Apiaguaiqui Tumpa, a Chiriguano Indian Leader from Eastern Bolivia during the Late 19th Century

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 politicians and indigenous communities dominated political debates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the western highland region in Bolivia has received more attention in studies of Bolivia’s nation-building attempts in the late nineteenth century than that of eastern Bolivia. The Guaraní indigenous group lived in multiple communities of reduced numbers in eastern Bolivia. These communities united in 1892 to fight the Bolivian army, as they had previously fought the Incas, the Spaniards, and the Santa Cruz settlers. 1892 marked not only the defeat of the Guaraní, but their extermination, supposedly eliminating the “Indian question” from the nation-building process in Santa Cruz. Scholars have focused on the elimination of the fierce Guaraní rather than on locating the Guaranís’ mobilization within broader political conflicts and processes in the late nineteenth century. I will investigate claims of “Indian messianism” among the Guaraní as well as claims of a united Indian front in the Battle of Kuruyuki. Apiaguaiqui Tumpa, the leader of the Guaraní forces in 1892 is depicted as vengeful, messianic, and as having led a unified Guaraní movement against the whites. I will revisit the protagonist Apiaguaiqui Tumpa and discuss the role of this eastern indigenous leader in the historical context of modernization, land appropriation, and political competition between the Liberal and Conservative parties rather than treating it as an isolated indigenous narrative disconnected from national processes.