In the 1990s, in much of Latin America, organizations representing the rural poor shifted from mobilizing along class lines as poor peasants to organizing and making claims on the state as indigenous peoples. These two books examine the origins and dynamics of these indigenous rights movements. Both Courtney Jung and Jose Antonio Lucero usefully employ a constructivist approach to reveal the political work in creating indigenous identities over time. While Jung makes a bolder theoretical statement drawing more exclusively on the emergence of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, Lucero designs a rigorous comparative study that extensively documents both the sub-national and cross-national differences in the construction of various indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia. Both books enrich our understanding of indigenous politics in Latin America. At the same time, both contribute more broadly, challenging and improving the ways we theorize political identity, citizenship, representation, and democracy in the twenty-first century.

Jung's study opens with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in January 1994, and asks where these political identities and movements came from. Provocatively eschewing thought experiments and ruminations on ancient philosophers (p. 28), Jung's book is almost equal parts normative theory and empirical analysis. This grounding of normative theory in empirical context is promising but could have been strengthened with a more explicit and transparent documentation of her research design and methods for observing what she terms the “real world.” For example, the author never clarifies whether she has focused on the Zapatista movement as a single case study within Mexico. At several points, Jung raises fascinating comparative differences between the experiences of the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas that were left tantalizingly underdeveloped.

Jung argues compellingly against liberal democratic theorists, most notably, perhaps, John Rawls, and multicultural theorists, such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, for making a “fetish of culture” and thereby limiting the scope of democratic contestation (p. 12). She advocates looking “behind the claims of culture” to the structural conditions that constitute groups (p. 15). Jung emphasizes how the modern state plays an important role in constituting these political identities—whether peasant or indigenous—at particular historical and political moments. She more emphatically rejects multiculturalism throughout the book and seeks to address liberalism's weaknesses with her theory of “critical liberalism.” She acknowledges the exclusion of liberal-democratic states but shows how the “promise of rights” opens up more space for indigenous rights activists to contest the boundaries of the political community (p. 25). In this way, she helpfully shifts the theoretical debate from a discussion of the procedures to reach consensus to how contestation might be expanded more fruitfully.

Jung thus locates the moral force of indigenous claims on the state in the ongoing existence of structural injustice over generations, not to a notion of shared cultural difference (p. 233). She highlights how the history of state formation in Mexico has created different experiences of exclusion and selective inclusion that have made peasant versus indigenous identities and strategies more or less salient at different points in time. She draws on extensive primary and secondary sources in Spanish and English as well as interviews with indigenous movement leaders and participant observation to trace the changes in state laws and policies from the colonial period through independence in 1812, the Mexican Revolution, the PRI-era, and the past two decades of “neo-liberal democratization” (p. 148). For example, she convincingly shows how for most of the twentieth century, the rural poor were incorporated into the Mexican state-building project as peasants. Although the book's three empirical chapters do not proceed in this fashion, Jung's argument about the shift from peasant to indigenous rights movements is essentially top-down. She accords a lot of significance to how changes in the international human rights regime and international economic changes have spurred domestic governance reforms, which then provided more recognition and opportunity for activists to mobilize along indigenous lines.

Lucero's book asks many of the same questions and uses a similar analytic approach but investigates different empirical contexts in Latin America. One of the strengths of Lucero's book is his careful comparative research design, which explicitly examines both sub-national and cross-national variation in indigenous politics in the similar Andean cases of Bolivia and Ecuador. Lucero attempts to explain first why the indigenous rights organizations became nationally unified in Ecuador but remained regionally fragmented in Bolivia in the 1990s, and then, more recently, why the national indigenous organization was dramatically weakened in Ecuador, whereas one region's indigenous leader, Evo Morales, was elected president in 2005 with a majority of the popular vote in Bolivia. Based on this historical comparative analysis, he is able to highlight a weakness in much of the existing literature that discusses “the” indigenous rights movement. He insists that there are many varied Indian movements within countries and over time (p. 5). His research questions exploit this variation by asking (1) why some movements are more unified than others, and (2) why some indigenous voices become seen by the state, NGOs, and other international actors as more “representative” than others.

Where Jung's book is deeply engaged with a wide range of theories, Lucero spends much less time wrangling with the theoretical literature. After cursory attention to a very small number of scholars he identifies as rationalist and structuralist, Lucero argues that a more culturalist explanation is needed to explain the creation of political identities and political subjects. Rejecting both liberal and communitarian theories of representation, but seemingly inspired by Hannah Pitkin and Michel Foucault, Lucero advocates building a “pragmatic constructivist theory of representation” where subjects do not exist prior to, but are constituted by the very process of representation (pp. 21–23).

Like Jung, he traces the historical process of state formation across different sub-regions from the colonial era through the corporatist period of nation-state building until today. Similarly, Lucero also focuses on explaining the remarkable shift from peasant mobilization to indigenous rights in the 1990s in these two countries. Lucero's empirical analysis is based on sixteen months of fieldwork, which included numerous interviews and participant observation working within NGOs and indigenous rights organizations. Lucero argues that due to regional differences in geography, economy, and culture, indigenous organizations emerged later in the Amazonian regions in Bolivia than they did in Ecuador. As a result, the various regional organizations in Bolivia developed unevenly and separately, each becoming powerful, but remaining fragmented. In contrast, the earlier organizational development in Ecuador facilitated the unification across regions into one national movement called CONAIE in the 1990s.

While Lucero acknowledges changes at the international level, he does not dedicate as much attention as Jung to these changes, and the relative causal impact of these discursive and legal changes is not clear in his analysis. For Lucero, the important spark for indigenous organization appears to be the rural response to agrarian reforms initiated earlier in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than the changes in international human rights norms or global economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Overall, Lucero is very effective at richly detailing the existence of important sub-national variation within the cases, but this can sometimes make it difficult for the reader to follow the overarching causal explanation for these differences. For instance, the weakening of the more unified movement of CONAIE in Ecuador appears highly contingent on individual elite actions and unclear as a more general causal story.

So what do these authors conclude about representation and democracy in the world today? Lucero makes the important point that scholars need to look beyond the study of formal electoral rules, political party systems, and legislative decision making to understand newly democratizing states, or what he calls “actually existing democracy” (p. 6). Both Lucero and Jung share the view that indigenous rights movements have limitations, but that overall they are a “democratizing force” (Lucero, p. 189), with new voices being heard and more expansive political claims being made (Jung, pp. 231–32). Where Lucero points out both the good and the bad of neoliberalism for indigenous politics, Jung takes a bolder normative stand, warning that indigenous rights activists should resist the potential “great risk of being marginalized or coopted by a neoliberal world order” and refuse the “cultural shackle” by continuing to expand their claims beyond the narrow cultural sphere (p. 293). Lucero and Jung both emphasize, however, that rarely are indigenous groups using their exit option to demand secession or a rewriting of national boundaries. Instead, they are struggling to use their voices to challenge their exclusion and transform state-society relations from within the liberal democratic nation-state. Both books raise the question of whether the politics of indigenous rights are comparable to those of ethnic minorities, women, or immigrant groups. Hopefully, Jung's and Lucero's emphasis on the political history of exclusion will stimulate further theoretical attention to what is often raised as the core political difference between indigenous groups and other historically marginalized populations: the foundational principle of political sovereignty. Finally, even though both Jung and Lucero insist on the role of human agency in the forging of political identity and action (Jung, p. 38; Lucero, p. 25), their empirical exploration remains limited to the elite level. In both books, the voices and strategic choices of indigenous movement leaders and activists are much more audible than those of ordinary people. Perhaps future scholarship will build on their insights to examine how the international human rights regime and state formation is experienced and shapes the construction of political identity and exercise of citizenship among “the multitudes” (Lucero, p. 191).