Work · Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy
Oppressed but Not Defeated
A history of Aymara and Quechua peasant struggles in Bolivia, 1900–1980, read through the long memory of anticolonial revolt.
Introduction
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui published Oprimidos pero no vencidos in La Paz in 1984, at a time when the Katarista movement was organising Aymara peasants. The book traces peasant struggles in Bolivia from 1900 to 1980: resistance to the expansion of the haciendas, the 1952 revolution and land reform, the pact between the military and peasant unions, and the Katarista unions of the 1970s. Its key distinction is between a “short memory” of the 1952 revolution and a “long memory” of anticolonial revolt reaching back to Tupac Katari’s siege of La Paz in 1781. Bolivia, she argues, never ceased to be a colonial society: an “internal colonialism” continued to organise work, land and citizenship along the line between indigenous and non-indigenous.
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