Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The assertiveness of indigenous and Afro-Latin peoples in Latin America has a long history. Rebellions, escape from enslavement, the maintenance of indigenous and African cultural practices in religious and other domains, struggles to retain land and form new communities – all this forms part of the background to Afro-Latin and indigenous identity formation from the mid-twentieth century. The background also includes the process of indigenous and black people becoming mestizos (mixed people); of slaves becoming free (and in some cases acquiring their own slaves); of communities of escaped slaves (palenques and quilombos) seeking work on nearby haciendas and asking Catholic priests to administer rites for them; of slave, free black, and indigenous people forming lay brotherhoods attached to the Church; of struggling for rights as citizens of the new republics, with no assertion of ethnic identity but rather a claim to equality and, if anything, disavowal of black or indigenous culture – or at least a view that such culture needed modernizing.Take the case of indigenous people of the Cauca region of Colombia in the late nineteenth century (Sanders 2003: 35-7). In their struggle for land against liberal depredations, they deployed both a discourse of equality for all citizens and a discourse that pointed up their particular status as indios. The latter included references to their ... log in or subscribe to read full text