The Ethnopolitics of Indian Resistance in Latin America

The Indian was, of course, invented by European colonialism. In the years immediately following the invasion of the Americas, the Spaniards constructed Indians as an epistemological category that has served, since then, the dual purpose of occluding the complexity and diversity of civilization found in this hemisphere and leaving them with a diminished, uncertain social identity. Since the early 16th century to be Indian in America has been a recurrent journey into the realm of ambiguity, an inquiry into a self whose limits and attributes are more the results of colonial interaction than the outcome of autonomous choices. The indigenous people of the agrarian civilizations of Middle America and the Andes were increasingly compressed by the fast-growing mestizo populations surrounding them, and soon after conquest this began to look like the inevitable fate of Amerindian societies. Indians found themselves beleaguered and oppressed by the intricacies of colonial institutions and forced to restructure themselves individually and collectively to serve the colonizer's goals and to survive. This onerous process unleashed a painful dialectic between an assumed communal ethnic identity and allegiance and the generic colonial Indian identity, both products of European political domination. This continuous search for an ethnic identity that would both satisfy the need for communal belonging and express affinity/solidarity with all those who shared the colonial experience has characterized the long history of ethnic resistance of the indigenous people of Latin America.