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Accepted Paper:

Spatialising race at the (post)colonial frontier: identity production, exclusions and legacies of Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen in the Bolivian Chaco  
Penelope Anthias (University of Cambridge)

Paper short abstract:

In the 1990s, Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco mobilised to claim collective rights to their ancestral territories – culminating in the creation of Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (TCOs). In this paper, I ask: Who was made invisible by the discursive construction and legal consolidation of TCO claims?

Paper long abstract:

In the 1990s, Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco mobilised alongside other lowland ethnic groups to claim collective rights to their ancestral territories - a struggle that culminated in the creation of Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (TCOs) in 1996. Underpinning these ethnic claims were territorial counter-narratives that drew on global discourses of indigeneity to frame the Guaraní as an oppressed "indigenous people" struggling to "recover territory" from powerful mestizo patrones. Yet, the reality of ethnic identities and land relations in the Chaco is more complex than such narratives - or the official TCO land titling process - acknowledged. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in TCO "Itika Guasu" to ask: Who was made invisible by the discursive construction and legal consolidation of TCO claims? In particular, I highlight the fate of "campesinos" - a label used to refer to poor small farmers, many of whom haled from rural highland communities and lacked formal property rights. Unaccounted for by NGOs or the state, many of these poor migrants initially opted to join the Guaraní organisation. However, their interpellation into the "indigenous" category - promoted by local NGOs - ultimately unravelled, in ways that served to re-inscribe notions of racial difference and bolster elite-led opposition to indigenous land rights. Through an examination of these fluid processes of identity-construction surrounding indigenous territorial claims, this paper reflects on the limited capacity of neoliberal cultural rights, and statist enactments of them, to grapple with the heterogeneous identities, competing claims, and racialised exclusions of postcolonial territory.

Panel P34
Race, ethnicity and racism in Latin America: exploring the uncomfortable linkages
  Session 1