Fictive Foundations: National Romances and Subaltern Ethnicity in Latin America

Author(s): Joanne Rappaport

Source: History Workshop, No. 34, Latin American History (Autumn, 1992), pp. 119-131
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289186
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 CRITIQUE

Fictive Foundations: National Romances

and Subaltern Ethnicity in Latin America
by Joanne Rappaport

Miguel Taimal, former governor and local historian of the indigenous

community of Cumbal, Colombia, once shared with me his version of
Columbus' arrival in America.' Columbus ventured across the ocean in
search of territory, he told me, because Spain was suffering a land shortage.
After six months of sailing, the land-starved sailors threatened mutiny.
Suddenly, they saw a light shining: their ship had reached land. Columbus'
crew first set foot on American soil with Law 89 of 1890 in hand; that is, they
arrived carrying copies of the post-Independence law that specifies the
nature of indigenous landholdings in Colombia.2
Hardly a version of the Spanish invasion as we would tell it, don Miguel's
tale compresses time and space, inserting such known quantities as
turn-of-the-century Indian law and Colombian national territory into a story
that should have taken place several centuries before, in the distant
Caribbean. The storyteller thus reintroduces indigenous people into
national history, seeking the roots of nationality in the colonial period,
instead of the nineteenth century. Don Miguel's account is reminiscent of
the history told by many of his Cumbal neighbors.3 Like them, he conflates
recent legislation and the colonial-era documentation that legitimizes
indigenous communal landholdings and provides evidence for indigenous
historians. But in an unusual twist, his Spaniards are ambiguous characters
who, like today's Indians, are starved for land; his Columbus has the
unlikely honour of granting Colombian Indians protectionist legislation.
The narratives of don Miguel and others like him provide subject matter
for local historical writing. One example is a mimeographed magazine, the
Chasqui Cumbe - or Cumbe Post - that was written in 1986 by two young
political activists, Efr&nTarapues and HelI Valenzuela.4 The first (and only)
issue of the magazine was historical in focus, calling for the elucidation of
data hidden in archives:

For much time the good customs of our elders, the laws, the experiences

rii t I [ suie 34
HiSto rv Wo rks h olp Jo rl ? History Workshop Jouirnal 1992
 of struggle, culture, traditional medicine, beliefs and the good lifeways
have been forgotten; likewise, the forced sufferings, domination, racial
discrimination and economic and social humiliation.

For that reason it is worthwhile to make known to the Great Cumbe

Family its hidden experiences, guarded in its archives, which have been
the fundamental basis for demanding [our] rights and following [our]
historical process as autonomous people with the right to live and develop
as human beings on our motherland inherited from our GREAT CHIEF
CUMBE.5

But while Tarapues and Valenzuela purport to write the history of their
community, what follows is essentially a mental map of Cumbal's territory
containing references to the boundary markers of its eighteenth-century
community title - precisely the document that Miguel Taimal confuses with
Law 89.6 Tarapues and Valenzuela go on to describe the ways of life of their
ancestors, highlighting subsistence practices, toolmaking, ceramics, and
barter in a series of brief paragraphs that tell us more of the lives of their
grandparents than of their precolumbian ancestors.
Once again, here is an account of the distant past that telescopes
historical referents from the colonial and precolumbian periods with
descriptions of life at the turn of the century. This written history of Cumbal
follows the conventions of such oral narrators as Miguel Taimal insofar as in
it, the events of long ago are couched within personal reminiscences from
the not-so-distant past.
While unsophisticated in comparison to the polished accounts of other
indigenous intellectuals, the Chasqui Cumbe represents a new kind of
foundational literature in Latin America, self-consciously providing a
written stimulus for the process of ideological consolidation and the
development of a sense of community that leads, ultimately, to national
projects.7 In the case of Cumbal, it is not so much the construction of a new
nation that is at stake, as a redefinition of Colombian nationality along
multicultural lines, which no longer prescribes cultural homogeneity as a
characteristic feature of the nation.8

Foundationalfictions
It is interesting to reflect upon indigenous accounts in light of other work on
literature and the formation of national ideologies. One prominent example
is Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions, which explores the role played by
Latin American nineteenth-century romantic novels in the formation of
national ideologies.9 Sommer's interpretation rests upon the work of
Benedict Anderson, who proposes that literacy is key to the development of
national consciousness, because it provides a context within which the
nation can be imagined by a broad reading public. In addition to studying the
role of newspapers in the constitution of the 'imagined community', as he
calls the nation, Anderson suggests that the genre of foundational novels
will provide a key to comprehending the development of national ideol-
"'
ogies.
Most of the novels considered by Sommer were written by authors of
considerable political influence, deeply committed to the development of
national projects on the political, as well as the artistic, levels; such books
have since become 'national novels', incorporated into curricula by
educators, recast by filmmakers, popularized to the point of providing
names for babies."
But while Sommer follows the lead of Anderson in elucidating the impact
of fictional writing in the creation of a national ideology, she has also turned
to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality to comprehend the particular
choice of theme made by Republican-era Latin American authors.'2 These
national novels are romances in two sense of the word: not only can they be
classified as such by genre, but they are also romantic inasmuch as they are
love stories.
Sommer seeks to understand why the vehicle of the romance should be
selected, over and over again, to generate a national consciousness. Her
goal is

to locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national

ideals are all ostensibly grounded in 'natural' heterosexual love and in the
marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation
during internecine conflicts at midcentury (p. 6).

The heterosexual love that Sommer explores in these novels is not that of
European romances; its purpose is different. In Latin American novels, the
gender attributes of heroes and heroines are confused, with females
exhibiting masculine strength and males displaying feminine compassion,
paralleling the emphasis on unity, personalism and alliance that character-
ized the political process of state consolidation.
It is as love stories that these novels provided vehicles for conceptually
linking the incompatible ethnic and regional groups that comprised the
nascent Latin American nations, for in these romances African slaves yearn
for white mistresses, women from the provinces love men of the capital,
Spaniards cherish Indian princesses, and mestiza beauties fall for creole
men. While foundational fictions projected themselves into the future, using
sexual love as a 'trope for associative behavior, unfettered by market
relationships' (p. 35) and for the political desire of patriotism, inter-ethnic
and inter-regional relationships were also used to tap the past, as a way of
legitimizing the creole elite. In fiction and in politics these novelists were

reforming one thing into another: valor into sentimentalism, epic into
romance, hero into husband. This helped to solve the problem of
establishing the white man's legitimacy in the New World, now that the
 illegitimate conquerors had been ousted. Without a proper genealogy to
root them in the land, the creoles had at least to establish conjugal and
then paternity rights, making a generative rather than a genealogical claim
(p. 15).

For Sommer, such novels were not simply allegories for authors-cum-
nation-builders, but alternative contexts within which national ideologies
were worked out:

I am suggesting that Eros and Polis are the effects of each other's
performance . . . Erotic interest in these novels owes its intensity to the
very prohibitions against the lovers' union across racial or regional lines.
And political conciliations, or deals, are transparently urgent because the
lovers 'naturally' desire the kind of state that would unite them (p. 47).

They played, consequently, the same role as did other written genres, such
as the essay, in creating and consolidating incipient national ideologies.
It is not my intention here to write a critique of Sommer's book, for my
own concerns - the ideology and rhetoric of indigenous-rights movements -
are quite different from hers. Instead, I will use Foundational Fictions as
point of departure for contemplating the dynamics of national identity in
Latin America. In particular, I will question the degree to which dominant
ideologies as they are expressed in romantic literature have been absorbed
by colonized ethnic groups and how these ideologies have been used in the
creation of alternative nationalist dreams.

The language of romantic love

Sommer's principal contribution is her sophisticated analysis of the use of
romantic love as a trope for patriotism in Latin American foundational
fictions."3The same choice, however, is made for radically different reasons
by Latin American subaltern ethnic groups; in fact, the very divergent uses
to which Indians have put the language of romantic love suggest that the
foundations established by these novels were fictive indeed. While Sommer
does indicate that politicians traced the connection between individual love
and love of country in their essays as well as in fiction, the usefulness of the
allegory was, moreover, confined to a limited number of expressive genres.
In nineteenth-century Latin American novels, love and courtship pro-
vided vehicles for bridging ethnic and regional differences that had proven
insurmountable in political practice. The ambiguities of gender roles
evinced in these fictional love affairs were exploited ideologically by authors
bent upon extolling the new social relationships of capitalist society. Erotic
language among the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Maya of
Yucatan, Mexico, likewise bridged cultural chasms. In his chronicle of
written communication between Maya politico-military leaders and Ameri-
can archaeologists, Paul Sullivan demonstrates that the language of
courtship and erotic love was employed by Maya letter-writers and
indigenous translators to establish social relations in an environment of
distrust and estrangement.'4 The Maya, descendants of nineteenth-century
rebels who had defied the Mexican government during the Caste War of
Yucatan and who were still alienated from their national and provincial
governments, made contact in the mid-1930s with archaeologist Sylvanus
Morley in the hopes that the American government would provide the
Indians with arms. Ultimately, then, love was to be replaced by trade in
arms.
This was not the first time the Maya used romance to bridge hostile ethnic
relations. During the Caste War they wrote love letters to their Yucatecan
enemies while they held them under siege:

Thus it is that I love you very much, with all of my heart, as I do all the
troops under your command in that town, even as I love all of your kind
who are used to speaking with me. They should themselves tell you if I
mistreat or harm any whites. Even as I love my fellow Indians, I thus also
do love the whites. 15

Sullivan suggests that the rhetoric of courtship introduced ambiguity and

complexity into a social relationship that had been simplified by war into
unadorned enmity.'6
The ambiguity implicit in this use of courtship rhetoric turns upon a
reversal of roles. As in the foundational fictions assessed by Sommer, where
male and female attributes are confused, in the Maya letters Indians, who
had traditionally occupied the subordinate female position in inter-ethnic
relations, used romantic metaphors as though they were male:

If Indians and their enemies were to become lovers at that moment, it

must have been clear to all of them that the relationship would be
asymmetrical. The Indians would be 'men' while the foreigners would be
'women' -not men and women as they truly were, but 'men' and 'women'
as social categories in the gender system of those times. What relations
covered by such a powerful metaphor would actually entail in the
day-to-day activities of production, exchange, and governance would
have to be worked ouit after peace came, and most likely silently, as
people continued to profess their love for one another on appropriate
occasions. As long as Indians had the guns, they had reason to expect they
would find happiness in such an admittedly open-ended relationship. In
the meantime a rhetoric of courtship offered the prospect of peaceful
union without precluding struggles to come. 7

Unlike the language of romance in nineteenth-century novels, however,

Maya erotic rhetoric was not meant to forge illusory bonds, nor to establish
legitimacy through the creation of genealogical ties. Instead, the discourse
of courtship was employed to wrest power from dominant groups, as a
means of coercion. Courtship here is not so much a vehicle for imagining a
nation as for rupturing the boundaries of the imagined community on the
one hand, and for controlling relations with outsiders, on the other.
The symbolism of courtship is also used by subaltern groups to forge
peaceful bonds across ethnic divisions, but again, in ways different from that
of fiction. The Guambiano of Cauca, Colombia, traditionally represent
themselves to others through their marriage ceremony. Displayed in
illustrated books, films, or dramatic presentations, wedding costume is one
of a number of key symbols used to convey the distinctiveness of Guambiano
culture.18It is important to note that unlike the Maya example or the novels
cited by Sommer, we are not speaking here of inter-ethnic romance, but of
the presentation by an ethnic group of a united front capable of defending
itself from outside encroachment, represented by traditional marriage
customs and by in-group conjugal unions. In recent attempts at Guambiano
self-representation that have developed in the course of the ethnic-rights
movement, wedding clothes are no longer used, but the symbolism of the
couple is still fundamental. The Guambiano flag, for instance, was devised
in the early 1980s when land claims became a priority in Guambia. The flag
has two parts: a cloth standard made up of bands of colour reflecting
women's attire, and a supporting rod made up of a governor's staff of office
and a machete, both generally carried by men. An abstract union of man and
woman is thus achieved through the juxtaposition of male and female
elements.19 When the banner is raised, side by side with the Colombian flag,
it is evident that the Guambianos do not intend to fuse with the dominant
society, but to redefine it.

Shared ideologies, contrastinggenres

It is significant that Guambiano self-representations are conveyed in
non-narrative visual genres, for it is in the field of painting that Som:ner's
romantic allegory was abandoned by Latin American nationalists. Nine-
teenth-century romantic authors and statesmen were ardent supporters of
other artistic and scientific forms of imagining the nation. In 1850, for
example, the Italian cartographer and soldier, Agustin Codazzi, was
contracted by the Colombian government to lead a massive interdisciplinary
expedition called the Comisi6n Corogratica, composed of cartographers,
artists, botanists and writers, whose aim was to define the contours of the
nascent republic through a detailed description of its boundaries, resources
and inhabitants.21In the days before photography was widely disseminated
in rural areas, Codazzi's expedition employed watercolourists to record the
regional and ethnic diversity they came across in the course of their travels.21
The Comisi6n Corogratica watercolours, painted by Carmelo Fernandez,
Enrique Price, and Manuel Maria Paz, display a variety of ethnic groups,
 Ntitioti(il Ro?mantces l125

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shown many times in tableaux portraying a variety of regional, occu-
pational, and racial types. Rich in details depicting clothing, phenotype, and
landscape, labelled with captions that define subjects by race or by
occupation, the people who populate these watercolours are generally
unoccupied in anything other than the business of representing categories of
the Colombian citizenry. Mestizos, whites, mulattos, and blacks (the few
Indians are displayed separately) stare into space, never at one another:
they are illustrative types, not characters; they inhabit tableaux, not
narratives. Sommer argues convincingly that Latin American authors
appropriated themes from European romantic literature and North Ameri-
can novels of the frontier as frameworks for their own romances. In
watercolours however, there was no pre-established canon into which the
ethnic variety of America could be inserted. While biblical or classical
history supplied European artists with contexts for the presentation of
people from other parts of the world, no such template was available for
depictions of the inhabitants of America.22
Notwithstanding this significant difference between the narrative genre
of fiction and the illustrative genre of travel painting, nineteenth-century
authors and artists employed similar ethnic stereotypes in their depiction of
subaltern ethnic groups. In both genres, for example, Indians are romanti-
cized, pushed back in time to the precolumbian era or transported in space
to the distant and inaccessible jungle; neither in fiction nor in art are they
situated in the same time or place as the national society. In the Brazilian
romance of Jose de Alencar, 0 Guarani, as well as in Enriquillo, written by
Manuel de Jesus Galvan of the Dominican Republic, the distant era of the
Spanish invasion provides an environment for their protagonists, mythical
Indian royalty. Similarly, the indigenous character of highland Colombia is
conveyed in the Comisi6n Corografica watercolours through illustrations of
ancient artefacts, while living Indians are only depicted in the distant
tropical lowlands or in close association with aspects of the landscape, as
though they belonged to the topography and not to the national society.
While nineteenth and early twentieth-century Indians did not appropri-
ate the romantic genres in vogue among creole power-holders, they were
profoundly influenced by the ethnic stereotypes that these statesmen
articulated in politics, in art, and most notably, in legislation. Colombia's
most significant piece of Indian legislation, Law 89 of 1890, stipulated
the manner in which savages in the process of being reduced to civilized
life should be governed'.23Its primary intent being the integration of Indians
into the dominant society, Law 89 was nourished by an evolutionary
perspective in which Indians were perceived as moving up the cultural
ladder toward western civilization.24 According to those who formulated
this law, Indians were historically anterior to the national society; they were
also placed at an earlier point in the human life cycle, since Law 89 also
directs that Indians be treated as under-age in all legal proceedings. The
evolutionary perspective filtered down to community members, primarily
through the diffusion of legislation and legal argumentation. Its influence is
particularly apparent in legal briefs associated with the extinction of the
reservations of the southern Colombian highlands, where Indians anxious
to shed their status and privatize communal lands emphasized that the 'sav-
ages' of Law 89 and other pieces of legislation belonged to the distant past
and were not to be confused with the prosperous, educated, Spanish-
speaking smallholders of the present.25
Contemporary examples of indigenous foundational literature, such as
theatre, deploy the same stereotypes present in nineteenth-century fiction,
painting, and legislation. In the militant drama of Cumbal, for example,
legitimacy is sought in the distant Indian past, through the portrayal of
conquest-era illustrative types, such as native chiefs and warriors, or
Spanish soldiers and priests. Contemporary plays are tableaux, not literary
narratives, more similar to the illustrations of the Comisi6n Corografica
than to foundational novels: in them, Indians fight the Spanish invaders,
but nothing much happens in terms of dramatic action. Indigenous illustra-
tive types are shown, moreover, in keeping with the conventions of the
dominant society: actors are nude and decorated with feathers, like
national stereotypes of lowland Indians, even though in the cold and damp
mountains of Cumbal at almost 4,000 metres above sea level, nudity was
never customary.

Archives, history, and self-representation

Let us return to Miguel Taimal's story which opened this essay. His prob-
lematic merging of space and period suggests that it is not just genre, but
timing, that is at stake in subaltern historical discourse. The telescoping of
historical referents that characterizes don Miguel's tale and those of other
indigenous narrators should not be ascribed simply to orality: it derives,
instead, from the character of the written sources which have been drawn
upon for evidence, those very legal documents that supply the Cumbales
and their elders with their ethnic stereotypes and their evolutionary
ideology.
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria writes that 'America existed as a legal
document before it was physically discovered', reminding us of the extreme
importance that Spain assigned to the written word.26 His theory of Latin
American narrative hinges upon this statement, for Gonzailez locates the
foundational sources of the novel outside of its fictional and narrative gen-
eric home, analyzing

the main forms that the Latin American narrative has assumed in re-
lation to three kinds of hegemonic discourse, the first of which is foun-
dational both for the novel and for the Latin American narrative in
general: legal discourse during the colonial period; the scientific, during
the nineteenth century until the crisis of the 1920s; the anthropological,
 during the twentieth century, up to Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps)
and Cien ahos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).27

That is, the models upon which Latin American fiction has depended are
multiple and historically-situated.
Unlike Doris Sommer, Gonzdlez Echevarrfa's theory transcends the
dominant Euroamerican idiom with which he is concerned - as the two
critics scrutinize some of the same nineteenth-century formative novels,
their work can be fruitfully compared.28By locating his foundational model
outside fiction Gonzailez has pinpointed a genre which also impacted upon
subaltern ethnic groups. On the one hand, the legal document constitutes
the primary form of inter-ethnic communication over the centuries, as well
as the principal written genre read by colonized groups. On the other hand,
the legal brief epitomizes the juridical system under which the dominance of
Europeans was secured, both before and after Independence from Spain.29
But if we follow Gonzailez Echevarria's argument with regard to Latin
American narrative fiction, the document loses its foundational status in the
nineteenth century, only recovering importance in the past three decades,
when almost all prominent writers cast their novels in documentary form.
Among indigenous groups, however, the document retains its status as a
guiding model, because it continues to be the primary written genre
produced and consumed by Indians. Those documents that are frequently
chosen as foundational models, moreover, were written in the colonial
period, for it was under Spanish domination that indigenous people were
protected by separate bodies of law; after Independence it was hoped that
Indians would melt into the general citizenry, thus freeing their protected
communal lands for commercial exploitation.3"Hence, the curious telescop-
ing of nineteenth-century legislation, colonial documentation, and invasion
by Miguel Taimal: the foundations of indigenous autonomy must still be
sought in the colonial period, because it is the only historical era in which
there was little dispute that Indians existed as legal beings.31
The iconic nature of much indigenous historical expression also emanates
from the legal documents that dictate the nature of discourse with the
outside. Colonial legal papers are not written in narrative style, but instead
juxtapose multiple legal briefs, including such diverse documents as land
titles, wills, census lists, and the recorded testimony of witnesses in a single
record whose constituent parts might span more than a century. Contem-
porary juridical manipulation of these documents fits them into a formulaic
type of expression dictated by contemporary law, in which evidence is cited
to support claims, as opposed to forming part of a narrative. Legal writing,
and not a narrative trope like romance, moulds the use of historical evidence
in fairly predictable ways.
While the compressed and iconic references to history present in legal
briefs are frequently fleshed out in the oral tradition, the examples of
historical writing that I was able to collect in Cumbal replicate legal
discourse, listing documents associated with key intervals in the com-
munity's past. Genres approaching the rich foundational literature of the
dominant society, while they have been published for the past decade, are
only beginning to take hold at the local level; one of the clearest examples I
observed was the quotation of the 1939 published treatise by Paiez leader
Manuel Quintin Lame in a play presented in Cumbal.32 Until indigenous
(and other subaltern) writing is widely disseminated in Latin America, as it
is among African Americans in the United States, we must look outside the
written narrative tradition for both models and prototypes of the foun-
dational literature that Sommer has so carefully analyzed for Latin America
in general.

NOTES

1 The research upon which this article is based was conducted in Cumbal, Narifno,
Colombia and in various Colombian and Ecuadorian archives, under the sponsorship of the
Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia and the Department of Anthropology, Universidad de
los Andes (Bogota), and under the supervision of the Cabildo Indigena de Cumbal. It was
funded by the following sources: September 1986 to August 1987, Council for the International
Exchange of Scholars (American Republics Program), National Science Foundation (grant no.
BNS-8602910), Social Science Research Council; May to August 1988, Fulbright-Hays
Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (U.S. Department of Education). I thank Catherine Allen
for her helpful commentary on this article and Bill Schwarz for suggesting it in the first place.
2 Republica de Colombia (Ministerio de Gobierno), Fuero indigena: disposiciones legales
del orden nacional, departamentaly comisarial - jurisprudencia y conceptos, Bogota, Editorial
Presencia, 1983, pp. 57-64.
3 On Cumbal historiography, see J. Rappaport, 'History and everyday life in the
Colombian Andes', Man (n.s.) 23: 4, pp. 718-39, 1988.
4 Chasqui is a Quechua word for the post runners of the Inca empire. Its use in southern
Colombia, beyond the boundaries of Inca control, can be attributed to the Spaniards, who were
instrumental in expanding the territory in which Quechua, or Quechua terminology, was used.
The chasquis of Cumbal were messengers who carried communiques between municipal
centres in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the term was used by Indians and
mestizos alike, although the chasquis were Indians required to give a certain number of days of
municipal service each year. Given its local history, it is interesting that this Inca expression,
introduced into the area by Europeans as a name for an exploitative institution, has been
appropriated today to represent indigenous identity.
5 ChasquiiCumbe, p. I (translation mine).
6 Cumbal's title is registered as Notaria Primera de Pasto (NP/P), 'Expendiente sobre los
linderos del resguardo del Gran Cumbal', Escritura 228 de 1908 (1758). On the use of space for
recording historical knowledge in the Andes, see J. Rappaport, 'History, myth and the
dynamics of territorial maintenance in Tierradentro, Colombia', American Ethnologist 12: 1,
pp. 27-45, 1985; and G. Urton, 'La arquitectura publica como texto social: la historia de un
muro de adobe en Pacariqtambo, Peru (1918-1985)', Revista Andina 6: 1, pp. 225-61, 1988.
7 Some examples of indigenous historiography include a general treatment by Wankar
(Ramiro Reinaga), Tawantinsuyu: cinco siglos de guerra Qheswaymara contra Espana,
Mexico, Nueva Imagen, 1981; for Bolivia, S. Rivera, 'Oprimidospero no vencidos': luchas del
campesinado aymara y qhechwa, 1900-1980, La Paz, Hisbol, 1986; for highland Ecuador, A.
Males, Villamanta ayllucunapac punta causai: historia oral de los Imbayas de Quinchuqui -
Otavalo, 1900-1960, Quito, Abya-Yala, 1985; for lowland Ecuador, the history textbook
Pueblo de fuertes: rasgos de historia shuar, Quito, Abya-Yala/Mundo Shuar, 1984; for some
English translations of similar writings, see R. Moody (ed.), The Indigenous Voice: visions and
realities, London, New Jersey and Copenhagen, Zed/IWGIA. An earlier Colombian example,
which will be discussed later in further detail, is Manuel Quintin Lame's 1939 treatise, Los
pensamientosdel indioquese educ6dentrode las selvascolombianas,publishedas En defensa
de mi raza,Bogota,Comitede Defensadel Indio, 1971;an Englishtranslationof Lame'sbook
is includedas an appendixto G. Castillo-Cardenas, LiberationTheologyfrom Below:thelife
andthoughtof ManuelQuintinLame,Maryknoll,New York, Orbis,1987,pp. 97-151.
8 In fact, this process is now well underway,with the participationof indigenous
representativesin the 1991ConstitutionalAssemblythatrewroteColombia'sconstitution,and
the subsequentelectionof three Indiansto the nationalSenate. They will be responsiblefor
draftingnew legislationto replaceLaw 89 of 1890.Fromits inception,however,Colombia's
founderssought to eradicateethnic diversityby decree, obliteratingspecial laws protecting
Indians and embracingthem as 'citizens'in an effort to free their lands for commercial
exploitation.For a politicaltreatiseon the issue, see R. Uribe Uribe, Reduccionde salvajes,
Bogota, El Trabajo,1907.Forsomecommentarieson ColombianIndianlegislation,see V. D.
Bonilla, 'OQu6politica buscan los indigenas?'in G. Bonfil Batalla (ed.), Indianidady
descolonizacionen AmericaLatina,Mexico,NuevaImagen,1979;andA. Triana,Legislaci6n
indigenanacional:leyes, decretos,resolluciones, jurisprudencia y doctrina,Bogota, America
Latina,1980.
9 D. Sommer,FoundationalFictions:thenationalromancesof LatinAmerica,Berkeley,
Universityof CaliforniaPress,1991;all referencesto Sommer'sworkwillhenceforthbe citedin
the bodyof the text.
It) B. Anderson,ImaginedCommunities:reflectionson the originand spreadof national-
ism, London,Verso, 1983.
11 Heranalysisencompassesa rangeof novels,includingin chronologicalorder,Gertrudis
G6mezde Avellaneda,Sab, Cuba, 1841;DomingoFaustinoSarmiento,Facundo,Argentina,
1845;Jose Marmol,Amalia,Argentina,1851;Jose de Alencar,0 GuaraniBrazil, 1857;and
Iracema,Brazil, 1865;Alberto Blest Gana, MartinRivas, Chile, 1862;Jorge Isaacs, Maria,
Colombia, 1867; Juan Le6n Mera, Cumanda,Ecuador, 1879; Manuel de Jesus Galvan,
Enriquillo,DominicanRepublic, 1882;IgnacioAltamirano,El Zarco Mexico, 1888;Juan
Zorilla de San Martin, Tabare, Uruguay, 1888; Jos6 Eustacio Rivera, La Vordgine, Colombia,
1924; R6mulo Gallegos, Dona Bdrbara,Venezuela, 1929; and Teresa de la Parra, Las
memoriasde MamaBlanca,Venezuela,1929.
12 M. Foucault,TheHistoryof Sexuality:an introduction,New York, Vintage,1980.
13 Anderson'suse of novels,in contrast,restsuponthe senseof simultaneity,of the feeling
of sharingin the activitiesof an entirepopulationinsteadof an individual,that writtenfiction
affords(see ImaginedCommlunities, pp. 28-40). He was also concernedwith demonstrating
that the convergenceof capitalismand printingmadepossiblean environmentin whichsuch
novelscouldmakea specificcontributionto nationalistideologies,pp. 41-49.
14 P. Sullivan,UnfinishedConversations:Mayasand Foreignersbetweentwo wars,New
York, Knopf,1989,pp. 106-120.
15 LetterfromJose MariaTzucto the commanderof the defendersof Bacalar,1852,cited
in Ibid., p. 115.
16 Ibid.,p. 118.
17 Ibid., pp. 119-20.
18 See, for example, the drawingin G. Hernandezde Alba and F. TumifiaPillimue,
Nuestra gente, 'namuy misag': tierra, costumbres y creencias de los indios guambianos,
Popayan,EditorialUniversidaddel Cauca,1965,p. 77. Also, JackieReiterandWolfTirado's
1979film,Guambianos.
19 For an analysisof this and a numberof other indigenoussymbolsof nationalityin
Colombia,see J. Rappaport,'ReinventedTraditions:the heraldryof ethnic militancyin the
ColombianAndes', in R. Dover, K. Seibold and J. McDowell(eds), Andean Cosmologies
throughTime:persistenceandemergence,Bloomington,IndianaUniversityPress,1992.
20 On the role of the Comisi6nCorograficain the developmentof Colombianscience,see
0. Restrepo, 'La Comisi6nCorograficay las ciencias sociales', in J. Arocha and N. de
Friedemann(eds), Unsiglo de investigacionsocial:antropologiaen Colombia,Bogota, Etno,
1984.
21 The most completecollectionof reproductionsof these watercoloursis J. Ardilaand
C. Lleras,Batallacontrael olvido:acuarelascolombianas,1850,Bogota, Ardila& Lleras.
22 See D. Poole, 'A one-eyed gaze: gender in nineteenth-centuryillustrationof Peru,'
DialecticalAnthropology13, pp. 333-64, 1988,for a discussionof this problemin European
depictionsof Peruvianwomen; Poole drawsupon EdwardSaid's Orientalism,New York,
Pantheon,1978for heranalysis.The samenon-narrative andillustrativecharacteris evidentin
the travel writingthat resultedfrom the Comisi6nCorografica.See, for example, Manuel
Ancizar's1853Peregrinacicn de Alpha,Bogota,BibliotecaBancoPopular,1984;andSantiago
P6rez' 'Apuntes de viaje', first publishedin 1853 and 1854 in Bogota newspapers,in E.
RodriguezPifieres(ed.), Seleccionde escritosy discursosde SantiagoPerez,Bogota,Biblioteca
de HistoriaNacional,1950.
23 FueroIndigena,p. 57.
24 F. Correa,'Estado, desarrolloy gruposetnicos:la ilusi6ndel proyectode homogen-
izaci6nnacional',in M. Jimeno,G. 1. OcampoandM. Roldan(eds), Identidad:memoriasdel
simposio'Identidadetnica,identidadregional,identidadnacional',Bogota, ICFES,1989.
25 See J. Rappaport,'History,law and ethnicityin AndeanColombia',LatinAmerican
AnthropologyReview2: 1, pp. 13-19, 1990.
26 R. Gonzalez Echeverria,Mythand Archive:a theoryof LatinAmericannarrative,
Cambridge,CambridgeUniversityPress, 1990,p. 46. Even beforeColumbusset sail, written
documentsestablishedSpain'sclaimto the landshe mightdiscover.The invasionof indigenous
territorywasaccompaniedby the readingof the Requerimiento, a documentwhichestablished
the legal basis of Europeans'claimsto Americanlands;ironically,it was read in Spanishto
Indianswho couldnot understandit.
27 Ibid., p. 40.
28 Nevertheless, unlike Sommer, Gonzalez also analyses the writings of authors of
indigenousancestry,suchas IncaGarcilasode la Vega.
29 See, for example, S. J. Stern, Perlu'sIndian Peoples and the Challengeof Spanish
Conquest:Huamangato 1640,Madison,Universityof WisconsinPress, 1982.
30 Foran English-language treatmentof the historyof Andeanindigenouscommunitiesin
the Republicanera, see T. Platt, 'The Andeanexperienceof Bolivianliberalism,1825-1900:
Roots of Rebellion in nineteenth-centuryChayanta(Potosi)', in S. Stern (ed.), Resistance,
Rebellion,and Consciousnessin theAndeanPeasantWorld,18thto 20th Centuries,Madison,
Universityof WisconsinPress, 1987,on Bolivia;and J. Rappaport,The Politicsof Memory:
nativehistoricalinterpretationin the ColombianAndes, Cambridge,CambridgeUniversity
Press, 1990,on Colombia.
31 Indiansare almost absentfrom Republican-eralegal documents,in contrastto their
ubiquityin the colonialdocumentaryrecord.IndigenousactivistsManuelQuintinLameand
Jose Gonzalo Sanchez were thus forced to appeal to the colonial record, in which they
discoveredthe name 'SupremeCouncilof the Indies'. The epithet was chosen by them to
designatethe regionalorganizationtheyfoundedin the 1920s,thusremindingtheirconstituents
of the institutionsthat protectedtheir ancestors'rights under Spain: see Rappaport,The
Politicsof Memory,p. 124.
32 Lame,Endefensademiraza.NativeAmericanliteratureis considerablymoreadvanced
in NorthAmerica,althoughits diffusionis, similarly,quitenarrow.See A. Krupat,TheVoice
in the Margin:nativeAmericanliteratureand the canon, Berkeley, Universityof California
Press, 1989.