From “Invisible Natives” to an “Irruption of Indigenous Identity”? Two Decades of Change Among the Tacana in the Northern Bolivian Amazon
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Sondra Wentzel provided by Institutional Repository of the Ibero-American Institute, Berlin From “invisible natives” to an “irruption of indigenous identity”? Two decades of change among the Tacana in the northern Bolivian Amazon “Al final nos dimos cuenta todos que éramos tacanas” (Tacana leader 2001, quoted in Herrera 2009: 1). 1. Introduction: The Tacana In the mid 1980s, a time of redemocratization and structural adjustment policies in Bolivia, consultations about a region suitable for field research on the situation of indigenous peoples in the context of “Amazonian development” led me to the Province of Iturralde in the lowland north of the Department of La Paz (Figure 1). The culture of its indigenous inhabitants, the Tacana,1 had been documented by German researchers in the early 1950s (Hissink & Hahn 1961; 1984). Also, under the motto La Marcha al Norte, the region was the focus of large infrastructure and agro industrial projects which had already stimulated spontaneous colonization, but local people had little information about these activities nor support to defend their rights and interests. Between 1985 and 1988, I conducted about a year of village level field re- search in the region, mainly in Tumupasa, an ex-Franciscan mission among the Tacana founded in 1713 and transferred to its current location around 1770, San- ta Ana, a mixed community founded in 1971, and 25 de Mayo, a highland colonist cooperative whose members had settled between Tumupasa and Santa Ana from 1979 1 Tacana branch of the Pano-Tacanan language family, whose other current members are the Araona, Cavineño, Ese Ejja, and Reyesano (Maropa).
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