The "Indian Problem" and an "Inca Solution": Race, Identity, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia

As a result of the 1899 Civil War in Bolivia, the Liberal Party rose to power under the leadership of president José Manuel Pando in the new highland capital of La Paz. Liberal officials and intellectuals then turned their attention to defining the role of the majority indigenous population in the modernization effort. The absence of a unifying discourse such as mestizaje led them to revisit the perennial "Indian question" in order to define the limits of national belonging in Bolivia. Employing both archival documentation and theatrical performance as historical sources, I argue that Liberal intellectuals and the regional Aymara elite ultimately forged their own images of the socially acceptable Bolivian Indian. These sources reveal efforts to forge an "Inca" identity, in which the Aymara elite were the heirs to the tradition of noble indigenous rule in Peru and thus "whitened" personages in the Bolivian context. While many scholars have associated references to the Inca past with strictly indigenous political projects of resistance, I suggest that the Inca image and past were integral elements in the nation-building process in the early twentieth century both for urban Liberal intellectuals and for the indigenous elite in Caracollo, Bolivia. As identities were negotiated in the early twentieth century, "acting Inca" through theatrical representations of the past was a means through which the local, Aymara elite attempted to claim a space within the Bolivian nation. Constructions of preferred Indian identities thus remained at the core of nation-building projects in Bolivia.