The figure of the ‘Indian’ in 1920s Bolivian theater

ABSTRACT

This article examines the treatment of the figure of the ‘Indian’ in the Bolivian theater of the 1920s. It opens up with a presentation of the theatrical work of Bolivia’s generación del 21. The selected corpus is then read as a set of texts that discuss the intersections between the notions of the ‘Bolivian nation’ and ‘indigeneity,’ two key elements in the intellectual debates of early 20^th century Bolivia. It attends to the connection between these plays and Bolivian indigenismo and inter-American indigenismo more broadly, thereby highlighting how the ‘Indian’ was understood to be a contemporary subject constrained by specific material circumstances. The article considers the plays Supay marca (1928), by Zacarías Monje Ortiz, which premiered in 1920; two plays by Antonio Díaz Villamil: La voz de la quena (1988), which premiered in 1922 and La Rosita ([1928] 2001), which premiered in 1925; and Los lobos del Altiplano (1930), by Federico Ávila.

RESUMEN

En esta contribución se analiza el tratamiento de la figura del ‘indio’ en el teatro boliviano de la década de 1920. Se parte para ello de una presentación de la labor teatral de la generación del 21 boliviana. Seguidamente, el corpus seleccionado es estudiado como un conjunto de textos que se pronuncian sobre los entrecruzamientos entre las nociones de ‘nación boliviana’ e ‘indianidad,’ dos elementos clave en los debates intelectuales en la Bolivia de las primeras décadas del siglo XX. De este modo, se presta además atención a la conexión del corpus con el indigenismo boliviano, en particular, e interamericano, en general, resaltando en este sentido la consideración del ‘indio’ como un sujeto contemporáneo constreñido por unas circunstancias materiales concretas. El artículo se detiene en la revisión de las obras Supay marca (1928), de Zacarías Monje Ortiz, que se estrenó en 1920; sendas piezas de Antonio Díaz Villamil: La voz de la quena (1988), que se estrenó en 1922, y La Rosita ([1928] 2001), estrenada en 1925; y Los lobos del Altiplano (1930), de Federico Ávila.

KEYWORDS:

• Antonio Díaz Villamil
• Bolivian literature
• Bolivian theater
• Generación del 21
• indigenismo
• Latin American theater

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Antonio Díaz Villamil
• generación del 21
• indigenismo
• literatura boliviana
• teatro boliviano
• teatro latinoamericano

Introduction

In the 1920s, the Bolivian stage saw the rise of a whole new set of themes, characters, and playwrights that contributed decisively to establishing a national theater, which discussed on stage the problems and concerns the country was facing and dealing with them.¹ One major preoccupation was certainly the situation of the large Bolivian indigenous population.

Especially notable during this period was the work of the so-called generación del 21 (with authors such as Antonio Díaz Villamil, Zacarías Monje Ortiz, Humberto Palza, Saturnino Rodrigo, Ángel Salas, among others), who first pioneered the publication and performance of a set of plays focused on national themes and settings that brought Bolivian theater to a high-watermark shortly before the crisis of the 1930s.

Many scholars agree on the importance of the 1920s in the history of Bolivian theater. Finot (1955, 389) underscored the preponderant role played by the playwrights, who organized themselves independently of outside influences, and who, from 1922 on, stirred ‘in the country a promising enthusiasm for theatrical production.’ In Jones’s view (1966, 284), ‘the 1920s was a very active decade in Bolivian drama,’ although that author also noted that the outbreak of the Chaco War at the beginning of the 1930s marked its conclusion (286). Elaborating on this idea, Muñoz indicated that:

The theatrical activity inaugurated by the Generación del 21 ended in 1930, the year when Federico Ávila published Los lobos del altiplano,² putting the Bolivian miner on stage as a dramatic character. Disheartened by the public’s poor reception of their plays, the artists of this generation abandoned the noble but thankless work of the theater, dedicating themselves instead to journalism, education, and politics. Two years later, the Chaco War brought theatrical activity almost to a standstill, and it took nearly four decades for another important organized artistic movement to emerge. (1981, 33)

Finally, Soria (1980, 60) identified two more events that factored into a decline in national theatrical activity at the turn of the decade: the economic depression and World War II.

In the 1920s, Bolivian theater began to feature ‘cholos, cholitas, miners, birlochas, pitucos, and high-society señoritos’ (Muñoz Cadima 1981, 31).³ Writing in the early 1980s, Muñoz was still lamenting that, by comparison to the representation of cholos – which would expand even further in the 1940s with Raúl Salmón’s plays – indigenous characters were not appearing as often as one would expect, given their demographic weight in the country. Muñoz blamed the relative absence on playwrights’ lack of familiarity with that segment of the population. This makes the body of work considered here all the more important and interesting since, over just a few years during the 1920s, a series of plays dialogued with the booming Andean literary indigenismo. Two milestones are relevant here: first, for the Bolivian context, Alcides Arguedas’s ‘Raza de bronce’ was published in 1919. Secondly, Cornejo Polar notes that Tomás G. Escajadillo has argued that Peruvian indigenismo got underway in 1920 with Enrique López Albújar’s ‘Cuentos andinos’ (Cornejo Polar 1980, 49). Cornejo Polar concludes that ‘strictly speaking, indigenismo as a movement arose and was consolidated starting in the 1920s’ (33).

The plays I discuss here focus on ‘Indians’ as coeval subjects, denouncing their impoverished, exploited condition.⁴ These two attributes would become central to the inter-American indigenist approach that emerged more clearly in the 1940s, in which the contemporary marginalization of indigenous people was explained by a long history of domination that formed the basis of understanding ‘Indian’ as a colonial category (Giraudo 2020, 81–86). I return to this in the final section.

The dramatic texts under discussion can be conceived as discursive and spectacular (theatrical, in this case) ramifications of one of the central themes considered in the early twentieth century by the most renowned Bolivian intellectuals: the problem of ‘race’ as a key factor for defining Bolivian ‘national identity.’ I have in mind, for example, the work of Arguedas and Tamayo, which Salmón (2013) referred to in these terms:

In Bolivia, although they are polar opposites in certain respects, Franz Tamayo’s Creación de una pedagogía nacional (1910) and Alcides Arguedas’s Pueblo enfermo (1909) established the parameters for creating ‘the nation’ as a (racially and culturally) coherent entity, underscoring the role of indigenous people in the formation of the nation, either as crucial (per Tamayo) or as an impediment (per Arguedas). These were the two works that most occupied the intellectual milieu in Bolivia until the 1930s. (39)

Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the limitations and implications of putting ‘Indians’ at the center of reflections on failed national access to modernity. Irurozqui emphasizes that the marginalized sectors of the country were accused:

… of being the greatest impediment to Bolivia’s progress, since the nation-state was an object in service of that progress.⁵ The works of Tamayo and Arguedas uphold that point of view […]. They both validated arguments about the influence of race on this whole problematic, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of the liberal regime. (1992, 569)

Thus, during the liberal period (1899–1920), particularly in the field of education, one can see a defense of the need for ‘de-Indianization’ as an essential objective for progress:

More than ever, modernization and unification remain the two great governmental rallying cries, which schools must obey for there to be a national regeneration. These must then be extended throughout the territory, and thus they must reach the indigenous populations at the margin of all ‘civilization’ in order to integrate them into the nation. […] From an educational politics of unification, there will then be a clear shift to an educational politics of de-Indianization. (Martinez 2010, 249-250)

To delve into the groundbreaking nature of the generación del 21 theater’s introduction of the presence of the ‘Indian’ on the Bolivian stage, I first introduce a group of writers before focusing on three specific plays – ‘Supay marca,’ ‘La voz de la quena,’ and ‘Los lobos del altiplano.’ This theatrical reflection on ‘Indians’ and their place in the nation was connected to contemporary concerns of intellectuals in other Andean countries; furthermore, many of its key elements linked up with discourses, practices, and artistic creations developed in the framework of inter-American indigenismo after 1940. Indeed, one of the playwrights focused on in this article, by Antonio Díaz Villamil, embodied a link between these two historical moments, playing a central role in the Bolivian milieu of the 1920s, at the first Congreso Indigenista Interamericano (held in Patzcuaro in 1940) and in the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (III).

The generación del 21 and the new Bolivian national theater

One of the most notable writers of the generación del 21 offers us a critical approach to the theatrical contribution of the Ateneo de la Juventud in his text ‘La literatura dramática en Bolivia’ (Salas 1925). In that text, Ángel Salas noted that the Sociedad Boliviana de Autores Teatrales was formed in La Paz on 2 April 1923, and that it was born thanks to the work of the Ateneo de la Juventud. The aim of this society was ‘to boost dramatic literature, and in so doing create solidarity among authors around their economic and moral interests’ (317).

Prior to that, the Ateneo had promoted the premieres of various Bolivian plays (Salas 1925, 317–319). Eight plays were presented, starting on 7 October 1922, with Antonio Díaz Villamil’s ‘La voz de la quena.’ Also of historical interest was the one-act dramatic poem ‘El Dios de la conquista’ by Enrique Baldivieso,⁶ which, according to Salas, had ‘the merit of establishing the philosophical judgment of the two figures involved in the tragedy of Cajamarca [Father Valverde and the Inca Atahualpa]’ (Salas 1925, 317). For his part, Díaz Villamil later returned to historical drama in the theater season of 1923 with ‘El nieto de Tupac Catari’ (Salas 1925, 318). Muñoz has evaluated the impact of the 1922 theater season at the Ateneo in these terms:

The eight plays have little if anything Bolivian about them. They are indistinguishable in tone and content from plays written in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, of this group, Ángel Salas, Antonio Díaz Villamil, and Humberto Palza would subsequently go on to create a truly national theater, featuring problems pertaining to their own country and flesh-and-blood characters as their protagonists. (1986, 183-184)

Suárez Radillo characterized this series of dramas as a ‘Festival of National Theater,’ adding:

it demonstrated the strength of the Ateneo de la Juventud, […] and made clear that if the new generation of playwrights suffered from errors of form and even of theme, it was nevertheless capable of generating the emergence of an art independent of all tradition. Or this at least was what they aspired to do by affirming, with delightful, youthful hubris, that they were creating a national theater. And indeed, at least a few of them did throw themselves with true sincerity into understanding and analyzing the social reality of their time. (1976, 169)

Soria (1980, 51) identifies several of the playwrights considered below as among the founders of the Sociedad Boliviana de Autores Teatrales: Saturnino Rodrigo, Ángel Salas, Antonio Díaz Villamil, Zacarías Monje Ortiz, and Alfredo Santalla Estrella (see Salas 1925).

Soria characterized the generación del 21 in terms of two essential traits for the development of the Bolivian stage. The first trait included profound reflection on national problems: ‘mestizaje, the character of the cholo-señorito, the Indian as a social class and social problem, the loss of our coastal territory, and international wars, etc.;’ and second ‘a certain professional approach to theater’ (1980, 53–53). Other critics have also alluded to how this generation marked a turning point in the history of Bolivian theater (Gómez de Fernández 1970, 144).

The Ateneo de la Juventud in particular, and the generación del 21 in general, deserve the credit for stimulating Bolivian theatrical production, engaging with themes linked to national concerns and showcasing characters, situations, and spaces recognizable to local spectators of the time, and thus distancing itself from prior creative tendencies like historical drama, monologue, or poetic drama (see Muñoz Cadima 1981, 21–23). Those themes included the indigenous question, framed within a contemporary context. In this regard, different critics seem to agree that Zacarías Monje Ortiz set a precedent when he broached this matter in ‘Supay marca,’ which Suárez Radillo (1976, 170) dates to 1920.⁷ For Salas (1925), ‘he was the first to put on stage the Indian of our time, highlighting the oppression that chains him to a city dominated by white people and cruel mestizos, “Supay-marca,” the city of fantastic monsters with an unquenchable thirst for Indian blood.’ Suárez Radillo (1976, 170) and Muñoz (1981, 30) make the same point, with the latter noting the leading role of indigenous people in the play. For his part, Álvarez García argued: ‘Vernacular theater, with meaning and expression drawn from the land, was first staged in Bolivia by Zacarías Monje Ortíz [sic], author of “Supay-Marka”’ (1959, 331).

Before analyzing these plays, it is important to mention the case of ‘La huerta.’ Premiered by the Círculo Lírico Dramático at the Teatro Municipal de la Paz on 11 May 1924, and published that same year by the publishing house Renacimiento, I do not discuss this ‘drama of indigenous manners’ by Ángel Salas Bustillo (1893–1970) in detail, since an extensive study of it already exists (Muñoz Cadima 1981, 41–58).⁸ As for its composition, the end of the text indicates that it was finished in June 1923. Muñoz Cadima (1981, 55) argues that ‘“La huerta” was a pioneer in Latin American drama: it did for Bolivian indigenist dramaturgy what “Raza de bronce” did for the indigenist novel.’ Muñoz’s evaluation of the play’s major themes is especially apposite here:

This conflict between Khana Aru [the young indigenous protagonist] and Espejo [the mestizo majordomo] - which is the main theme of ‘La huerta’ and to which the other two lines of action, honor and the destructive power of nature, are subordinated - has two dimensions, one personal and another at the level of race. The point of the play, then, is to present the unjust and prolonged exploitation of the Indian by the white man. (1981, 49-50)

This defense of indigenous interests is also carried out through the mediation of Tamayo’s ideal of mestizaje, i.e. ‘mestizaje should be the sought-after stage in the evolution of the nation, desired at all costs, the ultimate historical condition of all politics, all teaching, all supremacy’ (Tamayo 1979, 52). In this sense, Muñoz appreciates the influence of Tamayo on the protagonist of ‘La huerta’: 'in his Creación de la pedagogía nacional (1910), he advocates for a new Bolivian mestizaje based on the Indian, the only great repository of national energy. […] In ”La huerta,” this new mestizo is Khana Aru' (1981, 55). Bear in mind that Khana Aru returns to his rural milieu after training to be a soldier in the city. The contact with the urban world is a vital and intellectual stimulus that he nevertheless puts at the service of improving indigenous peasants’ quality of life, re-establishing his rural connection and identity: ‘I am a farmer, and must die a farmer’ (Salas 1924, 27). This contrast between city and country was also connected to Tamayo’s thinking, as we will appreciate in greater detail in ‘Supay marca.’

Thus, ‘La huerta’ contributed to the renewal of Bolivian theater following the parameters discussed above and served as a means of reflecting on national identity and the place, within it, of indigenous people. It had the peculiarity of doing so not through essay or narrative but through the artistic medium of theater; this was a novelty at the time. The plays examined below also served as intellectual devices for rethinking the situation and role of indigenous people within the Bolivian nation.

‘Supay Marca,’ by Zacarías Monje Ortiz (1895-??)⁹

Set in La Paz during the author’s lifetime, this play revolves around a lovers’ quarrel between Ciscula (an Aymara man, aged 24) and Kantuta (an Aymara woman, aged 18), which was caused by her supposed relationship with Don Roque (a creole rancher, aged 40).¹⁰ The dispute is mediated by Silverio (a rural Aymara sorcerer, aged 70). As personified by Don Roque, the city of La Paz stands out as a symbolic antagonist.

As Finot has pointed out, the title of the play, ‘city of monsters or of demons,’ alluded ‘to the servitude to which the Indian finds himself subjected when forced to live in a city populated by whites and mestizos’ (1955, 391). The title underscores the tensions between the indigenous, rural world and the urban world of white property owners. In the play, this conflict goes beyond a local debate to become national in scope; and beyond the national, if we contrast this text with Arguedas’s position in the 1909 essay ‘Pueblo enfermo,’ which Salmón summarized this way:

Arguedas’s argument, which disparages indigeneity and racial mixing, is based on an analogy between an individual’s cultural-racial ‘origin’ and the physical space that the individual comes from. In the case of the Bolivian aristocracy, the center of power, culture, and ‘civilization’ is clearly identified with urban space. (2013, 60)

Muñoz recalls that, although written in 1920, the play was not published until 1928. He emphasizes how original Monje’s treatment of indigenous characters was: ‘The plot is generally conceived around one-dimensional figures who are either good or bad, but already a step away from the literature that depicted the Indian as an exotic literary adornment’ (Muñoz Cadima 1981, 30–31). Monje presented indigenous characters who went through real, contemporary dramas, like the servitude of pongueo or pongueaje (the domestic service that indigenous tenants were obligated to give freely) (‘CISCULA. […] I’m going down there to do my pongueo, to gnaw on the bare bones that the masters leave behind’ [Monje Ortiz 1928, 12]), or obligatory military service, among various other kinds of oppression.¹¹

In this one-act play, the city, specifically La Paz/Chuquiagu, is marked as the origin of the evils that torment the indigenous characters, in whose defense the piece is written. Thus, in an opening speech (given by one of the characters, Ramucu), we are informed of the following: ‘contrary to popular belief, you will see how in my race the chords of an ecological lyricism, full of an integral poetry, still resonate, even though these days, which smack of slavery, we indigenous people sing as deaf mutes’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 4).

More specifically, the action occurs ‘at a place on the high plateau that skirts the valley at the base of which nestles a dove, the Most Heroic, Valiant, and Intrepid city of Nuestra Señora de La Paz’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 7). There we meet the young Aymara couple of Ciscula and Kantuta, who get into a lovers’ quarrel during which Kantuta will have to struggle not only against her situation of economic and family helplessness, but also suspicions about her honor encoded metaphorically as melting snow, or, more vulgarly, as reheated food (1928, 26, 28, 33).

La Paz is associated with violence:

CISCULA. Twenty times from here to Chuquiagu. I lived down there for two years straight. That was when they took me to the garrison to teach me, like all huaynas [young indigenous men], to kill people, to live without food, on pain of being kicked (Monje Ortiz 1928, 30).

It is also linked to trickery:

CISCULA. They’ll give you four reales for a ten-hour workday, and you’ll carry hundreds of kilos of soil. And when you’re asleep at night they’ll lie in wait to walk all over your body. (1928, 31)

And, in the final analysis, it is associated with moral degradation, equating it literally with hell and its dehumanizing capacity, emphasizing its separation from nature: ‘CISCULA. […] They live piled up on top of each other. From inside their houses, you can hardly see little patches of sky. With so little sunlight, their souls are cold’ (1928, 31).

Against the denigrating opinion of Arguedas, as shown above, Tamayo defended the intimate connection between indigenous people and rurality as a necessary condition for safeguarding the ‘astonishing vitality of their blood.’ From his point of view, indigenous people were destined to contribute the crucial element in the makeup of national identity, but to do so, they had to be circumscribed within rural spaces. Otherwise, they would risk being contaminated through contact with the urban areas proper to whites and mestizos. The ‘rustic health of our valleys and our high plateaux’ would thus be damaged in the urban context, giving rise to, among other evils, alcoholism: ‘Indian alcoholism does not exist in the countryside, or only to a minimal degree. Indian alcoholism begins to appear around the cities of white and mestizo people’ (Tamayo 1979, 90).

For his part, Monje put the negative geographical referent of the city in opposition to the rural/family territory (Tuncamuyu) and, ultimately, to the mountain refuge, to which the spirit of Kantuta’s grandmother guides her after her downfall: ‘Fly, you orphaned girl, you colorful flower, to the refuge of the high peaks; choose to die there. Pachamama will be with you!’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 29). The intimate connection between indigenous people and the land links up to indigenist constructions that, in different national contexts but within an inter-American project, underscored this fact as one of the keys to understanding American indigenous people (Giraudo 2020, 78–80).

The ‘creole rancher,’ Don Roque, embodies the city’s detestable, violent emanation that extends beyond its borders to subjugate indigenous rurality. From the moment of his entrance on stage toward the end of the play, he is characterized by his impetuousness: ‘CISCULA. He comes on horseback as if to trample us underfoot. Nothing can be done about that.’; and by his arrogance toward indigenous people: ‘DON ROQUE enters like a gentleman on horseback, followed by an indigenous man who says nothing’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 45). En route from La Paz to his parents’ hacienda, Don Roque encounters Ciscula and Kantuta. That these two are situated outside the terms of agricultural work is interpreted by him as a contravention of the established order, which he must restore immediately by taking Kantuta with him back to the hacienda while expelling Ciscula from it. Don Roque thus inserts his employees in a system of objects ruled by his desires, depriving them of their romantic intentions: ‘Who do you think you are, getting engaged?,’ and in response to the small protest Ciscula is able to make: ‘They may have bought the land, but not the people!’ (48). Ciscula’s attempts to rebel are ultimately forestalled by the sheer force of the hacienda owner’s whip.

Don Roque’s destructive impact on Kantuta is no less than on Ciscula. Although he does not strike her directly, he forces her to march with him to the ranch, threatening to imprison her if she disobeys. Kantuta, who shares her name with that of Bolivia’s national flower, functions as an image of the nation, which sees itself humiliated by the abuses of the creole, who plays the part of death: ‘CISCULA. […] Ay, he is the salt that allows no flower to bloom! Kantuta, miraculous flower, condemned to wither!’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 50).

Monje turns against this reading of the Bolivian nation that expels, eradicates, or subjugates its indigenous component. The play concludes not with the triumph of Don Roque, but rather, by means of ‘El apóstrofe de Ciscula,’ the focus turns to the theme of the times of scarcity, in which the indigenous ‘race’ finds itself subjugated, and the play urges rebellion and hopefulness. Previously, the sorcerer Silverio had complained to the sun god about his abandonment of indigenous people: ‘ay, Inti, bitterness of destroyed hearts, that is all you come to see each day when you rise above the plains and ravines of Collasuyo!’ (1928, 41). Similarly, he had called Ciscula and Kantuta ‘the rock and snow of the suffering homeland, which puts its oblivion and misfortune to sleep in your cracked hearts!’ (42).

In the end, Monje sketches out a critical reading of La Paz as a city from which creole domination emanates and encourages a renewed national flourishing based on indigenous reaffirmation – ‘Aymara, Aymara, man of infinitely distant years, when will you return!’ and somewhat later Ciscula even exclaims, ‘I myself am God!’ (1928, 51) – and on the destruction of the impure city. Hence, in his final speech, Ciscula skewers La Paz:

¡Supay marca! Demonic city! Mother of all sin! […] It was from your breast that the cause of my new life emerged. Every one of your stones will feel the blows of vengeance. You will be destroyed, and the ashes of the men you caused to howl, and the mud of the old villages that are no longer, must fill in the hole that your accomplice the river cut into the pampas to make the cradle in which you lie. (1928, 51-52)

It must be recalled that, in the historical context of the play, these calls to indigenous rebellion fed directly into the secular fears of the creole population: ‘Certainly, the Indian has been – and still is in the early twenty-first century – a source of permanent anxiety for the creole caste since the indigenous rebellions of the tumultuous eighteenth century’ (Sanjinés 2005, 35). A key example was the rebellion of Pablo Zárate Willka.¹² And Sanjinés adds:

During the 1920s […], the two most dramatic incidents for this [creole] class took place: the rebellion of Jesús de Machaca, on the high plateau outside La Paz in 1921, and that of Chayanta, in Sucre and Potosí in 1927. (2005, 37)

For her part, Irurozqui (2000, 385) affirms how the expansion of the haciendas triggered numerous such uprisings, including those of Pacajes (1914), Caquiaviri (1918), and Achacachi (1920 and 1931).

Thus, to return to the play, against the backdrop of the city as a symbol of corruption and indigenous destruction, and underscoring the inevitable relationship between indigenous people and the high plateau, again we find the salient image of the imperial flower, personified by Kantuta and supported by Ciscula’s indelible love for her. Kantuta’s abduction and subjugation by Don Roque equates to indigenous subjugation under creole socioeconomic domination. But, conversely, Ciscula’s loving trust symbolizes faith in a future of indigenous promise. Hence the play closes with these words from Ciscula: ‘And, with the last of its rays my Love will turn, because until then, the smallest remains of my bones will vibrate with the memory, young and chaste, of Kantuta, the flower that never dies, the flower of empire and hope eternal’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 52).

It is apposite here to juxtapose this disruptive, rebellious project of the nation, understood as an eminently indigenous entity fated to recover a historical but idyllic past, not only with the more sharply differentiated postulates of Arguedas in his ‘Pueblo enfermo’ ([1909/1959) but also with Tamayo’s criterion of ‘reconquering the place’ of indigenous people that had been ‘usurped’ through the process of mestizaje.¹³ Monje’s proposal projects the mythical yesteryear of indigenous governance as the horizon of political expectations for the new Bolivian nation.

‘La voz de la quena’ and ‘La Rosita’ by Antonio Díaz Villamil (1896?/1899?–1948)¹⁴

Although the main point of this article is the way four playwrights dealt with the situation of contemporary indigenous people, I do not want to overlook the more historical approach which Díaz Villamil also used to evoke indigenous people: his ‘drama of Inca evocation,’ ‘La voz de la quena,’ which premiered on 7 October 1922 (Salas 1925, 317).¹⁵ Díaz Villamil was one of the most important figures of the Bolivian theater of the time, while his novel from 1948 ‘La niña de sus ojos’ would stand out among midcentury Bolivian literature. He became one of the most notable Bolivian intellectuals associated with the inter-American indigenismo that took root in Patzcuaro.

La voz de la quena (Díaz Villamil 1988) deals with Atahualpa’s execution in Cajamarca and the Spanish conquest of Hatun Colla, the assassination of the chief Calicuma and his wife, and the flight to the mountains of their daughter, the ñusta or princess Nitaya, together with a small group of survivors.¹⁶ Díaz Villamil took advantage of a creative tradition and thematic familiar to local theatergoers in order to construct his ideological-artistic project.

Although the conquistadors in the play are represented as greedy, disloyal, and bloodthirsty, one of them, Tristán, stands out as exceptional. This character is the backbone of a dual proposal of ethnic-religious reconciliation through love, given that we know that in the past, while he was fighting in one of the last battles of the war against Al-Andalus, he fell in love with a Muslim woman, the daughter of his father’s murderer. His resentment at having been unable to keep her by his side because of the interference of another, more powerful nobleman is what led him to America: ‘I came with no other aim than to find my long-awaited death, or at least to dull my pain with the excitement of conquest’ (Díaz Villamil 1988, 95). In this way, Tristán comes to embody an ideal type of Spaniard, without losing the recognizably perverse side of the other conquistadors:

Look, two kinds of men have come from my homeland: some are evildoers […] whose violence has sown much hate and resentment; but there have been others, Nitaya, who came neither to search for gold nor to destroy your people, but to defend good and justice. (1988, 97-98)

Nevertheless, the love between Nitaya and Tristán meets resistance within their respective social groups. When Tristán confronts Spanish soldiers who are attempting to rape Nitaya, he gets a brutal beating for his audacity. For their part, the Inca elders, headed by the Sun priest, Huillac Huma, oppose the union between the two protagonists. Huillac Huma denies the ñusta’s love for the Spaniard and codes it, by contrast, as a stimulant to the martial capacity of their people: ‘That love is for us. We need it as a stimulant in war. And your name must be our battle cry and our cry for vengeance’ (1988, 100–101).

In the dénouement, the elders accidentally kill Nitaya, who had interposed herself in vain to save her lover’s life; he dies later anyway. Tristán and Nitaya are thus portrayed as two ideal types of ancestors of the Bolivian nation. Their nobility derives not only from their lineage, but is also evident in their virtuous, unprejudiced behavior and in their appreciation of the goodness of the ethnic-religious other. Díaz Villamil thus proposes a revision of the desired legacy upon which to build the Bolivian nation, even as he is aware that destruction and animosity tenaciously oppose the recognition of these twin aspects of nobility.

This Latin American version of Romeo and Juliet can be read in terms of Doris Sommer’s hypotheses about national novels in Foundational Fictions, whereby romance is an opportunity ‘to bind together heterodox constituencies’ (1991, 14), involving tensions that are ‘external to the couple’ (17). Nevertheless, ‘La voz de la quena’ leads to an unusually dramatic outcome for the lovers insofar as it can be interpreted as closing down the possibility of a reconciliation of the antagonisms based on the ‘logic of love’ (24). If we accept such a reading, whom would Tristán and Nitaya have represented symbolically at that time? Perhaps the indigenous and creole sectors of 1920s’ Bolivia. Or perhaps we should suggest a reading in which it would not be necessary to personify the lovers as symbols of cultural traditions that feed into Bolivian identity. Whatever the case may be, Díaz Villamil’s ending makes evident a failure of reconciliation and love at the hands of hate toward difference, which in its attempt at elimination ends up damaging itself.

On the other hand, the early twentieth century also saw the development of Bolivian costumbrista theater, in which the figure of the chola played an increasingly leading role, for example in Raúl Salmón’s Teatro Social, which enjoyed great success in the 1940s (Sanjinés 2005; Soruco Sologuren 2005; Soruco Sologuren 2011). Díaz Villamil played a salient role in this phenomenon, with plays like La Rosita (2001) (which was first performed by the Círculo Dramático at the Teatro Municipal in La Paz on 31 August 1925) and Cuando vuelva mi hijo (2000), that obtained the first prize of the Concurso Nacional del Círculo de Bellas Artes in 1926.

‘La Rosita’ addresses the problem of the inter-class and extra-marital relationships between a young chola and an affluent creole, developed against the backdrop of popular urban areas. The protagonist migrates from the countryside to the city, depicting part of her process of becoming a chola. In this way, Rosita is initially framed in a rural setting, ‘a hacienda house near a village’ (Díaz Villamil [1928] 2001, 11), but after her mother’s death she moves to La Paz, with an intent to kill the person responsible for that loss. Once in the city, Rosita wears ‘the classic garb of the La Paz chola’ (20).

As for the upper-class characters, the romantic flings of Emilio, ‘an aristocratic youth,’ are contrasted with those of his friend, René. The play includes the drama of a chola who is seduced and abandoned by an affluent man, thus taking on hints of melodrama: ‘RENÉ. Ask her what has become of your child, of that creature born for the gutter!’ (Díaz Villamil [1928] 2001, 74). This theme appears in other plays from that era, such as En la pendiente (1928) by Saturnino Rodrigo Cárdenas.¹⁷ Nevertheless, through the character of René, Díaz Villamil takes a critical view of these behaviors and offers an alternative vision of class relations in Bolivian society, making this play especially interesting.

The young René undergoes a process of ‘cholification’ that leads him to abandon his social position, live in Rosita’s picantería (diner-restaurant), and give himself over to alcohol. Nevertheless, Díaz Villamil does not portray this as the destruction of an upper-class man; instead, he uses it to denounce the hypocrisy of the dominant classes. René’s stubborn residence in the picantería is therefore a ‘refuge,’ testifying to ‘his voluntary exile from society’ in reaction to high society’s ‘environment of simulation and egoism’ (Díaz Villamil [1928] 2001, 69). René’s denunciation of creole fakeness is elaborated further and synthesized with his notion of national art, which, as he understands it, should be based on lo popular (the popular) rather than outside influences. Thus, hearing a popular song accompanied by a guitar, René affirms: ‘Here, too, there is sincerity in art, while you all adulterate it in deference to culture and replace it with’ (72).

In this play, Díaz Villamil situates lo nacional-popular as a key substrate for constructing the Bolivia desired by the ‘cholified’ René, who, rather than being contaminated in a cholo space like the picantería, has an epiphany that leads him to deepen his knowledge of the falseness of the elites and to immerse himself in the virtues of lo popular. It is as if his life plan were traced by Tamayo’s opinion about the fate of white people in the Americas in ‘Creación de la pedagogía nacional’: ‘the white man’s personality is condemned to perish in the Americas: either he will lose his caste status [se descasta], mixing in order to acquire new elements of life, or he will degenerate without mixing’ (1979, 83).

Rosita’s transformation is another key moment. At the beginning of the play, we witness the conflict that will mark her storyline: the barbarism and greed of the judge in her village – who, we learn later, is René’s father – have directly caused the death of Rosita’s father and indirectly that of her sick, impoverished mother. She heads to La Paz to avenge them by killing the judge but discovers that he has already died and decides that the blame must fall on his son. The love she comes to feel for this creole man and her decision to spare his life (which was being threatened by her fellow villager, Gregorio, at her own request) make apparent various important aspects if we read the play as a proposal to reconstruct the foundations of the Bolivian state: it acknowledges a past characterized by the exploitation and death exercised by the creole sector over the peasantry; an atypical representative of the creoles personifies an internal critique of his class; and finally, the proposed solution consists of social and ethnic consensus, based on the creoles’ recognition of lo cholo and lo popular as the epitome of lo nacional.

All this can be put in relation to Soruco’s insightful reading of Díaz Villamil’s novel ‘La niña de sus ojos,’ which takes in account the author’s intellectual precedents and political context:

In ‘La niña de sus ojos’ Domy represents Tamayo’s ideal mestizo, who has the creoles’ intelligence (their education and cultivated spirit) but is morally superior to them (the inheritance of the Indian race). Domy is thus destined to guide the nation. But this mestiza’s reaction in her cholo home also represents Arguedas’s racial typology, i.e., the barbaric Aymara origin of the cholo and the need for a racial mixture dominated by creole blood to avoid the degeneration of the social body. (Soruco Sologuren 2011, 181)

Soruco later adds:

Domy represents Tamayo’s mestizo nation, transformed from a ‘grotesque chola’ into a delicate, cultivated mestiza thanks to education. Nevertheless, education is insufficient to turn her into a symbol of the future nation; she still needs to be saved by her left-leaning suitor. (192)

Tamayo’s influence is also noticeable in ‘Cuando vuelva mi hijo.’ Protasio, who embodies ‘the prototype of the intellectualized cholo’ (Díaz Villamil 2000, 9), maintains that his race as listed on his passport should be ‘mestizo’ instead of ‘white,’ as his father had insisted. Here the playwright nods intertextually at Tamayo’s hypotheses: ‘If it hadn’t been for my father, here (on the identity card) it would tell the truth: “Race: Mestizo.” Someday this might be a source of pride. It is the race of the future’ (29).

In the end, in reading La voz de la quena (1988) and La Rosita ([1928] 2001), we observe how Díaz Villamil proposed a series of steps for revising and reconstructing the bases on which Bolivian national being is established. To do so he draws on two dramatic sub-genres of different types (historical and costumbrista), using them to argue for a desired historical-symbolic filiation and level a critique of the present, which together should lay the foundation for the nation’s future.

‘Los lobos del Altiplano’ by Federico Ávila (1904-1973)¹⁸

The final play in the dramatic corpus I have selected is Federico Ávila’s Los lobos del altiplano (1930). The first four acts take place in 1926, and the final one in 1930; Ávila signed the piece on July 1930.¹⁹ The concluding date is significant, given that it followed closely on the Revolution of 25 June 1930, which led to the end of the presidency of Hernando Siles Reyes and General Carlos Blanco Galindo’s rise to power.²⁰ In fact, the diegetic frame largely coincides with Siles’s presidency (1926–1930). Spatially, the five acts transpire at a mining estate on Bolivia’s high plateau, owned by the family of the protagonist, Franz Alva. Regarding the later influence of this play, Suárez Radillo (1976, 171) noted: ‘it has a sincere, moving concern for Indians that – high-flown and affected dialogue notwithstanding – pointed a way for subsequent writers to approach this sizeable proportion of the national population.’

Over the course of the play, the luminosity personified by the characters who side with indigenous demands (the creoles Franz Alva and Clara – notice the symbolic importance of these two names – and the Aymaras Mamani and Catari) is opposed to the secular darkness codified in the titular ‘wolves of the high plateau,’ expressed in four kinds of oppression and embodied in three antagonists. Don Gumercindo is representative of economic oppression, given his capacity as patron of the mine where the action takes place, and of political oppression, evident particularly at the end of the play, when we see him inaugurated as president of the nation. Botijas embodies the ‘prototype of the Upper Peruvian pettifogger’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 27), representative of juridical oppression, an underhanded lawyer who puts his knowledge of the law at the service of established power and who, when Gumercindo rises to power, becomes the Minister of Justice. And finally, there is Tata Mancio, a cleric representing religious oppression.²¹

Ávila’s work marks out a teleology²² of indigenous emancipation in Bolivia, resorting to two timelines: he develops the profiles of the protagonists of the present day, who are called to lead the contemporary indigenous liberation, and makes them heirs of a subversive historical tradition in a specular game that encourages the text to be read as a palimpsest.

Franz stands out as a central figure among the heroes of the planned liberation. He appears at first as poised to inherit, on his marriage, the mine where the play’s action takes place, and from the beginning he is identified as an intellectual close to indigenous people: ‘Franz: twenty-four years old. […] Intellectual type. […] Dressed very neatly, although he wears clothes woven by the Indians of the high plateau’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 10). Intertextual references play a highly important role in his intellectual construction, such that from the outset of the play he is characterized by the texts and intellectual teachers with whom he identifies. His study is adorned with engravings and photographs of foreign thinkers such as Spengler, Keyserling, and Tolstoy, alongside portraits of Bolivian intellectuals like Daniel Sánchez Bustamante, Juan Misael Saracho, and Franz Tamayo.²³ Sánchez Bustamante’s influence as an intellectual reference is patent in Ávila’s play, which he dedicates ‘to the studious youths of Bolivia, through the intermediary of their honorable teacher, Dr. Daniel Sánchez Bustamante’ (3).

In fact, the play contains several allusions to a ‘Teachers’ Conference’ – perhaps the one that was to be held on 30 November 1930 (Suárez Arnez 1986, 234) – at which ‘discussion will, first and foremost, be about Autonomy; we want to achieve it’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 93–94). Autonomy for universities would be recognized by the Estatuto de Educación Pública or the Estatuto Sánchez Bustamante, promulgated in July 1930 (Suárez Arnez 1986, 186). Teachers’ role as a social group at the center of the discussions about Bolivia’s transformation permeates Ávila’s entire play and coincides with the rise of the Consejo Nacional de Educación (1930–1945), ‘an entity that enabled them [teachers], for the first time, to reach the highest levels of state power’ (Talavera Simoni 2011, 89).

To return to the protagonist’s study, also notable are representations of historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Tupac Amaru, and the Inca Garcilaso. Later, we encounter other influences, including Lenin (Clara will likewise be identified as a ‘socialist,’ [Ávila y Ávila 1930, 217]) and the Argentine writer Ricardo Rojas, of whose book, El Cristo invisible (1927), Franz has a signed copy.

With their courageous pedagogical work, Franz and Clara exemplify the leading role that Ávila attributes to teachers as a collective important for indigenous liberation. Other notable agents of social change include university students and indigenous people themselves, as well as workers and young soldiers (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 195–196). It is interesting that Ávila complicates and multiplies the construction of revolutionary agents, arguing that, if it is to come about, emancipation will result from a collective effort in which indigenous people must have a leading but not exclusive role. For their part, the two young people act as the symbolic spiritual parents of a ‘new race:’ ‘FRANZ. […] we must give birth to a new race; our mission is to put an end to these Andean beasts […];’ ‘FRANZ. […] Come on, Clara, let’s go! The sun is shining. We are destined to conceive a new race’ (150 and 157).

Nevertheless, this genesis of the new ‘Indian’ will not be realized without tension and conflict. Indigenous people play a decisive role, thus revealing the importance that they must have in their own process of emancipation. Notable in this regard is the role of Catari, who argues: ‘When it comes to revolution, you get better results from a sword than from a whole encyclopedia. That’s why I’m focusing on chemistry, on making gases and bombs. The way I see it, these are the best intellectual products for our time’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 202). In fact, as the insurrection that finally defeats Gumercindo progresses, Franz is drawn to more violent positions and methods that conflict with his pacifist stance, even though he had already decided to go beyond theoretical reflection at the start of the play: ‘Look, I’ve ripped up all my sappy writing about your pain as a race and as men; whimpering won’t do us any good. I can sense that myself and others in this country are evolving toward more practical things’ (25). In this sense, before fleeing the hacienda to get more actively involved in the rebellion, Franz had identified with the premises of José Uriel García, author of the 1930 essay ‘El nuevo indio,’ whom he calls his ‘teacher:’ ‘FRANZ. […] the New Indian, who will be the future of these lands, will conquer his spiritual freedom, but calmly, securely, without subversive movements, without absurd uprisings’ (119). Unlike Luis E. Valcárcel, who was more inclined to revolutionary action, García defended the new ‘Indian’ as a result of the process of ‘cholification’ (Giraudo 2011, 29–30).

Much of the play is engaged in a discussion with the key theoretical figures of the Andean indigenismo of the time, who shared with other notable figures in the Americas a vision and orientation that were not only indigenist, but also social and ‘Indo-Americanist’ – that is, had a continent-wide notion of the Indian (Giraudo 2020, 74–76).²⁴ As a result, it is not strange to be shown Franz and Clara’s fondness for Mariátegui and his argument about the link between the regime of landed property and indigenous marginalization: ‘FRANZ. […] I have no doubt that we will seek the causes of the [indigenous] problem in the economy of the country and not just, as has been done until now, in its judicial, administrative, or ecclesiastic structure; less still in its duality or plurality of races; and not in its mere cultural or moral conditions, either’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 120).

By contrast, in discussing what a national art should look like, elaborating a sort of normative poetics, Franz lashes out against Alcides Arguedas because ‘he gives us a false vision. That great writer’s sin is that he uses Western, European lenses; he judges our reality from a point of view that is not our own’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 96). The critique of Arguedas’ eurocentrism reinforces the identification with the Indo-Americanist orientation: Franz backs the demand for an American gnosiology in which the indigenous element will prove foundational.

Franz and Clara’s concept of national art draws on the words of another Bolivian intellectual, Carlos Medinaceli, a member of the literary group associated with the journal Gesta Bárbara (founded in Potosi in 1918) and subsequently recognized primarily for being the author of one of the most notable indigenist Bolivian novels, ‘La Chaskañawi,’ published in 1947.²⁵ In fact, Clara literally cites it in her declamations. For example:

CLARA. Yes, ‘our literature has to be truthful to the point of cruelty, revolutionary to the point of torture, swollen with pain to the limit; and above all, inflamed with a spirit of redemption and justice like an arrow destined to bury itself in the den of iniquity itself;’ a literature like that, as conceived by our compañero Medinaceli whose book I’m citing, will be the only one that makes us worthy of our art and our country. (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 97-98)

Thus, according to the teleological conception of history described above, Bolivia would be called to engender a new form of revitalizing culture: ‘here, if they know how to value our artists and thinkers, we must inevitably see a new form of life flourish, a new culture that will replace the sufficiently diagnosed Western one’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 96). But the text not only projects into the future; it also seeks to construct a subversive genealogy.

To do so, Ávila relies on the technique of the play within a play. In keeping with his project of indigenous education, Franz draws on the theater as one more pedagogical tool, directing a play about Tupac Amaru that stars indigenous people who work on their lands. At that point there develops a specular game according to which Franz will act ‘as protector of the Indians … of Santelices … ’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 83), while Mamani will play Tupac Amaru and Catari will play Katari. (It is unclear whether this refers to Tomás Katari or to Tupac Katari.) Furthermore, Franz and Mamani had already discussed metempsychosis, concluding – half seriously, half in jest – that Franz was the reincarnation of Las Casas or Ventura Santelices, while Mamani was that of José Gabriel Tupac Amaru (1930, 23).

An intertextual and transversal reading of history is thus presented, in which different agents appear repeatedly with chronological variations, as if a palimpsest were predestined to undertake the historical challenge of indigenous liberation.²⁶ Hence the historical referents in play within the play serve not only to recall models of behavior from the past, but to evoke the future to come: ‘CATARI. […] Do you remember, tata, the Insurrection from the other day? … It’s just the same … As if the person who wrote the play had copied it from what happened … ’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 83).

Coda: indigenous Bolivian characters and approaches to inter-American indigenismo

It is interesting to see how the theater offered a venue in which to construct a discourse that openly advocated for the defense of indigenous people in a context that was key to forging the idea of a contemporary Bolivian nation. In this way, Monje, Díaz Villamil, and Ávila (along with Salas) gave form to different visions of indigenous people and therefore of the nation.

Monje constructed an antithetical pair that opposed indigenous rights to the rapaciousness of the creole patron. Although the protagonist is physically defeated by the hacienda owner’s whip, the play closes with a call to rebellion, to the coming destruction of the enemy. Díaz Villamil pointed out the need for a dialogue that would give rise to a mestizaje that respected and valued its indigenous, cholo, and popular components. Finally, Ávila introduced new actors who appealed to the need to unite sectors that, including in essential form, went beyond the ethnic component while simultaneously bringing up referents and premises with a socialist flavor. He delved into the economic causes of indigenous exploitation, highlighted the labor of teachers, and put his money on overturning the political-economic oligarchy upholding that exploitation. The rebellion headed by his characters was no longer a latent potential as in Monje, but was instead triumphant; hence Clara’s final lines of the play: ‘we have put an end to the LAST WOLVES OF THE HIGH PLATEAU!’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 236).

Aside from the importance of properly locating the creative gaze in the Bolivian reality of the time, and even granting that these texts are primarily related to the tradition of Andean indigenismo that was forming at the time, the modernity of these plays is remarkable when we regard them from the standpoint of the hypotheses and milestones that sustained inter-American indigenismo in the mid-twentieth century.

For one thing, these theatrical texts already feature some of the positions vis-à-vis the problem of American indigenous people that were to become essential to later developments in indigenismo: a social interest in the living conditions of indigenous people, who were themselves understood to be contemporary subjects; a desire to explain the historical and current causes that perpetuate their marginalization and exploitation, and, in this connection, a denunciation of the dominant classes; an intent to view the problem through a national and popular lens; and, in sum, a longing to construct discourses that would contribute to indigenous emancipation.

In addition, several of the playwrights discussed in this article participated in some of the foundational acts of that indigenismo. Díaz Villamil, then vice president of the Consejo Nacional de Educación, joined the official Bolivian delegation accompanying the director of Educación Indígena de Bolivia, Elizardo Pérez, and the ambassador (not to mention writer and literary critic) Enrique Finot at the first Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, held in Patzcuaro in April 1940, but originally slated for Bolivia (Giraudo 2011; AHIII, Bolivia, ‘Díaz Villamil, Antonio’; Pérez 2015). Furthermore, like the Peruvian José Uriel García, Díaz Villamil and Ávila were part of the provisional Executive Committee of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano – García and Díaz Villamil as head spokesmen of Peru and Bolivia, respectively, and Ávila as deputy spokesman for Bolivia. The committee was active from 29 April 1940, to 24 March 1942, at which point the Instituto ratified its definitive formal constitution (Giraudo 2006, 12–25; AHIII, Bolivia, ‘Díaz Villamil, Antonio’).

We therefore have a twofold connection to the evolution of inter-American indigenismo, testifying to the modernity of the theater that arose in 1920s’ Bolivia. Through the discourse of the theater, the playwrights discussed in this article, and by extension the Bolivian national theater, were already starting to incorporate themselves into the community of practice that was inter-American indigenismo, which would crystallize and expand powerfully in the 1940s. At that point some of these writers would once again engage with the events and institutions responsible for developing and implementing the proposals of a new indigenist project that was now continent-wide in scope.

Archives

AHIII: Archivo Histórico del Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (Inter American Indian Institute Historical Archive), now in the Centro de Documentación Manuel Gamio, PUIC-UNAM, Fondo III, Mexico City.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleague, Laura Giraudo, whose erudition and insight have substantially enriched this article. I also thank my colleagues at the Biblioteca Americanista de Sevilla, CSIC, who provided access to many of the references needed to prepare this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish MINECO under the RE-INTERINDI Project “The Other Sides of the Indigenismo: A Socio-Historical Approach to Ethnic and Racial Categories and their Uses in Latin American Societies,” HAR2013-41596-P, and the HeterQuest Project “Heterogeneity under question: cross-knowledge and cross-practices in law, indigenismo and social issues,” PID2019-107783GB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). This paper has been translated from Spanish.

Notes on contributors

Emilio J. Gallardo-Saborido

Emilio J. Gallardo-Saborido, is an associate researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos/Instituto de Historia, Spanish National Research Council in Seville, Spain. His research focuses on sociological and historical approaches to contemporary Latin American literature, and on the relationships between ethnicity and cultural production in Spain and the Andes. He currently leads the projects Escritores latinoamericanos en los países socialistas europeos durante la Guerra Fría (PID2020-113994GB-I00 /AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033) and Presencia del flamenco en Argentina y México (1936-1959): espacios comerciales y del asociacionismo español (PY20_01004, Junta de Andalucía).

Notes

1. It would be worth problematizing the notion of a ‘national theater’. For one thing, Muñoz invokes it while noting the absence of ‘a true national theater in the nineteenth century. In these plays one cannot recognize Bolivian characters, given that they are distorted to match the grandiloquent tone in which the authors chose to translate their sensationalist, patriotic purposes and follow the romantic canons’ (1981, 23-24). He identifies 1912 as the starting point of Bolivian theater, pegged to the publication of Fabián Vaca Chávez’s ‘Carmen Rosa’, ‘the first Bolivian play to feature contemporary characters who were perfectly recognizable in La Paz society at the time’ (24). It would likewise be important to consider other manifestations when evaluating what to include in the term national theater and its chronology. For example, in the context of the Bolivian Civil War and its aftermath, we could ask about the role of Incan drama staged in the community of Caracollo, where the theater acted as a means of reclaiming indigenous identity by recovering the Inca past: ‘The local Aymara elite in the highland town of Caracollo, Bolivia, adopted an “Inca” identity in the wake of the war to avoid the stigma of being “Aymara” – an unacceptable form of Indianness – and to mobilize for national inclusion in ways that an assertion of contemporary Aymara identity would have prohibited’ (Kuenzli 2013, 10). Finally, it would be interesting to analyze the treatment of the social question in early twentieth-century Bolivian theater as taken up by the Cuadro Dramático Rosa Luxemburgo and the theater troupe Luz y Verdad. Lora took note of them both, identifying them as ‘the first effort to carry out social theater’ (1969, 124).

2. On this point he agrees with Suárez Radillo, for whom Ávila ‘concludes the generación del veintiuno’s work with his 1930 drama, “Los lobos del altiplano”’ (1976, 170).

3. In Irurozqui’s view, in the early twentieth century, ‘there arose another category, synonymous with mestizo, but with a negative connotation: the cholo. This term designated the racial degeneration caused by the everyday mixing of the white and Indian races, encompassing most of Bolivia’s population, whose capacities and public rights, upon being categorized as cholos, were questioned’ (2000, 118). Soruco defines the chola as ‘an urban mestiza woman who wears eighteenth-century Spanish clothing, braids, and a Borsalino hat, and thereby differentiates herself from the mestiza and creole women who wear fashionable Western clothing’ (2017, 13). The dictionary defines birlocha as a chola who adopts the dress of a woman of a superior social class; pituco means a person who is ostentatiously of high social class (roughly equivalent to ‘fop’ in English); señorito means a well-off and idle young man.

4. It would be interesting to include other plays in this survey. Jones mentions one that I have been unable to find, called ‘Mañacu’: ‘Some costumbristas have written whole plays in the Indian languages. Nestor Lizarazu wrote “Mañacu” in Quechua, the language of the Inca nobles’ (1966, 283). Finot (1955), too, refers to this play.

5. Made within the complex dynamics of the creation and consolidation of nation-states, this accusation would also extend to other South American countries – in Colombian discourse about the ‘defects of the race,’ for example – influencing the indigenist politics adopted in each case.

6. Baldivieso also took an interest in the inter-American indigenismo of Patzcuaro. The III archive holds the biographical sketch he sent to be included in the directory of people and institutions specializing in American indigenous questions (see Giraudo 2011). He attached it to a letter dated 24 February 1942, addressed to Carlos Girón Cerna, then secretary of the III. In it, he identified himself as a ‘lawyer’ and ‘Professor of Constitutional Law in the Department of Economic Sciences and Political Law at the Universidad de La Paz,’ while at the same time identifying his specialty as ‘constitutional and educational questions’ (AHIII, Bolivia, ‘Baldivieso, Enrique’).

7. Regarding the date of this play, the 1928 edition includes a postscript with the heading, ‘At the third staging of this play, a La Paz newspaper reported, on Tuesday, 1 July 1924 […]’ (Monje Ortiz 1928, 53).

8. Born in La Paz, Salas received his bachelor’s degree in business and worked in journalism, holding notable positions at publications like El Diario, Los Debates, and El Tiempo, of which he was director. Among other occupations, he also acted as Secretary of the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública in 1919 (Barnadas 2002b).

9. Born in La Paz, he earned his law degree in 1925 (Barnadas 2002b).

10. In Bolivia, creole or criollo means a person born in Bolivia who belongs to the dominant class and is considered white by local standards.

11. Nevertheless, note how in ‘La huerta’ the mestizo majordomo alludes on several occasions to military service in the city as the origin of the indigenous protagonist’s militant attitude. Historically, this same concern can be found among elites critical of the liberal project: ‘Through universal education and conscription, the Liberal Party had created the machinery to manufacture more cholos. The new conservative vanguard disagreed only about which was more dangerous to society: universal literacy or conscription, giving Indians access to their first letters or their first guns?’ (Larson 2011, 147).

12. On this rebellion, see the work of Xavier Albó or that of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who points out: ‘The Willka rebellion was perhaps the final autonomous Indian rebellion of the republican period. Thoroughly defeated and decimated, their troops acted like a nation within a nation: in their open confrontation against the dominant creole minority, they expressed the ideology and practice of an anti-colonial fight. Through the crisis unleashed by Zarate’s rebellion, the Indian, as a colonial category, came to be reproduced in the collective perceptions of creole society’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 86).

13. ‘The mestizo – who in our part of the Americas numerically and qualitatively constitutes the superior, valid component of the race – that mestizo feels Indian blood in his veins, blood that is unvanquished and invincible, despite all historical appearances. We have already said it: these are the underground reprisals of history’ (Tamayo 1979, 63).

14. Born in La Paz. Barnadas (2002a) outlines the importance of educational sector in his professional life, where he held several posts (professor of History and Geography, director of Colegio Bolívar, high-level official at the Ministerio de Educación, municipal inspector of the profession, and vice president of the Consejo Nacional de Educación).

15. It is worth recalling here that modern Incan drama in Quechua developed around Cuzco from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, and that Quechua-language costumbrista comedy would also emerge in the 1930s. These cultural phenomena have been studied in depth by Itier (1995, 2000).

16. Díaz Villamil’s work is at the origin of one of Bolivia’s few silent films, ‘Wara Wara’ (José María Velaso Maidana, 1930): ‘After the theatrical success of the play, Velasco Maidana convinced Díaz Villamil to adapt it into a screenplay’ (Vargas Villazón 2010, 69).

17. Born in Potosi, Cárdenas was linked to the field of education: he studied at the Escuela Normal de Sucre and founded the Instituto Normal Superior de Educación Física. He also held diplomatic posts in Argentina and Ecuador and worked as a journalist, founding and directing several publications, e.g. La Nación in 1952 (Barnadas 2002b). For a close reading of ‘En la pendiente’, see Muñoz Cadima (1981, 59-68).

18. Born in Tarija, he received his doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, in addition to studying law at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (1923–1927). He held positions as an educator as well as a diplomat. In Tarija he was at the head of the Biblioteca Municipal, during which time he founded the first lyceum (1944) and the Universidad Juan Misael Saracho (1946), serving as the university’s first dean (Barnadas 2002a).

19. There is some ambiguity about the date of this play in the only edition I have found (1930): the cover indicates that it was published in Tarija in June 1930, the signature at the end of the play puts it in the same place, but in July of that year. The following lines spoken by Catari help to clarify the date of composition; I read them as alluding to Siles’s attempt to extend his term in office: ‘[L]ook, for me, what’s strange, what’s inconceivable, will always be the founding of this nation-building party that is simple-minded enough to believe in the reality of the famous term-extension (prórroga)’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 191).

20. This historical moment is dramatized in Alfredo Santalla Estrella’s ‘Palabra de cadete’, which premiered in La Paz by the Compañía Tiahuanacu on 10 October 1930. The role of Ángel as one of the cadets behind the uprising is especially notable, but there are also the figures of two servants (Petrona and Simón) with markedly Aymara linguistic traits: ‘Its local vocabulary, especially in the speeches of the Indian servants, makes it incomprehensible to the average reader’ (Jones 1966, 283).

21. It is appropriate to read Ávila’s play in connection with the thinking of contemporaneous writers like Mariátegui or Valcárcel, but it also echoes earlier writers like Manuel González Prada, whose ‘Discurso en el Politeama’ presented an idea analogous to that of Ávila’s ‘Los lobos del Altiplano’: ‘It falls to you, school teachers, to galvanize a race that has become numb to the tyranny of the justice of the peace, the governor, and the priest, the trinity that keeps the Indian in ignorance’ (González Prada 1894, 72-73). In another text from 1904 (‘Nuestros indios’), González Prada (1985) highlighted other ideas that are in dialogue with the plays discussed in this article, like the importance of the socioeconomic component of indigenous oppression and the need for indigenous people to take a leading role in the defense of their own rights.

22. In fact, in one of his dialogues, Franz elaborates what he understands as the four great eras of Bolivian history, running from the ‘Inca Period,’ the ‘Colonial Period,’ and Independence or the ‘reign of heroism; of military heroes’ to an era that was imminent, and would be characterized by the recognition that the ‘Indian’ is the ‘sole and absolute owner of these lands and the effective promise of these Americas, which will be grandiose, whenever we dare to come closer to the Indian and discover all there is in him … ’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 102).

23. These authors also influenced the playwright himself: ‘[…] as a historian he was influenced by the Germans Spengler and Keyserling and the Argentine R. Rojas. According to Francovish, he trained in “the mysticism of the earth,” theorizing Bolivian historiographic self-knowledge, polemicizing with the pessimism of A. Arguedas and the Eurocentrism predominant among historians, and championing the Andean past’ (Barnadas 2002a, 225-226).

24. In this play, reinforcing its profile as work with a clear thesis, there is also room to discuss the arguments of other non-American thinkers, like the German Keyserling (Ávila y Ávila 1930), who had visited La Paz in 1929 (Stefanoni 2012, 2014). There are likewise clear echoes of the Spengler of The Decline of the West (Spengler 2021).

25. After praising the work of Carlos Medinaceli as initiator of literary criticism in Bolivia, Luis H. Antezana adds, ‘Furthermore, Medinaceli not only wrote one of the paragons of the chola Claudina figure [i.e. in “La Chaskañawi”] but his work was also connected to the “gesta bárbara” movement, whose objective was, precisely, to renew the current literary horizon, in which things local (read: marginal) still had no voice, as they say’ (2002, xix). On ‘La Chaskañawi’, see also, for example, Soruco (2011, 2017).

26. Note, for example, this intertextual echo reflected in the title of the play itself: ‘TATA MANCIO. – […] Furthermore … that Las Casas, he brought war on us. He went so far as to tell us we were “HUNGRY WOLVES”’ (Ávila y Ávila 1930, 83).