“But Our Indians Are Different:” Regional Difference, Constructions of Race, and the Comparative Nation-Building Processes in Eastern and Western Bolivia

In Bolivia, a country where indigenous people have historically constituted the majority of the population, constructions of race, questions of national belonging, and issues of national identity for both national politicians and indigenous communities dominated political debates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Struggles over politics and land intensified in the late nineteenth century, as liberals and conservatives competed for power. Indians sit at the center of any narrative of the highland nation-building experience in late nineteenth-century Bolivia, and indigenous peoples participated earnestly in the process of defining citizenship in the nation-building project. Two major regional Indian mobilizations define this era; in western Bolivia, the Aymara indigenous group’s participation in the 1899 civil war between liberals and conservatives, and in eastern Bolivia, the 1892 Battle of Kuruyuki between the indigenous Guaraní population and the Bolivian army. Scholars tend to isolate these movements from the broader political scenario and from national political struggles, treating the first as an autonomous Aymara-led movement and the second as a messianic Indian movement.  I will offer the first-ever comparison of these two movements, insisting that these “Indian histories” were very much part of “national history,” and key in shaping constructions of region, race, and nationalism in Bolivia.