Abstract
In Racial Spoils from Native Soils, Arthur Scarritt shows how the neoliberal expulsion of indigenous people from their lands continues a racist colonial legacy. A central question guiding this book is how a small minority of colonizers is able to dominate a great majority of indigenous people. Scarritt elaborates the ideas that institutional racism and indirect rule processes have served colonial interests. Through ethnographic work and historical analysis of the Huaytabamba village in Peru, Scarritt documents how developmentalism and neoliberalism subordinate the indigenous community and illustrates how racial dynamics play a central role in this process. Accordingly, institutional racism and indirect rule subordinate and divide the indigenous people, and intermediary authoritarians serve as buffers and brokers to colonial interests. Racism stratifies and paternalism controls the indigenous populations, employing indigenous brokers—curacas (indigenous leaders) and, later, acculturated natives or mestizos—to solicit favors from those in power. Successful brokerage enhances the intermediary’s personal power but makes the indigenous community more vulnerable to exploitation and expulsion in various historical periods.
The Huaytabamba village is typical of rural Latin America: predominately indigenous, highly agriculturally based, very Catholic, poor, and with a long history of struggles among indigenous groups and those accommodating to the colonial power. At the time of Scarritt’s study, the villagers spoke primarily Quechua and lived without electrical services, though they did have a drinking water system and outhouses. The villagers relied on their own subsistence work to sustain themselves and practiced various forms of collective or communal labor, such as faenas (village projects) and ayni (farming work groups). Scarritt was not fluent in the Quechua language and always felt a sense of alienation, which changed as he joined the villagers’ struggle against one of their own, Damian, who had acquired the cultural and social capital of mestizos and had become an influential intermediary broker. Damian’s role in the case study illuminates how the local and the global relate and reproduce racial and class inequalities.
In Latin America, the author observes, racial domination has produced a triracial hierarchy, with whites at the top, mestizos in the middle, and the indigenous at the bottom. Scarritt defines mestizaje not in racial terms, but in ethnic terms where the indigenous can become ethnically mestizos in the city. The rural village and city are represented as polar racialized spaces: one indigenous and the other mestizo. This racial binary minimizes the racial-ethnic complexity/diversity within the village and the city. Ethnic mestizos generally have less mobility and power than the racial mestizos, and the former’s biases toward the more indigenous community reflect internalized racism, a source of tension among the urban- and village-centered indigenous people.
It would have been interesting to learn how racial mestizaje and colorism shaped ethnic mestizaje. Did the more indigenous-looking mestizos have the same mobility as the more European-looking ones? In addition, in the case study, intermediaries uniformly appear to abandon their community and join the “colonizers.” This binary representation seems to suppress a more complex reality. The emergent in-betweens can also pursue their own group interests, challenge those in power, and/or sometimes side with and empower those at the bottom, particularly when they privilege the standpoint of the marginalized (see Barajas 2009). Nonetheless, Scarritt insightfully observes that racism is a normal operation in a society that institutionally and culturally reproduces impoverishment and dependency among indigenous people.
Scarritt provides a coherent story of how the indigenous have been subordinated since colonialism. Racialized indirect rule has been a central form of domination since conquest, and authoritarian leadership has helped control the indigenous population. In the colonial period, for instance, the Toledo Reforms moved from encomiendas to the corrigidor system, leading to larger haciendas, segregation/homogenization of the indigenous people, suppression of their self-sufficiency, and forced dependency on those in power. The curacas served as the intermediaries and as agents of colonialism, managing the labor and tribute of indigenous people for the Crown. During the independence period, criollos implemented liberal land reforms that displaced indigenous people from their lands and increased their exploitation. Mestizos then served as buffers to threats from the indigenous people and were often contracted as gamonales, private security, for the haciendas. Thus, the elites secured their interests by allowing mestizos mobility and citizenship.
During the Agrarian Reform, mestizaje served as a new form of social control and facilitated a paternalistic developmentalist policy that subordinated indigenous communities. The state presented itself as a champion for peasant communities and promised developmental support, which involved a brokerage system. This system took more from the villages than it offered them. Scarritt illustrates this process with his ethnographic story of Damian, the indigenous broker. The story begins when the Huaytabamba village accesses a tractor that soon breaks down, but the village does not try to repair it for fear that it will be repossessed by a bank. The village had put in more work (village crops) and money (personal income and registration and delivery fees) in getting the tractor from the city than what it got in return. The tractor had been donated by the Japanese government and should have been cost free. On top of this theft, Damian took on a loan using the tractor as collateral and hurriedly abandoned the village with all their funds. The village was left in debt. The “benevolent” developmentalism effectively achieved what colonial coercive forces did in the past. Damian reproduced the exploitative relationship between the indigenous village and the mestizo city/global economy, which funneled wealth out of the village.
This ethnographic case study also documents how changes to neoliberalism intensify the racial system and displacement of natives from their lands. In the neoliberal period, Scarritt argues, global financial capitalists, the rentier class, have less use for indigenous labor but more interest in extracting their resources. Racism enables neoliberalism to more efficiently appropriate land and resources, and the intermediary group—from the local to the national level—still plays a crucial role in priming and attaining land for the optimum profits of neoliberal global elites. The author notes, “these outcomes prove highly racialized, with the mechanisms of expulsion disproportionately targeting darker complected peoples” (p. 6; see also p. 78).
As an illustration of this process, the author tells the story of when Damian returns empty-handed to Huaytabamba after being away for some years. In his absence, the village had undergone some transformative changes, and many converted to Evangelicalism. According to Scarritt, this religious conversion had positive outcomes. The village rebuilt their trust in the community and sought new collective projects, which were core to their indigenous identity and culture. Under the leadership of a devout Evangelical, Pedro, the village placed its own interests over private ones. However, upon his arrival, Damian introduced a new political movement to privatize their communal lands. Most villagers were pro-comunidad, but the most powerful families (mostly Evangelicals) were for privatization. Nonetheless, with the mestizos’ strategic social, cultural, and institutional capital, the few privatizers forced the privatization plan on the village, employing and reproducing racial and class biases (e.g., modern vs. primitive). Scarritt explains, “The privatization struggle was a struggle to de-indianize the land, the resource most strongly associated with indigeneity, a struggle for land mestizaje” (p. 86).
Scarritt does an excellent job illuminating how colonial logics and acts assert themselves in the neoliberal period. The question of how a small number of colonizers dominate such a large population of indigenous people is effectively answered. Historically, relations of colonial domination have been secured by intermediaries through indirect rule, reproducing racial hierarchies and benefitting from their broker position. Overall, Scarritt contributes a deep conceptual analysis and rich ethnographic detail about how internal (indirect rule) and external (neocolonial) oppressions continue to subordinate indigenous communities.