Much ink has been spilled on the Andean past and how it relates to eternal verities about the Andes. To a certain extent, this perspective is valid, for the geographic environment of the Andes (despite recent climate change) has not varied much over the centuries. That is, the Andean mountain range, located in a subtropical and tropical climate makes possible the cultivation of a large variety of plants and animals in different ecological zones present in the area, often within a very short distance from another. This created a type of human society that was able to take advantage of these factors, with its concomitant emphasis on communal lands, reciprocal arrangements, etc. that exist still today since in many ways it is the most rational use of the (otherwise potentially harsh) environment.
The problem that arose with the insights about the Andean ecosystem and its social and political implications was that most insights came about in the 1970s and early 1980s, with the examination of early colonial records by John Murra and the many anthropological studies done in the ¨ethnographic present¨ during the same time period. In addition to Murra, the work of the scholars associated with the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (where Murra published as well) were most influential and included work by Bolivianists as well, such as the seminal work by Tristan Platt and Thierry Saignes. In addition, with the notable exception of Platt, few scholars were preoccupied with the nineteenth century, but instead focused on the colonial period or the present. It meant that, with few exceptions, the post-independence period until the 1960s was mostly uncharted territory until very recently. At best, scholars who worked on this period used Andean paradigms developed for the late twentieth century or the colonial period tried to find continuities with those eras, bridging through ¨upstreaming¨ or ¨downstreaming¨ the vacuum in between. This worked to a large extent for the economic analysis of Andean peasant agriculture and behavior because, as mentioned above, the unique geography of the Andes created patterns that were discernible over the longe durée. It led to the insight that, for example, in many cases hacienda regimes in the highlands and valleys were based on Andean principles of economic exchange as well and that at times indigenous communities were becoming more hacienda-like as commercialization and class differentiation advanced in certain Andean villages.
The emphasis on land tenure systems and economic behavior of peasants in the Andes has receded in the past few decades, especially as the Peruvian agrarian reform of the late 1960s and early 1970s faded once the political bankruptcy of the military-directed reforms became evident in the explosion of violence under the Shining Path and Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru in the 1980s. Instead, the focus of the debate shifted towards another problem: How was it possible that a guerrilla movement could have such great success in a region that had been under government control for centuries? The issue quickly zeroed in on what apparently had been the inability of the republican Peruvian state to incorporate politically the Andean peasantry. Florencia Mallon, who had engaged in the earlier debate of the economic incorporation of the peasantry in the Central Highlands of Peru, expanded her earlier study to show how the peasants in Junín had created their own nationalism during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), only to be suppressed afterwards by Andrés Cáceres, the very political ally who had earlier benefited from the peasant montoneras that rode to the rescue against the Chilean invaders during the La Breña campaign. Mallon’s work, which compared Peru to Mexico in the 1850s and 1860s, engendered a whole new field within nineteenth-century studies, the integration of subalterns (particularly peasants) into the nation-states of Latin America. It also revitalized the study of peasants in the Andes, where most studies agreed with Mallon’s results about the incapacity of the Peruvian state to incorporate indigenous peasants as full citizens. (Walker, Thurner) Only Cecilia Méndez recently has shown that this issue was more complicated than that, demonstrating that the indigenous peasants of Huanta, rather than having been marginalized, were able to rebel effectively and impose their leaders on the Peruvian state. They were able to do so because they had always been ¨plugged in¨ to the economy and larger Peruvian society as muleteers and coca traders.
In Bolivia, the debate has taken a different form and recent events, just like in Peru, have given the historical works a different twist than they had before. Two events dominate the historical analysis of the Bolivian peasantry, the 1953 agrarian reform and the election of Evo Morales in 2005. The 1952 Revolution, the context within which the agrarian reform occurred, created a different dynamic between state and peasantry. After all, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario after 1953 did integrate the peasantry into the body politic as clients of the government (admittedly, in certain areas such as Cochabamba with considerable difficulty (see Kohl, Gordillo)), but, as Tristan Platt asserted, as peasants rather than Indians. In fact, Platt’s work in 1981 showed that during the nineteenth century the indigenous communities engaged the Bolivian state in many ways, but through their own, Andean concepts attenuated by the centuries of colonial rule, in a complex relationship mediated by ideas of reciprocity and the application of binary concepts of different indigenous and creole-white spheres.
Since the publication of Platt’s Estado boliviano y ayllu andino, others have proposed other ways of looking at the relationship between state and the Andean peasantry. Most prolific in this sense has been Marta Irurozqui, who asserted in a number of works that indigenous communities rebelled effectively during the nineteenth century and thus were able to affect the constitution of the nation-state and also the ruling creole elites’ visions on the Indians. I have also argued that the Bolivian elite’s awareness of being surrounded by indigenous communities, especially in the mining regions, led to the application of a liberal solution to communal lands. The 1874 legislation provided for the measurement and distribution of lands to the Indians themselves rather than their forced sales to others because the mining elites realized that the state was too weak to do otherwise. Rossana Barragán’s review of legislation regarding citizenship rights and how they changed has also brought many new insights into the rights of indigenous peoples as citizens.
A number of transformative works on Andean peoples in twentieth-century Bolivia all show consistently the subversive use of memory and legislation that created a separate reality that the state later adopted. These works were inspired by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s slim book on highland indigenous resistance in Bolivia, Oprimidos pero no vencidos, published in the early 1980s. In a kind of manifesto of the Aymara-led Katarista movement that emerged in the 1970s against the military dictatorships of that decade, the book posits that the Aymara and Quechua created historical memories that persisted into the late 20th century and led to the creation of ethnic movements that pushed for a return to democracy and dignity for Andean peoples. The research done by the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), of which Rivera was one of the founders, led to many new insights into indigenous movements, most importantly that of the caciques apoderados, indigenous activists who moved from village to village trying to fight through legal means the usurpation of community lands after the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century. Waskar Ari’s doctoral dissertation went into greater detail than anyone on this important movement. More recently, Laura Gotkowitz’s new book on indigenous movements centered on Cochabamba has shown the persistence of these leaders and how they created a parallel legal justification and apparatus that began to be put into effect with the 1952 Revolution.
The emergence of Evo Morales and his movement that has astutely tied indigenous issues to his larger agenda of union-based socialism, has led to a revisiting of the meaning of Bolivia’s indigenous past. Gotkowitz’s book fits perfectly within this trajectory, as the 2009 Constitution in many ways has made reality what certain strains of the indigenous movements have proclaimed for so long. But the resurgence of indigenous peoples and peasants in general under the MAS banner, now as local officials and national legislators, has given new meaning to past events as the new regime creates new historical myths and also provides for a rereading of historical events. In addition to a natural interest in the Túpac Katari/Tomás Katari revolts of the 1780s, recently reanalyzed by Sinclair Thomson and Sergio Serulnikov (as well as new works on the Oruro Creole revolt by former politician/historian Fernando Cajías and historian Oscar Cornblit), the Federalist War of 1898-9 has warranted new interest. While the classic account by Ramiro Condarco Morales (1964) still provides much information, new works by Pilar Mendieta and Forrest Hylton show more clearly the indigenous separatism of a faction of the Aymara rebels who initially aided the Liberal Party in overcoming the ruling mining elites of Sucre and Potosí. In addition to putting a new spin on the Aymara-Creole oligarchy divide (seemingly so similar to political events in the early twenty-first century), both authors show the class divisions among the indigenous members as well, where the wealthy ayllu members were punished for their anti-communal behavior by the revolutionaries led by Juan Lero. This also shows us that we must pay more attention to economic factors in Andean communities, a task upon which I am now working.
Where does all of this leave us? The events of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have provided the need for reflection over the role of Andean peoples since independence. It is clear that the Indians will not go away; they appear to be stronger today in many ways than in the past. It means that our studies into that past are more vital today than ever, for with hindsight we can see issues that we could not before, such as the importance of historical memory, as well as the persistence of institutions and ideas that, although transformed over the centuries, maintain their force today. In fact, some government officials in Bolivia are using the insights from THOA and anthropologists to establish what the customs of Andean ayllus were to incorporate into present-day laws. Nancy Postero has written about the use of Andean utopias in Bolivian politics. This vitality in Andean studies is, of course, a kind of “upstreaming” (or is it “downstreaming”?), as we reinterpret the past to make sense of the present. But it is precisely this kind of constant interaction between present and past that keeps this field so fascinating and so relevant today.