Boundaries, Identity, and The "Indian."
Boundaries, Identity, and The "Indian."
Boundaries, Identity, and The "Indian."
Jorge E. Arboleda
In this paper I approach the concept of boundaries and their relationship to Democracy in
a context of ethnic struggle in Latin America. Boundaries are defined here as in Wolin’s
Fugitive Democracy: “Boundaries proclaim identity and stand ready to repel difference.
They may signify exclusion- ‘Keep-out!’- or containment –‘Keep inside!” (Wolin, 1996:
31). I explore how boundaries are constructed through a power relationship between a
dominant and dominated culture. Identities are thus external, and perhaps internal,
representation of boundaries. Individuals “wear” their boundaries like suits, and express
potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political
beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and modes of action for realizing
boundaries and identities in a social space, paradoxically erasing the ethos of individual
cultural identities as the dominated is annihilated or assimilated into the culture of the
My argument here is that in the case of Colombia, and other Latin American
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ordinary citizens to become political beings because people’s political “beingness” has
been constructed through simulation and violence. First, identity is the result of a process
primitive love for order (ritual, aesthetic, and political), and by incorporating western
patterns of accumulation (as explained below by Lévi-Strauss). Second, identity has been
In both cases, the sense of belonging to an ethnic reality has been related to the
the old colonial Spanish division between white, Creole, Indian, mestizo, and black.
Domination through violence has made it possible for individuals to prevail over others
Colombia. Upon graduation, I was hired to write a biography of the founder of the mine,
The Case. On September 17, 1990, the inhabitants of the town of Puracé were surprised
by a fire in the sulfur mine "El Vinagre," located on the slopes of the Puracé volcano.
This fire was the sixth in the last ten years. The fire caused major economic hardship for
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the Puraceños because most of them worked in the mine.
The fire burned for 66 days. It destroyed most of the mine and expelled sulfur gases
burning the vegetation and killing cattle, birds and other animals. Many Puraceños were
hospitalized and treated for respiratory ailments. The mining company lost more than
200,000 dollars.
meeting to plan the best way to help the people and to avoid any further damages. In a
contingency plan they decided to install temporary health centers, distribute anti-gas
I participated in the meeting, and afterwards, the president of the company asked
my opinion on how to avoid panic in the region. Based on my experience with the
Puraceños I answered: "When the volcano is angered it is necessary to bring San Miguel,
the local religious patron, in procession." My suggestion was based on the Puraceños’
beliefs that San Miguel could calm the volcano's anger because he had proven to be the
My comments were received very skeptically. It was impossible for the Industrias
Puracé’s corps of engineers and management to imagine that San Miguel's procession
contingency plan, the local Workers Union had a meeting with the company's president
and directors. To the management's surprise the Union's directors demanded a procession
of San Miguel to calm the fire. The board of directors accepted the union's demand, and
on September 20th the procession took place, stretching for 15 miles. The fire was over
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one week later.
with the fire exemplify the different languages of the dominated and the dominators. This
dichotomy was further underlined as I continued my research. The most interested person
in the project seemed to be one of the daughters of the mine’s founder. As my research in
the archives progressed it became clear that the daughter wanted the biography to show
her father in a different light than that that which the Puraceños saw him. I tried to be
sensitive to her requests, but in the end what I wrote didn't correspond with her desires.
The company responded as I expected: they did not publish the book. On one hand I had
the indigenous perception of the founder and on the other the story Mosquera's family
wanted me to tell to the people outside Puracé. For the family, and the well-to-do and
“middle class” of Colombia, the mine’s founder was a hero, and “an innovator”.
For me, it was clear that the views of the indigenous, and the mine’s owners did
not coincide. The latter thought their hero was a remarkable man, meanwhile the
indigenous thought the man that was a devil’s creation. They thought his greatness was
based not on his ability to develop a successful mining enterprise, but rather in his
capacity to bargain with evil, and to freely surpass life’s and death’s spaces.
These Puraceños’ beliefs are based on their world view. The Puraceños spiritual
world is divided into hot and cold, fire and ice, and governed by creatures from both
environments. The devil, their main spiritual creature, is the hottest. He lives inside the
volcano where he has his "balcony home." They said, “Manuel was a strong worker who
did not fear the Devil and who was allowed to live in the Devil’s house. He was a poor
man with many debts when he started working in the mine. In order to pay off his debts,
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and to develop his mine projects, Manuel sold his soul and his employee's souls to the
devil." The Indigenous were convinced that Manuel had to sign an evil pact with the
devil, and didn’t want to be carried to hell in the hands of Mosquera, by being his
employees, but neither did they want to be return to the poverty which characterized their
There are two main characteristics in the construction of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
identities in Latin America. The first is related to a process of simulation in which the
counterfeiting. The second is related to the position of the individual and his social group
as a part of a former imperial violent culture. I examine these two points below.
1. Simulation and Identity. The early origins of actual identities are marked by self-
Octavio Paz points, the construction of an identity has been a process of simulation.
Simulation has given us the opportunity to “invent, or rather to counterfeit, and thus to
evade our condition.” (Paz, 1985: 43). We see the Indian far from us but also as part of
us. We know he is the Indian and we know that because he’s reflected in the mirror in
which we look at ourselves. Or, as Lévi-Strauss has explained: we see in the primitive the
same mind, with the same logic, the same categories, the same requirements of order, and
in short the same capacities for understanding. Only because of moral reasons, we keep
him in an “enigmatic, even mystifying, otherness” (Hénaff, 1998: 26). In the case of the
Puraceños, their “Indianess” is not other but our, and theirs, invention.
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The purpose here is to explain the construction of the boundaries existing between
the Puraceño and the non-Puraceño. We have heard stories and read books about how the
history of Latin America began with the arrival of the Spaniards whose conquest and
and order. When Latin Americans imagine the conquistadores they have the romantic
vision of an armored knight, carrying a sword and a cross, proudly riding a horse
surrounded by Indian porters and a few slaves. No one stops to think about the distinct
roles of each one. Most Latin Americans, especially men, see themselves as the one
dressed in the tin vest, seated on the white horse, while no one, except few
anthropologists –and the Indians themselves- who dare to travel between the two
identities, stop to think themselves as the Indian porter. Then comes the question, is it
true that only because of technological superiority the Spaniards where able to ride the
horse while their luggage was carried by the Indian porter? It is hard to believe that gun
powder was the sole factor in allowing the Spanish complete domination in an
Language, Order, and Accumulation. One of the answers we can give to the question
above is related to the popularization of the Spanish language. The use of a lingua franca
allowed the Spaniards to travel between mentalities and to forge local thinking by
teaching the use of their mother tongue. Scholars, like Benedict Anderson, have proved
this. It was the versatility of the Spanish language, and its popularity through printing,
which allowed Indian nations formerly separated by geography and wars to communicate
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Whatever beauty and versatility the Spanish language had, it was not only this
which made the criollos, the sons of the conquistadores and colonizers, to prevail in the
Latin American social order. It was perhaps, the promise of political order and peace
would arrive one day to the lives of the Puraceños. At least those were the teachings the
Spanish church began implementing since the early days of the conquest. And it was
thanks to those teachings that the Spaniards came to finally recognize the advantage of
having priests among their crews. As Friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis writes on his
evangelical work in the 19th century:“I replied to the Indian chief that they [the Indians]
should come with us, that I will give them the gift of our teachings. He replied no, that his
people wanted me to go with them, that they needed me, and that in exchange, they would
pay me with monkeys, fish, plantains, fruits, etc.” (Santa Gertrudis, (1775) 1970: Vol. I:
311).
signified the connection between two cultural features of Spaniards and Indians. This
means that it was the combination of the colonizers’ hunger for wealth and the
indigenous’ love for order, especially ritual order that facilitated the expansion of the
Spanish colonization. As Lévi-Strauss has explained, what made different the world of
the primitive Indians from that of the Spanish-Creole was the latter’s interest in
Thus, while Santa Gertrudis narrated how “poor” these Indians were by only possessing
few hammocks that were kept by their chief, he also witnessed their enjoyment of the
mysteries of the holly trinity, and their enjoyment of learning the new mixed Spanish-
Indian language while pronouncing God’s new words: “Pancoa dios payquí? -who’s
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God-, Dios payre –god father-, Dios cary –God’s son-, and Dios spiritu santo –God’s
holly spirit.” Thus, while the conquerors could satiate their thirst for accumulation, the
Indians were converted to Catholicism and into Spanish speakers while they dreamt of
the ritualized paradise portrayed in the Spanish spoken teachings of the Bible.
To believe that the Puraceños will enter into competition with the Spaniard for
accumulating resources is a mistake. Their world, which we may call primitive, did not
spin around possessions; it spins in a constant demand for order, especially ritual order:
“all sacred things must have their place” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 10). And this desire for
order was what the Indians may have shown to the Spanish cavalries as they militarily
and ritually took possession of land and souls while promising the coming of paradise. As
the conquistador Pascual de Andagoya writes: “I entered their land with 150 men, 60 on
horse and the rest on foot. The Indians [from the town of Apirama] waited for me formed
in a squadron as perfect formed as the ones I have seen in Italy. The may have been
which the indigenous attempt to reproduce the ritual and political order of Hispanic
institutions, and reluctantly accept the western hunger for accumulation. Thus, what we
see in the story of the Puraceños is not only a very well organized myth of creation in
which the world is organized in two mythical halves, hot and cold, or ice and fire, but an
Surprisingly, in the story, neither the Indians, nor the non-Indian Mosquera loose their
original identities. He brings the order, as the Indians wish, and the Indians cooperate to
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let him satiate his hunger for accumulating wealth, a perfect match reaching back to the
The cultural mixture of the two identities, western Creole and Indian, has created
the mestizo, that identity that Paz has portrayed as trying to escape from itself by
boundaries intersect and reject at the same time. Mythical order attempts accumulation,
and rejects it at the same time because accumulating turns the individual into the greedy,
evil Mosquera of the Puraceños’ story. As accumulation incorporates the love for order,
the mestizo becomes suicidal because by accumulating, for example land or power, he
has to incur in violence against his own people, thus destroying mythical order. Thus, in
Latin American political systems the dominant mestizo classes don’t accumulate to better
the political reality, they do so to keep the political order, paradoxically, to keep the two
diverse identities. The romantic idea held by Mosquera’s daughter about the role of her
father is also a romantic love for the sense of ritual order in which the Creole stays as an
2. Building the State: Accumulation, Violence, and the Annihilation of the Indian.
As we have shown above, the advantage held by early Spanish adventurers was due to
their ability to travel in the continent spreading one well organized kingdom based on one
language, one church (the community of god), and one government, that created in the
indigenous populations a reliance on the sense of order that operated from northern
California to Patagonia and from the Philippines to Cuba. Next, I explore how that sense
of order was developed through a process of increasing violence, simulated from the
European experience.
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What shocked the Indians was not only the increased extension of their other time
small geographic and cultural worlds but an organized sustained violent action in which
they saw themselves converted into the servitude of the newcomers. The expeditions of
Spaniards and creoles into undeveloped lands also carried Indians along routes never
traveled before. Porters, guides, carpenters, masons, etc. were forced out from northern
Chile and Peru into Colombia and Venezuela, young male and female Indians were stolen
by Portuguese bandeirantes to be sold as slaves in the coast of Brazil. All of them were
forced to move and to help in the building of new cities and towns. Despite the well -
organized rituals of the Catholic Church, and its promise of a new land and paradise, the
Indians saw their world turned upside down. They were forced to move in order to create
new communities, new Indian towns, and countries. The composition of Indian towns
not hard to find men and women born under the seasonal weather of the southern cone.
Families were formed at random, and blessed by the mandates and order of the ecclesial
and civil authorities. For example, Santa Gertrudis writes, “the day after they recovered
from the flu, I called all of them. I made them form in lines divided between men and
women. To the one who looked the most experienced man I gave a cane and made him
into their chief. After that, I pulled out men and women from the lines and made them into
families” (Santa Gertrudis, (1775) 1970: Vol. I: 271). Thus, the formation of families and
towns came to be –for the Indigenous- organized and destroyed under the rule of only
Until the early 19th century, when the natives were already organized into small
communities, the model seemed to work in some ways for both Indians and Spaniards.
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Many Indians had developed prosperous towns under the eyes of the church’s misiones or
accumulating and trading the riches of the new world. Paraphrasing Hard and Negri, it
limits, and a regime that effectively encompassed the spatial totality. It was a regime built
not only on conquest but rather on a new order that effectively suspended the Indian’s
history. The Spanish empire really went to the depths of the social world by seeking to
directly rule over human nature. Despite its bloodiness, it presented itself as dedicated to
The empire, that seemed a perfect match of love for order and the Spanish desire
to accumulate, collapsed because the Spanish side created its own boundaries after more
than 300 years of ruling. The division on the Spanish-side between American-born
criollos and the Iberian-born peninsulares halted the continuation of the empire because
While the criollos, as Anderson explains, had only the option to succeed in power by
appointment to positions within their own provinces, the peninsulares could act as more
powerful figures who could aspire to rule all over the empire including the king’s cortes
in Madrid (Anderson, 1983: 59). This created two types of individuals in the Spanish
social structure and was the cause of the criollos to rebel and to break their link to the
mother-land. It was the creoles who developed the independence movement when they
saw no reason in sharing the product of their accumulation with the metropoli. Thus,
boundaries, geographical and social, that had been present but not legitimized until the
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explosion of the independentista movements of the early 1800s created 18 new republics
The breaking of the colonies-metropoli link was catastrophic for the Indians. They
suffered from the expropriation of the lands the crown had assigned to them, and the lack
of recognition of the Indigenous authorities, in the past protected by the figure of the
king. Another consequence was the expropriation of the Church’s lands and the expulsion
of the priests that not only affected the power of the Church but also the wellbeing of
many Indians who had seen in the priests their protectors against the greediness of the
landed criollos. Thus, after many Independencias, the Indians ended up secluded in
rapidly shrinking resguardos whose autonomy and sovereignty was solely based in old
titles granted by the long gone king (e.g. the Puraceños based their right over land in a
title granted by the Spanish king in 1784). Their role, as the Puraceños story testifies, was
not other than that of second class citizens of states that condemned them to live in
seclusion until suddenly some sporadic discovery (such as sulfur) in the lands of their
resguardos make them useful to the interests of the heirs of the criollos.
The seclusion of the Indian in the resguardos not only marked a physical
seclusion from the world of the criollos and the mestizos but segregation from all aspects
of political life. As in Walzer, the Indian minority became “marginal, vulnerable, poor,
and stigmatized, in part at least, because of their commitment” to a traditional culture and
political life (Walzer, 2004: 45). This is evident in most of the 19th century’s Latin
American constitutions that declared the native Indians as legal minors (e.g. Colombian
Law No 89 of 1890). As a result, the newly formed states could freely decide on the most
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ability to contract, tax paying, the owning of property, etc. The conversion of indigenous
population into minors had no other intention than the political annihilation of the
indigenous. The seclusion of the Indigenous in this juridical limbo signifies that as in
Wolin, Latin American countries have become a nationalistic force that pursuits a
homogenous identity that is been quickened through purgatives such as ethnic cleansing
Colombian Liberal Pedro Fermín de Vargas’ address to Congress in the 19th century:
Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference toward normal human endeavors causes one to
think that they come from a degenerate race which deteriorates in proportion to the
distance from its origin… it would be very desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by
miscegenation with the whites, declaring them free of tribute and other charges, and
The status of indigenous people as legal minors still affects their political
boundaries created under colonial rule has not changed. Their right, for example to buy
and sell lands, is still subject to their condition as legal minors, as expressed in
possibilities to contract. Evidence of this denial is also found for example in the claims
made by the Mexican governor of the state of Oaxaca who accused the Mexican
indigenous law as racist and discriminatory (La Jornada –news-, 2001:01-05. page 2).
The old distinction between Creole and Indian is still present within new features
of domination. In Latin America the boundaries are set no longer between the criollos
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and the peninsulares but inside the systems of their new democracies. In each country
these boundaries are not geographic but borders between the poor and marginalized,
mostly of Indian descent, and the well-to-do mostly criollos’ descendants. The Indian
that leaves the resguardos becomes a poor urban dweller whose “indianess” dies as he
approaches the city. The one who stays within the resguardos dies poor and marginalized
in a territory delineated by a long gone king. In recent times those old boundaries,
between the Indians and the criollos, are also translated into boundaries between the
urban elites, most of them mestizos, and the rural and urban poor. The Indians, despite
their actual presence in the isolated resguardos and in the museums and cultural
institutions, seem to have disappeared, annihilated by years of policing and the majority’s
Conclusion.
I have argued here that in Latin America democratization has not been able to
fully develop the political potentialities of ordinary citizens to become political beings.
culture has been abused by powerful nationalistic forces that have taken advantage of the
Second, identity has been formed in Latin America through a violent relationship
between dominant and dominated identities inherited from Spanish imperial colonization.
The breaking of the link between the colonies and the metropoli produced a process of
constant violence in which the Indians have suffered expropriation of their lands, and the
non-recognition of their local authorities. As a result, the Indians are still today secluded
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in small resguardos and in a juridical limbo in which autonomy is paradoxically granted
In both processes, the sense of belonging to an ethnic reality has been related to
the individual’s position in either the dominant or dominated ethnicity. Latin American
politics has produced segregated political systems and failed democracies that while
accentuating the existence of early social and cultural boundaries is still today attempting
to escape from its indigenous roots by annihilating everything related to “being Indian.”
References.
- Andagoya, Pascual de. [1544] 1982. Relación de los Sucesos de Pedrarias Dávila
en la Tierra Firme y de los Descubrimientos del Mar del Sur. In Antonio Cuervo
- Hard, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Chicago Press.
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- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1976. Structural Anthropology. Vol. 2. New York: Basic
Books.
- Paz, Octavio. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude and other Writings. New York:
Grove Press.
- Santa Gertrudis, Fray Juan de. (1775) 1970. Maravillas de la Naturaleza. Vol. 1.
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