Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Map 1 The North Andes. Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador in 1830
- Map 2 The Central and South Andes. Peru and Bolivia after Indepedence
- Trials of Nation Making
- Introduction
- 1 Andean Landscapes, Real and Imagined
- 2 Colombia: Assimilation or Marginalization of the Indians?
- 3 Ecuador: Modernizing Indian Servitude as the Road to Progress
- 4 Peru: War, National Sovereignty, and the Indian Question
- 5 Bolivia: Dangerous Pacts, Insurgent Indians
- Conclusion: Postcolonial Republics and the Burden of Race
- Bibliographic Essay
- Index
Conclusion: Postcolonial Republics and the Burden of Race
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Map 1 The North Andes. Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador in 1830
- Map 2 The Central and South Andes. Peru and Bolivia after Indepedence
- Trials of Nation Making
- Introduction
- 1 Andean Landscapes, Real and Imagined
- 2 Colombia: Assimilation or Marginalization of the Indians?
- 3 Ecuador: Modernizing Indian Servitude as the Road to Progress
- 4 Peru: War, National Sovereignty, and the Indian Question
- 5 Bolivia: Dangerous Pacts, Insurgent Indians
- Conclusion: Postcolonial Republics and the Burden of Race
- Bibliographic Essay
- Index
Summary
This book has traced the dynamic interactions among highland indigenous peasants, factious Creole elites, and emerging “mestizo” sectors swelling the interstices of Andean rural society. It maps diverse national and regional landscapes, which became more textured, fluid, and differentiated over the course of the nineteenth century. Against that rich tapestry of Andean socio-cultural flux and transformation, this book has also explored the hardening conceptual landscape of race in the Creole national imaginary. For it seems that in varied contexts, the imagined Indian was almost invariably cast in contradictory terms – as both essential and anathema to the forces of order, progress, and civilization. In their varied expressions, racial discourses proved to be crucial props in the second half of the nineteenth century, after Creole reformers began dismantling the legal-discursive framework that had continued to bind Indians to the state through their partially restored tributary status.
At base, 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. In social and juridical terms, this reformulation dealt a double blow to indigenous communities. First, Indians lost their legal rights to collective existence and protection and became individuals subject to universal contract law. Gone, too, was the common ground on which Indians, regional elites, and states had tried to work out their fundamental differences over indigenous entitlements under colonial rule and the new republics.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Trials of Nation MakingLiberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910, pp. 246 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004