Engaging Modernity: the political making of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, 1900–2008

Most analyses of the recent indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia and Ecuador (as well as other Latin American countries) have sharply divided the new indigenous politics from earlier class-based political projects of the left. The emergence and mass-appeal of indigenous movements, in these analyses, are rooted in ethnic and cultural cleavages between indigenous peoples and the rest of Bolivian and Ecuadorean society. This article argues that a political interpretation of indigenous movements in these countries gives a more coherent explanation for their historical trajectories as well as their present situation, in particular their high degree of articulation with other popular political actors. Its historical section describes the emergence of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador as part of an engagement with modernity that began in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the cross-ethnic projects of unions and radical parties of the traditional left and put indigenous communities into positive relationships to the modernizing Bolivian and Ecuadorean states.