The Chayanta Rebellion: A Minor Utopian Moment?

• In Event: Minor Utopias and the Left

Abstract

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that while the concept of desencuentros is helpful for making sense of indigenous political alliances and conflicts with non-indigenous groups in republican Bolivia, we should also be attentive to moments of encuentro that produced minor utopias, in which anti-colonial demands from Indian communities for self-government received support from urban radicals. On the afternoon of July 25, 1927, a young shepherdess set fire to a hillside on Florentino Serrudo’s estate, launching the greatest insurrection of indigenous peasants since the Federal War of 1899—and the first in Bolivia to be labeled “communist.” This paper takes seriously the fears that Chayanta rebellion of 1927 generated among landlords, state officials, and the press, and examines the dynamics of mobilization, the formation of alliances among indigenous caciques, and non-indigenous artisans and intellectuals, and the state response. It shows that in the years before the Chayanta uprising, rural caciques from indigenous communities and radical artisans and intellectuals in the cities of Sucre and Potosí formed a political alliance based on a shared commitment to rural education, communal land ownership, and redistribution of wealth and power. This incipient alliance sought to erase ethnic and class hierarchies in order to build a more democratic society, and largely succeeded in blocking further landlord advance in the southern Bolivian countryside. It pre-figured, on a regional scale, the national revolutionary coalition of 1952.

Author

• Forrest T Hylton, Universidad Nacional de Colombia