations, 77, 83, 84, 88,
104, 109, 116 94, 103
Kirschner, Cristina Fernández de, Quechua, 85–7, 89, 94
125 TIPNIS (Territoria Indígena Parque
Kolla Indians, 104 Nacional Isidoro Securé), 75,
‘La Conquista del Desierto,’ 101 76, 91–2
Ley de Política Indígena Bourdieu, Pierre, 189, 204,
(Indigenous Policy Law) 1985, 215n20
102 branqueamento, 182–7
localities; Amaicha, 104, 105, Brazil, 4, 5, 11, 12, 28, 91, 103,
107–9, 115–17, 121, 126; 155–76, 180–2, 184, 189, 190,
Chañares, 109, 110; 196, 197, 201–7, 210, 215n15,
Chasquivil, 120–2, 124; 215n19. See also Amazonia;
Chuchagasta, 125; El Paso, proceduralism; universalism
 INDEX 225

Amazonia, 27, 156, 164, 165, 169, D

176n20 da Matta, Roberto, 207
David, Frei, 210 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 135
dos Palmares, Zumbi, 205, 216n22
ENEM, 189, 201, 210
higher education, 182, 201, 210; E
private for profit education, Ecuador
182; Quotas Law (Lei das Comisarías de la Mujer y la Familia,
Cotas – Quotas Law), 195, 136
206, 211; ‘vestibular exam’, CONAIE (Confederación de
201, 210 Nacionalidades Indígenas del
movimento negro, 164, 184, 187, Ecuador), 140
189, 190, 196 Constituent Assembly (Montecristi,
private schools and universities, 2007), 139–41
208 Constitution; Article 57, 142, 143;
proUni state scholarship, 210, 211 Article 171, 141, 142
racial democracy, 203, 205 Correa, President Rafael, 134,
SEPPIR, 212 138–40
State University of Rio de Janeiro, Indigenous autonomy, 94, 138,
193 142, 148, 150
Supreme Court, 180, 181, 204, Indigenous justice, 148
206, 211, 212 Indigenous women’s rights,
University of Campinas, 201 138
National Human Rights
Commission, 136
C REDCH (Red de Mujeres Kichwas y
Campesino Nations, 77 Rurales de Chimborazo), 134,
Candido, Antonio, 185 137–43, 147, 150
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 203 Vivir bien/buenvivir/sumac
Chiapas, 2, 6, 9, 16, 39, 43, 44 kausay/living well, 81, 87,
Chile, Mapuche women’s feminist 133
identity, 150 ENEM, 189, 201, 210
citizenship, 5, 10, 24, 82, 83, 85, 106, ethnogenesis, 10, 25–9, 102–4, 170
145, 155–76, 188, 205
coca growers, 26, 76, 83, 86, 87, 91,
93, 94 F
colour prejudice (preconceito de cor), Ford Foundation, 194, 196, 204
184 Fraser, Nancy, 37
common property regimes, 161 Frei David, 210
corporatism, 25–9, 62 Freyre, Gilberto, 185, 202, 203,
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 147 215n18
cursinhos, 201, 210 Fry, Peter, 179, 196, 202–4, 215n19
226 INDEX

G L
Gaard, Greta, 150 land tenure, 3, 13, 26, 27, 49, 50, 55,
Geertz, Clifford, 17, 18, 21–2 103, 157, 160–2, 164, 165,
gender 167–71
gender-based violence, 147 legal pluralism, 6, 144
Kichwa gender politics (Ecuador), Liberation Theology, 9, 110, 165,
147 176n20
Guimarães, Antonio Sergio, 207–9 Li, Tania Murray, 78

H M
Habermas, Jurgen, 16 Maggie, Yvonne, 196, 202, 203,
higher education, 182, 185, 209, 215n19
211 Merry, Salle Engle, 149, 150
hybridity, 15, 203 mestiçagem/métisssage and mestizaje,
15, 24, 76, 81, 93, 182
Mexico
I Agrarian property, forms of; colonial;
ILO Carapan Codex, 51; mercedes de
Convention 169 ‘Indigenous and tierra (land grants), 48, 49,
Tribal Peoples Convention’ 103; títulos primordiales
(1989), 36, 37, 40, 122, (original title documents), 48;
134 communal (Comunidadagraria),
‘Declaration of fundamental 40, 46, 52; ejido, 39–43, 46,
principles and rights at work’ 52, 56, 60, 64n3; traditional,
(1998), ix 10, 42, 92
indigeneity, definition, 79 Durango State; Bernalejo
indigenous demography, 11 (Durango), 41–4; Santa María
Indigenous justice, 7–11, 23, 24, 133, de Ocotán (Durango), 41–3
136, 137, 141–3, 148 governance/state policies, 13
Indigenous rights, 2, 20, 114, 134, Indigenous authorities; municipios
138–9, 144, 145 indígenas, 56
Indigenous women’s rights, 134–9, indigenous peoples; Huichol People,
143, 144, 147, 150 36, 42–4; Nahua People, 48,
interculturalidad, 3–5, 9 49; Purhepecha or Tarascan
intercultural education, 4, 19, 114, People, 33, 38, 47–51, 56–60,
116 62; Tepehuan People, 41–4;
inter-legality, 135, 148, 149 Wixarika Nation, 36
international law, 36, 91, 139, 149, INEGI (National Statistical
150 Institute), 40, 47
 INDEX 227

International Labor Organization Once Pueblos, 51; Capacuaro,

(ILO), 36, 122, 134 58; Carapan, 47, 51, 52,
land reform; Secretaría de la 66n11; Cherán, 52;
Reforma Agraria, 65n9 Cheranástico, 47; Chilchota,
land tenure (regulation of); 45, 49, 51–3, 61; Huécato, 47,
Comisariado de Bienes 58; Nurío, 66n14; Ocumicho,
Comunales (Rural Social Sector 44; Pamatácuaro, 45, 49–51,
Authorities), 40; Comisariado 53, 54, 56, 61; Paracho, 52,
de Bienes Ejidales, 40; 66n14; Paricutín, 50; San
Composición de tierras Juan Nuevo Parangaricutiro,
(reordering of tenure), 48; 46, 47, 49, 50; Santa Cruz
Juzgado General de Indios Tanaco, 47; Santa Fe de la
(Colonial Tribunal for Indian Laguna, 56; Tarecuato, 47, 56,
affairs), 59; PROCEDE 66n14; Tinguindín, 55;
(Programa de Certificación de Tzintzuntzan, 51; Urapicho,
DerechosEjidales), 39, 40, 52, 52; Zamora, 53, 55; Meseta
64n3, 65n9; Procuraduría Tarasca (Tarascan Plateau),
Agraria (Mexico), 40, 45; 44–7, 65n10; Purhépecha
Programa de Focos Rojos (Red Nation Decree, 56; Vicaría de
Spots Programme), 26, 39–44; la Meseta Tarasca (Church
Tribunals Agrario (Agrarian Vicariate for the Tarascan
Tribunal), 40, 50, 54 Plateau), 59
Michoacán State; Indigenous Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN),
institutions; Consejo 39, 40, 42, 50
Consultivo Indígena, 45, 56; Partido de la Revolución
Coordinación Interinstitucional Democrática (PRD), 45, 49,
para la Atención a los Pueblos y 55, 65n10, 66n14, 66n15
Comunidades Indígenas del Partido Revolucionario Institucional
Estado de Michoacán (PRI), 39, 40, 50, 56, 65n10,
(Coordinating Body for 66n15
relations with Indigenous Presidents and State Governors;
Peoples and Communities - Carlos Salinas de Gortari, 39;
CIAPCIM), 57; Nación Felipe Calderón, 36; Lázaro
Purépecha Zapatista, 57; Cárdenas, 45; Lázaro Cárdenas
Organización Nación Batel, 57; Vicente Fox, 39
Purépecha (ONP), 49, 57; Morales, Evo, 25, 26, 75, 79–83, 86,
Pacto de Huaxa Manaka, 36; 87, 91, 93–5, 138
localities; Angahuan, 53, 54, Movimento Negro, 164, 184, 187,
57; Apatzingán, 53; 190, 196, 198
Arantepacua, 52; Cañada de los multicultural citizenship, 24, 144
228 INDEX

multiculturalism, 3–5, 24, 35–62, Q

75–96, 135, 143–4, 157, 158, quilombos/quilombolas, 6, 27,
173, 179, 180 156–61, 163, 165–71, 173,
174n1, 174n4
Quotas Law (Lei das Cotas – Quotas
N Law), 195, 206, 211
nation-building, 15, 79, 81 Quotas for university entrance,
natural law, 40, 41, 65n4 202
and Jus Gentium, 37
neoliberalism, 21, 205
NGOs, 11, 17, 22, 78, 158, 159, R
164, 169, 171, 172, 176n18, 184 Rabinow, Paul, 17–19
racial classification, 3, 180, 187, 191,
196, 202, 205, 209
O University of Brasilia Race
Okin, Susan, 144 Tribunal, 190, 194 (see also
Brazil)
racial democracy, 187, 203,
P 205
Peru, 5 Rappaport, Joanne, 1, 20, 22, 23
NURAJ (Núcleos Ruralespara la Rawls, John, 16, 180, 181, 188,
Administración de Justicia - 198–200, 205, 206
Rural Nuclei for the recognition, politics of, 2, 16, 26,
Administration of Justice), 36, 62
150 Rifkin, Marc, 145
Phillips, Anne, 13, 144 rights
plurinational state collective, in Ecuadorian
Bolivia Constitution, 134 constitution, 25
Colombia, 134 universal, 135, 145–8, 151
Ecuador, 133–5 Roseberry, William, 148
private for-profit higher education, rural settlements
182 anexos, 41
private schools and universities, estancias, 49
208 ‘municipio 114’, 56, 57, 66n14
proceduralism, 199, 200 rancherías, 65n7
ProUni state scholarship programme
for students at private universities,
210, 211 S
pueblos originarios (original peoples), Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, 182, 184
41, 88, 102. See also Argentina; Scott, Joan, 146, 193
Mexico Security Operations
 INDEX 229

Operación Conjunta Michoacán, U

53 United Nations
Special Operations Group (Grupo Convention on the Elimination
de Operacionesespaciales – of All Forms of Discrimination
GOES), 47, 58 against Women (CEDAW –
Sen, Amartya, 200 1979), 138, 142, 144, 148
SEPPIR (Secretaria de Promoção de Declaration on the Rights of
Politicas de Igualdade Racial), Indigenous Peoples
197, 212 (UNDRIP – 2007), 139,
Sieder, Rachel, 7, 8, 36, 141
78, 83 United States
Sikkink, Kathryn, 149, 150 Dawes Severalty Act (1887), 145
social constructionism, 12 United States Supreme Court, 181,
Song, Sarah, 145, 149 204
State institutions for Indigenous universalism, 23, 146, 148, 150, 172,
affairs 181, 189, 198, 199, 201, 205,
Comisión Nacionalpara el 207
Desarrollo de los Pueblos University of Brasilia Race Tribunal,
Indígenas (CDI—National 190, 194
Indigenous Development University of Campinas (UNICAMP),
Commission - formerly 163, 201, 206, 216n29
National Indigenous Institute usos y costumbres, 4, 7, 13, 14, 41
Instituto Nacional
Indigenista—INI, 52
State University of Rio de Janeiro V
(Universidade do Estado violence
do Rio de Janeiro - UERJ), in Ecuador, 147
193 feminicide, 134
strategic essentialism, 40, 78 gender-based, against women,
Supreme Court, 115, 137, 142, 147–8
180, 181, 187, 204, 206, vivir bien, 81, 87
211, 212

W
T Wade, Peter, 1, 24, 78, 184, 186
Taylor, Charles, 2, 13, 16, 37, 59, Wallerstein, Immanuel, 146
180, 181, 199 Wilson, William Julius, 204
Telles, Edward, 11, 183, 185, 186, women’s rights
197, 214n5 collective, 4, 25, 28, 108, 133–5,
Tsing, Anna, 148 138–44, 151
Tupac Amaru II, 104 global, 135
Tupac Katari, 104 universal, 143, 144, 146
230 INDEX

Y Zapatismo, xvii, 9, 10, 15, 58,

Young, Iris Marion, 13, 188, 199 138
San Andrés accords, 9
Women’s Law, 138
Z Zumbi dos Palmares,
Zacatecas State, Valparaíso, 42 215n22