Boundaries, Identity, and the “Indian.

Jorge E. Arboleda

In this paper I approach the concept of boundaries and their relationship to Democracy in

a context of ethnic struggle in Latin America. Boundaries are defined here as in Wolin’s

Fugitive Democracy: “Boundaries proclaim identity and stand ready to repel difference.

They may signify exclusion- ‘Keep-out!’- or containment –‘Keep inside!” (Wolin, 1996:

31). I explore how boundaries are constructed through a power relationship between a

dominant and dominated culture. Identities are thus external, and perhaps internal,

representation of boundaries. Individuals “wear” their boundaries like suits, and express

them through cultural and political views.

Boundaries correspond with to individual socio-economic status, and they are

perceptible in physical space. Physical, geographical, and cultural spaces are

correspondent with boundaries, especially political boundaries. “Good neighborhoods” sit

next to “bad” ones separated by “invisible” barriers dividing diverse realities.

Democracy, as Wolin points, is “a project concerned with the political

potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political

beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and modes of action for realizing

them” (Wolin, 1996: 31). Thus, Democracy, by definition, attempts to conciliate

boundaries and identities in a social space, paradoxically erasing the ethos of individual

cultural identities as the dominated is annihilated or assimilated into the culture of the

dominator. Thus, democracy seems to turn into a totalistic, homogenizing agent.

My argument here is that in the case of Colombia, and other Latin American

countries, attempts to democratize have not developed the political potentialities of

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ordinary citizens to become political beings because people’s political “beingness” has

been constructed through simulation and violence. First, identity is the result of a process

of simulation in which a native-dominated culture has reinvented itself by maintaining

primitive love for order (ritual, aesthetic, and political), and by incorporating western

patterns of accumulation (as explained below by Lévi-Strauss). Second, identity has been

formed by a violent relationship between dominant and dominated identities inherited

from Spanish colonization.

In both cases, the sense of belonging to an ethnic reality has been related to the

individual’s position as dominator or dominated. This simple categorization has replaced

the old colonial Spanish division between white, Creole, Indian, mestizo, and black.

Domination through violence has made it possible for individuals to prevail over others

and, on occasion, to escape the stigma of old identities.

I set my inquiry in an ethnographic context based on the relationship of a native

Andean South American group, the Puraceños, to a dominant westernized pre-capitalistic

culture of Colombia. I hope my findings help to uncover the presence of boundaries in

developing societies where ethnic conflict is still very present.

The Ethnographic Setting

In 1991 I worked as a researcher for a mining company in the southwestern Andes of

Colombia. Upon graduation, I was hired to write a biography of the founder of the mine,

Manuel Maria Mosquera-Wallis. .

The Case. On September 17, 1990, the inhabitants of the town of Puracé were surprised

by a fire in the sulfur mine "El Vinagre," located on the slopes of the Puracé volcano.

This fire was the sixth in the last ten years. The fire caused major economic hardship for

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the Puraceños because most of them worked in the mine.

The fire burned for 66 days. It destroyed most of the mine and expelled sulfur gases

burning the vegetation and killing cattle, birds and other animals. Many Puraceños were

hospitalized and treated for respiratory ailments. The mining company lost more than

200,000 dollars.

On September 17, the mining company Industrias Puracé, called an emergency

meeting to plan the best way to help the people and to avoid any further damages. In a

contingency plan they decided to install temporary health centers, distribute anti-gas

masks, and to print and distribute brochures to prevent new fires.

I participated in the meeting, and afterwards, the president of the company asked

my opinion on how to avoid panic in the region. Based on my experience with the

Puraceños I answered: "When the volcano is angered it is necessary to bring San Miguel,

the local religious patron, in procession." My suggestion was based on the Puraceños’

beliefs that San Miguel could calm the volcano's anger because he had proven to be the

only one capable of that, during past fires.

My comments were received very skeptically. It was impossible for the Industrias

Puracé’s corps of engineers and management to imagine that San Miguel's procession

would calm down the fire. .

On September 19, while the non-Indigenous employees were working on a

contingency plan, the local Workers Union had a meeting with the company's president

and directors. To the management's surprise the Union's directors demanded a procession

of San Miguel to calm the fire. The board of directors accepted the union's demand, and

on September 20th the procession took place, stretching for 15 miles. The fire was over

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one week later.

The differences between indigenous non-indigenous beliefs in regards to how deal

with the fire exemplify the different languages of the dominated and the dominators. This

dichotomy was further underlined as I continued my research. The most interested person

in the project seemed to be one of the daughters of the mine’s founder. As my research in

the archives progressed it became clear that the daughter wanted the biography to show

her father in a different light than that that which the Puraceños saw him. I tried to be

sensitive to her requests, but in the end what I wrote didn't correspond with her desires.

The company responded as I expected: they did not publish the book. On one hand I had

the indigenous perception of the founder and on the other the story Mosquera's family

wanted me to tell to the people outside Puracé. For the family, and the well-to-do and

“middle class” of Colombia, the mine’s founder was a hero, and “an innovator”.

For me, it was clear that the views of the indigenous, and the mine’s owners did

not coincide. The latter thought their hero was a remarkable man, meanwhile the

indigenous thought the man that was a devil’s creation. They thought his greatness was

based not on his ability to develop a successful mining enterprise, but rather in his

capacity to bargain with evil, and to freely surpass life’s and death’s spaces.

These Puraceños’ beliefs are based on their world view. The Puraceños spiritual

world is divided into hot and cold, fire and ice, and governed by creatures from both

environments. The devil, their main spiritual creature, is the hottest. He lives inside the

volcano where he has his "balcony home." They said, “Manuel was a strong worker who

did not fear the Devil and who was allowed to live in the Devil’s house. He was a poor

man with many debts when he started working in the mine. In order to pay off his debts,

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and to develop his mine projects, Manuel sold his soul and his employee's souls to the

devil." The Indigenous were convinced that Manuel had to sign an evil pact with the

devil, and didn’t want to be carried to hell in the hands of Mosquera, by being his

employees, but neither did they want to be return to the poverty which characterized their

lives before the mine provided their meager wages.

“Indianess:” Boundaries and the Building of Identity.

There are two main characteristics in the construction of Indigenous and non-Indigenous

identities in Latin America. The first is related to a process of simulation in which the

individual recognizes himself through comparison with others, invention, and

counterfeiting. The second is related to the position of the individual and his social group

as a part of a former imperial violent culture. I examine these two points below.

1. Simulation and Identity. The early origins of actual identities are marked by self-

recognition in the mirror of otherness. We believe in what we are because of the

characteristics we see in others. In post colonial Latin America, as Mexican writer

Octavio Paz points, the construction of an identity has been a process of simulation.

Simulation has given us the opportunity to “invent, or rather to counterfeit, and thus to

evade our condition.” (Paz, 1985: 43). We see the Indian far from us but also as part of

us. We know he is the Indian and we know that because he’s reflected in the mirror in

which we look at ourselves. Or, as Lévi-Strauss has explained: we see in the primitive the

same mind, with the same logic, the same categories, the same requirements of order, and

in short the same capacities for understanding. Only because of moral reasons, we keep

him in an “enigmatic, even mystifying, otherness” (Hénaff, 1998: 26). In the case of the

Puraceños, their “Indianess” is not other but our, and theirs, invention.

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 The purpose here is to explain the construction of the boundaries existing between

the Puraceño and the non-Puraceño. We have heard stories and read books about how the

history of Latin America began with the arrival of the Spaniards whose conquest and

colonization aimed to reestablish recently abandoned medieval patterns of government

and order. When Latin Americans imagine the conquistadores they have the romantic

vision of an armored knight, carrying a sword and a cross, proudly riding a horse

surrounded by Indian porters and a few slaves. No one stops to think about the distinct

roles of each one. Most Latin Americans, especially men, see themselves as the one

dressed in the tin vest, seated on the white horse, while no one, except few

anthropologists –and the Indians themselves- who dare to travel between the two

identities, stop to think themselves as the Indian porter. Then comes the question, is it

true that only because of technological superiority the Spaniards where able to ride the

horse while their luggage was carried by the Indian porter? It is hard to believe that gun

powder was the sole factor in allowing the Spanish complete domination in an

undiscovered world where the indigenous were the majority.

Language, Order, and Accumulation. One of the answers we can give to the question

above is related to the popularization of the Spanish language. The use of a lingua franca

allowed the Spaniards to travel between mentalities and to forge local thinking by

teaching the use of their mother tongue. Scholars, like Benedict Anderson, have proved

this. It was the versatility of the Spanish language, and its popularity through printing,

which allowed Indian nations formerly separated by geography and wars to communicate

to each other (Anderson, 1983: 40).

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 Whatever beauty and versatility the Spanish language had, it was not only this

which made the criollos, the sons of the conquistadores and colonizers, to prevail in the

Latin American social order. It was perhaps, the promise of political order and peace

would arrive one day to the lives of the Puraceños. At least those were the teachings the

Spanish church began implementing since the early days of the conquest. And it was

thanks to those teachings that the Spaniards came to finally recognize the advantage of

having priests among their crews. As Friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis writes on his

evangelical work in the 19th century:“I replied to the Indian chief that they [the Indians]

should come with us, that I will give them the gift of our teachings. He replied no, that his

people wanted me to go with them, that they needed me, and that in exchange, they would

pay me with monkeys, fish, plantains, fruits, etc.” (Santa Gertrudis, (1775) 1970: Vol. I:

311).

Language domination and teachings about socially moving to a better life

signified the connection between two cultural features of Spaniards and Indians. This

means that it was the combination of the colonizers’ hunger for wealth and the

indigenous’ love for order, especially ritual order that facilitated the expansion of the

Spanish colonization. As Lévi-Strauss has explained, what made different the world of

the primitive Indians from that of the Spanish-Creole was the latter’s interest in

accumulating wealth, discoveries, techniques, and knowledge (Lévi-Strauss, 1976: 350).

Thus, while Santa Gertrudis narrated how “poor” these Indians were by only possessing

few hammocks that were kept by their chief, he also witnessed their enjoyment of the

mysteries of the holly trinity, and their enjoyment of learning the new mixed Spanish-

Indian language while pronouncing God’s new words: “Pancoa dios payquí? -who’s

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God-, Dios payre –god father-, Dios cary –God’s son-, and Dios spiritu santo –God’s

holly spirit.” Thus, while the conquerors could satiate their thirst for accumulation, the

Indians were converted to Catholicism and into Spanish speakers while they dreamt of

the ritualized paradise portrayed in the Spanish spoken teachings of the Bible.

To believe that the Puraceños will enter into competition with the Spaniard for

accumulating resources is a mistake. Their world, which we may call primitive, did not

spin around possessions; it spins in a constant demand for order, especially ritual order:

“all sacred things must have their place” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 10). And this desire for

order was what the Indians may have shown to the Spanish cavalries as they militarily

and ritually took possession of land and souls while promising the coming of paradise. As

the conquistador Pascual de Andagoya writes: “I entered their land with 150 men, 60 on

horse and the rest on foot. The Indians [from the town of Apirama] waited for me formed

in a squadron as perfect formed as the ones I have seen in Italy. The may have been

approximately 12.000” (Andagoya [1544] 1982: 150).

In more modern times identity is still constructed by process of simulation in

which the indigenous attempt to reproduce the ritual and political order of Hispanic

institutions, and reluctantly accept the western hunger for accumulation. Thus, what we

see in the story of the Puraceños is not only a very well organized myth of creation in

which the world is organized in two mythical halves, hot and cold, or ice and fire, but an

accommodation of an organized mythical world into the arrival of a modern colonizer.

Surprisingly, in the story, neither the Indians, nor the non-Indian Mosquera loose their

original identities. He brings the order, as the Indians wish, and the Indians cooperate to

8
let him satiate his hunger for accumulating wealth, a perfect match reaching back to the

appearance of the Spanish cavalries in indigenous territories during colonial times.

The cultural mixture of the two identities, western Creole and Indian, has created

the mestizo, that identity that Paz has portrayed as trying to escape from itself by

simulating, inventing, or counterfeiting other’s identities. In the mestizo, the original

boundaries intersect and reject at the same time. Mythical order attempts accumulation,

and rejects it at the same time because accumulating turns the individual into the greedy,

evil Mosquera of the Puraceños’ story. As accumulation incorporates the love for order,

the mestizo becomes suicidal because by accumulating, for example land or power, he

has to incur in violence against his own people, thus destroying mythical order. Thus, in

Latin American political systems the dominant mestizo classes don’t accumulate to better

the political reality, they do so to keep the political order, paradoxically, to keep the two

diverse identities. The romantic idea held by Mosquera’s daughter about the role of her

father is also a romantic love for the sense of ritual order in which the Creole stays as an

imperial figure ruling over the ignorant Indians.

2. Building the State: Accumulation, Violence, and the Annihilation of the Indian.

As we have shown above, the advantage held by early Spanish adventurers was due to

their ability to travel in the continent spreading one well organized kingdom based on one

language, one church (the community of god), and one government, that created in the

indigenous populations a reliance on the sense of order that operated from northern

California to Patagonia and from the Philippines to Cuba. Next, I explore how that sense

of order was developed through a process of increasing violence, simulated from the

European experience.

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 What shocked the Indians was not only the increased extension of their other time

small geographic and cultural worlds but an organized sustained violent action in which

they saw themselves converted into the servitude of the newcomers. The expeditions of

Spaniards and creoles into undeveloped lands also carried Indians along routes never

traveled before. Porters, guides, carpenters, masons, etc. were forced out from northern

Chile and Peru into Colombia and Venezuela, young male and female Indians were stolen

by Portuguese bandeirantes to be sold as slaves in the coast of Brazil. All of them were

forced to move and to help in the building of new cities and towns. Despite the well -

organized rituals of the Catholic Church, and its promise of a new land and paradise, the

Indians saw their world turned upside down. They were forced to move in order to create

new communities, new Indian towns, and countries. The composition of Indian towns

became so varied that in a little capellania or encomienda of southern Colombia it was

not hard to find men and women born under the seasonal weather of the southern cone.

Families were formed at random, and blessed by the mandates and order of the ecclesial

and civil authorities. For example, Santa Gertrudis writes, “the day after they recovered

from the flu, I called all of them. I made them form in lines divided between men and

women. To the one who looked the most experienced man I gave a cane and made him

into their chief. After that, I pulled out men and women from the lines and made them into

families” (Santa Gertrudis, (1775) 1970: Vol. I: 271). Thus, the formation of families and

towns came to be –for the Indigenous- organized and destroyed under the rule of only

one order, that of the Spanish empire.

Until the early 19th century, when the natives were already organized into small

communities, the model seemed to work in some ways for both Indians and Spaniards.

10
Many Indians had developed prosperous towns under the eyes of the church’s misiones or

the encomenderos, while the Spanish authorities kept enriching themselves by

accumulating and trading the riches of the new world. Paraphrasing Hard and Negri, it

was an Empire characterized fundamentally by the lack of boundaries, a rule without

limits, and a regime that effectively encompassed the spatial totality. It was a regime built

not only on conquest but rather on a new order that effectively suspended the Indian’s

history. The Spanish empire really went to the depths of the social world by seeking to

directly rule over human nature. Despite its bloodiness, it presented itself as dedicated to

peace (Hard and Negri, 2000: xiv-xv).

The empire, that seemed a perfect match of love for order and the Spanish desire

to accumulate, collapsed because the Spanish side created its own boundaries after more

than 300 years of ruling. The division on the Spanish-side between American-born

criollos and the Iberian-born peninsulares halted the continuation of the empire because

the former saw their geographic seclusion to a territory or province as a disadvantage.

While the criollos, as Anderson explains, had only the option to succeed in power by

appointment to positions within their own provinces, the peninsulares could act as more

powerful figures who could aspire to rule all over the empire including the king’s cortes

in Madrid (Anderson, 1983: 59). This created two types of individuals in the Spanish

social structure and was the cause of the criollos to rebel and to break their link to the

mother-land. It was the creoles who developed the independence movement when they

saw no reason in sharing the product of their accumulation with the metropoli. Thus,

boundaries, geographical and social, that had been present but not legitimized until the

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explosion of the independentista movements of the early 1800s created 18 new republics

in Spanish America after 1810.

The breaking of the colonies-metropoli link was catastrophic for the Indians. They

suffered from the expropriation of the lands the crown had assigned to them, and the lack

of recognition of the Indigenous authorities, in the past protected by the figure of the

king. Another consequence was the expropriation of the Church’s lands and the expulsion

of the priests that not only affected the power of the Church but also the wellbeing of

many Indians who had seen in the priests their protectors against the greediness of the

landed criollos. Thus, after many Independencias, the Indians ended up secluded in

rapidly shrinking resguardos whose autonomy and sovereignty was solely based in old

titles granted by the long gone king (e.g. the Puraceños based their right over land in a

title granted by the Spanish king in 1784). Their role, as the Puraceños story testifies, was

not other than that of second class citizens of states that condemned them to live in

seclusion until suddenly some sporadic discovery (such as sulfur) in the lands of their

resguardos make them useful to the interests of the heirs of the criollos.

The seclusion of the Indian in the resguardos not only marked a physical

seclusion from the world of the criollos and the mestizos but segregation from all aspects

of political life. As in Walzer, the Indian minority became “marginal, vulnerable, poor,

and stigmatized, in part at least, because of their commitment” to a traditional culture and

political life (Walzer, 2004: 45). This is evident in most of the 19th century’s Latin

American constitutions that declared the native Indians as legal minors (e.g. Colombian

Law No 89 of 1890). As a result, the newly formed states could freely decide on the most

fundamental rights of indigenous such as the place of living, freedom of movement,

12
ability to contract, tax paying, the owning of property, etc. The conversion of indigenous

population into minors had no other intention than the political annihilation of the

indigenous. The seclusion of the Indigenous in this juridical limbo signifies that as in

Wolin, Latin American countries have become a nationalistic force that pursuits a

homogenous identity that is been quickened through purgatives such as ethnic cleansing

or the imposition of a [legal] orthodoxy (Wolin, 1996:32). Example of these policies is

Colombian Liberal Pedro Fermín de Vargas’ address to Congress in the 19th century:

“To expand our agriculture it would be necessary to Hispanicize our Indians.

Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference toward normal human endeavors causes one to

think that they come from a degenerate race which deteriorates in proportion to the

distance from its origin… it would be very desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by

miscegenation with the whites, declaring them free of tribute and other charges, and

giving them private property in land” (Anderson, 1983: 21).

The status of indigenous people as legal minors still affects their political

participation in Latin America. Indigenous seclusion within legal and geographic

boundaries created under colonial rule has not changed. Their right, for example to buy

and sell lands, is still subject to their condition as legal minors, as expressed in

Colombia’s supreme court sentence No C-139/96 (04-09-1996), that denies indigenous

possibilities to contract. Evidence of this denial is also found for example in the claims

made by the Mexican governor of the state of Oaxaca who accused the Mexican

indigenous law as racist and discriminatory (La Jornada –news-, 2001:01-05. page 2).

The old distinction between Creole and Indian is still present within new features

of domination. In Latin America the boundaries are set no longer between the criollos

13
and the peninsulares but inside the systems of their new democracies. In each country

these boundaries are not geographic but borders between the poor and marginalized,

mostly of Indian descent, and the well-to-do mostly criollos’ descendants. The Indian

that leaves the resguardos becomes a poor urban dweller whose “indianess” dies as he

approaches the city. The one who stays within the resguardos dies poor and marginalized

in a territory delineated by a long gone king. In recent times those old boundaries,

between the Indians and the criollos, are also translated into boundaries between the

urban elites, most of them mestizos, and the rural and urban poor. The Indians, despite

their actual presence in the isolated resguardos and in the museums and cultural

institutions, seem to have disappeared, annihilated by years of policing and the majority’s

belief that the “Indian” is part of past history and myth.

Conclusion.

I have argued here that in Latin America democratization has not been able to

fully develop the political potentialities of ordinary citizens to become political beings.

Political “beingness” has been constrained by a process of simulation in which native

culture has been abused by powerful nationalistic forces that have taken advantage of the

indigenous’ primitive sense of order, while forcing them to incorporate patterns of

western hunger for accumulation.

Second, identity has been formed in Latin America through a violent relationship

between dominant and dominated identities inherited from Spanish imperial colonization.

The breaking of the link between the colonies and the metropoli produced a process of

constant violence in which the Indians have suffered expropriation of their lands, and the

non-recognition of their local authorities. As a result, the Indians are still today secluded

14
in small resguardos and in a juridical limbo in which autonomy is paradoxically granted

by national laws that seek the disappearance of indigenous culture.

In both processes, the sense of belonging to an ethnic reality has been related to

the individual’s position in either the dominant or dominated ethnicity. Latin American

politics has produced segregated political systems and failed democracies that while

accentuating the existence of early social and cultural boundaries is still today attempting

to escape from its indigenous roots by annihilating everything related to “being Indian.”

References.

- Andagoya, Pascual de. [1544] 1982. Relación de los Sucesos de Pedrarias Dávila

en la Tierra Firme y de los Descubrimientos del Mar del Sur. In Antonio Cuervo

(ed.) Colección de Documentos Inéditos sobre la Geografía y la Historia de

Colombia Vol. 1. Bogotá: Imprenta Pérez. 77-165

- Anderson. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. New York: Verso.

- Colombia’s Supreme Court. Sentence No C-139/96, April 9th, 1996.

- Hard, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press.

- Hénaff, Marcel. 1998. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural

Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

- La Jornada. Mexico DF, January 5th, 2001. Page 2.

- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press.

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- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1976. Structural Anthropology. Vol. 2. New York: Basic

Books.

- Paz, Octavio. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude and other Writings. New York:

Grove Press.

- Santa Gertrudis, Fray Juan de. (1775) 1970. Maravillas de la Naturaleza. Vol. 1.

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