A trope of colonial obliteration?: a critical note on ‘Colonial Latin America’ and related conversations

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Notes

1 For example, the Zapatista movement that emerged in Mexico in 1994 offered for us an important elaboration on the possibility of interweaving Indigenous politics of autonomy and liberation as alternatives to colonialism and neoliberalism. On the Zapatista movement, see Mora 2017.

2 On the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), see Stephenson 2002. Founded in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1983, this Aymara research cluster put in the foreground of its scholarly agenda the question of colonialism. Pivotal publications of THOA during the 1980s were El Indio Santos Marka T'ula, cacique principal de los ayllus de Qallapa y apoderado general de la comunidades originarias de la República (1984), a book collectively authored by THOA members and engaged in the anti-colonial legacy of a late nineetenth-century Aymara leader; as well as, in a similar vein, Mujer y resistencia comunitaria: historia y memoria (1986). THOA emerged as an Indigenous intellectual group in dialogue with the works of Fausto Reinaga (1906–1994) and the political activism of Jénaro Flores (1942–2019), key figures in the positioning of the Katarista-Indianista movement in the Bolivia of the 1970s. In our own Mapuche intellectual context, the influential book ¡ … Escucha winka … ! Cuatro ensayos de historia nacional mapuche published in Chile in 2006 and authored by four Mapuche historians (Pablo Mariman, Sergio Caniuqueo, José Millalen and Rodrigo Levil) was a key reference for us in terms of an anti-colonial Mapuche rewriting of history in Chile.

3 For example, some points of reference for us were the writings of Vine Deloria (Lakota and Dakota) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Māori). See Deloria 1989; Smith 2008.

4 Postcolonial theory became highly influential in the humanities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In American Indian studies, an important critique of postcolonial theory is that of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in her book, A separate country: postcoloniality and American Indian nations (2011). Cook-Lynn (Dakota) challenges the idea of a ‘postcolonial America’ and proposes to re-center the Native American conversation on colonialism vis-à-vis a horizon of American Indian nationhood. Likewise, in American Indian literary nationalism, a book co-authored by Jace Weaver, Craig Womack and Robert Warrior, the statement by Linda T. Smith is also quoted to establish a similar Indigenous critique of the ‘postcolonial’ turn: see Weaver et al., 39–40. It is well known that many scholars of postcolonial theory emerged from the diaspora from South Asia, linking cases like India to a ‘postcolonial’ experience. Against that current, the resurgence of organized Indigenous movements in this region in recent decades, such as the Adivasi (First Inhabitants), has enabled native voices to reposition the centrality of colonialism not so much in regard to European colonial powers but rather in their struggle to confront local settler colonial agents that dominate in present-day India.

5 At an Indigenous summit in Quito, Ecuador, in the early 1990s, Aymara leader Takir Mamani proposed to use Abya Yala to name the whole continent. Following the lead of Mamani, Speed uses this term here. At the Quito summit, Mamani argued that ‘Naming our cities, towns, and continents is equivalent to subjecting our identity to the will of the invaders and their inheritors.’ Abya Yala or Abiayala is a term from the language of the Guna People (natives of what today is called Panama). Kuna thinker Aiban Wagua claims that Abiayala, in the Guna language, means ‘the territory saved, preferred, and loved by Baba and Nama,’ that is by mother and father. More broadly, it could be translated as ‘mature land, land of blood,’ a Guna concept that refers to the entire American continent (Wagua 2007, 342). In recent decades, many Indigenous leaders and organizations from Mexico, Central, and South America have used this term to replace ‘Latin America’ and/or ‘the Americas’ (Keme 2018); yet some Indigenous activists and organizations have opted for yet other ways of naming the region or the continent based on their own linguistic and cartographic ancestral traditions.