Five Hundred Years of Political Struggle: New Research on Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Mexico

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20952329
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Nicole Pacino
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Pacino / BOOK REVIEW 141

Five Hundred Years of Political Struggle

New Research on Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Mexico

by

Nicole Pacino

Benjamin Dangl The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the

Decolonization of History in Bolivia. Chico, CA, and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2019.

Inés Durán Matute Indigenous Peoples and the Geographies of Power: Mezcala’s Narratives

of Neoliberal Governance. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20952329

The rise of indigenous rights movements in the1990s and early 2000s focused con-

siderable popular and scholarly attention on the status of Latin America’s diverse

indigenous communities. Claiming to be “a product of 500 years of struggle,” as

Mexico’s Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National

Liberation—EZLN) phrased it (1993), indigenous rights groups have launched guerrilla

insurrections, blockaded cities, and toppled governments in an effort to make their

voices heard. Mexico’s EZLN declared war on the national government in 1994,

Ecuador’s Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of

Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador—CONAIE) forced a president to resign in 2000,

and the massive protests in Bolivia known as the “water war” of 2000 and the “gas

wars” of 2003 and 2005 shut down major urban centers. Indigenous mobilizations

became a feature of Latin American society at the turn of the century, leading to a new

era of historical and social science scholarship looking to contextualize and document

these movements.

Two new books pursue further understanding of the influence of indigenous com-

munities on political processes in the face of national hardships and international pres-

sures. The historian Benjamin Dangl’s The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous

Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia and the sociologist Inés Durán

Matute’s Indigenous Peoples and the Geographies of Power: Mezcala’s Narratives of Neoliberal

Governance both examine indigenous communities in contemporary Latin America and

their attempts to navigate changing political and economic realities. Durán Matute’s

analysis, centered on the community of Mezcala in Jalisco, Mexico, and its diaspora in

the United States, deals more with survival strategies in the face of neoliberal economic

policies and transnational migration, while Dangl’s narrative tells an empowering story

of Bolivian indigenous people reclaiming their history as a platform for political action.

Each book raises questions about how indigenous communities situate themselves as

political actors in relation to national and transnational politics and demonstrates that

these communities draw from their past to influence the present and shape the future.

Dangl argues that Bolivia’s indigenous peoples became increasingly salient political

actors during the twentieth century by mobilizing their history to empower their com-

munities to fight for social change. The people whose lives are detailed in this book saw

their fight for justice and equality as a continuation of centuries of struggle against differ-

ent oppressors: the Spanish colonizers, a white/mestizo modernizing elite, paternalistic

revolutionaries, brutal dictators, and finally neoliberal reformers. Focused mainly on

Nicole Pacino is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.