From Aymaras to Incas: The “Regeneration” of the Bolivian Nation in the Early Twentieth Century

Within a comparative Latin American context, Bolivia often earns the dubious distinction of exemplifying one of the weaker attempts at developing a viable nation-building project in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. National intellectuals struggled with their “Indian problem” in terms of citizenship, modernity, nation building, and race, as defined in large part by the eugenics movement. In contrast to previous scholarship that associates local community-level promotions of Inca imagery or theatrical performances of the Inca past with indigenous rebellion or with a collective desire to return to an Indian past, I will attempt to show that the narratives and images of the glorified Inca past as constructed by liberal intellectuals and by the local indigenous Aymara elite in early twentieth-century Bolivia served as a means to negotiate and define the nation-building project in Bolivia.  Liberal intellectuals, pressed to address the “Indian question” even more urgently in the wake of the 1899 Civil War precisely because of the Aymara participation in the war as the liberals’ allies, opened up spaces for national belonging through their rhetorical inclusion of a socially constructed progressive Inca identity. In Bolivia discourses of progress and of national belonging took place through constructions of difference between the Indian identities of  “Aymara” and “Inca.” I will use both primary and secondary sources in presenting supporting evidence, including theatrical presentations of the Inca past in early twentieth-century highland Bolivia.