This book is an interdisciplinary study of the connections between ethnic politics and performance in Bolivia. It draws on archival research and ethnographic methodology, and takes up a history-of-ideas approach, offering a complex and engaging perspective on the issue. Kuenzli uses previously neglected documents of the Peñas trial in the aftermath of the Bolivian 1899 Civil War to demonstrate that collaboration between indigenous communities and national political parties is an essential part of the Aymara past, as are autonomous Indian movements.
She begins by using the testimonies of the Aymaras accused in the Peñas trial to argue that the alliance between Aymara communities and the Liberal Party was not a relationship of convenience to be broken when promises were not met, but an earnest effort to change the political system as a whole, a process that continued even after the war. This argument challenges the Bolivian revisionist historiography that since the 1970s has sought to underscore the autonomy of the Indian resistance to the state. Kuenzli's critique points out that revisionist works have relied too heavily on Ramiro Condarco Morales's thesis regarding the ultimate significance of the trial. The main problem according to Kuenzli is that Morales's conclusions are based almost uniquely on the prosecution's affirmations of race war, and that the testimonies of the accused rarely support this.
Kuenzli's main argument is that political persuasion rather than race-based movements drove the testimonies in the trial. This insight is also applied to an analysis of the intellectual and cultural responses of communities in the aftermath of the war. The political establishment used the trial as a means to minimize the alliance between Liberals and Aymaras, constructing the latter as “savages” in need of tutelage, and ultimately divorcing the Indian uprising from the Civil War. On the side of the defense, Kuenzli finds that the bulk of the testimonies suggest that the rebels were not acting as a vengeful mob, but out of precise political motivations and in support of the Liberal Party. She argues that the violence that ensued after the uprising that supported the Liberal army was not caused by race war or class strife, but was, rather, the exercise of local power struggles.
Her analysis of the discourse of honor in several testimonies sheds light on the trial as a debate over definitions of citizenship and nation. The discourse of honor went beyond the usual categories of family, social status, race and upbringing to claim a space in the national community by offering military and political service to the nation.
Kuenzli's second chapter, an illuminating exercise in intellectual history, describes the efforts of the Liberal intellectual elite based in La Paz to construct an image of the Aymaras that could circumvent the uncomfortable associations of highland Indians with crime, savagery, and primitiveness. She seeks to explain the paradoxical fact that the La Paz-based elite looked to celebrate the Aymara past and did so in the immediate aftermath of the 1899 Civil War and the trials that found the Aymara guilty of race war and in need of tutelage. Adding to the paradox (and Kuenzli does a great job explaining this complicated dynamic) national intellectuals and local Aymara intelligentsia collaborated in relegating the achievements of the Aymaras to the distant past, while at the same time privileging the Incas as representing the more progressive, and preferred, Indian identity.
The discourse of the intellectuals strove to connect the distant Aymara heritage, visible only in ruins, to the more recent Inca empire. Drawing a contrast to this distant greatness, intellectuals lamented the sorrowful state of contemporary Aymaras. This differential construction of Indian identities in historical time was part of a larger discourse of progress and modernity that conceptualized stages of development in human civilization. This chapter focuses on the work of Emeterio Villamil de Rada, a group of intellectuals gathered in the Aymara Academy, the archeologist Arthur Posnansky, and the historian Manuel Rigoberto Paredes. Paredes is the most significant, for several reasons. A descendant of the Siñani cacique family of Carabuco and a fluent speaker of Aymara, Paredes critiqued the exalted image of the Incas promoted by other intellectuals and offered a more nuanced version of the narrative of origins by including, for example, the enslavement of the Aymaras by the Incas. Significantly, Paredes did not break with the narrative that claims that the Incas were the cultural descendants of the Aymara civilization, but instead inverted the importance attributed to each group. Kuenzli suggests that Paredes's affirmation of his Aymara heritage proved a disservice to his political career, especially when he attempted to win elections at the national level. Constructions of preferred Indian identities were central to the discourse of modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, for both urban creole and mestizo intellectuals, as in the case of provincial Aymara elites.
Chapters 3 and 4 study the performance of the preferred Inca identity in the Aymara town of Caracollo, at the beginning of the twentieth century and today. Kuenzli shows that in the aftermath of the civil war of 1899 the Aymara elite of Caracollo adopted an “Inca” identity to escape an unacceptable, and indeed dangerous, form of Indianness, and in order to carve out a space in the national imaginary by way of theatrical renditions of history. Chapter 3 investigates the historical roots of Inca plays in Caracollo and how the town's most important families of Aymara heritage adopted the Inca identity in an effort to dissociate themselves from the negative perceptions of the highland Indian. The Inca identity served as a vehicle of political participation in the modernizing project of the Liberal elites. In the early 1900s the town elite began to organize theatrical representations of the Spanish conquest, performed in Quechua, during the regional celebrations of the Virgin of the Rosary. Kuenzli demonstrates how theater, both urban indoor presentation and street performance, was a symbol of modernity during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
The theaters built in the mining centers during the tin boom were in themselves a visible sign of modernization and modernity, and Kuenzli argues that Caracollo's Aymara elite conceived its street performances of Inca plays as a way to participate in the nation's efforts towards modernization. Contrary to traditional interpretations that see the cycle of Inca plays in the Andes as part of a narrative of resistance that spanned both the colonial and national periods, Kuenzli stresses the historical specificity of each Inca play. In the case of Caracollo's play, Kuenzli points out the way indigenous communities engaged indigenista appropriations of Indian past. She puts the Caracollo play in the larger context of performance and politics in Bolivia during that period, making connections between the urban theater groups from La Paz, which presented plays infused with the liberal ideology, and the Caracollo theater guild's own version of the history of Spanish conquest.
Kuenzli's analysis of the Caracollo play is detailed and insightful. The author argues that the specificity of this particular play lies in the topic of literacy, thus contrasting it to the vast majority of Inca plays from the cycle. Here, the central issue is the basic question of language difference between conquistadors and Incas. This focus on literacy is consistent with the Liberals’ ideology of progress and modernity and alludes to citizenship requirements during that era.
In her final chapter, Kuenzli turns to today's Inca performances in Caracollo in the broader context of the Oruro carnival and folkloric festivals in general, and the politics of ethnic identity since the 1970s, which have given rise to a distinct Indian discourse centered on resistance to state oppression. This chapter constitutes an ethnography of contemporary ethnic politics from the local perspective of Caracollo. It is based on interviews with the actors and the fieldwork carried out in Caracollo, Oruro, and La Paz.
Kuenzli affirms, despite the many changes in the play since its inception in the aftermath of the 1899 Civil War, that the play continues to stress the central issue of literacy and to serve for those associated with it as a means to acquire social prestige as local intellectuals. She stresses the difference between the appropriations of indigenous past made by contemporary ethnic organizations—as in the casting of the figure of the Inca king as an anticolonial symbol of resistance—and the Caracollo rendition of the history of conquest. Instead of treating the Inca king as an anticolonial figure, the Caracollo Inca actors locate their story within the global narrative of conquest, side by side with the Moors and Christopher Columbus, and not as an autonomous resistance to colonialism. Kuenzli concludes by noting that constructions of “preferred” Indian identities that emerged in the 1900s continue to be central in Bolivia's contemporary political and cultural life.
Kuenzli's is an important book that will spark debate and inspire further research and reflection on the issues of performance and politics.
