Indigeneity, Gender, and Resistance: Critique and Contemporaneity of Bolivian Anarchism in the Historical Imagination of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Abstract

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Bolivia was a hub of Andean transnational solidarities rooted in artisanal trades, and spearheaded by migrant workers whose cultural, educational and social activism reflected a mosaic of influences from older militant traditions in neighbouring countries. Virtually absent from existing overviews of Latin American anarchism in English, Bolivian anarchism engaged extensively with autonomous indigenous and communal movements, and is therefore a distinctly revealing case from which to evaluate the engagement of anarchists with indigenous majorities in the Andean space where they lived. This article explores the work of sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, whose dense tapestry of pioneering scholarship on the intertwining horizons of conquest, rebellion, republicanism, resistance and populism in Bolivia over five hundred years includes profound and nuanced assessments of indigeneity and gender, pointing to the need for a more nuanced understanding of how racialised identities are defined in society, and the ways in which they are deployed discursively by revolutionary movements. From the rebellions Tupac Katari and Pablo Zárate Willka in the late 19th century, the subsequent quest of Aymara 'caciques apoderados' for allies among organized artisans and the urban poor, struggles of anarchist women, independent agrarian trade unionism, and the Katarista movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the popular insurgencies of the past three decades, Cusicanqui's work threads together archival, oral and iconographic history while enlisting the participation of popular movements in an ongoing critique of the legacies of internal colonialism, racialization, patriarchal inheritances, and languages of resistance in Bolivia; as well as the lessons of struggles for autonomy, freedom and decolonization in which anarchists and the movements they subsequently influenced took part.