Kirkpatrick Sale begins his account of the conquest of the Americas with the assumption that the “grand narrative”

of progress requires revision, a starting point for a large body of scholarship and polemic that questions “modernity.”

Exposing the brutal, faulty premise on which the story of the “New World” was launched, Sale intends to add dignity to the

Latin American indigenous experience in hopes that the voices of the conquered will emerge once the conquerors’ self-

serving story has been debunked. And maybe as late as 1992 the belief persisted in the Americas that the heroics of

Columbus, or Colon as Sale refers to him partly for the irony, should overshadow the devastation of indigenous culture and

people wrought by 500 years of colonial exploitation in one form or another, from without and within, from 1492 through

to the 19th century republican modernization projects that further marginalized indigenous culture, neglecting the material

needs of indigenous people in the best of cases and brutally exterminated them in the worst. To go back to Columbus is to

chart a new course through history. Opponents took 1992 as an opportunity to reconsider the colonial legacy and to expose

where colonialism persists. But Sale’s revision calls forth an important notion of Latin American history, whether viewed

as contact and assimilation or hybridization, as conquest and “culture loss,” or more positively, as the story of cultural

persistence despite challenges at every turn since 1492. As is obvious to the student of Latin American history aware of

some of the many ways it has been written, the past exists at the mercy of the present.

This truism is an unforgettable one for indigenous Latin Americans whose cultures were recast as ciphers in

national ideology by reformers who saw, in Indians, the impediment to national progress that modernizing states needed to

transcend. Like Sales, these reformers believed that the history was malleable, and perhaps could be denied. But the past is

not dead; history haunts indigenous cultures and many remain as insecure as ever before. And it would not be surprising if

for these cultures their history, as much as it is revered or viewed as a source of stability and relief, also feels oppressive.

Having jettisoned its “faith in Progress,” the industrialized West would seem prepared to encounter with clearer eyes the

material and cultural insecurity that plagues many indigenous communities. But the central lesson of the “death” of

“Progress,” that history has no real beginning or end, has also led the West to view the Latin American experience as one of

bitter irony. History seems to repeat itself in some way, now with oil corporations and bureaucrats the conquistadors and

Latin American governments as permissive and distant European crowns; now with anthropologists, environmentalists, and

international aid workers joining Christian missionaries to misperceive and falsely represent indigenous people though

seeking to help and understand. The call to preserve “traditional” culture proceeds from a desire to forestall further tragedy.

It means digging into histories of resistance and transcendence, less than histories of conquest. It means preserving cultures

that were never “backward” per se, but remain fatalistic and hierarchical according to commentators on Mayan cosmology

and its pantheon of deterministic huacas. It should be asked whether such cultures prepare its people to survive (and if this

is what culture should do). Kay B. Warren has highlighted the importance of “cultural capital” in her solution to one of the

main problems facing indigenous cultures, a kind of double bind wherein cultural and material security are difficult to

achieve together, but neither can proceed without the other. History shows there is no guarantee an indigenous person will

gain purchase and achieve material security within mixed, mestizo society, even if they give up their “traditional” ways;

conversely, the call for the preservation of the “traditional” often marginalizes indigenous cultures by enforcing the

paternalistic sense that their history is all they have. For Warren, cultural and material security are one, as history or the

“traditional” serves as capital upon which indigenous people can and do trade for their material survival. But does a

particular culture suffer some loss of singularity or distinctness when it becomes a commodity, as with the Otavalenos who

sell their crafts on the international market? The financial returns on this cultural production allow its creators to survive, to

live their culture instead of visiting it in a museum, to bring it into contact with the world and provoke the kind of

intercultural engagement that cultural pluralism seems to require. But this is also how cultures disappear. In some regards,

the experience of the Otavalenos does not look all that different from the Taino Indians, who were forced by necessity to

alter their culture for Columbus. It seems desirable to seek a balance between heritage and living creativity when thinking

about indigenous cultures and their place in the world. Both heritage and living creativity demand respect. But respect alone

gives life to neither. Even Columbus, in his journals and Letter to Santangel, proclaimed an admiration for the indigenous

people of Latin America.

Culture includes fact and fiction, the future and the past, the production of sustenance and the consumption of pop

culture ephemera. It includes religious sensibility for how questions of purpose should be asked and answered. Cultures can

disappear. They can also change and grow. If the past is so malleable and the future so uncertain (even if multinationals and

NGOs are the new conquistadors and priests), can anything be considered non-negotiable when it comes to the preservation

of native culture? Is it possible to preserve cultures that have contributed to cultural syntheses since Columbus? By saying

yes we avail ourselves to the futility of trying to locate a prelapsarian moment of “cultural purity.” The constitution of the

“authentic” is just as contentious as the notion of “culture loss.” But traditional culture began to disappear in 1492. And as

Hulme noted in his argument for self-ascription as the most solid basis for studying ethnicity, attempts to make objective

accounts about the period before 1492 suffer from the distortional nature of observation itself to subtly alter that which is

under examination, meaning it is largely impossible to picture pre-contact indigenous culture in a way that does not

somehow conform to the observer’s contemporary ideal. We are left with subjectivity, self-ascription, and redescription, all

of which, because they propose fluid ethnicity, place the essentialist notion of “traditional” culture into doubt. A second

consequence of contact is the view that colonialism has been a story of engagement and the negotiation of social power and

identities rather than blatant domination and the grind toward cultural uniformity. If one is ready to admit that Western

culture is far from “genuine” or “authentic,” they should also acknowledge that even the most “backward” of indigenous

people already live in a world amid a proliferation of choices and things – as they would have before Columbus arrived. To

view everything as negotiable allows us to regard indigenous identity as the result of self-determination. Autonomy is the

West’s most cherished ideal and probably its greatest conceit. But it does raise the possibility of identities that are equally

as authentic as the traditional ones modernity displaced. The preservationist argument on the other hand, particularly when

advanced by contemporary Western reformers, resembles in its paternalism the 19th century assimilationist desire to “save

the man by killing the Indian.” And when advanced by western reformers it is particularly ethnocentric. It actually

resembles a kind of American exceptionalism by proposing that for indigenous people there is isolation and innocence left

to regain. What is the best way to ensure that indigenous cultures remain alive but somehow freer to create themselves?

Cultures have inherent dignity (at the risk of essentialism). Through this post-Progress perspective the 19th century looks

grim. But pleas for ethnic tolerance and intercultural respect do not guarantee the emergence of societies where each

distinct subculture enjoys recognition and self-determination. The Latin American experience has been too much a story of

cultural engagement and transformation to put much faith in the relocation of the elusive “traditional.” Rather, it has always

been the story of cultural hybridization, itself a challenge or refutation to the colonial vision. Viewing it this way is the best

way to respect the history of the indigenous experience. The best way to respect living creativity and the future of

indigenous people is to aim for “the maximization of opportunities for individual variation, and group variation insofar as

the latter facilitates the ability of individuals to recreate themselves.”1 As such, cultures recreate themselves in diverse,

unexpected ways.

The story of Latin America encompasses more than just Latin America. And it certainly began prior to 1492. How

1 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, New York: 1999), p. 237.

far into history must we retreat to find its origin? To the instance the first pre-human organism struggled up onto the

seashore, or when people first felt it alright, and maybe necessary, to speak to others unlike themselves? Should the

retrospective imagination limit itself to Greece or the Roman Empire when looking for the origins of Spanish colonialism?

Sale’s story is about Columbus and not the indigenous people of the Americas whose own “civilization” rivaled that of

Columbus’ cultural ancestors in scope. According to Sale, Columbus was a “child of Renaissance materialism.” Many have

observed that neither liberty nor humanism nor European antiquity’s vision of universal equality mean anything on the

ground. They are ideals and for Renaissance humanists they were historical lessons that had achieved the status of truth.

But they are also abstractions. And for Columbus they seem to have proposed little more than a dispensable formality, a

pretext or chance to make history by denying it. The Latin American experience is partly the legacy of the Renaissance

then, with its sanctification of human reason, its preference for the material over the otherworldly, its introduction of

temporal losers, winners, and the chance for transcendent glory. But the primacy and utility of persuasion over compulsion

were among the intellectual ideals that Europeans took from the revival of antiquity. Thus colonialism also exists to be

criticized. But here Sale’s achievement is mostly rhetorical and literary. Actually, his polemic seems like an unintended

parody of both the Black Legend and the triumphant conquest narrative, as it drastically overemphasizes Columbus’ actions

and downplays the agency of his victims. Sale repudiates the Columbus of romance and epic by revealing the Iberian to be

barely literate brute, his discovery an accident with malignant consequences. Sale quotes Columbus’ journal extensively (if

selectively), as if to allow Columbus to hang by his own words. Harbouring a vision of wealth nourished by a library of

books whose references to gold he compulsively underlined, Columbus could only read the land for its commercial

possibilities and claimed the islands by naming them after familiar places back home, largely, Sales contends, because he

was incapable of perceiving difference. Sale makes a valuable point by reminding his readers that naming and unnaming

are ownership claims, acts of theft that go beyond mere words. “Primed with dark suppositions” about the islands’

inhabitants and their relationships, Columbus supposed the Carib/Arawak duality--“a spurious couplet” in the words of

Peter Hulme--through which he filtered all his subsequent perceptions and initiatives. Sale shows the folly of these

suppositions by deconstructing the flimsy circumstantial basis the myth of the hostile and cannibalistic Island Carib rested

upon, thus undercutting Columbus’ justification for enslaving and deporting the “savage” natives, and subsequent European

projects to paint indigenous people as dark, evil, and “beyond the pale” of humanity also. But taking down conquistadors is

no guarantee that the conquered will get their historical due. Neither does it guarantee that the correct story will emerge. To

paraphrase an outside source with only slight modification, they led Columbus back in chains but that doesn’t mean the

Americas don’t exist.2 Sale’s corrective treads a well-worn path. However large-hearted in intent his account may be, it

actually does little to convince us that he views the victims of Columbus as anything more than passive antagonists. Sales

and Columbus have this in common.

Sale presumes to vindicate indigenous people through a revision of the European record, hoping to somehow

restore the indigenous record as well. But surely there were better ways for Sale to cast doubt on the celebration of Europe's

“discovery” than to cast the Tainos as the hapless victims of Columbus, which he does, in similar terms to those used by

Columbus himself: as happy, docile, and defenseless. Assuming European sovereignty over the Caribbean from the outset

and thus the Christian citizenship of the natives he would therefore probably illegally enslave, Columbus was more

coherent in his unambiguous assessment of the Tainos, whom he considered harmless counterpoint to the Caribs. “They are

fit to be ordered about and made to work, to sow and do everything else that may be needed,” Columbus wrote.3 Sale makes

an interesting point when observing that the dynamics of colonialism obscured an opportunity for a “dispirited and

melancholy Europe to have learned something about fecundity and regeneration, about social comeliness and amity, about

harmony with the natural world.”4 This invitation to envision what might have been is as truly fascinating as Jared

Diamond’s question on why Pizarro got to Cajamarca before Atahuallpa could conquer Spain. But if, as Hulme contends,

there is no such thing as “prehistory,” then perhaps there is no history either. The past is at the mercy of the present in

Sale’s ahistorical representation of the Tainos as the antithesis to the stupid, dispassionate Colon. By saddling the Tainos

with his own utopian suppositions, Sale replicates Columbus’ paternalism. “It is said,” Sale concludes, “that what perplexed

the Tainos of Espanola most about the strange white people from the large ships was not their violence, not even their

greed, nor in fact their peculiar attitudes toward property, but rather their coldness, their harshness, their lack of love.”5

Columbus too was perplexed by the alien culture he encountered. In his Letter to Santangel, Columbus wrote that the

2 Bellow, Saul, The Adventures of Augie March. Author of this great American picaresque, also a Cultural Warrior and protector of the literary ‘canon’, Bellow surely made no friends when some time in the early 90s he said: “Who is the Proust of the Paduans, the Zola of the Zulus.” 3 Sale, Kirkpatrick, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 113.4 Ibid, p. 113.5 Ibid, p. 151.

Tainos were “so lacking in guile and so generous with what they have that no-one would believe it unless they saw it.”6

Neither Sale nor Columbus allows the Tainos to seem “real” in their respective accounts. The Tainos appear simply and

essentially as blank slates on which Columbus imprints a vision of acquiescence and Sale a hospitable ideal. The politics of

ethnicity seem to require sensitivity to continuities and an awareness of the West’s self-delusion about its own capacity for

tolerance. The indigenous peoples of Latin America also suffer an injustice from the large-hearted, embracive, almost

Salesian, marginalizing gesture one would have encountered at Stauffer Library in the spring of 2004, where a display

entitled “AnOther Voice” contained pictures of indigenous people dancing in the street for their recognition—a museum

piece in a soundproof case.

To some, the circumstances of indigenous people look much the same now as they did throughout the colonial and

republican periods: oppressed and yanga - pointless. Eduardo Galeano asks profound questions, such as whether an Indian

begins to commit ethnic suicide by giving up his or her language. These are the questions we must entertain when

considering what indigenous people are likely to gain and lose while facing the predicament wherein neither the “modern”

nor the “traditional” provide relief from cultural and material insecurity, and when observing how this dynamic has

somehow animated much of Latin American history despite looking like an invitation to quietude or inaction. But Galeano

also condemns progress as if there were only one kind of progress—Progress. He exposes the perniciousness of both the

good and bad intentions of the 19th and 20th century politicians and intellectuals of the liberal modernizing/assimilation

consensus, a view advocated more recently by Mario Vargas Llosa in his re-appraisal of the Columbian legacy. Prior to

examining Galeano’s neo-colonial criticism, let us examine Llosa’s neo-liberal argument. Llosa believes that the native

people of Latin America need to be welcomed into modern society but feels they cannot enter without sacrificing their past.

According to Llosa, the modern and the traditional must accommodate each other, and the past might have use if it can be

felt to be “magical” or “mythical” once again--providing Latin Americans refrain from seeking vindications where they did

not occur. Llosa’ revision amounts to a quarrel with preservationists, who overemphasize the value of “traditional” society

in his view given that the Aztec Empire, which eradicated hunger and accomplished great engineering feats, also, through a

“state religion that took away the individual’s free will and crowned the authority’s decision with the aura of a divine

mandate,” inculcated a “metaphysical docility” that led Indians into tragedy upon contact. In contrast to the individualistic

cultural inheritance which liberated the conquistadors to succeed so conclusively, Incan hierarchy rendered the

6 Columbus, “Letter to Santangel,” p. 51.

Tawantinsuyu, or the Empire in its totality, “a beehive--laborious, efficient, stoic.”7 Well, individualism may legitimize

social movement but it is no guarantor against hierarchy. Social distinction is the point of the European society championed

by Llosa; it is certainly no less hierarchal than the “beehive” he laments. But how else to explain why Tenochititlan fell so

rapidly to the Spanish if not that Indians were incapable of making decisions on the fly, of taking the initiative when the

Inca fell. “They let themselves get killed,” Llosa concludes. That is it, as if Latin Americans, and especially indigenous

people, need to get past 1492.

Ross Hassig puts it a different way. According to Hassig, the Spanish onslaught was just one aspect in a large-

scale realignment of the Mexican political economy set in motion prior to 1492. “Mexico was not conquered from abroad

but from within,” and not because of “metaphysical docility” or a slip into cultural stagnation and decline, but because self-

interest governed decisions and relationships in the Aztec world just like everywhere else.8 He emphasizes that the

Tlaxcallans chose to deploy their decisive force in alliance with Cortes against the Aztecs. This “coup or rebellion” initiated

the Conquest period whose consequences, such the destruction of indigenous intellectual life and the syncretization of

indigenous religion, few could have foreseen. For Llosa by contrast, the Conquest appears to have been nearly pre-

ordained. His determinism resonates with the omens contained in the Aztec accounts of the period, which look like self-

fulfilling prophecies in hindsight. No doubt these accounts, archived in the Florentine Codex, were pillaged for justification

by imperialists and modernizers since then. According to these accounts, Montezuma believed that a god named

Quetzalcaotl had arrived in the form of Cortes; thus he resigned himself to apathy, too “weak and listless and too uncertain

to make a decision….He mastered his heart at last, and waited for whatever was to happen.”9 Montezuma waited for the

Spaniards to act. Llosa finds this example of revision as foresight, whether it is accurate or not, amenable to his own

assertion of native passivity. But Llosa argues with contemporary Spanish society as well. According to Llosa, there are

two Latin American societies rather than one; and only the problem of native poverty, a priority because it is more

receptive to reform than ethnocentrism or racism, would seem to prevent him from calling for the classic republican ideal:

out of many, one. “We did it; we are the conquistadors,” Llosa writes of the society to which he belongs: the modern,

7 Llosa, Mario Vargas, “Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrought and What He did Not,” Harper’s, #281 (Dec. 1990), p. 49.8 Hassig, Ross, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (New York: Longman, 1993), p. 1489 Leon-Portilla, Miguel, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 36.

Western-oriented cosmopolitans who persist in the “habit of passing to the devil the responsibility for any evil we do.”10

But the obstacles to “integration”--by which Llosa means indigenous modernization and maybe the softer notion of

“inclusion” rather than “assimilation”-- lie in the vast economic gulf that separates the two societies, Spanish and Indian.

And it is incumbent upon native societies to achieve self-direction by renouncing their culture. In reference to his own

novel, The Storyteller, Llosa performs a double-duty by praising the indigenous cultures he also slates to disappear one way

or another. In the novel, a small Amazonian tribe, repressed and persecuted and archaic as a result, yet alive and still a

“driving cultural possibility” worthy of respect, must nevertheless abandon their culture before it withers away, as if it were

necessary, almost fated to disappear, but also a tragedy that honourable cultures must cede to the utilitarian gods because

they no longer work. Actually, according to Llosa, there is no possibility that traditional culture and material prosperity can

occur at the same time, because, as the massacre at Tenochtitlan showed, Aztec culture did not work in the first place. He

calls for inclusive humanist epics, a new total history to serve the present. In epics, the stakes are often high. Thus it makes

sense that Llosa then moves on to an either/or: the persistence of “primitive cultures” or the creation societies where

inequalities fall to sustainable, human levels.11

Maybe Llosa believes “cultural capital” applies only to people like himself, a novelist of the Latin American

experience and a neo-conservative candidate for political office in Peru, a citizen of Spain who lives in London, England.

By contrast, Galeano writes that “history changes according to the song that sings it.”12 But in his account both indigenous

people and colonialists have always sung the same song, and now it returns, on a centuries-spanning feedback loop, once

again. Wearily, Galeano gives us irony. In 1986, the shaman of the Chamacoco Indians of Paraguay was obliged by

evangelical missionaries “to set aside his feathers and rattles and chants, because they are the things of the Devil.” In 1614

the Archbishop of Lima ordered all quenas and other Indian musical instruments burned, “so that the demon can’t continue

playing his trick.”13 Such an interpretation of Latin American history obviously undercuts the notion of linear time and

accords with the Mayan cyclical cosmology, where “time [is] founder of space.”14 Galeano condenses five hundred years

into a brief meditation. In his account, it appears that the story of indigenous culture in Latin America has always been, at

best, an ill-fated, culture-denying effort to save the man by killing the Indian. In 1989, General Noriega sought to postpone

10 Llosa, p. 5211 Ibid, p. 52.12 Galeano, Eduardo, “Othercide,” in We Say No: Chronicles 1963-91 (New York; Norton, 1992), p. 310.13 Ibid, p. 307.14 Ibid, p. 310.

a UN invasion by assuring the world, “We are not a tribe.” But why? Galeano argues that biological fatalism has prevented

Latin Americans from recognizing the fundamental values that Indian cultures have preserved for themselves, “despite

centuries of persecution, humiliation, and degradation.” Lamenting that the world may not be ready to listen, Galeano goes

on to warn that those “those fundamental values are no museum pieces,” and that it is an insult against indigenous culture to

think otherwise.15 Galeano’s is an argument for ethnicity that recognizes racism as a social fact that persists in setting the

terms by which non-Indians process indigenous culture. Colonialism reproduces itself in fundamental ways. Not

surprisingly then, Galeano’s revindication of Mayan culture engages the same sense of “timelessness” that fuels the view

that Indigenous people are essentially “backward” and therefore still require “salvation.” He prescribes little, at least here in

this section of “We Say No,” of the way toward change. Instead, Galeano hopes to rewrite the story of virtuous suffering.

As he implies, there may be a kind of honour owed to those who stoically bear their fate. As such, it may seem mean-

spirited to deny Mayans a record of their misery, like revoking their history or their name, and especially feeble when

measured against Galeano’s powerful language. His argument should be credited for rejecting the notion that this particular

moment in history is particularly critical; he refuses to conjure the ‘revolutionary now.’ When Galeano says no to abuse, he

also says no to the abuse of history that progressives sometimes commit when they rush to solve the problems facing

indigenous culture as if those problems had just been “discovered.” As an added irony, Galeano likely provoked an even

greater degree of sympathy from progressive Western elites, hence deepening the flood of paternalism to which he must

continue to say No. Galeano’s meditation on time and oppression is reactionary and fundamentally conservative. But it

leans to the side of heritage so that the past might be reclaimed and allowed to have some benefit for future generations.

Galeano’s fatalism is meant to be corrective; he aims to clarify the historical record by showing that the oppression of

indigenous people has gone on longer than one might think. Indigenous values are no “museum pieces.” Neither is the story

of the oppression of indigenous people a novelty. If for Galeano the Natives of Latin America have become the continents

perpetual underdog, for others that record waits to be exploited. It waits to be presented as a surprise.

The Spanish colonial regime was founded on a Christian vision of salvation and redemption, a regime Wade Davis

would clearly deplore though arguing that now, more than ever, we must perceive the need to direct our attention to the

protection of indigenous culture, as it may provide the key to global survival. In light of our newfound understanding of the

planet’s fragility, we must attend to securing the integrity of what Davis calls the “ethnosphere,” a realm of indigenous

15 Ibid, p. 315

language and knowledge rooted in the land but so illusive as to be invisible to the common, Western, observer whose

senses have been suppressed in a wash of text. Davis’ argument is far from cynical. He repackages the plight of indigenous

culture to stress the benefits its salvation would bring to humanity. The globe hangs in the balance should we fail to protect

the unwritten languages and unrecorded knowledge that pave the way to an understanding of the natural world in key areas

of stunning biological diversity like the Amazon. But do we risk merely cheapening and deterritorializing the genuinely

profound insights into the natural world that is particular to the indigenous culture that renames trees each generation

according to the sound the wind makes whistling through their branches by stressing its value to the world at large. It is

obvious to Davis that we live in a globalized culture. But the real life of any culture exists at the margins (to make a point

that’s popular among the rich, leisured, cosmopolitan global elite). Thus is the argument for the preservation of the

ethnosphere a utilitarian, assimilationist one, given that the preservation of the biology of the Amazon also means to retain

it for scientific study and modern medicine? Wade Davis is an impressive thinker, attuned to the central insight of

anthropology that is global diversity. Is he also a “cannibal” or cowode? Do attempts to preserve the indigenous languages

that disappear at an unprecedented rate miss a more pressing reality in the poverty that seems perennial in native societies,

and leaves them vulnerable to violence, addiction, and stagnation? Are these societies any more violent, addicted and

stagnant than non-native societies? Does the hope that the best of both worlds could emerge in a kind of classless, casteless

social democracy where everyone feels accountable for the ills of marginalized groups and where challenges for cultural

respect rarely need to be made, represent a) the “thin edge of the wedge” of a another kind of damaging Progress, and deny

b) what also seems due to the indigenous people of Latin America: an exclusionary, militant, and revolutionary ethnic

nationalism, or even some kind of vengeance? These questions inform an attempt to define what is non-negotiable

concerning the preservation of indigenous culture. It is critical at this juncture in the history of Latin America that

indigenous people continue to define their culture while also finding ways to gain leverage in a global economy that, since

Columbus, has driven them to the bottom of the economic hierarchy and kept them there while first negating a traditional

worldview intimately intertwined with work and the land for being insufficiently “modern” then pillaging it for its exotic

cachet. Many indigenous people have worked through the traditional-modern double bind. According to Colloredo-

Mansfield, the Otavalenos of Ecuador have redefined what it means to be indigenous by expanding regional trade into

global markets while actually preserving their cultural traditions and earning sufficient wealth to gain political leverage

against the status quo. Prior to weighing the argument for hybridity against that for the pan-Mayan movement, it is

necessary to recognize how indigenous peoples suffered under colonial rule while also working out their own challenges to

colonial oppression, and then how they continued to defend and define their culture in the Andean republics of Chile,

Ecuador, Colombia and Peru of the post-independence era.

Steven Stern places the Columbus quandary under a more illuminating light than does Sale. Stern’s argument for

the relative freedom of the colonial regime--which allowed for the revival of traditional native hierarchies and social

patterns—in comparison with the Incan Empire and to the caste-formation among native populations after the critical year

of 1570, is among the more rigorous and complex examined here. Stern shows how indigenous people gained autonomy

through adaptive strategies but suffered from the “tragedy of success” as adapted indigenous elites came to represent

colonial interests and the emergence of “civil society” made indigenous people increasingly beholden to their oppressors. In

Stern’s view, 1492 merits discussion and commemoration but defies consensus because it initiated “a history of social

grievance and political strife too intense to allow for a common language for discussion.”16 This is precisely why it should

be discussed according to Stern, as to “detach” 1492 from “political sensibilities” is to deny the very contention at the heart

of colonial history. Whereas Sale’ revision keeps the victims of Columbus in the same essentialist box as before, Stern

begins with a statement that keeps 1492 alive rather than inert in recognition of how difficult it is to definitely state what

the event and subsequent history have meant if there are as many versions of both as there are people, and little chance for a

shared frame of reference (whether desirable or not.) For indigenous people it was mostly for the worse, but 1492 initiated

the story of the West and modernity according to Stern, which he makes evident through the almost existential statement

that “…the year 1492 launched an era of discovery in the Americas, the object of discovery was both the self and the other.

The conquest confrontations promoted not acts of being, but acts of becoming: politically and religiously charged acts of

self-discovery and self-definition.”17 Stern’s argument aids our consideration of whether native culture can be preserved by

showing that the “traditional” was actually the product of cultural engagement. Amerindians did more than “accept or rebel

against that which [was] done to them...[a one-dimensional view that] simplifies the process of moral denunciation and

defense.” They found room to maneuver in the colonial system; they “assisted, resisted, appropriated, subverted,

redeployed…European projects, utopias, and relationships.”18 But the “tragedy of success” meant that they had to adopt

16 Stern, p. xxvi.17 Ibid, p. xiv.18 Ibid, p. xlii.

Spanish ways to do so. Stern point seems to be that Amerindians acted in their own self-interest and were able to protect

their institutions, but, for the most part, Europeans controlled the terms of cultural exchange. Amerindians acted

autonomously, and achieved success at times, within an ever-narrowing window of possibility.

The process of cultural creation did not exclude the indigenous people of Latin America in the early years of

colonialism. In his discussion of Peru to 1640, Stern works through the origins and consequences of the three “contending

paradigms” or utopias--the quest for wealth, social precedence, and Christian conversion--that Spaniards exported to Latin

America and refined throughout the first centuries of colonialism, and which established the course of South American

nation-state making in the centuries that followed. The West, Stern writes, “would construct proto-national cultures not out

of the ebb and flow of Mediterranean heterogeneity, but out of more exclusionary claims to cultural and religious

redemption.”19 But there was little consensus among the Spaniards about the goals they had undertaken; there really was no

“project” at all as the three Spanish paradigms conflicted with each other and ran up against indigenous challenges to

power, and the fact that none of these paradigms could work without native complicity or adaptive strategy meant that

traditional forms of authority and culture and labour remained partially intact. The European’s dependence on the post-

Incan alliances should not be exaggerated, Stern cautions. Stern studies Huamanga, a region of Peru where the end of the

Incan Empire brought a resurgence of small-scale community and ethnic economies whose vitality drew on centuries of

local tradition and experience. It was temporary. Nevertheless, the colonial relationship between the Spaniards and the

Andean people did reaffirm the role of the kuraka, now a deal-making labour boss and social climber who also symbolized

the communitarian identity of “his” people and who, because he could only assume this position of authority with the

blessing of the previous lord, represented a kind of cultural continuity as well. Allyu kinship networks and lineages found

expression in a parallel cosmology that explained labour relationships, social patterns, and the community’s health under

the authority over material life held by religious huacas or “ancestor mummies,” the deities native Andeans placated

through major cultural celebrations tied to harvests and fertility rites.20 “Ritual, cooperative labor, wealth-these things went

together in Andean society,” Stern writes.21 Tradition, hierarchy and religious determinism, then, remained part of Andean

life within the colonial framework. The diverse members of this culture participated in the colonial economy through the

mediation of the kuraka, who reinforced traditional culture but also absorbed Spanish ways. On the one hand, the

19 Ibid, p. xxii.20 Ibid, p. 1521 Ibid, p. 15

resurgence of the kuraka allowed Andean communities to regain a degree of control over the flow of labor and tribute and

to incorporate the search for prosperity into their daily experience; on the other, their relations with Spanish society

strengthened local elites and eventually altered the traditions of productive labour. Stern writes:

[I]t is not surprising that the majority of the agricultural and artisanal surplus, and a considerable amount of the tributes in precious metals funneled to the Europeans rested heavily on the kuraka’s ability to mobilize the labor of the kinfolk in accordance with traditional Andean norms and expectations. More striking, however, is that even in the most dynamic sectors of the colonial economy-mining and textile manufactures-the Europeans could not transcend their reliance upon the kurakas. Andean participation in the commercial economy was real. They embraced the entry of commercial capital onto the Andean stage; only later would they discover that the embrace was deadly. (40)

According to Stern, native communities “displayed an open, aggressive-even enthusiastic-attitude” toward the commercial

opportunities that seemed to open up for some. These opportunities also opened the way for cultural exchange. At elite

levels, Indians such as the yanaconas served as the retainers of their colonial masters and learned Spanish styles of dress

and habit. Their willing adaptation to Spanish culture and social norms was a sign of “loyalty” that “swelled the effective

numbers of colonizers.”22 Cultural adaptation occurred at the level of the autonomous allyu societies as well. The Lucanas

Andamarcas natives incorporated the symbols of the Catholic religion into their own with the construction of a native

church of Santa Ana but did not perceive the move to require that native society abandon its traditional huacas. In other

words, they did not see Christianity and their own religion in exclusive terms. Neither did the Otavalenos, who included a

Christ-like god among their syncretizing religion’s pantheon of deities. But this figure appeared, ironically, as a kind of

land surveyor. Is this an example of a native religion absorbing the stress of colonialism and seeking to somehow explain

the foreign claim on their land, or hegemony at its worst? According to Stern, Indigenous people gained in the short term

but lost in the long run of their engagement with the colonial regime. It would seem that wealth set the terms and tipped the

balance to the Spanish side, as cultural exchange lead to adaptation, and adaptation to the consolidation of power.

Despite the relative success of their adaptation to colonial conditions, the growing sophistication of the colonial

regime forced Huamanga’s native people to confront the decline of local autonomy, relationships, and production.23 The

culture, politics, and economy of the colonial regime worked together against Andean culture in Stern’s account of the rise

of Spanish “civil society.” He observes that the creation of a system of justice eliminated the relative flexibility of the

22 Ibid, p. 55.23 Ibid, p. 49.

ecomendero system and initiated a period of class formation among the indigenous population that effectively divided

Andean society between the labourer, who worked dangerous jobs for low wages while watching his or her culture

disappear, and the aspiring aristocrat, who frequently adopted the Spanish styles and ways in order to get ahead. During the

crisis of the 1560s, the taquiongo movement challenged Spanish authority and native complicity by pressuring local elites

to cut their ties with the colonial regime and renew Andean loyalties and rejuvenate Andean culture. This ethnic uprising

failed to achieve ethnic solidarity beyond its own membership. Once the Toledan reforms consolidated the colonial regime

in the 1570s, natives could only air their grievances to a formal legal system designed to defend colonial interests.

Resistance to colonialism, then, became bound up in the colonial system itself. As indigenous people came to need the help

of their exploiters to resist exploitation, they also walked into a cultural trap when they began to adopt Spanish ways. For

Indians, “the paths to success” depended on their ability to negotiate their own assimilation to Hispanic-mestizo society.

But as Stern points out, little separation existed between the cultural and economic dimensions of life in Indian societies.24

The spread of Hispanic culture manifested itself in the resources Indians used in material production, such as with Indian

artisans who adopted the use of Spanish tools, and more generally through native production of such prototypically Spanish

goods as eggs and beef for consumption by colonial elites, both Spanish and Indian.25 Also, the metastasis of Hispanic

culture took form through the appropriation of Spanish titulature by ladinos, who came to think of themselves as colonial

nobility, and adopted Spanish culture through symbolically charged forms of representation, despite their Indian origins.

Stern explains how wealthy Indians sought to transcend their origins through clothing that represented their aspirations

rather than their affiliation with tradition and the past:

Andean culture esteemed cloth highly as a ritual article, and as an emblem of ethnic affiliation and social position. Natives who wore fine Hispanic clothes vividly expressed an aspiration to move beyond a condemned Indian past and merge into the upper strata of colonial society. Andean thought interpreted “religious” relationships as a mutual exchange which provided material reward to those who served the gods. Christian devotion by wealthy Indians symbolized their attempt to nurture a mutually beneficial interchange with the Hispanic world, its gods, (including saints) as well as its people.26

Once again we return to a central problem regarding Indian culture. The introduction of European-style

commercial relationships as the basis of human relations led to the repackaging of culture as the vector of socioeconomic

24 Ibid, p. 16925 Ibid, p. 16726 Ibid, p. 170

aspirations. Through the appropriation of Spanish culture, Indians could attempt to transcend their origins by buying into

Spanish life. It remains true for indigenous people today, while conversely there also seems to be some pressure, especially

among people with money and opportunity in the West, to transcend a condemned vision of material progress via cultural

adventure and the pursuit of the “authentic” through the consumption of ethnic arts. In Huamanga, the “mutually beneficial

interchange” that looks like an embrace of other cultures, one contemporary Western students of Latin America might find

difficult to disparage, also happened to represent the material aspirations of its socio-economically striving practitioners,

and the consequences hit hardest among the lower labouring segment of the Andean population who became cut off from

traditional ways of living through their necessary reliance on ladino leadership. Wealthy and accultured Indian elites

“flagrantly violated the world view and psychology of colonialism” and unsettled the herrenvolk privilege enjoyed by all

whites over all Indians that legitimized colonial exploitation by contradicting the racial and cultural stereotypes which held

that Indians were essentially lazy and inferior and therefore deserving of the bottom rung in an emerging socioeconomic

hierarchy.27And so these indigenous elites, a kind of colonial middle-class, shared ambivalent relations with both white and

Indian society and ran the risk of alienation from both in that their hybrid identities--Spanish by choice but forever Indian

by birth--dictated they were never to feel at home in either culture.28 Ironically, alienation and cultural “seeking” are

perhaps a starting point for intercultural recognition and respect. But in an era when cultural pluralism was far from a

priority, it was also the way that “weaker” or less functional cultures faded away. These elites condemned their culture and

sought to forget their past. According to Stern, the tragedy of success lay precisely in this relationship, “in the way it

recruited dynamic, powerful, or fortunate individuals to adopt Hispanic styles and relationships, thereby buttressing

colonial domination.”29 These Indian elites looked liked exceptions to racial or cultural rules. By emancipating their

economic lives from the traditional Andean system of reciprocity and obligation, ladinos actually implied, through their

success, that the culture they emerged from then condemned could not produce or retain the successful individuals who

disproved stereotypes surrounding it. As such, the Indians looked like exceptions that proved the rule. Stern puts the

complicated relationship between success and origins in a culture of rising Spanish hegemony this way: “Indians succeeded

not because they were Indian, but because they could, to a certain extent, recast themselves as Europeans despite their

27 Ibid, p. 180.28 Ibid, p. 18129 Ibid, p. 159

racial inheritance.”30 In such a climate it was unlikely that a taquiongo-style ethnic movement would rise to challenge the

economic power of colonial elites, though the lure of colonial cities, of cultural oblivion and freedom from the past, drove

deeper wedges between those ostensibly in need of cultural purification, the Indian elites, and the rural peasants they

represented and/or brokered the exploitation of. Thus native society experienced a breakdown along emerging class lines,

as some Andeans gained access to Spanish society, and the traditional faded from view. In Stern’s study, native Peruvian

culture came into being through a process of social conflict and transformation, through which essentialist views of inferior

Indian nature and culture were disproved. At the very least, this should also make one wary of asserting the priority of

“traditional” native culture, because as Stern argues, “the challenge of conquest…is Huamanga’s most enduring heritage.”31

Brooke Larson shows that this culture-transforming challenge to conquest continued during the 19th century in

Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Andean peoples suffered a double indignity: of economic incorporation as wage

labourers and subsidizers of modernity, and as excluded cultural losers at the ideological level of nationhood based on a

“new age of discovery, conquest, and colonization of the “Indian race.” They also disproved supposed racial truths and the

legitimacy of such a vicious, recapitulative national program “by pursuing everyday economic, political, and cultural

strategies that undermined and challenged rigid Indian-white bipolarities.”32 According to Larson, “…hegemonic

imaginings of the rural Indian hinterlands and the “Indian problem” could not recognize or acknowledge the multiple

cultural and economic pathways that more and more Andean peoples were following out of an increasingly stigmatized

Indianness.”33 Rather, “one of the cultural legacies of nineteenth-century Andean history was the negotiation of diverse,

ambiguous ethnic self-identities,” a vindication of mestizaje that does not excuse “whitening” or “civilizing” but could put

cultural assimilation in a slightly more favourable light.34 Indigenous people made use of the available. Nevertheless, the

dominant story of the 19th century held that fledgling Latin American countries would arrive in a future of market-driven,

culturally homogenous nations only under the direction of reforming intellectuals and elites for whom “racial destiny” was

pressing and real. Many 19th century liberal reformers embraced “whitening” through European immigration as means to

combat the Indian problem that seemed to shackle the nation to a future of perpetual regression. For Indians however, a

degree of autonomy if not cultural redemption occurred at the economic level, in regional markets beyond the modernizing

30 Ibid, p. 188.31 Stern, p. 193.32 Larson, p. 571.33 Ibid, p. 572.34 Ibid, p. 572.

capital. But their escape from a stigmatized Indianness also produced floating labour forces, transience and community

fragmentation, and the emergence of an “amorphous mestizo majority” which only deepened the Indian problem, according

to modernizers.35 Strangely, contemporary advocates of traditionalism seem to hold a similar interpretation of cultural

mestizaje to that of the more liberal modernizers of the 19th century. Neither viewed it as the product of native people

adopting diverse ethnic “self-identities” in order to negotiate their lives. Both see it as a move that threatens the body

politic. How did this view obscure native agency and contributions to nationhood based on ideologies that denied the very

possibility that Indians could play such a positive role? Peru and Ecuador are worth looking at here in order to get a sense

of the complex interaction between ideology and real life, and how throughout Latin American society the ideal of

whitening came up against the reality of cultural mestizaje, a process by which native societies were marginalized by

outside efforts to force their assimilation to mainstream society while carrying forth with their own tradition of Andean

insurgency as well.

In Peru and other Andean republics, the “Indian problem” was viewed by even the most “liberal” of the 19th

century liberal reformers as a kind of ball and chain, slowing the progress the nation. Larson also shows how the indigenous

people of the Andean highland campaigned against, and contradicted through their wartime republican heroism and more

prosaic everyday routines, both the civilizing policies of the Peruvian state and the later more tolerant but no less dignifying

“patronage paradigm of Indian oppression.” For the nation to modernize it was necessary for the Indian to be civilized or

reformed from without, to be made to see the error of his or her ways. By the conclusion of the War of the Pacific the

Indian was regarded as an impediment to progress that the republic needed to purge. More liberal thinkers believed the

Indian needed to be saved. And the difference may be marginal in its consequence. In any event, reformers considered

native backwardness and apathy to be the cause of the republic’s greatest shame: its defeat at the hands of Chilean invaders.

Larson identifies the two intertwined reforms Prado’s government put into place under its “conquest” Indian policy, the

first a revival of the constitutional liberalism of the 1820s by which Indians were redefined as citizens with equality before

the law, the second a revival of oppressive land reforms. Together, these reforms meant that Indians were repackaged in an

abstraction as “citizens,” and became “last among equals” in an institutional and moral setting that revoked their right to

communal property. The rights of citizenship did not really apply to Indians; in addition, the basis of Andean community

came under attack. As Larson writes, these reforms “marked the beginning of the republic’s sustained assault on Indian

35 Ibid, p. 567

communities.”36 In 1866, Indian resentment led to insurgence in Huancane. The Prado government responded with

immediate force, instituting a “campaign of state terror” intended to exterminate native populations and permanently

extinguish the possibility of resistance. According to Larson, “the rebellion of Huancane…unmasked a harsher, militarized

republic that redefined Indians-all Indians-as tributaries without rights, and as potential enemies of the nation.” But Indian

culture did not disappear. And the “Indian problem” persisted in the eyes of reformers. In coalition with coastal oligarchs,

the Pardo government attempted to “civilize” the Indian for his own benefit and for the prosperity of the nation. This

redemption project called for Indians to be released “from their material and moral bondage, to feudal estates, and to their

own subsistence communities and cultural practices as well.”37 The person gained a kind of citizenship; the Indian, Andean

culture, and “Indianness” lost status. Similarly, Colombia and Ecuador attempted to assimilate Indians by eliminating the

racial category from census records. Hoping to create “new Indians” in Peru, Pardo sought to remold the Indian as a

cultureless, low wage worker by introducing labour schools and “forced hispanization” through Spanish language

instruction. Later, Nicolas de Pierola, “the self-style Indian Protector,” appealed to “his Indians” to sacrifice for the national

war effort against Chile in exchange for government support against local tyrants--an irony, Larson points out, because it

was “Indian soldiers themselves who punctured the myth of Pierola’s “’Protectorate,’” revived the rhetoric of equality and

citizenship, and thereby took political matters into their own rough hands. So much for the power of paternalism.”38 It

seems that to be objects of paternalism was the best Indians could hope for from republican governments in their relations

with Spanish-mestizo society.

Larson’s condemnation of paternalism bears notice today as much as it should have been heeded then, because so

often during the post-conquest republican period native people have engaged with mainstream society in a positive way, as

rebels or dissident-citizens, as Indians who were and are anything but helpless and passive and mute. During the period of

civil insurrection that followed the war, Peruvian nationmakers consolidated a theory of defeat that blamed the highland

Indian’s lack of patriotism and republican zeal. Meanwhile, the Mantaro and Huaylas peasant movements protested for the

recognition of both the Indian contribution to the war and for a return to “good government” that would inculcate the

material and cultural conditions necessary for Indian villages to survive. The vara of Huaylas, for example, waged a paper

campaign consisting of petitions and documents drawn up my mestizo lawyers, in which in one 1887 example they asked:

36 Ibid, p. 623.37 Ibid, p. 629.38 Ibid, p. 628.

Why “should they give tribute and labor when they received in return only misery, hunger, and hardship.”39 The demand for

reciprocity is evident here as illustration that cultures re-assert their fundamental points in diverse ways, that tradition and

change and growth are not necessarily exclusive. According to Larson, “these dignified peasants indict[ed] the hypocritical

elites for not recognizing their patriotic contributions to the republic before and during the Pacific War, but they framed a

dissident history of the republic to challenge the moral basis of the posttributary state. Already in the 1880s the politics of

ethnicity were beginning to implicate the ethics of nationalism.”40 In the first decades of the 20th century, Cuzco

intellectuals sought to recapture the nation’s authentic cultural patrimony by rediscovering the Indian as a source of

national pride. But postwar reformation reinstalled the official version of Indian nature, and its deleterious consequences for

the nation. According to Larson, cultural mestizaje offered no solution to the “Indian problem” for these reformers.

Through the prism of national ideology, the misti landowner was viewed as an impediment to whitening, the Indian mestizo

a “pariah.”41 There was no easy exit from the “Indian problem,” a fact articulated by the modernizers who constantly

reformulated it, and the indigenous people who constantly challenged their assumptions. In this sense, liberal modernizers

were not the only reformers; indigenous people had a say in the future direction of their republics as well. In retrospect

there is no easy way to deny that Peruvians missed a chance to introduce a more inclusive nationhood. Rather, governed by

racial essences and republican universalism, Andean states disguised a weighted deck in a political tradeoff. Larson

identifies 19th century Andean history as the period when indigenous peoples were “transfigured” into “biological subjects,”

a basic insult designed to render all challenge moot as further proof of recalcitrance or “backwardness.” At the same time,

republican citizenship dangled the possibility of inclusion by making indigenous people universal subjects, by supposedly

giving them rights and a voice. “Formally Indians lost their colonial-derived legal rights to collective existence and

protection, and they became individuals subject to universal contract law. Informally they assumed the biological attributes

of an inferior racial group, whose very character rendered them unfit for civil society,” Larson writes.42 Suffering such

diminutions, it is surprising that indigenous cultures existed as more than resistance culture. Andeans transcended the

“Indian problem” through their protest, citizenship, and everyday actions. But their transforming challenges could only do

so much to repeal the significant wedge that racism and modernization, as well as change and growth within indigenous

39 Ibid, p. 654.40 Ibid, p. 65841 Ibid, p. 65842 Ibid, p. 686.

culture itself, had driven between indigenous people and their past. In fact, they resisted the republics to protect something

far from traditional. As Larson points out, they protested for the rights of citizenship, and laid the foundation for future

protest in the name of equality and cultural pluralism--all of which has much to say about, but maybe little capacity to

change, the private racism that makes those rights irrelevant in both private and public life. During colonialism native

people retained a degree of autonomy. But they were not free. Later, they had few real rights in a system where legal,

republican rights emerged as the supposed guarantor of freedom. Now, when native people gain a degree of material

security they still risk “culture loss” due to assimilation. And it is hard to call indigenous peoples’ service of Western

patrons in the theme park of “authenticity” a rediscovery of their most “significant patrimonies.”

The cyclical aspect of Latin American history is always evident, especially if that is what one, “armed with dark

suppositions,” is prepared to encounter. For progressives and cynics in the West, the recognition that good intentions often

have bad, unintended consequences both deepens and derives from the death of “Progress,” which casts suspicions over all

intentions and sometimes leads to a kind of gleeful defeatism as well. That “Progress” has failed is perhaps the feeblest

self-criticism the West can levy against itself. The priority shift among some in the West--from quantitative measurement,

utilitarianism, and industrial growth, to quality of life assessments, cultural pluralism, and spiritual growth—attests to the

fact that progress is eminently revisable, and probably no less corrupt. We do not banish Progress when we dispense with

viewing the world through the cash nexus. The cult of Progress goes by different a different name, Justice. Similarly, we

think we are on the right track. (While even those committed to the permanent italicization of “Progress” measure their

success by their fame.) Cycles, hauntings, timelessness (if not entropy and regression)--these are features of the indigenous

world view as well. One of the better things one can do with one’s life is to look elsewhere for insights, to learn about the

“self” and the “other” by how the other views you. But the native worldview also serves as fodder for the consumption of

culture as product, the damaging and marginalizing search for the “authentic,” the New Agey stuff of the late modern

Western experience. So it seems that a repudiation of the Newtonian universe and all it has wrought only leads us back into

committing the kind of Western-centric offenses we thought the death of Progress could help us avoid. Can we gain any

perspective on the Latin American indigenous experience, or do all who engage the search for “perspective” about or

through the indigenous experience only deepen the colonialism of the past? Joe Kane, Katherine Milton, and a host of

authors writing on the contemporary situations and possibilities of Latin America’s indigenous people deal with

fundamental questions about indigenous culture. What problems and solutions should one be wary of entertaining? Where

does the familiar Indian/man double bind reassert itself once again? Can anything be said to be non-negotiable if Indians

have gained some security from market economies while also retaining features of the “traditional” life through cultural

hybridity? Or is it necessary for indigenous people and students of their experience to establish what is non-negotiable so

that indigenous people can be saved from the same market economy, one that also exploits labourers and makes a fetish of

the "traditional" and "authentic,” thus signaling conclusively that the traditional and authentic are gone and the search for it

a kind of sham or grand self-delusion, a self-perpetuating mess?

According to Woodrow Borah, it is easier to forget about culture, and, by implication, identity politics as well.

Borah argued that when we speak of “Indians,” we actually refer to an impoverished labourer or an alienated peasant.43 His

Marxist argument highlighted the difficulty of identifying indigenous people by traditional markers of ethnicity, perhaps

even more difficult today as indigenous cultures infuse other cultures and indigenous people continue to adopt European

culture for their own use, as Europeans begin to pay homage to the indigenous people who with scarce positive recognition

have played an essential role, as labourers and cultural losers, in the construction of Latin American nations, and hence in

the rise of the North American and European nations that Latin American nations have served as a resource-rich

geopolitical outposts, as well. But this history only makes cultural identity more pressing. It would seem to propose the

need for a new culture-based creation story. However, even the most culturally-sensitive accounts seem to do damage to the

indigenous experience. In Katherine Milton’s anthropological account, the thin line between sympathy and paternalism is

exposed in a portrayal of indigenous people she obviously appreciates, but also marginalizes. Milton laments that they have

been seduced by such stereotypically Western ailments as sugar addiction, like children. She holds them up as a simplistic

ideal with the reminder that electricity and a functioning postal service are not all they are cracked up to be. In Milton’s

account, this innocent indigenous culture provides a noble counterpoint to the West. Not surprisingly, Milton wavers on

whether cultural change is good or bad, inevitable or whatever.

The Indians begin to produce extra arrows or blowguns or hunt additional game or weave baskets beyond what they need so that this new surplus can be traded. Time that might, in the past, have been used for other tasks—subsistence activities, ceremonial events, or whatever—is now devoted to production of barter goods. In addition, actual settlement patterns may be altered so that the indigenous group is in closer, more immediate contact with sources of manufactured items. Neither

43 Borah, Woodrow, “Race and Class in Mexico,” in Jorge Dominguez, ed., Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), p. 12.

of these things, in itself, is necessarily good or bad, but each does alter traditional behaviour.44

Since what is meant by traditional behavior is unclear, Milton’s observation is difficult to argue with. But by seeing these

people as fundamentally different, as premodern and once outside the encroaching West, she actually absolves people of

European origin of having to remember that they live in on a continent founded by Amerindians. Strangely however, her

definition of the “traditional” seems to be largely defined by what some consider to be “traditional” within the West, the

“conservative” that progressives in Western industrialized nations have sought to displace. Milton cites the anthropologist

Bill Balee’s finding that the Ka’apor Indians of Maranhao State have lived in “peaceful coexistence with outsiders since

1928” yet retain many features of the traditional life due to the persistence of the “nuclear family”--the essence of

republican order and the “bedrock institution” at the root of the post-war Western society that set the “technological roller

coaster” in motion in the first place. Milton concludes by agreeing with the lamentation that “we can’t all go back to the

jungle, we can’t become forest-living Indians….[but] I’m not sure we wouldn’t be far happier if we could.”45 Perhaps.

Milton argument that the introduction of Western materialism “can be a thin edge of a wedge that will gradually alter the

behaviour and ecological practices of an entire society” seems sound (though, as Diamond points out, historically disease

spreads faster than material culture). And if there is nothing inherently good or bad about cultural change, then perhaps

there is also nothing wrong with taking the measure of one’s own materialistic existence, as Milton does, through the

anthropological “participant-observation” of another. But we should remember that exalting a society for its innocence,

rather than for what it is, has much the same effect as dismissing or demonizing it for its “backwardness.” Milton criticizes

the “pacification” efforts that have lured “forest-dwelling Indians” out of their seclusion and into the “wider economic

sphere” throughout history. But what are the Indians in her account if not passive ideals for a kind of Western self-

criticism? Participant-observer anthropology seeks to move past the omniscient, top-down views common to traditional

anthropology. Nevertheless, Milton’s study seems even more abstract and reductive of indigenous culture, her participant-

observer anthropology even more impersonal than the brand of anthropology it replaces despite its allowances for the

author’s personal experience—maybe because this experience frames her account. Milton’s Indians represent a kind of

lapsarian moment in her portrayal. “In the past, when stone axes were used, various individuals came together and worked

44 Milton, Katherine, “Civilization and its Discontents,” in Susan E. Place, ed., Tropical Rainforests: Latin American Nature and Society in Transition (Wilmington: SR Books, 1993), p. 25.45 Ibid, p. 27-28.

communally to fell trees for a new garden,” Milton writes. “With the introduction of the steel ax, however, one man can

clear a garden by himself [and] collaboration is no longer mandatory nor particularly frequent.” So what should we make of

her criticism of Western culture, including mail and the automobile, which—sure—frustrate and annoy and exact a toll on

the rest of the world but also facilitate cooperation and engagement? It might not be all that reductive of Milton’s article to

say that it poses as a criticism of individualism and the loss of the “traditional” while inadvertently celebrating atomization

and cultural isolation, since might we not be happier in the jungle? Her “perceptions of the rainforest” filter a view of its

inhabitants as helpless wards requiring the veteran guidance of those who have modernity wanting. Certainly many

indigenous communities exist at the edge of the modern civilization, at the precipice of some kind of abyss, unprepared for

the fall that many want to save them from. But doesn’t Milton’s anthropology miss the fact that indigenous people like the

Huaorani seek to retain their culture and land, and their sovereignty as well, but happen to be much more “modern” than

perhaps Milton would care to admit?

Joe Kane’s ground-level narrative of the struggle for the preservation of indigenous land and culture precedes the

question of what indigenous people want or require by asking: who are the Huaorani? He finds that the Huaorani

themselves know very well who they are--“the people”--making efforts to define the Huaorani appear paternalistic and

prescriptions for cultural persistence seem fraught with implications of colonialism. One probably even commits an offense

by calling the Huaorani one among many “peoples.” But there is little doubt that the Huaorani is far from isolated. They

already have access to many Western luxuries and are beginning to consider them as necessities; according to Kane, many

Huaorani even ignore the consequences of their fascination with air travel by racking up bills to the airline that will indebt

future generations. Yet traditional Huaorani culture remains very much alive despite the “the cannibals” or the cowode--a

group that includes the missionaries who seek to convert them to Western Christian morality, the company who disregards

their presence and claims, Kane himself, and “everyone else on earth,” according to the Huaorani--who threaten it.46 As

Kane points out, it is untraditional for indigenous cultures to place the “national, or the interests of “the people” as a whole,

above the interests of the family unit. But that is what the Huaorani attempted to do to stem the intrusion of oil exploration

that proceeds under the fleeting, formal authority of the Ecuador government, a government that also purports to offer

protection from exploration and settlement that threatened to essentially exterminate a people and a culture for the sake of

thirteen day’s worth of oil consumption in America at the time of Kane’s writing. According to Kane, the Huaorani

46 Kane, Joe, “With Spears from All Sides” The New Yorker, Sept. 27, 1993, p. 57

traditionally reacted to such intrusions with armed force, an honour-based practice rooted in traditional lifeways that often

led to a seemingly endless series of murderous reprisal. There is little doubt that continued existence of traditional Huaorani

culture is in doubt. But is this significant aspect of traditional culture worth preserving? Rachel Saint, the “Big Nurse”-like

missionary who opened the Oriente to development through her own settlement and attempts to redeem a ‘barbarous,’

heathen people, clearly does not think so in Kane’s account. Kane reports Saint speaking on a wave of intratribal vengeance

killing in the middle of the 20th century: “they were committing ethnic suicide….Pure savages. I can’t think of any other

word for people who kill their own kind.”47 Vengeance killing may be ethnic suicide, but to call it savagery means indicting

pretty much the rest of the world of the charge as well. Like Progress, “savagery” takes many forms; it is obvious that even

the most “civilized” people wage honour-based killing in the form of large-scale preemptive and defensive wars. Saint’s

evangelism is an intrusion, the consequences of her settlement devastating not only because 20% of the region’s “wild

Aucas” succumbed to polio, a disease for which they had no immunity, upon her arrival; and her politics and rhetoric are

pretty offensive to the Huaorani and alien to anyone who thinks cultural respect a good thing. However, Saint’s admonition

of intratribal violence seems well within the boundaries on prescription about other cultures that ethnic politics require one

to observe, and should make us aware that the arguments for the preservation of indigenous culture and native assimilation

as Christian consumers are far from exclusive. The argument for preservation that casts a blind eye to vengeance killing

argues against the possibility of a more humane world.

Missionaries like Rachel Saint and evangelical groups like the Wycliffe Institute are not the only ones who

threaten indigenous culture, and there is merit to Saint’s argument that the people of the Amazon, like any other culture

group under internal pressure, threaten their own existence should vengeance killing remain a feature of the traditional life

they want to preserve. In Kane’s view, the environmentalist Robert Kennedy and his Rio Napo Foundation, which sought to

represent the Huaorani in their dealings with Conoco, are similarly guilty of undermining Huaorani culture by denying

Huaorani agency, by assuming to speak for, as Enquiri of the Huaorani notes, a people they have never met. Kane writes

for a popular audience, aiming to provoke a change of belief among American consumers who benefit from the exploitation

of the Oriente’s oil reserves and the turbulent state of Huaorani culture. Having shown the downsides of all those

interventions both positive and negative, Kane’s story ends with a note of pathos, perhaps the only way it could. The

Huaorani stay home on Columbus Day in 1992, as thousands of Indians descend on Quito in Ecuador to protest and rally

47 Ibid, p. 72.

around speakers who brandish spears purchased from tourist shops, as if, as the “bravest people in the Amazon,” they did

not need even need to prove it. By forming the OMHAE to speak as a collective, the Huaorani broke with tradition and also

cleared away doubt as to who, precisely, they were, but maybe not the need for the kind of support or endorsement whose

double-edge Kane exposes. The Huaorani are “the people.” The rest of the world is cowode. The Huaorani, in some sense,

became more isolated in the process of alerting the world to its grievance.

By the 1970s, three perspectives had come to dominate the discussion of the dilemma that faced Mexico’s Indian

population, and in certain respects these perspectives frame the debate concerning Latin America’s indigenous populations

and cultural preservation today. According to Alan Riding, many traditional anthropologists viewed Indians in strictly

cultural terms, and tended to favour the isolation of Indians under a protective, mediating, governmental umbrella.

However, as we see in the case of the Huaorani of Ecuador, the pressure to modernize persists for cash-strapped Latin

American governments. Often it outweighs even the most genuine governmental efforts to preserve indigenous cultural

identity. By contrast, Marxists argued that the preservation of cultural distinction denied what Indians needed most: to be

brought into the market economy in order to be saved as peasants or proletariats. They viewed culture as secondary--and

suspect. Remarkably however, the Marxist prescription for the first step indigenous people should take in order to improve

their condition had much in common with the capitalist perspective which says that social problems can be solved, and

culture preserved, through inclusion in supposedly democratic market economy. Lastly, a pluralist interpretation assumed

the difficult task of reconciling the double bind by eschewing assimilation for the belief that the survival of Indian groups

enriched Mexico as a whole. This view implied that “social development need not imply cultural integration.” Apolinar de

la Cruz, spokesman for the National Council of Indian Peoples, explained the enervating effects of paternalism to Miguel

de la Madrid as the former campaigned for the Mexican presidency in 1982. Paternalism “has corrupted generations, it has

blunted our ethnic and class consciousness…it aims to protect us until we are ready to act on our own, but it prevents us

from developing a capacity to look after ourselves.”48 Madrid responded by encapsulating what amounts to a contemporary

liberal ideal: “To create a national culture does not mean imposing uniformity. Rather, it means recognizing the diversity

and wealth of expressions that comprise Mexican culture….If we lose something of Huichol culture, not only the Huicholes

but all of us will lose.”49 Riding elaborates on the double bind when discussing the absorption of the Nahuas, Otomis, and

48 Riding, Alan, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 202-20349 Ibid, p. 202-203.

Mazahuas who live closest to Mexico City into the mestizo way of life. Many come to Mexico City looking for work, to

sell or beg. According to Riding, in the process they pick up different habits and become “barely distinguishable from other

peasant migrants working on building sites or sweeping streets….Their need to survive physically inevitably threatens the

survival of their culture.”50 And all that can remain for indigenous people is the interior life, a feeling of certitude that their

sense of Indianness may be touched and harmed but never destroyed by the convulsive modern world they engage.

“Perhaps the only thing not stolen from the Indians has been their soul, their inaccessible world of strange languages and

dialects, of hidden pride and strong hierarchy, of deep religious sensitivity and powerful ritual, of mystery and magic,”

Riding writes.51 Is this enough, the most that anyone can demand or even hope for? What purpose does the transcendent

soul really serve?

While Indian communities have survived in some regions because of their internal religious and political cohesion,

it is arguable, as Riding points out when observing the particular, almost unassailable nature of this aspect of these culture,

whether such a necessarily and understandably defensive culture can bridge the differences with others in the way that

pluralistic understanding would seem to require. As Llosa entreaties, Spanish society first needs to accept indigenous

people. But to join in a nation of cultures it would seem necessary that particular cultures be open to engagement in order to

set some of the terms by which they are perceived. Additionally, in Riding’s view, there is little material advantage to the

preservation of traditional lifeways. The cacique who once stood for the cultural integrity and economic autonomy of

indigenous communities now may simply be the largest landowner and most local oppressor in the region, and not

necessarily Indian. In many regions this figure deepens the isolation of indigenous communities by controlling the local

economy, with force if necessary, to maintain a state of “chronic indebtedness” to himself. Apolinar de la Cruz put the

relationship between caciques and the people this way: “With political power, the caciques prevent our remote villages

from being provided with adequate food, health, education and communications because it is evidently easier to control a

hungry, sick and ignorant people.”52 In Riding’s view, it is remarkable that indigenous culture has persisted where it has.

His is one of the grimmer assessments of the challenges facing indigenous culture, and does not consider the preservation

of the “traditional” to be rewarding in itself. The same culture Mexico’s indigenous people have fought to preserve also

happens to be a self-selected prison “from which the only escape is surrender to the mestizo way of life”—and therefore no

50 Ibid, p. 209.51 Ibid, p. 214.52 Ibid, 211.

real escape at all. Just as the premise of a multicultural nation gains acceptance in Mexico, the market economy and the

mestizo way of life attracts the children of a culture that consigns them to fatalism and failure in the world around them.

Riding highlights some additional problems as well. Many indigenous people have already taken the opportunity to forget

their cultural inheritance and reject the opportunity to make it more relevant. They have rejected both the elusive

“traditional” as well as their real cultural origins. Religious ceremonies are celebrated with less fervor than in the past

according to Riding’s citation of Jacinto Gasparillo, who writes that the Indians of Guerrero “prefer to watch television,

rather than participate in the annual ceremony on May 2 asking for rain.”53 As unfortunate as this lack of cultural vigilance

or attention to tradition may seem, what cultural groups in the West have not experience this kind of cultural change? Is

there anything particularly unique, then, about the indigenous cultural/material bind? For Riding, neither the traditional nor

the mestizo ways of life address the social problems facing indigenous people. To put it differently, whereas some culture

groups see their traditions fading into anachronism, Indians continue to be scorned for their culture and ethnicity or race

even after supposedly subsuming their identity in the marketplace. Perception matters, and frequently it is racial difference,

rather than ethnicity, that mestizo society perceives. In Riding’s view, the globalized culture and the market economy do

not allow room for cultural difference. But the market does not whiten after all.

First, what matters more: whether indigenous people understand themselves as Indian, or whether they are

perceived as Indian, and guilty of all the term entails? How do self-ascription and perception combine to comprise “ethnic

identity? Alan Sandstrom recognizes that cultural boundaries are permeable, as Indians have influenced mestizo culture and

been influenced by this culture as well. According to Sandstrom, who qualifies himself as an outsider, “Indianness” is a

“matter of degree rather than kind,” and whatever makes one Indian need not necessarily be lost in the pursuit of material

security. Sandstrom points to the example of one man in the region covered in his study, an Indian named Julio Martines

who speaks Spanish as well as Nahuatl, the language of everyday use for his family. Martines wears Western style clothing

and sends his daughter to private school but continues to sponsor and attend Nahuatl communal rituals; he makes his living

as a farmer and a Popsicle vendor; his “outlook, many economic activities, dress, speech, and other characteristics would

seem to link him with the mestizo world” though he continues to perceive himself as Indian and retains the cultural traits

that Sandstrom believes Indians must retain in order to be considered Indian, such as self-definition and reverence for the

traditional pantheon of spirits that, despite religious syncretism in Sandstrom’s view, derive mainly from “Native American

53 Ibid, p. 218.

traditions.”54 Martines maintains a real connection to his culture’s past. Also according to Sandstrom, “Ethnicity is often

situational in that people decide when and how to assert their identity using different strategies at different times.” Thus

Sandstrom opens the way to reconsider ethnicity as fluid, taking us back to Stern’s observation that Indian identity has been

conditioned by engagement since 1492, and the need to stop at 1492, given Hulme’s contention that assertions about pre-

Columbian native culture are speculative and maybe imperial because we may do an injustice by perceiving something in

the past among pre-literate cultures that was not there. Sandstrom also opens the way to reconsider indigenous identity as

not only fluid but stable, through his observation on the endurance of the indigenous inner life. It is precisely this mixture

of the stable and the fluid that meets its enemy in racism that is equally essential, fleeting and strategic, as Colloredo

Mansfield observes while showing the challenges to the cultural triumph of the Otavalenos. Racism is sanctioned by

ideology and custom; it is reinforced by visceral daily contact that seems to highlight timeless Indian inferiority through

which the perception of racial difference continues to operate.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfield shows how the perception of “Indianess” continues to hinge of qualitative assessments

of racial hygiene. In other words, the “dirty Indian,” a stock figure of the 19th century discourse of racial destinies,

continues to exist in the eyes of mestizo society, which takes it difference through bourgeois norms of hygiene and

presentation. According to Colloredo-Mansfield, “the odours, textures, and materials of rural life become racial emblems as

the white-mestizo elite constitute themselves and their national authority by pursuing an elusive physical and moral ideal:

cleanliness.”55 Race exists as social fact.56 Colloredo-Mansfield attempts to examine the discursive force of race while also

showing how ethnicity operates in Otavalo, where it is a “two-way street” that keeps the reality of fluid identities in view

and hence, the promise of a national culture that it is at once common and pluralistic, as well. What is significant here is

that the Otavalenos accept an enlarged understanding of ethnicity, the media-indigenas, a term that “reinvents” the idea of

mestizaje” and works against fixed notions of race.57 For the indigenas themselves, their assertion of ethnic difference and

the persistence of their traditional culture have important economic consequences. It is the foundation of their craft

business, as “First World tourists search for authentic, non-industrial artifacts, weavers oblige by adapting their skills and

54 Sandstrom, Alan R. “Ethnic Identity and its Attributes in a Contemporary Mexican Indian Village” in John Kicza, ed, The Indian in Latin American History (Wilmington: SR Books, 2000), p. 273.55 Colloredo-Mansfield, Rudi, “Dirty Indians’ Radical Indigenas, and the Political Economy of Social Difference in Modern Ecuador,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 17:2 (1998), p. 187.56 Ibid, p. 201. 57 Ibid, p. 194.

wares to new tastes.”58

Otavalos culture persists then, in a way, as a marketable good, and remains the foundation of the media-indigena

identity that “perhaps most clearly and effectively deconstructs the opposition of modern and traditional” and hence also

that between the Indian and the man.59 According to Colloredo Mansfield, “Prosperity…has not induced Otavalenos to

sever ties with the past….[C]ultural difference provides a resource for indigena to get ahead in the modern world while

preserving the strength of native traditions.”60 The continued cultural distinctiveness of the region attracts thousands of

foreigners to the local markets of Otavalos each year. In addition, they display this cultural difference in their travels

throughout the world, as many Otavalenos now live in a “trade diaspora” that stretches from Quito to Amsterdam.

“Wherever they live, their appearance marks their identity,” Colloredo-Mansfield writes.61 The Otavalenos have also

achieved a degree of political recognition, to go along with the cultural recognition they have achieved while moving above

a marginalized position in the labour force, without endorsing an exclusionary ethnic nationalism. According to Colloredo-

Mansfield, “Even as indigenous leaders fight for their cause, they are careful not to repudiate the sovereignty of the nation.

The goal is not independence but an equitable integration reflecting indigenous values.” Nevertheless, we should wonder if

this integration doesn’t somehow recapitulate the trivializing effects of the 19th and 20th century national identities, which

marginalized native culture by celebrating only those aspects of it that had faded into history. Hybrid indigena identities,

such as those many Otavalenos perform through their engagement in the market economy and return to traditional forms of

cultural and community expression, seem to reconcile the cultural/material double bind. According to Colloredo-Mansfield,

“Claims to native status authenticate Otavaleno products and sustain the international marketing of handicrafts. Drawing on

an ideology of ethnic difference, indigenous political leaders gain official recognition of their own distinctive culture while

at the same time become stronger participants in national political institutions. The politics of ethnicity offers the possibility

of inclusion on terms at least partly set by indigenas themselves.”62

But is there anything less stable than survival through participation in an economy based on a “traditional” that

exists partly because Western tourists, eager to engage with the non-industrial, wish it so? How solid are the terms the

Otavalenos set themselves? What happens to the Otavalenos political power when the Western money goes elsewhere? The

58 Ibid, p. 194.59 Ibid, p. 201.60 Ibid, p. 201.61 Ibid, p. 189.62 Ibid, p. 201.

contradictions highlighted by Colloredo-Mansfield bear repeating. Such inclusion gives legitimacy to protest. But it also

limits the force and range of that protest because it aims ultimately at “harmonious relations,” or accommodation, with

white-mestizo society. A 1990 Ecuadorian indigenas uprising “politicized” the Inti-Raymi sun festival in that the festival

coincided with a national protest over land. It was a “sacrament of dignity” that reaffirmed indigenous culture and placed its

practitioners on “the national stage as important social actors” in recognition that cultural and political claims are often one

and the same. In some sense this means that indigenous people must accommodate oppressive national institutions while

protesting them—“the tragedy of success,” according to Steven Stern. In fact, as Colloredo-Mansfield notes, many

Otavalenos considered the protests of the early 90s to be yanga or futile, feeling instead that solidarity within the

community, and a measure of control over production that cannot be achieved when production is geared toward the tourist

market for “traditional” and “authentic” goods, are more important for indigenous people to pursue. And finally, the

emphasis on ethnicity and culture has done little to absolve the Indian of the racial affront he commits simply by being

himself or herself in the eyes of white-mestizo society. “The racism of an elderly white-mestizo is inextricably entangled in

the smell of cement dust and eucalyptus smoke coming off the poncho of a man riding next to him on a bus,” Colloredo-

Mansfield writes.63 Race continues to factor into perceptions of social difference. It is far from unusual that Westerners seek

the gritty authenticity of native life and cultural products, which offer contrast from the equally stereotypical view of

Western material culture as simultaneously sterile and mass-produced, and relief from the worry that all one’s purchases

and culture might leave one feeling empty. Hybrid identities are the product of this sort of engagement, and they allow

social and economic room for maneuver, but does the notion of hybrid identity lose its force or validity when we consider

that what makes it possible for Otavalenos to preserve their culture is its production for the market? In other words, that it is

strictly “for us,” that “our” enjoyment and fulfillment keeps “them” alive and doing what we pay them to do as we go

looking for diversity in its natural habitat? It is difficult to determine what’s worse: the racism on the bus or the racism that

which seems implicit in all such commercial transactions. Proponents of the Pan-Mayan movement argue they are

intertwined.

On the surface, the pan-Mayan movement does not seem all that different from the movement for recognition by

the Chiapas rebels, who articulated the desire for “harmonious relations” and the “formation of a more fundamental unity of

63 Ibid, p. 202.

all Mexican men and women…that recognizes the true diversity of the ethnic communities that make up modern Mexico.”64

This critique echoes the demand for indigenous rights contained within the pan-Mayan movement but traditionally de-

emphasized among those who identify with the “paradigm of class-based antagonism” and the “populare” movements

endorsed by leftists who sought to unify with impoverished mestizos. But it should be clear by this point that few strict

boundaries exist between perceptions of race and ethnicity, both which operate on questions of culture. The same is true

when class is added to the complex of perspectives that define social difference and the struggle for social justice. Indians

are not simply peasants, as Borah suggested. Indians occupy the lowest class in Latin American social and economic

hierarchies partly because they continue to be subjected to a depressing scorn that is racial in nature. Some perceive that

there is something essential about Indian traits, that dirtiness and even poverty are essentially Indian. And to outmaneuver

racism by reclaiming the ahistorical argument, according to Kay B. Warren in her article on the move toward

“heterogenous politics” in Latin America, Mayanists have emphasized the essentialism of indigenous culture, that “there is

a culturally specific indigenous way of knowing: a subject position no one else can occupy and political interests no one

else has to defend.”65 Pan-Mayanists have led many worthy projects designed to promote cultural diversity through efforts

to win recognition for Mayan culture; they have sought to preserve Mayan culture by calling for “a wider distribution of

cultural resources such as education and literacy in indigenous languages.”66 The pan-Mayan movement aims to redress all

of colonial history through the formulation of “counterhistories” and “searing critiques of foreign research practices and

scholarship.” They recognize that language is the basis of culture and have produced textbooks to promote indigenous

language retention. “They condemn colonialism and racism as an ongoing situation rather than a moment of sociogenesis

that occurred five centuries ago at the Spanish invasion,” according to Warren.67 As valuable and reasonable as much of

Pan-Mayanist program sounds, the movement is not without critics such as Mario Roberto Morales, who sees it as elitist

and alien to the needs of indigenous culture. Culture is a matter the market decides, Morales believes. Globalization has

brought indigenous people, “making the best capital available from their culture for investment in tourism and their best

merchandise for export…into global postmodernity.”68

Entertaining abstractions like “globalization” and “global postmodernity” seems like giving in to the omnipotent

64 Ibid, p. 201.65 Warren, Kay, Indigenous Movements and their Critics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 37.66 Ibid, p. 37.67 Ibid, p. 37.68 Ibid, p. 45.

and determinist “They.” But if Warren’s attention to his argument is any indication, Mario Roberto Morales has devised

some of the more penetrating critiques of the Pan-Mayan movement. It is difficult to disagree with Morales that “globalized

popular culture, hybridity…culturally fabricated otherness and mestizaje” call into question the existence of “the Maya.”69

George Lovell makes interesting points in this direction in the chapter of his book, A Beauty that Hurts, entitled “The T-

Shirt Parade,” where he meets a “true” Indian who may or may not also be a “trekkie” based on a t-shirt that proclaims such

an affiliation, others with t-shirts bearing obscure slogans and affiliations that Western urban hipsters would be proud to

wear, and Demetrio Cojti Cuxil, a prominent Mayan nationalist who speaks in familiar academic abstractions of a Mayan

culture that is at once “generic” and “locally articulated,” “elastic, fluid, flexible.”70 Whereas Lovell takes the hopeful

stance on the question of hybridity, citing Galeano’s assertion that “Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a

display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing contradictions of everyday life,” for Morales cultural identity seems to be

nothing more than the product of grand market forces that make “culture” seem false and disingenuous, more about kitsch-

value and rapid pop-culture turnover. For example, Morales argues that Maya intellectuals miss in their analysis and

defense of a “transcendent Mayaness” the people do not conform to such a rigid, formal and unrealistic bicultural scheme: a

new generation of Mayan kids “who walk around with tape players on their shoulder listening to heavy metal, with Reebok

shoes, punk haircuts, and t-shirts that say “Save the Tropical Rainforest.”71 As such, Warren cites Morales writing that

while he supports indigenous rights, Pan-Mayanism should be better regarded as a “construction,” the product of an

intellectual exercise doubly dangerous in that its creators deny their fundamental engagement with the “academic funders

market” and transnational forces at large at the cost of denying real Mayan history. Pan-Mayanism is top-down, according

to Morales, for whom it seems there is nothing particularly important about the effort to retain traditional indigenous

culture because it is far from “authentic” or “pure” to begin with, and not how indigenous people have chosen live within

the small room for maneuver that transnational culture flows allow. The Pan-Mayan movement is a “boom,” or a trend,

ultimately the product of Western paternalism that “incorporates (not separates) the marginal subject and the subaltern in

the globalizing scheme.”72 According to Morales, racism itself only exists where the Mayanists locate it through a narrow

lens wizened by class conflict.

69 Ibid, p. 42. 70 Lovell, W. George, A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995), p. 136.71 Warren, p. 42. 72 Ibid, p. 43.

There is something myopic about Morales’ assertion. It is cold to the notion that Mayans may have a special claim

and gives no credit at all for indigenous resistance and self-direction. Strangely, the only positive aspect of Morales’

“deconstruction” is an inclusive one, that together we belong to a grand mess, the Mayans locked with everyone else into

state of “inescapable otherness,” having already “lost the struggle for self-determination to the globalizing forces of

incorporation.” Morales sums up one view of the “modern condition” in which few feel settled or “at home” and no one

should expect to, where everything is in flux and no one is blameless, etc. The best Morales can prescribe in this vein is that

we, especially the Pan-Mayanists he sees as committed to a regressive and dishonest position that denies the cultural battle

has been lost, pick and chose where possible among what vast, diverse, deterministic forces allow. Accusing the Pan-

Mayanists in a language that is appropriate to his unsympathetic realist stance of attempting to “sell itself” as a “superior

fundamentalism,” Morales says no, and yes to the market once he makes clear he is aware that the culture it engenders is

basically delightfully fraudulent as well. To state the obvious, Morales does not leave much room for anything like “the

good” when arguing that cultural pluralism can only emerge through market forces, that purveyors of the “authentic” also

pay for what they sell. Refracting 500 years of colonial history through a pessimistic lens that reveals experience to be a

non-starter, Morales dispenses with the notion of progress but retains the faculty of reason, viewed on and off in the West

since antiquity as the agent of social progress, to an overwhelming degree. Morales’ analysis results in an impoverished

approach to race and ethnicity in Latin America and the question of indigenous rights and cultural persistence. Here, the

diagnosis means to be the prescription, which is strange because it puts such emphasis on the faculties that supposedly led

us into the “post-modern” mess in the first place. Under the weight of theory, culture can be seen to change, but never

grow.

However, Morales’ argument does have much to recommend it. He is correct to suggest that culture has lost some

ineffable dignity when it exists primarily for the Western consumption of the faux-traditional. He is correct to argue that

“the other” sometimes exists as a “construction” and that maybe to continue speaking of the other is to continue practicing

colonialism (though colonialism certainly also persists when people are denied their “otherness). Above all, he would be

correct to argue that contemporary values greatly influence our perception of history. There is even some hope in his

argument: culture may be an illusion, but that does not preclude the possibility of common ground through culture. His

argument might be amenable to an international collective of hip-hop musicians, their music a typically “post-modern

pastiche” but political, comprised of gunshots overlapping blatant product placements laced with raditional tribal rhythms,

and traded in online communities. This is a kind of cosmopolitanism, but not a deracinated one. There is room for the past

in present; it actually persists through trends and technology and can forge a politically useful synthesis and sense of

continuity between the authentic and how we perceive it according to why we need it. There is room for the past in the

present that allows for the existence of the other as something more real than a “construction.”

Warren devotes much of her argument to countering Morales, but the final line of her article most effectively

counters Morales’ contention that Mayan culture cannot be protected and that identity is problematic given that both are the

products of market forces--evidence, in his view, that undercuts the Pan-Mayanist argument and cultural preservation

generally. Unsurprisingly, Warren’s citations of Morales betray his lack of sympathy for “the other,” not the “other” exalted

by the academy but the one who is a real person with a history both singular and common, one Morales does not seem to

believe to be alive or worthy of imaginative sympathy. Morales, in his paternalism-sensitive way, is correct that a young

Mayan may be as likely to lose interest in the politics of ethnic identity and shrug at the notion of Pan-Mayanism. And he

highlights a big problem, because if this revival is not for the young, then who is it for? Morales might believe his work

aims to save indigenous people from their backward, nationalist ways in a world that breaks down national boundaries and

especially ethnic identities that cling to the past; and perhaps he would assert that experience offers little guidance for the

future, that it can be no stable basis for identities that shift under precious little personal direction. We cannot know, as he

writes, who descends from the conqueror or the conquered. People feel their heritage in different ways. And according to

Morales, some, like the Mayan intellectuals he demeans as puppets of Western capitalism, in fundamental conflict with

their own pursuits because aiming to bring about a “transcendent Mayaness” while also moving into the middle-class

through on the strength of their leadership, choose to deny it. But as Warren writes, observing the puzzlement with which

Mayan intellectuals meet the ambivalence of outside observers to their accomplishments in raising the profile of Mayan

culture, “there are diverse ways of being Maya.”73 Given Morale’s attention to the reality of hybrid identities, (which

certainly, despite Warren’s claim that much of Morale’s argument exists “only on paper,” are more real than academic

constructions or “museum pieces”) one would think he would recognize pan-Mayanism as one of these identities, that

Mayan “fundamentalism” is no more or authentic a way to live then the state of strange market-programmed flux he

celebrates in the new generation of Mayans, who might as well live in the heartland of America as some Ecuador slum

73 Ibid, p. 51.

according to their cultural tastes. There are diverse ways of being Maya, especially given the fundamental interior sense of

Mayan or Indian identity one might retain despite surface appearances. The demand to lead a “modern” life does not

exclude the retention of faith. Cultures can change and grow. It is not a loss for the lessons of indigenous culture to reside

solely in an atomized individual’s heart. Maybe this is where the grand narrative ends and begins again, or maybe this is

where it continues on as before.

Now, 500 years after Columbus, neither indigenous culture nor progress is dead. Both change; cultures grow. One

typically Western, ‘post-Progress’ vision has emerged to include the hope that people need not seek to transcend their

origins while seeking to make a life and form new loyalties somewhere other than where they born. But often the available

is not so obvious at the time. Latin America’s indigenous people have not always controlled their fate, and to think

otherwise is to obscure real violence and degradation. But as both Pan-Mayanism and its critics show, the past need not

overwhelm the present. Latin America’s indigenous people have laid claim to the future where possible by resisting

oppression or condemning their own past, by leaving their traditional lands or rejecting the mainstream society that rejects

them, by taking from mainstream society to create a common cultural language through which they can press for

recognition and achieve dignity, by impressing their own cultural values on the mainstream to do the same. They continue

to do so. As statistics on language disappearance show, indigenous people cannot completely control their destiny.

Colonialism is an ongoing process; but so is the creation of its opposite: genuine cultural pluralism backed by material

security. They exist at the levers of indigenous resistance, evident in cultural expressions and political demands wherever

one looks throughout history and across the contemporary scene. But in some regard, to say that this moment is especially

critical is to return to a kind of grand narrative of salvation and redemption; it is to say that things have gotten progressively

better or progressively worse for indigenous people when probably neither is true. Language, race, culture, ethnicity, how

we define, prioritize, and apply them; the value placed on the hope that people can forge a sense of continuity between their

origins and their future; the hope that indigenous people of diverse loyalties can prosper; that indigenous movements forge

a cross-ethnic consensus according to wisdom of tolerance, and that their opponents might feel the same--all are negotiable.

And maybe it has always been this way. Carlos Fuentes wrote somewhere that Europeans “discovered” America, but

Americans conceive it. They invent it. In the sense that the West can revisit over 500 years of history and yet retain the

ability to imagine what the rest of today might look like, the story of 1492 is not finished yet, neither is what we take from

it. Neither, especially, is what we make of it.