Transbordering Latin Americas by Clara Irazábal

Author:Clara Irazábal [Irazábal, Clara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415840392
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Place Making and Ideology

7

Nations within Nations

Transnationalism and Indigenous Citizenship in Latin America

Marcela Tovar-Restrepo

Over the last three decades in Latin America, indigenous movements have played key roles in re-visioning democratic processes from local to global horizons. Indigenous peoples have sought to redefine their identity, their constitutional rights and duties, and their relation to the state. From Chile to Mexico, sprouting transnational citizenship projects have emerged, contesting not only the foundational nation-state tropes but also conventional isomorphisms established between place, space, and culture.

These ethnic rights initiatives have exceeded nation-state boundaries, making evident the existence of ethnically different nations within established political, jurisdictional, and administrative limits. Living in nations within nations, indigenous men and women have claimed special citizenship rights, deploying diverse strategies to produce new forms of gender and cultural difference, sameness, or self-presentation. Such strategies have required the flexible and transnational mobility of these peoples between historically and hierarchically interconnected local, regional, and global spaces. Local communities, national states, NGOs, and regional and international movements have been crucial sites where indigenous peoples have negotiated issues of identity, established different alliances, and posed new political, cultural, and gendered geographies.

This chapter explores strategies followed by indigenous peoples—both men and women—to produce new forms of gender and cultural difference within local and global shared and connected spaces. I focus on how these processes force us to rethink the politics of space, community, identity, and citizenship in Latin America. For that purpose, national constitutions and international agreements (e.g., the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007) are analyzed as key loci that illustrate how transnational imaginary significations, related to identity and citizenship, have traveled from local to global spheres, making possible the recognition of indigenous rights. I discuss contributions made by articulation theory to understand processes of creation of ethnic sameness and difference that are at the core of these emergent transnational citizenship projects pursued by indigenous movements. Furthermore, having worked with indigenous movements in different local and national instances in Colombia, international instances (e.g., United Nations forums), and human rights NGOs, my participant observation adds useful content to this analysis.1

Here, the term transnational mostly refers to relations among post-colonial nation-states but also acknowledges indigenous peoples as constituting nations within these nation-states. In English, the term nation is commonly used to refer to ethnic minorities or indigenous peoples within postcolonial countries, to the point that Canada collectively calls its indigenous peoples First Nations—630 recognized governments or bands across the country. Conversely, nation has not been a term commonly used in Spanish to connote indigenous peoples. This is so in part because, in general, indigenous peoples refer to themselves by their own proper names (e.g., Mapuche people) or as indigenous peoples (particularly in their struggles to claim national civil rights or build transnational coalitions, as I explain below). Additionally, Latin American nation-state governments, recently discussing their national projects and adopting new constitutions, have largely resisted the recognition of indigenous peoples as nations because of the perceived juridical complications and risks of secession

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