A Review of  The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia

The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia by Brooke Larson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024

Brooke Larson’s book on the history Indigenous education in Bolivia is a masterpiece. It is deeply researched, beautifully written, a pleasure to read and a gift to historians of Bolivia, education, Indigenous movements and so much more.

The book puts Indigenous people front and center, not simply on principle but also because, as the book reveals, Aymara community members, leaders, teachers, self-taught lawyers, archivists, scribes and students organized for decades to win schools and literacy, both as ends in themselves and as means to defend and regain community land and autonomy. Not only did they demand state-run and -funded schools, but they also built village schools themselves, from gatherings under trees and in homes and churches to the famed Warisata. While education was no doubt a neocolonial tool to “civilize” and dominate Indigenous people, as Aymara intellectuals and activists charged in the 1970s and 1980s, Larson convincingly argues that for decades “the rural school symbolized emancipation from the tyranny of isolation, ignorance, and illiteracy” (290) for Aymara communities subject to forced labor and landlord violence. For them, Larson emphasizes, the fight for literacy and schools was a decolonial struggle.

Larson explores this history from around 1900 through the 1970s on four levels: grassroots Indigenous experience and activism, state policy, intercultural middle-class mediation and engagement with transnational pedagogical ideas and developments.

In 1900, where the story begins, 73 percent of Bolivia’s population lived in the countryside and only 16 percent of school-aged children had any schooling, despite the reigning constitution’s guarantee of universal public education. As Larson explains, education was a central feature of elites’ debates over the so-called “Indian Question.” While conservative separatists doubted whether Indigenous people could be incorporated into dominant creole society, liberals tended to believe that cultural assimilation was possible and that education was the foremost way to achieve it. But while liberal modernizers sought modern de-Indigenized citizens, they also wanted a subordinated rural labor force to continue performing barely compensated labor on haciendas as well as free infrastructural labor for the state.

These tensions came to a head after the 1899 Federal War when victorious Liberal Party leaders executed their former ally and Aymara leader Zarate Willka along with more than three hundred of his followers. Despite opposition from landowners fearful that schooling would encourage Indigenous unrest, the government of Liberal president José Manuel Pando (1899–1904) designed an assimilationist education plan that nonetheless maintained a “racialized neocolonial divide between the unacculturated rural Indians and the urban population of semi-assimilated mestizos and privileged (“criollo”) whites” (41). Though these plans mostly floundered—few rural schools were built—Larson shows that they “opened narrow spaces for Aymara school activism to take root and flower in the harsh political climate of the Altiplano” (69).

In the early 1900s, creole hacienda owners continued to encroach on Indigenous community lands that had survived earlier rounds of dispossession. As they had in the colonial period, villagers used the legal system to contest landlord abuse—efforts that required literacy. Larson traces the interconnected work of a growing network of community leaders called caciques apoderados who mounted legal challenges to landowners and a grassroots village school movement that grew in the same Altiplano communities and ayllus waging legal battles. Ambulatory teachers moved around the Altiplano, giving classes and organizing schools, often clandestinely to protect them from landowner violence. Community members built schools themselves and hundreds of teachers were Indigenous community members, including the remarkable Eduardo Leandro Nina Quispe, a self-taught Aymara activist and teacher who saw education as a means to reestablish an Aymara-Quechua homeland.

One of the Aymara school movement’s greatest achievements was Warisata, an elementary school and teacher training institute for Indigenous students located in La Paz’s Omasuyos province. The hope was that this “escuela-ayllu” would serve as the center of cultural and political life for the Indigenous communities and ayllus surrounding it as part of a broader liberatory project. The Warisata story usually focuses on the school’s middle-class, non-Indigenous co-founder, Elizardo Pérez. But Larson convincingly argues that that the school was “primarily the creation of Aymara peasant leaders” (111), especially Avelino Siñani, a reading teacher who already ran an elementary school for Indigenous children in Warisata and co-founded the Warisata with Pérez. Teachers, students, parents and community leaders ran the new school together, according to local traditions of community self-governance.

The school could not escape the broader contradictions of indigenismo and developmentalism, however. Warisata was, as Larson argues, “an extraordinary achievement of self-determination” (143). But she also shows that it clung to a farm-school model that employed students (and community members) as laborers and trained them for agricultural work. While Siñani advocated a literacy-based curriculum, Pérez backed agricultural, work-based courses. Over time the school became more vocational than emancipatory, both because Siñani lost the debate and because of the formidable social and political forces the school was up against.

Warisata was founded and operated in the 1930s, a decade of Indigenous and colono mobilization, landlord retaliation (including the public whipping of Warisata leaders in 1934), forced conscription for the Chaco War (1932–1935) and punishment for draft evasion. Neither landlords nor military impressers looked fondly on the Warisata experiment.

The school enjoyed a reprieve in the late 1930s under reformist “military-socialist” presidents. But in the early 1940s, a restored conservative oligarchic government took over the school, caricatured it as racist and paternalistic, and emptied it of any remaining emancipatory content. Gone were references to communities, ayllus, and Indigenous self-governance. Instead, the new curriculum called Indians campesinos, made peace with haciendas, and became entirely vocational. Vigilante groups and thieves violently attacked Warisata and its satellite schools and, nationally, both the left and the right cohered around an assimilationist mestizaje project that “also insisted on anchoring the Indian in the mural Andean milieu” (190). In practice, as Larson demonstrates throughout the book, separatism and assimilation in Bolivia have often gone hand-in-hand.

Nevertheless, the cacique apoderado movement survived and continued to fight for Indigenous land, self-governance and education in the 1940s. Larson uncovers the work of Indigenous and peasant leaders like Antonio Alvarez Mamani who traveled the highlands and valleys, distributing print materials and organizing secret reading groups, legal campaigns, unions and schools. The leaders of this highly organized network came from Aymara and Quechua-speaking communities and haciendas but were also well-versed in Spanish and national culture due to military service in the Chaco. Their efforts culminated in a wave of colono strikes, a series of regional Indigenous congresses, and the 1945 National Indigenous Congress. As Larson emphasizes, delegates’ demands included primary schools, literacy, and preservation of Indigenous languages.

As Indigenous and peasant activists were working to establish local control over schooling and curricula in tune with community values and practices, the Bolivian government invited in U.S. education reformers who promoted centralized state control and a “functional pedagogy” based on vocational and behavioral training that would turn rural Indigenous people into productive peasants. In exchange for material aid, technical expertise and new-fangled pedagogy, the Bolivian government handed Warisata and educational policy over to “North American engineers of rural development and intimate modernity” (164). Warisata co-founder Elizardo Pérez lamentably aided these efforts as interim minister of education. But as Larson makes clear, rural communities wanted academic knowledge, not latrine-building skills. Rural teachers and their unions, left parties, rural normal school and university students, peasant leaders and indigenista intellectuals and pedagogues all critiqued this new imperial brand of assimilationist pedagogy.

Of all the reforms that came after the 1952 revolution, education reform has received the least scholarly and commemorative attention. Larson reveals that the revolution unleashed a powerful wave of rural school activism. Across the country’s highland and valley provinces, Indigenous communities and hacienda colonos petitioned the government for both land and schools. Communities’ demands for education were “not couched in a civic language of citizenship rights, however, but framed as an anticolonial vindication for having been denied their basic right to schooling,” Larson writes. “True revolution, they implied, would come in the form of the lettered Indian” (270). As her previous chapters show, this claim was the product of a half century of grassroots organization by Indigenous activists, teachers, students, parents and community authorities.

As in earlier decades, fights for literacy and land were interconnected. Filing and litigating land claims required literacy skills or assistance from literate intermediaries. As Larson notes, and as I have found in my own research, agrarian reform resolutions normally mandated that peasant beneficiaries build primary schools on ceded hacienda land.

Larson concludes that, like rural education more generally, post-revolutionary education reform was a double-edged sword. While schooling became a means of overcoming poverty and illiteracy, the state attempted to use schools to “bolivianize” and “modernize” the Indigenous majority and win their loyalty to the nation and the ruling MNR party. Like in Mexico, the post-revolutionary government expected Indigenous people to shed their identities, language and cultural practices to assimilate into a unified mestizo nation. This acculturation agenda made school a traumatic experience for many Aymara and Quechua-speaking students. But the state’s assimilationist project was always aspirational and, as Larson argues, should not lead us to overlook the fact that rural schools were a peasant and Indigenous conquest.

Shockingly, 98 percent of the national education budget went to urban schools. But literacy rates still rose in the countryside and Indigenous communities and children put both rural and urban schools to use for their own ends. In the decades after the revolution, there was boom in popular print literature, Aymara- and Quechua-language radio programs, peasant study groups and read-alouds and community writing. “Radio, newspaper, or pamphlet—those were the tools that could bestow a measure of cosmopolitanism on a rural village, without necessarily erasing the rituals and routines of Indigenous ways of living, working, and knowing in the changing world around them” (293), Larson writes. This statement captures one of the book’s most important lessons: that Indigenous communities wanted and worked to win education on their own terms and to a large degree succeeded.

Winning schooling after the 1952 revolution helped set the stage for the last fifty years of Indigenous movements that have recast Bolivia as an Indigenous-majority nation. The children of the revolutionary generation often moved from the countryside to the city to make good on the promise of schooling, becoming lawyers, doctors, and engineers—and in some cases Aymara activists, teachers and intellectuals who critiqued post-revolutionary education’s assimilationist agenda and created bilingual pedagogical tools of their own. As Larson emphasizes, the existence of these critiques and proposals showed that assimilationism failed.

Among the organizations founded by the new generation of Aymara activists and intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s was the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), founded in 1983. THOA members researched the history Aymara, Quechua, Uru and Guarani communities, often by uncovering the documents that Aymara activists before them had produced and archived.

Over the past two years, I’ve worked closely with THOA’s members, including some of its founders, researching the history of Indigenous communities’ relationships with the Andes Mountains. As I’ve looked for community members to interview, I’ve found it is sometimes easier to meet them in El Alto, La Paz’s Indigenous sister city, than in their communities. Many Aymaras maintain residences in both their home communities and El Alto where they came to further their education. There may have been a primary school in their community but usually attending secondary school and certainly university meant moving to El Alto or La Paz. Realizing the revolutionary promise of education for rural communities meant moving to cities where the bulk of the education budget was spent.

While some of the children and grandchildren of 1952 have lost connections to their communities of origin, many actively maintain them. I recently attended the Tres Cruces Festival in Cohoni, a set of four Aymara communities perched on the edge of the great mountain Illimani around four hours from La Paz-El Alto. Men and women, young, old, and middle-aged, played sikus and danced through Cohoni’s plaza and communities, presenting themselves before local authorities and a traveling Catholic priest (who arrived late and didn’t stay long). Some elders worry that their traditions are losing out to influences from the city. But several of the musicians were young men who live in El Alto learning to play the siku for the first time. These younger players played the loudest and danced the hardest. Maybe it was their youthful energy, but I think it was the joy of rediscovery and return that animated them. When the party was over, they got on minibuses to go back to the city, a bit more confident that they could be urban and educated as well as Indigenous and connected to their communities. I think Warisata’s Aymara founders would be pleased.

Toward the end of the book, Larson discusses the efforts of former Warisata teachers and students to rehabilitate the school’s reputation and revive its memory. Most notably, former teacher Carlos Salazar and Warisata graduate, teacher, and daughter of Avelino Siñani, Tomasa Siñani de Willka, wrote new histories of Warisata in the 1970s and 1980s that decentered Elizardo Pérez, recentered Indigenous protagonists and connected the school to a broader and long-standing project of Indigenous liberation.

I had the chance to return to Warisata earlier this year for the first time since reading this book. There I spoke with Juan Churata Cosme, a professor of linguistics and primary education at Warisata who was born and raised in the community and educated first at the school and later at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz. While I did not ask him about the history of the school, he recounted it in detail and with pride. He told me that when Elizardo Pérez first visited Warisata and called on members of its eight Indigenous communities to build the school, “the community did not respond.” It was only when Avelino Siñani took up a shovel that community members joined the construction brigades and the larger project. As we spoke, hundreds of the province’s union leaders, dressed in their signature red ponchos and carrying chicotes, were meeting on the school’s soccer field to decide what candidate to support in the upcoming presidential elections. Nearly a century after its founding, its reputation redeemed, the escuela–ayllu is an ever-changing reality.

While the primary sources that historians use are always products of the history we study, that is especially the case here. Larson tells a remarkably rich story drawing on cacique petitions, newspaper articles, government reports, memoirs, and oral histories conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, including some by her. Lack of Indigenous-produced written sources is often one of the biggest barriers to researching Indigenous history before the late twentieth century. This study shows why and how that changed. The struggle for literacy and schools is one facet of a long-standing Indigenous-popular tradition of autodidacticism in Bolivia, the Andes, and Latin America. This book sheds crucial light on the making of that tradition.

The Lettered Indian captures the ways that ethnic politics can both exclude Indigenous people and empower them. Brooke Larson powerfully shows that in 20th-century Bolivia, Indigenous people made sure this dichotomy bent toward liberation. Taking up the master’s tools—pens, documents, schools, and archives—they tore down, rebuilt and opened up the master’s house while also restoring their own.

Sarah T. Hines is Associate Professor in the History Department, University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022)

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