Doctoral Dissertation Research: Multicultural Citizenship and Indigneous Identity

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates indigenous movement strategies for constructing multicultural citizenship in Bolivia and Guatemala. It compares how the movements invoke their identity to justify demands for land, territory, and political autonomy -- rights that are crucial to indigenous citizenship and that, when granted, can dramatically alter power relations and the locus of state authority. Bolivia's indigenous movement politicizes its identity to justify demands for "territory" and "autonomy"; their Guatemalan counterparts, by contrast, demand land redistribution and focus on building "local power" within community government. In both countries, indigenous people are a historically marginalized and racialized majority, and the challenge of including them as full citizens of the state is tremendous. Why do the Bolivian and Guatemalan indigenous movements respond to this challenge in such different ways, and how can we explain their differing demands? I propose that political opportunities and institutions interact with indigenous identity to produce the different demands -- and different politicizations of identity -- in the Bolivian and Guatemalan movements. Using data from semi-structured interviews, observations, and documents, I will reconstruct the processes of demand-making through the local and national level experiences of major indigenous social movement organizations in each country. The findings will contribute to theory on social movements and identity politics, and will reveal the socio-political factors that lead to very different ways of reconfiguring citizenship in multi-ethnic and racially polarized democracies. Additionally, the results of the study will carry important practical implications by investigating indigenous movement agency in influencing multicultural rights policies, which are debated in both national and international arenas.