Fictive Foundations: National Romances and Subaltern Ethnicity in Latin AmericaAuthor(s): Joanne RappaportSource: History Workshop, No. 34, Latin American History (Autumn, 1992), pp. 119-131Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289186Accessed: 02/08/2009 21:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to HistoryWorkshop.

http://www.jstor.org

CRITIQUE

Fictive Foundations: National Romances and Subaltern Ethnicity in Latin America

by Joanne Rappaport

Miguel Taimal, former governor and local historian of the indigenous community of Cumbal, Colombia, once shared with me his version of Columbus' arrival in America.' Columbus ventured across the ocean in search of territory, he told me, because Spain was suffering a land shortage. After six months of sailing, the land-starved sailors threatened mutiny. Suddenly, they saw a light shining: their ship had reached land. Columbus' crew first set foot on American soil with Law 89 of 1890 in hand; that is, they arrived carrying copies of the post-Independence law that specifies the nature of indigenous landholdings in Colombia.2

Hardly a version of the Spanish invasion as we would tell it, don Miguel's tale compresses time and space, inserting such known quantities as turn-of-the-century Indian law and Colombian national territory into a story that should have taken place several centuries before, in the distant Caribbean. The storyteller thus reintroduces indigenous people into national history, seeking the roots of nationality in the colonial period, instead of the nineteenth century. Don Miguel's account is reminiscent of the history told by many of his Cumbal neighbors.3 Like them, he conflates recent legislation and the colonial-era documentation that legitimizes indigenous communal landholdings and provides evidence for indigenous historians. But in an unusual twist, his Spaniards are ambiguous characters who, like today's Indians, are starved for land; his Columbus has the unlikely honour of granting Colombian Indians protectionist legislation.

The narratives of don Miguel and others like him provide subject matter for local historical writing. One example is a mimeographed magazine, the Chasqui Cumbe - or Cumbe Post - that was written in 1986 by two young political activists, Efr&n Tarapues and HelI Valenzuela.4 The first (and only) issue of the magazine was historical in focus, calling for the elucidation of data hidden in archives:

For much time the good customs of our elders, the laws, the experiences

HiS to rv Wo rks h olp Jo rl [ rii t I s uie 34 ? History Workshop Jouirnal 1992

120 History Workshop Journal

of struggle, culture, traditional medicine, beliefs and the good lifeways have been forgotten; likewise, the forced sufferings, domination, racial discrimination and economic and social humiliation.

For that reason it is worthwhile to make known to the Great Cumbe Family its hidden experiences, guarded in its archives, which have been the fundamental basis for demanding [our] rights and following [our] historical process as autonomous people with the right to live and develop as human beings on our motherland inherited from our GREAT CHIEF CUMBE.5

But while Tarapues and Valenzuela purport to write the history of their community, what follows is essentially a mental map of Cumbal's territory containing references to the boundary markers of its eighteenth-century community title - precisely the document that Miguel Taimal confuses with Law 89.6 Tarapues and Valenzuela go on to describe the ways of life of their ancestors, highlighting subsistence practices, toolmaking, ceramics, and barter in a series of brief paragraphs that tell us more of the lives of their grandparents than of their precolumbian ancestors.

Once again, here is an account of the distant past that telescopes historical referents from the colonial and precolumbian periods with descriptions of life at the turn of the century. This written history of Cumbal follows the conventions of such oral narrators as Miguel Taimal insofar as in it, the events of long ago are couched within personal reminiscences from the not-so-distant past.

While unsophisticated in comparison to the polished accounts of other indigenous intellectuals, the Chasqui Cumbe represents a new kind of foundational literature in Latin America, self-consciously providing a written stimulus for the process of ideological consolidation and the development of a sense of community that leads, ultimately, to national projects.7 In the case of Cumbal, it is not so much the construction of a new nation that is at stake, as a redefinition of Colombian nationality along multicultural lines, which no longer prescribes cultural homogeneity as a characteristic feature of the nation.8

Foundationalfictions

It is interesting to reflect upon indigenous accounts in light of other work on literature and the formation of national ideologies. One prominent example is Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions, which explores the role played by Latin American nineteenth-century romantic novels in the formation of national ideologies.9 Sommer's interpretation rests upon the work of Benedict Anderson, who proposes that literacy is key to the development of national consciousness, because it provides a context within which the nation can be imagined by a broad reading public. In addition to studying the role of newspapers in the constitution of the 'imagined community', as he

National Romances 121

calls the nation, Anderson suggests that the genre of foundational novels will provide a key to comprehending the development of national ideol- ogies.

"'

Most of the novels considered by Sommer were written by authors of considerable political influence, deeply committed to the development of national projects on the political, as well as the artistic, levels; such books have since become 'national novels', incorporated into curricula by educators, recast by filmmakers, popularized to the point of providing names for babies."

But while Sommer follows the lead of Anderson in elucidating the impact of fictional writing in the creation of a national ideology, she has also turned to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality to comprehend the particular choice of theme made by Republican-era Latin American authors.'2 These national novels are romances in two sense of the word: not only can they be classified as such by genre, but they are also romantic inasmuch as they are love stories.

Sommer seeks to understand why the vehicle of the romance should be selected, over and over again, to generate a national consciousness. Her goal is

to locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national ideals are all ostensibly grounded in 'natural' heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts at midcentury (p. 6).

The heterosexual love that Sommer explores in these novels is not that of European romances; its purpose is different. In Latin American novels, the gender attributes of heroes and heroines are confused, with females exhibiting masculine strength and males displaying feminine compassion, paralleling the emphasis on unity, personalism and alliance that character- ized the political process of state consolidation.

It is as love stories that these novels provided vehicles for conceptually linking the incompatible ethnic and regional groups that comprised the nascent Latin American nations, for in these romances African slaves yearn for white mistresses, women from the provinces love men of the capital, Spaniards cherish Indian princesses, and mestiza beauties fall for creole men. While foundational fictions projected themselves into the future, using sexual love as a 'trope for associative behavior, unfettered by market relationships' (p. 35) and for the political desire of patriotism, inter-ethnic and inter-regional relationships were also used to tap the past, as a way of legitimizing the creole elite. In fiction and in politics these novelists were

reforming one thing into another: valor into sentimentalism, epic into romance, hero into husband. This helped to solve the problem of establishing the white man's legitimacy in the New World, now that the

122 History Workshop Journal

illegitimate conquerors had been ousted. Without a proper genealogy to root them in the land, the creoles had at least to establish conjugal and then paternity rights, making a generative rather than a genealogical claim (p. 15).

For Sommer, such novels were not simply allegories for authors-cum- nation-builders, but alternative contexts within which national ideologies were worked out:

I am suggesting that Eros and Polis are the effects of each other's performance . . . Erotic interest in these novels owes its intensity to the very prohibitions against the lovers' union across racial or regional lines. And political conciliations, or deals, are transparently urgent because the lovers 'naturally' desire the kind of state that would unite them (p. 47).

They played, consequently, the same role as did other written genres, such as the essay, in creating and consolidating incipient national ideologies.

It is not my intention here to write a critique of Sommer's book, for my own concerns - the ideology and rhetoric of indigenous-rights movements - are quite different from hers. Instead, I will use Foundational Fictions as point of departure for contemplating the dynamics of national identity in Latin America. In particular, I will question the degree to which dominant ideologies as they are expressed in romantic literature have been absorbed by colonized ethnic groups and how these ideologies have been used in the creation of alternative nationalist dreams.

The language of romantic love

Sommer's principal contribution is her sophisticated analysis of the use of romantic love as a trope for patriotism in Latin American foundational fictions."3 The same choice, however, is made for radically different reasons by Latin American subaltern ethnic groups; in fact, the very divergent uses to which Indians have put the language of romantic love suggest that the foundations established by these novels were fictive indeed. While Sommer does indicate that politicians traced the connection between individual love and love of country in their essays as well as in fiction, the usefulness of the allegory was, moreover, confined to a limited number of expressive genres.

In nineteenth-century Latin American novels, love and courtship pro- vided vehicles for bridging ethnic and regional differences that had proven insurmountable in political practice. The ambiguities of gender roles evinced in these fictional love affairs were exploited ideologically by authors bent upon extolling the new social relationships of capitalist society. Erotic language among the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Maya of Yucatan, Mexico, likewise bridged cultural chasms. In his chronicle of written communication between Maya politico-military leaders and Ameri- can archaeologists, Paul Sullivan demonstrates that the language of

National Romances 123

courtship and erotic love was employed by Maya letter-writers and indigenous translators to establish social relations in an environment of distrust and estrangement.'4 The Maya, descendants of nineteenth-century rebels who had defied the Mexican government during the Caste War of Yucatan and who were still alienated from their national and provincial governments, made contact in the mid-1930s with archaeologist Sylvanus Morley in the hopes that the American government would provide the Indians with arms. Ultimately, then, love was to be replaced by trade in arms.

This was not the first time the Maya used romance to bridge hostile ethnic relations. During the Caste War they wrote love letters to their Yucatecan enemies while they held them under siege:

Thus it is that I love you very much, with all of my heart, as I do all the troops under your command in that town, even as I love all of your kind who are used to speaking with me. They should themselves tell you if I mistreat or harm any whites. Even as I love my fellow Indians, I thus also do love the whites. 15

Sullivan suggests that the rhetoric of courtship introduced ambiguity and complexity into a social relationship that had been simplified by war into unadorned enmity.'6

The ambiguity implicit in this use of courtship rhetoric turns upon a reversal of roles. As in the foundational fictions assessed by Sommer, where male and female attributes are confused, in the Maya letters Indians, who had traditionally occupied the subordinate female position in inter-ethnic relations, used romantic metaphors as though they were male:

If Indians and their enemies were to become lovers at that moment, it must have been clear to all of them that the relationship would be asymmetrical. The Indians would be 'men' while the foreigners would be 'women' -not men and women as they truly were, but 'men' and 'women' as social categories in the gender system of those times. What relations covered by such a powerful metaphor would actually entail in the day-to-day activities of production, exchange, and governance would have to be worked ouit after peace came, and most likely silently, as people continued to profess their love for one another on appropriate occasions. As long as Indians had the guns, they had reason to expect they would find happiness in such an admittedly open-ended relationship. In the meantime a rhetoric of courtship offered the prospect of peaceful union without precluding struggles to come. 7

Unlike the language of romance in nineteenth-century novels, however, Maya erotic rhetoric was not meant to forge illusory bonds, nor to establish legitimacy through the creation of genealogical ties. Instead, the discourse

124 History Workshop Journal

of courtship was employed to wrest power from dominant groups, as a means of coercion. Courtship here is not so much a vehicle for imagining a nation as for rupturing the boundaries of the imagined community on the one hand, and for controlling relations with outsiders, on the other.

The symbolism of courtship is also used by subaltern groups to forge peaceful bonds across ethnic divisions, but again, in ways different from that of fiction. The Guambiano of Cauca, Colombia, traditionally represent themselves to others through their marriage ceremony. Displayed in illustrated books, films, or dramatic presentations, wedding costume is one of a number of key symbols used to convey the distinctiveness of Guambiano culture.18 It is important to note that unlike the Maya example or the novels cited by Sommer, we are not speaking here of inter-ethnic romance, but of the presentation by an ethnic group of a united front capable of defending itself from outside encroachment, represented by traditional marriage customs and by in-group conjugal unions. In recent attempts at Guambiano self-representation that have developed in the course of the ethnic-rights movement, wedding clothes are no longer used, but the symbolism of the couple is still fundamental. The Guambiano flag, for instance, was devised in the early 1980s when land claims became a priority in Guambia. The flag has two parts: a cloth standard made up of bands of colour reflecting women's attire, and a supporting rod made up of a governor's staff of office and a machete, both generally carried by men. An abstract union of man and woman is thus achieved through the juxtaposition of male and female elements.19 When the banner is raised, side by side with the Colombian flag, it is evident that the Guambianos do not intend to fuse with the dominant society, but to redefine it.

Shared ideologies, contrasting genres

It is significant that Guambiano self-representations are conveyed in non-narrative visual genres, for it is in the field of painting that Som:ner's romantic allegory was abandoned by Latin American nationalists. Nine- teenth-century romantic authors and statesmen were ardent supporters of other artistic and scientific forms of imagining the nation. In 1850, for example, the Italian cartographer and soldier, Agustin Codazzi, was contracted by the Colombian government to lead a massive interdisciplinary expedition called the Comisi6n Corogratica, composed of cartographers, artists, botanists and writers, whose aim was to define the contours of the nascent republic through a detailed description of its boundaries, resources and inhabitants.21 In the days before photography was widely disseminated in rural areas, Codazzi's expedition employed watercolourists to record the regional and ethnic diversity they came across in the course of their travels.21

The Comisi6n Corogratica watercolours, painted by Carmelo Fernandez, Enrique Price, and Manuel Maria Paz, display a variety of ethnic groups,

Ntitioti(il Ro?mantces l125

g54s~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P

' S o' ?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.....

w^^i ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~... .... o ' <_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.....

|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. .. .....A r

a -0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~..... .... .

A watercolour from the Ca}mision Corografica: 'Santander: African and Mestizo~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~...... types' (Carmelo Fernandez , 1 851) .~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. ...... ..

126 History Workshop Journal

shown many times in tableaux portraying a variety of regional, occu- pational, and racial types. Rich in details depicting clothing, phenotype, and landscape, labelled with captions that define subjects by race or by occupation, the people who populate these watercolours are generally unoccupied in anything other than the business of representing categories of the Colombian citizenry. Mestizos, whites, mulattos, and blacks (the few Indians are displayed separately) stare into space, never at one another: they are illustrative types, not characters; they inhabit tableaux, not narratives. Sommer argues convincingly that Latin American authors appropriated themes from European romantic literature and North Ameri- can novels of the frontier as frameworks for their own romances. In watercolours however, there was no pre-established canon into which the ethnic variety of America could be inserted. While biblical or classical history supplied European artists with contexts for the presentation of people from other parts of the world, no such template was available for depictions of the inhabitants of America.22

Notwithstanding this significant difference between the narrative genre of fiction and the illustrative genre of travel painting, nineteenth-century authors and artists employed similar ethnic stereotypes in their depiction of subaltern ethnic groups. In both genres, for example, Indians are romanti- cized, pushed back in time to the precolumbian era or transported in space to the distant and inaccessible jungle; neither in fiction nor in art are they situated in the same time or place as the national society. In the Brazilian romance of Jose de Alencar, 0 Guarani, as well as in Enriquillo, written by Manuel de Jesus Galvan of the Dominican Republic, the distant era of the Spanish invasion provides an environment for their protagonists, mythical Indian royalty. Similarly, the indigenous character of highland Colombia is conveyed in the Comisi6n Corografica watercolours through illustrations of ancient artefacts, while living Indians are only depicted in the distant tropical lowlands or in close association with aspects of the landscape, as though they belonged to the topography and not to the national society.

While nineteenth and early twentieth-century Indians did not appropri- ate the romantic genres in vogue among creole power-holders, they were profoundly influenced by the ethnic stereotypes that these statesmen articulated in politics, in art, and most notably, in legislation. Colombia's most significant piece of Indian legislation, Law 89 of 1890, stipulated

the manner in which savages in the process of being reduced to civilized life should be governed'.23 Its primary intent being the integration of Indians into the dominant society, Law 89 was nourished by an evolutionary perspective in which Indians were perceived as moving up the cultural ladder toward western civilization.24 According to those who formulated this law, Indians were historically anterior to the national society; they were also placed at an earlier point in the human life cycle, since Law 89 also directs that Indians be treated as under-age in all legal proceedings. The evolutionary perspective filtered down to community members, primarily

National Romances 127

through the diffusion of legislation and legal argumentation. Its influence is particularly apparent in legal briefs associated with the extinction of the reservations of the southern Colombian highlands, where Indians anxious to shed their status and privatize communal lands emphasized that the 'sav- ages' of Law 89 and other pieces of legislation belonged to the distant past and were not to be confused with the prosperous, educated, Spanish- speaking smallholders of the present.25

Contemporary examples of indigenous foundational literature, such as theatre, deploy the same stereotypes present in nineteenth-century fiction, painting, and legislation. In the militant drama of Cumbal, for example, legitimacy is sought in the distant Indian past, through the portrayal of conquest-era illustrative types, such as native chiefs and warriors, or Spanish soldiers and priests. Contemporary plays are tableaux, not literary narratives, more similar to the illustrations of the Comisi6n Corografica than to foundational novels: in them, Indians fight the Spanish invaders, but nothing much happens in terms of dramatic action. Indigenous illustra- tive types are shown, moreover, in keeping with the conventions of the dominant society: actors are nude and decorated with feathers, like national stereotypes of lowland Indians, even though in the cold and damp mountains of Cumbal at almost 4,000 metres above sea level, nudity was never customary.

Archives, history, and self-representation

Let us return to Miguel Taimal's story which opened this essay. His prob- lematic merging of space and period suggests that it is not just genre, but timing, that is at stake in subaltern historical discourse. The telescoping of historical referents that characterizes don Miguel's tale and those of other indigenous narrators should not be ascribed simply to orality: it derives, instead, from the character of the written sources which have been drawn upon for evidence, those very legal documents that supply the Cumbales and their elders with their ethnic stereotypes and their evolutionary ideology.

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria writes that 'America existed as a legal document before it was physically discovered', reminding us of the extreme importance that Spain assigned to the written word.26 His theory of Latin American narrative hinges upon this statement, for Gonzailez locates the foundational sources of the novel outside of its fictional and narrative gen- eric home, analyzing

the main forms that the Latin American narrative has assumed in re- lation to three kinds of hegemonic discourse, the first of which is foun- dational both for the novel and for the Latin American narrative in general: legal discourse during the colonial period; the scientific, during the nineteenth century until the crisis of the 1920s; the anthropological,

128 History Workshop Journal

during the twentieth century, up to Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) and Cien ahos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).27

That is, the models upon which Latin American fiction has depended are multiple and historically-situated.

Unlike Doris Sommer, Gonzdlez Echevarrfa's theory transcends the dominant Euroamerican idiom with which he is concerned - as the two critics scrutinize some of the same nineteenth-century formative novels, their work can be fruitfully compared.28 By locating his foundational model outside fiction Gonzailez has pinpointed a genre which also impacted upon subaltern ethnic groups. On the one hand, the legal document constitutes the primary form of inter-ethnic communication over the centuries, as well as the principal written genre read by colonized groups. On the other hand, the legal brief epitomizes the juridical system under which the dominance of Europeans was secured, both before and after Independence from Spain.29

But if we follow Gonzailez Echevarria's argument with regard to Latin American narrative fiction, the document loses its foundational status in the nineteenth century, only recovering importance in the past three decades, when almost all prominent writers cast their novels in documentary form. Among indigenous groups, however, the document retains its status as a guiding model, because it continues to be the primary written genre produced and consumed by Indians. Those documents that are frequently chosen as foundational models, moreover, were written in the colonial period, for it was under Spanish domination that indigenous people were protected by separate bodies of law; after Independence it was hoped that Indians would melt into the general citizenry, thus freeing their protected communal lands for commercial exploitation.3" Hence, the curious telescop- ing of nineteenth-century legislation, colonial documentation, and invasion by Miguel Taimal: the foundations of indigenous autonomy must still be sought in the colonial period, because it is the only historical era in which there was little dispute that Indians existed as legal beings.31

The iconic nature of much indigenous historical expression also emanates from the legal documents that dictate the nature of discourse with the outside. Colonial legal papers are not written in narrative style, but instead juxtapose multiple legal briefs, including such diverse documents as land titles, wills, census lists, and the recorded testimony of witnesses in a single record whose constituent parts might span more than a century. Contem- porary juridical manipulation of these documents fits them into a formulaic type of expression dictated by contemporary law, in which evidence is cited to support claims, as opposed to forming part of a narrative. Legal writing, and not a narrative trope like romance, moulds the use of historical evidence in fairly predictable ways.

While the compressed and iconic references to history present in legal briefs are frequently fleshed out in the oral tradition, the examples of historical writing that I was able to collect in Cumbal replicate legal

National Romances 129

discourse, listing documents associated with key intervals in the com- munity's past. Genres approaching the rich foundational literature of the dominant society, while they have been published for the past decade, are only beginning to take hold at the local level; one of the clearest examples I observed was the quotation of the 1939 published treatise by Paiez leader Manuel Quintin Lame in a play presented in Cumbal.32 Until indigenous (and other subaltern) writing is widely disseminated in Latin America, as it is among African Americans in the United States, we must look outside the written narrative tradition for both models and prototypes of the foun- dational literature that Sommer has so carefully analyzed for Latin America in general.

NOTES

1 The research upon which this article is based was conducted in Cumbal, Narifno, Colombia and in various Colombian and Ecuadorian archives, under the sponsorship of the Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia and the Department of Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes (Bogota), and under the supervision of the Cabildo Indigena de Cumbal. It was funded by the following sources: September 1986 to August 1987, Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (American Republics Program), National Science Foundation (grant no. BNS-8602910), Social Science Research Council; May to August 1988, Fulbright-Hays Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (U.S. Department of Education). I thank Catherine Allen for her helpful commentary on this article and Bill Schwarz for suggesting it in the first place.

2 Republica de Colombia (Ministerio de Gobierno), Fuero indigena: disposiciones legales del orden nacional, departamental y comisarial - jurisprudencia y conceptos, Bogota, Editorial Presencia, 1983, pp. 57-64.

3 On Cumbal historiography, see J. Rappaport, 'History and everyday life in the Colombian Andes', Man (n.s.) 23: 4, pp. 718-39, 1988.

4 Chasqui is a Quechua word for the post runners of the Inca empire. Its use in southern Colombia, beyond the boundaries of Inca control, can be attributed to the Spaniards, who were instrumental in expanding the territory in which Quechua, or Quechua terminology, was used. The chasquis of Cumbal were messengers who carried communiques between municipal centres in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the term was used by Indians and mestizos alike, although the chasquis were Indians required to give a certain number of days of municipal service each year. Given its local history, it is interesting that this Inca expression, introduced into the area by Europeans as a name for an exploitative institution, has been appropriated today to represent indigenous identity.

5 Chasquii Cumbe, p. I (translation mine). 6 Cumbal's title is registered as Notaria Primera de Pasto (NP/P), 'Expendiente sobre los

linderos del resguardo del Gran Cumbal', Escritura 228 de 1908 (1758). On the use of space for recording historical knowledge in the Andes, see J. Rappaport, 'History, myth and the dynamics of territorial maintenance in Tierradentro, Colombia', American Ethnologist 12: 1, pp. 27-45, 1985; and G. Urton, 'La arquitectura publica como texto social: la historia de un muro de adobe en Pacariqtambo, Peru (1918-1985)', Revista Andina 6: 1, pp. 225-61, 1988.

7 Some examples of indigenous historiography include a general treatment by Wankar (Ramiro Reinaga), Tawantinsuyu: cinco siglos de guerra Qheswaymara contra Espana, Mexico, Nueva Imagen, 1981; for Bolivia, S. Rivera, 'Oprimidospero no vencidos': luchas del campesinado aymara y qhechwa, 1900-1980, La Paz, Hisbol, 1986; for highland Ecuador, A. Males, Villamanta ayllucunapac punta causai: historia oral de los Imbayas de Quinchuqui - Otavalo, 1900-1960, Quito, Abya-Yala, 1985; for lowland Ecuador, the history textbook Pueblo de fuertes: rasgos de historia shuar, Quito, Abya-Yala/Mundo Shuar, 1984; for some English translations of similar writings, see R. Moody (ed.), The Indigenous Voice: visions and realities, London, New Jersey and Copenhagen, Zed/IWGIA. An earlier Colombian example, which will be discussed later in further detail, is Manuel Quintin Lame's 1939 treatise, Los

130 History Workshop Journal

pensamientos del indio que se educ6 dentro de las selvas colombianas, published as En defensa de mi raza, Bogota, Comite de Defensa del Indio, 1971; an English translation of Lame's book is included as an appendix to G. Castillo-Cardenas, Liberation Theology from Below: the life and thought of Manuel Quintin Lame, Maryknoll, New York, Orbis, 1987, pp. 97-151.

8 In fact, this process is now well underway, with the participation of indigenous representatives in the 1991 Constitutional Assembly that rewrote Colombia's constitution, and the subsequent election of three Indians to the national Senate. They will be responsible for drafting new legislation to replace Law 89 of 1890. From its inception, however, Colombia's founders sought to eradicate ethnic diversity by decree, obliterating special laws protecting Indians and embracing them as 'citizens' in an effort to free their lands for commercial exploitation. For a political treatise on the issue, see R. Uribe Uribe, Reduccion de salvajes, Bogota, El Trabajo, 1907. For some commentaries on Colombian Indian legislation, see V. D. Bonilla, 'OQu6 politica buscan los indigenas?' in G. Bonfil Batalla (ed.), Indianidad y descolonizacion en America Latina,Mexico, Nueva Imagen, 1979; and A. Triana, Legislaci6n indigena nacional: leyes, decretos, resolluciones, jurisprudencia y doctrina, Bogota, America Latina, 1980.

9 D. Sommer, Foundational Fictions: the national romances of Latin America, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991; all references to Sommer's work will henceforth be cited in the body of the text.

It) B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of national- ism, London, Verso, 1983.

11 Her analysis encompasses a range of novels, including in chronological order, Gertrudis G6mez de Avellaneda, Sab, Cuba, 1841; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo, Argentina, 1845; Jose Marmol, Amalia, Argentina, 1851; Jose de Alencar, 0 Guarani Brazil, 1857; and Iracema, Brazil, 1865; Alberto Blest Gana, Martin Rivas, Chile, 1862; Jorge Isaacs, Maria, Colombia, 1867; Juan Le6n Mera, Cumanda, Ecuador, 1879; Manuel de Jesus Galvan, Enriquillo, Dominican Republic, 1882; Ignacio Altamirano, El Zarco Mexico, 1888; Juan Zorilla de San Martin, Tabare, Uruguay, 1888; Jos6 Eustacio Rivera, La Vordgine, Colombia, 1924; R6mulo Gallegos, Dona Bdrbara, Venezuela, 1929; and Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mama Blanca, Venezuela, 1929.

12 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: an introduction, New York, Vintage, 1980. 13 Anderson's use of novels, in contrast, rests upon the sense of simultaneity, of the feeling

of sharing in the activities of an entire population instead of an individual, that written fiction affords (see Imagined Commlunities, pp. 28-40). He was also concerned with demonstrating that the convergence of capitalism and printing made possible an environment in which such novels could make a specific contribution to nationalist ideologies, pp. 41-49.

14 P. Sullivan, Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between two wars, New York, Knopf, 1989, pp. 106-120.

15 Letter from Jose Maria Tzuc to the commander of the defenders of Bacalar, 1852, cited in Ibid., p. 115.

16 Ibid.,p. 118. 17 Ibid., pp. 119-20. 18 See, for example, the drawing in G. Hernandez de Alba and F. Tumifia Pillimue,

Nuestra gente, 'namuy misag': tierra, costumbres y creencias de los indios guambianos, Popayan, Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 1965, p. 77. Also, Jackie Reiter and Wolf Tirado's 1979 film, Guambianos.

19 For an analysis of this and a number of other indigenous symbols of nationality in Colombia, see J. Rappaport, 'Reinvented Traditions: the heraldry of ethnic militancy in the Colombian Andes', in R. Dover, K. Seibold and J. McDowell (eds), Andean Cosmologies through Time: persistence and emergence, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992.

20 On the role of the Comisi6n Corografica in the development of Colombian science, see 0. Restrepo, 'La Comisi6n Corografica y las ciencias sociales', in J. Arocha and N. de Friedemann (eds), Un siglo de investigacion social: antropologia en Colombia, Bogota, Etno, 1984.

21 The most complete collection of reproductions of these watercolours is J. Ardila and C. Lleras, Batalla contra el olvido: acuarelas colombianas, 1850, Bogota, Ardila & Lleras.

22 See D. Poole, 'A one-eyed gaze: gender in nineteenth-century illustration of Peru,' Dialectical Anthropology 13, pp. 333-64, 1988, for a discussion of this problem in European depictions of Peruvian women; Poole draws upon Edward Said's Orientalism, New York, Pantheon, 1978 for her analysis. The same non-narrative and illustrative character is evident in

National Romances 131

the travel writing that resulted from the Comisi6n Corografica. See, for example, Manuel Ancizar's 1853 Peregrinacicn de Alpha, Bogota, Biblioteca Banco Popular, 1984; and Santiago P6rez' 'Apuntes de viaje', first published in 1853 and 1854 in Bogota newspapers, in E. Rodriguez Pifieres (ed.), Seleccion de escritos y discursos de Santiago Perez, Bogota, Biblioteca de Historia Nacional, 1950.

23 Fuero Indigena, p. 57. 24 F. Correa, 'Estado, desarrollo y grupos etnicos: la ilusi6n del proyecto de homogen-

izaci6n nacional', in M. Jimeno, G. 1. Ocampo and M. Roldan (eds), Identidad: memorias del simposio 'Identidad etnica, identidad regional, identidad nacional', Bogota, ICFES, 1989.

25 See J. Rappaport, 'History, law and ethnicity in Andean Colombia', Latin American Anthropology Review 2: 1, pp. 13-19, 1990.

26 R. Gonzalez Echeverria, Myth and Archive: a theory of Latin American narrative, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 46. Even before Columbus set sail, written documents established Spain's claim to the lands he might discover. The invasion of indigenous territory was accompanied by the reading of the Requerimiento, a document which established the legal basis of Europeans' claims to American lands; ironically, it was read in Spanish to Indians who could not understand it.

27 Ibid., p. 40. 28 Nevertheless, unlike Sommer, Gonzalez also analyses the writings of authors of

indigenous ancestry, such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. 29 See, for example, S. J. Stern, Perlu's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish

Conquest: Huamanga to 1640, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. 30 For an English-language treatment of the history of Andean indigenous communities in

the Republican era, see T. Platt, 'The Andean experience of Bolivian liberalism, 1825-1900: Roots of Rebellion in nineteenth-century Chayanta (Potosi)', in S. Stern (ed.), Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, on Bolivia; and J. Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: native historical interpretation in the Colombian Andes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, on Colombia.

31 Indians are almost absent from Republican-era legal documents, in contrast to their ubiquity in the colonial documentary record. Indigenous activists Manuel Quintin Lame and Jose Gonzalo Sanchez were thus forced to appeal to the colonial record, in which they discovered the name 'Supreme Council of the Indies'. The epithet was chosen by them to designate the regional organization they founded in the 1 920s, thus reminding their constituents of the institutions that protected their ancestors' rights under Spain: see Rappaport, The Politics of Memory, p. 124.

32 Lame, En defensa de mi raza. Native American literature is considerably more advanced in North America, although its diffusion is, similarly, quite narrow. See A. Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: native American literature and the canon, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989.