Brooke Larson’s new book is a masterful piece of historical research and writing that uses the lens of Indigenous education to examine the country’s colonial racist legacy and the struggle of Indigenous people to eliminate it. Through multiple fascinating examples, Larson illustrates how literacy, and education more generally, were central to struggles to reclaim usurped lands, and to achieve full citizenship and self-determination for the nation’s Indian majority. She does this in a book of great chronological and intellectual sweep that begins with Immanuel Kant and finishes with the educational policies of “pluri-national” Bolivia after Evo Morales was elected president in 2005. This exceptional work is essential for understanding Bolivian history and the struggles of Indigenous people in the Americas.
While carefully examining pedagogical and racialist ideologies of Bolivian and international twentieth-century intellectuals, the book is exciting because of its focus on Aymara leaders’ activism, in particular the life stories of individual leaders. Not only has Larson done impeccable archival and secondary research for the book, but she was also able to interview a number of the actors (or their relatives) who were involved in the struggle for education.
The book has seven chapters and an epilogue that brings the story almost up to the present moment. The beginning of book discusses different early twentieth-century elite prescriptions for educating and integrating the Indian majority, which was seen by policymakers as necessary for Bolivia to become a modern, civilized nation. Whatever pedagogical differences existed, all of these early theorizers saw Indian education as essential but feared that it would cause Indigenous people to become political rabble rousers or “impertinent” urbanites who had learned how to use the law to advocate for their rights. Most particularly all of these writers primarily conceived of the Indian majority as a servile, rural labor force that they were terrified of losing.
However, even the government’s minimal efforts at creating a pedagogy that was at once “civilizing” yet maintained racial and class inequality encouraged Indigenous people to organize for schools and their rights. Particularly, literacy and an understanding of the legal system were seen as essential for communities to reclaim lands that had been illegally expropriated under liberal laws that had privatized communally held lands. Much of the rest of the book examines those struggles.
A core focus is Warisata—the rural Escuela Ayllu—that was organized in the 1930s in the province of Omasuyos in the Department of La Paz by Elizardo Pérez, a white indigenista who was a graduate of Bolivia’s first teachers school, and Aymara educator and activist Avelino Siñani. The school was conceived as combining academic classroom instruction with innovative, agricultural, and craft experience, sometimes taught by experts from other countries. Although there is still debate about the degree to which control of the school resided with Indigenous people versus Pérez, Warisata’s governance was primarily in the hands of a council of community elders with democratic participation from parents and other community members. Warisata and its satellite schools encouraged Indigenous empowerment; therefore, it was seen as a threat to the right-wing oligarchy that came back into power in 1940 after a populist period in the mid-to-late 1930s. The new regime and its supporters saw Warisata as a key site of subversion and a challenge to elite control. In spite of militant resistance by parents and teachers, the government set about destroying it through cuts to financial support, accusations of incompetence and communist agitation, and eventually even violence.
Larson’s description of resistance to the destruction of Warisata is one of the most compelling sections of the book. Particularly, her focus on teacher Carlos Salazar is very vivid and personal, especially since she was able to interview him numerous times. Salazar arrived at the school in 1936 and after it was attacked became one of the schools most dedicated defenders through his political activism and polemical journalism, as well as his work as a visual artist and a novelist.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, the official government position, financed and guided by US aid programs, was that Bolivia’s schools should create mestizo citizens through acculturation. But these new “civilized” and “integrated” rural Bolivians would not receive the same education as urban, public school students; instead, they would acquire minimal literacy skills and be instructed in civics and most particularly more modern agricultural techniques. It was a plan that the government educational experts hoped would acculturate Indian people while maintaining them in their roles as the country’s agricultural workers. Even the populist revolution of 1952 led by the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario did not significantly change this educational policy. However, after the revolution, Indigenous demands for education as a right exploded; the number of rural schools, and students enrolled, increased; and more rural people became bilingual and managed to continue their education in larger towns or cities. Eventually, by the 1970s and 1980s, groups of Indigenous, activist intellectuals produced stinging critiques of the country’s educational system that did not reflect their values. Their positions, building on more than 50 years of struggle, were echoed in the 2006 redefinition by the Ministry of Education of the goals of education as “decolonizing, liberating and anti-imperialist” (336).
