Work · Indigenous Philosophies
The 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.
Introduction
Reinaga published the book in 1970 in La Paz through his Partido Indio de Bolivia; it circulated among Aymara and Quechua activists and has often been reprinted. It opens with the thesis that there are two Bolivias, an Indian one and a mestizo-white one that rules it, and that the revolution of 1952, by turning Indians into “campesinos”, changed their name but not their colonial situation. Neither the nationalist right nor the Marxist left, both led by mestizos, can liberate the Indians; they must become the subject of a revolution of their own, for which Reinaga invokes the communal order of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca state. In its analysis of colonialism and racism the book draws on Frantz Fanon. It became the founding text of indianismo; whether and how far it shaped the katarista manifestos of the 1970s, above all the Manifesto of Tiwanaku (1973), is debated among historians.
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