Cauca's Indigenous Movement in Southwestern Colombia

Cauca in southwestern Colombia is home to some of the most fascinating and important twentieth-century Indigenous organizing efforts in Latin America. Most notably, Manuel Quintin Lame who emerged as a key leader in Cauca used his literacy skills to petition the government for the rights of Indigenous peoples. As historian Brett Troyan aptly demonstrates in this important book, Quintin Lame as well as other leaders such as Gregorio Hernandez de Alba and Juan Palechor did not operate in a political vacuum. Troyan draws on extensive archival documentation to illustrate how Indigenous leaders negotiated with dominant political parties and armed guerrillas groups. Rather than presenting Indigenous peoples as hapless victims of larger political forces, Troyan forcefully underscores their agency in defining and directing the concerns of marginalized communities. She offers a carefully documented and very insightful analysis of how across the twentieth century local Indigenous leaders repeatedly challenged the Colombian central government's discourse on citizenship and ethnicity. The result is a compelling book that will be of fundamental interest to scholars wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the political constructions of ethic identities. -- Marc Becker, Truman State University Although studies of indigenous organizing in Latin America have expanded our understanding of contemporary social movements, this work-largely written by anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists-has remained, with only a few exceptions, untethered from its historical context, as though the robust indigenous presence in the modern political scene emerged out of thin air. If we are to comprehend how and why ethnic rights have become such a central concern today, even in countries like Colombia, with tiny indigenous populations, we must look to the past: to how indigenous communities forged innovative strategies for voicing their demands to the state during a period in which Latin American nations imagined themselves as homogeneous, before constitutional reform recast the nation as pluriethnic. Cauca's Indigenous Movement provides readers with this much-needed historical depth by focusing on the twentieth-century antecedents to the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), Colombia's first modern indigenous organization. Brett Troyan draws on rich and until now neglected archival evidence to highlight the complexities of early indigenous organizing: the heterogeneity of indigenous political strategies over time, the intensity of internal conflicts over their implementation, the changing response of the Colombian national state and regional government to indigenous activism. In doing this, she provides readers with a welcome corrective to our insistence on dwelling exclusively on activism in the present, as well as new ways of situating that present in a complex past. -- Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University Brett Troyan's Cauca's Indigenous Movement in Southwestern Colombia is a seminal work for understanding twentieth-century indigenous politics. Troyan expertly explores the relation between indigenous actors and the Colombian state, creating a powerful study in state building and community formation from above and below. Troyan's work also helps us understand the intense resonance and meaning discourses of indigenous citizenship exercised both in the Colombian past and its present. -- James E. Sanders, Utah State University