Anthropologist Andrés Guerrero is best known in the English-speaking world for his groundbreaking 1997 article ‘The Construction of a Ventriloquist's Image: Liberal Discourse and the “Miserable Indian Race” in Late 19th-Century Ecuador’, published in the Journal of Latin American Studies (29: 3 (1997)). Framed in the context of a long history of intermediaries negotiating relations between the dominant culture and subaltern populations, Guerrero introduced the image of ventriloquism to describe how liberal politicians spoke on behalf of rural indigenous peoples. Typically, elites manipulated their position of privilege to administer and control marginalised populations. Unfortunately, as the language of ventriloquism gained popularity in the social sciences, many scholars came to assume that this was the dominant and perhaps even the only way that subalterns interacted with intermediaries in their attempts to communicate their concerns to the dominant culture. Guerrero's new book provides an opportunity to correct, broaden and deepen those understandings and interpretations.
Most of the essays in Administración de poblaciones, ventriloquía y transescritura are edited versions of Guerrero's previously published material. For those who know of Guerrero only through his 1997 JLAS essay, this collection provides an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with the rich intellectual production of the leading scholar of nineteenth-century Ecuadorean history. Focusing primarily on the indigenous communities of Otavalo in the northern Ecuadorean highlands, Guerrero provides rich descriptions and analyses of the daily lives of community members, local political officials, landlords, mestizos in the nearby towns and informal lawyers known as tinterillos. Together, the essays critique the formation of a system of republican citizenship in which state structures sought to administer and dominate ethnic populations.
The first of the six essays, entitled ‘Curagas y tenientes políticos: la ley de la costumbre y la ley del Estado (Otavalo, 1830–1875)’, was originally published in Revista Andina in 1989. Providing an excellent entry point for the discussions in this book, this chapter examines shifts from ethnic to secular authority in Otavalo during the nineteenth century. Rooting the essay in a rigorous study of local archival collections, Guerrero examines the slow decline of the power of the ethnic leaders known as curagas (kurakas) as authorities sought to replace them with the mestizo representatives of the central government known as tenientes políticos.
The second chapter, ‘Una imagen ventrílocua: el discurso liberal de la “desgraciada raza indígena” a fines del siglo XIX’, is a revision of the essay published in English in the JLAS in 1997, and forms the heart of the book. This chapter examines the transitions triggered by the termination of the tribute system in 1857 as society shifted from a state-centred administration of indigenous peoples to a decentralised model that devolved power to local landholders and power brokers. Guerrero argues that a shift of power to private hands removed indigenous peoples from government administration, effectively rendering them invisible in the archival record. The 1895 Liberal Revolution resulted in a re-engagement with indigenous issues, but often (as elsewhere in Latin America) this led to an opportunistic positioning aimed at enhancing liberal political fortunes rather than advancing indigenous liberation. The consolidation of liberal power is what led Guerrero to characterise external engagement with indigenous issues as the work of a ventriloquist intended to control and channel subaltern expressions of resistance. In essence, the entire book is an expansion of the issues and arguments that Guerrero presents in this chapter.
The third chapter, ‘El proceso de identificación: sentido común ciudadano, ventriloquía y transescritura’, was originally published in the book After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), which Guerrero edited with Mark Thurner. This essay returns to themes presented in the previous two chapters relating to how citizenship rights were constructed in 1843 and 1857, with the first case displaying an opposition to universal equality and indigenous peoples disappearing from state discourse in the second. Guerrero charts the disappearance of indigenous demands into a ‘ventriloquist’ discourse through a shift from first to third person in legal petitions.
The final three chapters are least likely to have already been seen by those familiar with Guerrero's work, and they present the most interesting and innovative aspects of this volume. Already in his JLAS article, Guerrero has raised the research problem posed for historians by the disappearance of the voices of indigenous petitioners into the ventriloquist's prose. Chapter four (‘Los protectores de indios republicanos, el historiador y el archivo: una hermenéutica de las representaciones judiciales’), originally published in América en la época de Juárez (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2007), addresses this issue most directly. Here Guerrero examines how the suppression in 1854 of the colonial intermediaries called protectors de indígenas gave rise to the informal lawyers known as tinterillos or pendolistas. These individuals gained a harshly negative reputation as manipulative abusers of rural petitioners who unnecessarily drew out their legal cases to the detriment of everyone but themselves. Their editing of indigenous voices for public or political consumption gives rise to the ‘transescritura’ that Guerrero references in the title of the book.
The fifth chapter, ‘Los silencios de archivo y sus fantasmas: los tinterillos y el historiador’, is the only one in the book that has not been previously published, but it is well worth reading. Guerrero begins the essay by noting that indigenous petitions are commonly written in the first person, but rarely does that voice belong to the person who is writing the document. Rather, the tinterillos provided that service, but their individual identities disappear in the archives. Although they became omnipresent in rural areas, the historical record almost never explains where they came from or why indigenous communities might have made use of their services. Despite their key role in rural conflicts, almost no studies have been conducted on the tinterillos. A key problem is that not enough information remains in the archive to define who the tinterillos were or what they intended to accomplish. As a result they remained shadowy figures and the term ‘tinterillo’ came to be seen in a negative and derogatory light, even as rural communities remained reliant on their actions. How the tinterillos became an arena for disputing and advancing indigenous concerns, and how the label ‘tinterillo’ became a derogatory term used to denounce one's political opponents, remains a realm well worthy of much more study. The best in the collection, this chapter justifies the publication of the volume and provides the strongest reason why people will want to pick up and read this book.
A relatively short concluding chapter entitled ‘Inmigrantes africanos e indios ecuatorianos: dos casos en reverberación de la administración privada de poblaciones’, originally published in Ciudadanía y exclusión (Madrid: Catarata, 2007), draws a parallel between the administration of ethnic populations in nineteenth-century Ecuador and the struggles that Ecuadorean immigrants face in Spain in the twenty-first century.
If I have a complaint about the book, it is that it moves away from the rich ethnographies that informed Guerrero's initial work in the 1970s on agrarian reform and land tenure patterns in the Ecuadorean highlands, which culminated in his masterful study La semántica de la dominación: el concertaje de indios (Quito: Ediciones Libri Mundi, 1991). This work is more theoretical and historiographic in the sense of examining how historians write about the intermediaries who petitioned on behalf of indigenous peoples, rather than presenting a sustained examination or critique of the lived realities in rural communities. The result is a lengthy and sometimes wordy expansion of the key arguments that Guerrero already presented in his 1997 JLAS article. For those concerned with intermediaries and the administration of ethnic populations, however, Guerrero's new book is a masterful study that sets a high standard for future work in the field.
