The following was composed in January of 2014 for Professor Avi Chomsky's course on modern Latin America at Salem State University.
An insightful work of impressive scope on a
novel topic, Brooke Larson’s Trials of
Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910
offers “an interpretive synthesis”[1]
of the secondary sources on the relationship between highland Andean peasants
in what are today Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to the process of nation
building that those societies experienced during the nineteenth century,
explored through four case studies, one for each modern state. Larson sees “the
Indian problem” as “the political and rhetorical centerpiece” of nineteenth
century nation-building projects in the Andes.[2]
She explores this process through three “methodogical pathways”: struggles over
the “colonial heritage,” periods of war and repression, and the practice of
popular religion.[3] Larson is a Professor of
History at Stony Brook University and former director of Stony Brook’s Latin
American and Caribbean Studies Center. She previously authored Cochabamba, 1550-1900: Colonialism and
Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia (2nd ed., 1998) and co-edited
Ethnicity, Markets and Migration: At the
Cross-roads of History and Anthropology (1995).
One of Larson’s primary
arguments is that the “Andean peasant insurgency in the 1770s and 1780s forever
changed the configuration of colonial power, at the top, and local indigenous
polities and forms of ethnic mediation, at the bottom of society.”[4]
This insurgency made “the would-be Creole patriots ever more ambivalent about
the prospects and promises of independence.”[5]
In those societies where the Creole elites feared revolts by the peasantry, the
Creole elites were more likely to favor maintaining ties to the Spanish
monarchy. In Peru, for instance, “the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in
1814 probably brought a collective sigh of relief to most Creoles,” where,
“still haunted by fears of the Andean insurrection of the 1780s, many
landowners and merchants preferred to live under the iron fist of Spanish
absolutism than unleash the forces of revolution and rebellion.”[6]
With independence, Creole elites of the Andean
regions sought to incorporate indigenous peoples into their societies in ways
that eliminated indigenous autonomy and communal practices, but that also
denied them full participation in modern republics. For Larson, “the central
paradox of Western modernity was to impose universal definitions of free labor
and citizenship, as well as mold national cultures into homogeneous wholes
(along Eurocentric ideals), while creating the symbols and categories of innate
difference in order to set the limits on those ‘universalistic’ ideals.”[7]
The device by which Creole elites sought to accomplish these goals was to
associate the racial and ethnic qualities of “Indianness” with subordination.[8] Larson argues that “the
emerging postcolonial relationship mandated the redefinition of Indianness from
a corporate group, endowed with codified tributary obligations and rights, to
an inferior ‘race’ sentenced to the margins of nation and civilization.”[9] For instance, “the
Church-sponsored republican project of Ecuador reinforced caste.”[10]
While whiteness was identified with “civilization and citizenship,” Indians
were identified as “the backward race…biologically predestined to serve the
nation as its laborers, servants, soldiers, and beasts of burden.”[11]
Relatedly, Larson emphasizes the continuity of practices that subordinated
Andean peasants throughout both the colonial and Republican periods, such as
the continuation of the Indian tribute for decades after independence in some
places.[12]
In Bolivia, for instance, “rather than dissolving the official tributary and
territorial basis of Indianness, the Bolivian republic seemed to be advancing it!”[13]
For Larson, “it would be a
mistake to reduce peasant politics to the proverbial polarity of Indian
resistance or accommodation,”[14]
and she seeks to present a nuanced characterization of peasant societies, one
in which “the history of highland Andean peoples” are seen as “fundamentally
intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural
processes.”[15] Looking to William
Roseberry’s interpretation of Gramsci’s ideas about power[16],
Larson presents Andean peasants as participants in negotiating their role in
postcolonial society, and it is the failure of the contending parties to agree
on the framework for such negotiations to which she attributes the subsequent
violence in those societies. “The Andean republics had uncommon difficulty
negotiating power and legitimacy within a common framework of liberalism or
nationalism during the late nineteenth century”[17]
and thus “entered the twentieth century without having built a hegemonic
‘language of contention’.”[18]
Larson quite dramatically fails to achieve at
least one of her goals, that of being “accessible to a wide range of scholars
[and students],”[19] so much so that one
strongly doubts this was a goal the author took seriously. Consider her own
unwieldy statement of her thesis: “This study seeks to…examine emerging elite
articulations of liberalism, nationalism, and racism in messy political
contexts of rural struggle, market expansion, and political crisis…by exploring
how nineteenth-century racial imagery, thinking, and practice were embedded in,
and in turn reorganized, internal colonial hierarchies subordinating Indianness
(and its variant racial admixtures) to the Creole domain of power, civilization,
and citizenship.”[20]
While one wonders whether Trials
of Nation Making could have been composed in less arcane language, it is nonetheless a powerful, nuanced synthesis of the
secondary literature on the process of state formation in the nineteenth-century
Andes. It is the first work of its kind and will therefore likely prove indispensable to those
interested in further exploring the issues with which it deals.
[1] Brooke
Larson, Trials of Nation Making:
Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), XI.
[2]
51.
[3]
53-57.
[4]
4-5.
[5] 6.
[6]
141.
[7]
13.
[8]
14.
[9]
246.
[10]
139.
[11]
140.
[12]
6.
[13]
206.
[14]
12.
[15]
5-6.
[16]
9.
[17]
11.
[18]
13.
[19]
XI.
[20]
14.
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