Fausto Reinaga

Works

• 1970The Indian Revolution

  Manifesto of indianismo (“Indians” here are the Aymara, Quechua and other Native peoples of the Andes, not the people of India): Bolivia is split into an Indian and a mestizo-white nation; the revolution of 1952 turned Indians into “peasants” without ending colonial rule, and their liberation must be the work of the Indians themselves, without tutelage by the left or the right.

Position

Reinaga is on the map as the founder of indianismo, the current of Andean thought that made the Indians themselves the subject of their liberation – unlike indigenismo, a policy for Indigenous peoples made by others. After the revolution of 1952 the Bolivian state had renamed the Aymara and Quechua “campesinos”, peasants, and integrated them through land reform and unions. Reinaga rejected the label: the Indian question is not a class question but that of a colonised nation, and in Bolivia an Indian nation lives under the rule of a mestizo-white one – there are “two Bolivias”. Liberation must therefore be the work of the Indians themselves, against the paternalism of the right and of the Marxist left alike. For this argument he drew on Frantz Fanon, whose analysis of colonial racism and of the colonised mind he applied to the Andes, while he rejected Marxism itself as a European doctrine; Álvaro García Linera later called the relation between indianismo and Marxism a “desencuentro”, a missed encounter, and described Reinaga as the most influential intellectual of indianismo in its formative period. His later works reject Western thought as a whole as a philosophy of violence and set an Andean wisdom against it; critics charge the opposition of Indian and Western with essentialism and with reversing racial categories rather than overcoming them, while others read it as a philosophy of Indian liberation. In 1984 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui treated his party and ideas as a minor strand of the Aymara movement; later she called his thought seminal for her own and him a fundamental thinker of the Aymara and Quechua renaissance (as reported in La Jornada, 2015). How far the katarista manifestos of the 1970s took up his writings is debated.

Life & context

Fausto Reinaga, born José Félix Reinaga Chavarría on 27 March 1906 in San Pedro de Macha in the province of Chayanta in northern Potosí, came from an Indigenous family of the region and called himself, deliberately, an “indio”. He studied law at the Universidad Mayor de San Francisco Xavier in Sucre and qualified as a lawyer. In his early writings he combined Marxism with indigenismo; in 1957 he travelled to Leipzig and the Soviet Union, sent, according to different accounts, by the Communist Party of Bolivia or as part of a trade-union delegation. He then broke with the communists and on 15 November 1962 founded the Partido de Indios Aymaras y Keswas, later renamed Partido Indio de Bolivia. Scholars distinguish three phases in his work: an indigenist-Marxist phase until about 1960, an indianista phase in which he wrote “La revolución india” (1970) and “Tesis india” (1971), and from the mid-1970s an “amáutic” phase with works such as “La razón y el indio” (1978) and “La revolución amáutica” (1981), named after the amautas, the sages of the Inca empire. He died in La Paz on 19 August 1994.

Further main works

• Indian Thesis (Tesis india, 1971)
• Indian America and the West (América india y Occidente, 1974)
• Reason and the Indian (La razón y el indio, 1978)
• Amautic Thought (El pensamiento amáutico, 1978)
• The Amautic Revolution (La revolución amáutica, 1981)