Ever since Angel Rama first bundled writing, imperial power, and urbanism into the powerful metaphor of ‘‘the lettered city,’’ scholars have been fasci- nated by the role that alphabetic literacy played in the cultural and spatial colonization of the Americas.∞ The lettered city began as a blueprint of a
classical polis, which the Iberian rulers would stamp onto the untamed land- scapes of the New World. Each such city would serve as a citadel of Iberian civilization, as well as the locus of writing, law, and the monarch’s overseas bureaucracy. As the Spanish empire built an administrative machinery, its urban spaces soon turned into ‘‘cities of protocols’’ producing laws, regula- tions, proclamations, certificates, propaganda—not to mention secular and religious ideologies to justify the imperial enterprise in the first place.
At the center of that knotted relationship between writing, power, and urbanity stood a tiny group of administrators, lawyers, and other educated men of letters (whom Rama identifies as ‘‘letrados’’).≤ As masters of the
written word, these lettered men became a traditional force in Latin Amer- ica’s public life. Not only did they monopolize the symbols and instruments of imperial knowledge and power in radically heteroglossic, colonized so- cieties, they conducted the day-to-day a√airs of administration, justice, and extraction. The letrados were the flesh-and-blood agents who put into prac- tice Antonio de Nebrija’s famous dictum of 1492 that the language of Castile was ‘‘the companion of empire.’’
The link between writing, urban space, and legitimate rule only became stronger with time, as indigenous people appropriated Spanish writing in
Forging the Unlettered Indian 135 their ongoing protestations and negotiations before their colonial overlords. As indigenous subjects were drawn into the orbit of Spanish imperial justice, the lettered city reinforced its spatial and bureaucratic function as an internal metropole committed to the monarch’s dual project of colonizing and evan- gelizing indigenous people in the empire’s rural hinterlands. Particularly in the Amerindian highlands, where millions of rural peasants vastly outnum- bered the urban enclaves of Hispanic and hispanizing populations, the let- tered city became a focal point for ongoing colonization, an ideal polis that outlived its capacity to be an outpost of the Iberian empire.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish urban ideal was still the pre- serve of a tiny Hispanic elite monopolizing the dominant language. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, Latin American cities were trans- formed by the social forces of modernization and by a new generation of letrados who, as journalists, literary nationalists, teachers, lawyers, and uni- versity professors, began to ‘‘broaden the exercise of letters.’’≥ Riding the
circuits of nationalism in the early 1900s, the lettered city reached out into the countryside to rediscover its national heritage, interior landscapes, and van- ishing folkways. At the same time, the lettered city sought to bring ‘‘public instruction,’’ ‘‘universal education,’’ or ‘‘national pedagogy’’ to the masses. These new letrados would seem to be the flag bearers of a universalizing nationalism, if not a revolutionary idealism, that would finally breach the colonial barrier by spreading access to literacy beyond the privileged few.
Yet, Rama’s sweeping narrative of the lettered city never chronicles the city’s demise. Despite the transformation of urban life under economic mod- ernization and political flux, the lettered city still ‘‘retained a vision of itself as a cultural aristocracy,’’ albeit one that ‘‘incorporated powerful democratizing cross-currents.’’∂ Jeremy Adelman has recently noted this subtle paradox in
the work of Rama, where ‘‘letrados claim to be proponents of change, but wind up reproducing a seminal condition of Latin American history, which is the power of the city.’’∑
One way to examine this enduring paradox is to probe the bitter ideological battles that erupted in the lettered city over the question of popular literacy. Because writing, specifically o≈cial and legal forms of writing, furnished a powerful cultural symbol and tool of legitimacy in a racially divided, radically unequal society, its surrender to the greater cause of universal schooling was inevitably going to produce controversy among those who had most at stake. Even dissident intellectuals who ushered in the era of cultural nationalism in the early twentieth century were traditionalists, simultaneously celebrating
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their nation’s vanishing ‘‘folk traditions’’ and urban popular cultures, and fearing the democratizing forces that threatened to corrupt their cultural domain. Many worried, for example, about delivering literacy, cultural mobil- ity, and the franchise to peasants, the laboring classes, or new immigrants beginning to flood into the cities. Blind adherence to universal norms was tantamount, in their view, to surrendering the terms of their own cultural authority, and ongoing debates on education called forth conservative chal- lenges to European ideals of universalism, positivism, and democracy. But there were material and class interests at stake, as well. No generation of letrados was willing to surrender its privileged access to power and knowledge; none wanted to abandon its stake in cultural power and withdraw from public life, especially when membership in the cultural plutocracy continued to confer prestige and wealth to those who rode the circuits of power politics.
And yet, by the 1870s, the ideal of public education was beginning to spread beyond the vanguard reformers of Uruguay and Argentina into the heartland of the Andean nations, where liberal reformers turned to Europe and the United States for pedagogical models that might guide them in establishing national systems of education and inculcating civic values in the masses.∏ Even before many nations had established public schooling, the
program to o√er ‘‘education and instruction’’ to the masses became a source of bitter contention among factions of the lettered elite, each seeking to assert its authority over this new tool of nation-building and use it to advance its ideological, partisan, or class interests. By 1910, these intraelite squabbles were su√used with larger theories about national identity, race, and gender.π
Increasingly, the very idea of educating the masses in order to bring them into the nation in various capacities (perhaps as enfranchised citizens, wage laborers, or patriotic soldiers) raised deeper ideological and pseudoscien- tific issues about the nation’s capacity for ‘‘racial improvement,’’ economic progress, and cultural homogenization. Literary nationalists, in turn, bor- rowed elements from German idealism to probe the nation’s moral character, racial-cultural essence, and mythic past—all strategic forms of knowledge and power that might guide the nation’s ‘‘apostles of education’’ to raise the masses and redeem the nation.∫
The stakes were particularly high in the city of La Paz in the early 1900s, after it was transformed into Bolivia’s seat of economic, political, and intel- lectual power. Its secondary role was that of internal metropole, home to writers and statesmen who were designing new liberal land reforms and civilizing projects for the Aymara population of the altiplano. The outlying
Forging the Unlettered Indian 137 provinces of La Paz, populated by some half-million Aymara peasants, were becoming increasingly attractive as an agrarian hinterland to land specula- tors and latifundistas (large estate owners), eager to capitalize on liberal land laws, railroads, urban food markets, and a growing reserve labor force of dispossessed ex-comunarios (member of a land-based community or ayllu). As the scramble for indigenous lands grew more ruthless, the city of La Paz experienced an influx of Aymara refugees fleeing rural violence and land divestiture. The metaphorical lettered city, in other words, was under assault by the forces of modernization. The Aymarization of La Paz intensified dur- ing the liberal boom years of the early 1900s, as the city became a refuge and place of protest for the ex-comunarios and a sprawling street fair for Aymara merchants and laborers. Such a jostling of ethnic-racial groups in downtown La Paz brought the city’s lettered elites face to face with their Indian Other. And if such everyday encounters failed to alarm progressive members of the urban elite, then the specters of ‘‘race war’’ on the altiplano certainly did. All this combined to make the ‘‘Indian problem’’ more urgent to the urban architects of nationhood in Bolivia than to those almost anywhere else in Latin America.
Under such circumstances, Bolivian elites confronted a fundamental con- tradiction of postcolonial nationmaking—how to unify this weak and di- vided nation around universal principles of literacy, su√rage, and civilization while securing social peace in the countryside and protecting the lettered city of La Paz from litigious Indians and acculturating cholos? How would La Paz’s liberal vanguard fashion a national pedagogy that might reconcile these con- tradictory goals of cultural hegemony and racial exclusion? Would educators promote the Spanish language and literacy so as to inculcate hispanist values, hasten Indian acculturation, and prepare the rural masses for their entry into national political life? Or would educational reformers seek to educate In- dians in their ‘‘natural habitat,’’ away from the harmful social influences of the city and its ‘‘degenerate’’ hybrid races? Would Bolivia’s national peda- gogues discover the ‘‘national soul’’ in a hispanized version of mestizaje, or in some recycled version of Indian redemption and racial purity?
Bolivian elites tried to confront such questions through the lens of rural school reform. The development of a separate system of Indian schooling privileged manual labor over literacy. Racial discourses played an important part in the imagining and engineering of a modern Bolivian society through pedagogic reforms. For it was in the production of race and educational discourses that we can perceive the techniques Bolivia’s letrados used to
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defend their cultural authority against the challenge of literate and litigious Indians who were flooding the lettered public sphere with their own written and oral dispositions on land, justice, and citizenship. Educational reformers played a key role in the formation of a racial discourse impacting educational policy. By 1920, Bolivia had set in place a segregated model of rural Indian schooling that was to endure for almost fifty years. A dissident group of intellectuals hijacked the liberal ideal of universal literacy and schooling to push forward a model of Indian schooling that subordinated universal liter- acy to specialized labor. Bolivia’s reformulated ‘‘national pedagogy’’ became a discursive tool for valorizing a new subject—the schooled, but unlettered, Indian.
The Politics of Possibility
Around 1900 Bolivia’s writers and statesmen were eager to capitalize on the new liberal-positivist spirit of science, rationality, progress, and reform. En- couraged by the racial prognosis of the national census of 1900, and predict- ing the gradual racial assimilation of Aymara and Quechua peasants, a few pensadores began to toy with theories of race and environment to diagnose the essential character of Bolivia, Latin America’s most Indian nation, and predict its destiny. Among a tiny vanguard of writers, educators, and politi- cians, new doctrines of environmental determinism opened the possibility of racial uplift and improvement. The idea that the Indian was a victim of nature, history, and deprivation gained currency in the writings of Bautista Saavedra, among others. After the murder of liberal soldiers by Aymara rebels in the 1899 civil war, Saavedra became the overnight expert on the Indian ‘‘collective psychology’’ in his role as the Indians’ defense lawyer. Before the court and in the press, Saavedra vigorously argued that the Ay- mara’s sociopsychic character was molded as much by climatic and social forces, as by biology. The Aymara’s desire for revenge on Bolivian society, Saavedra contended, sprang from their centuries-long oppression. While this argument gave cold comfort to Indian defendants, it carried a hopeful mes- sage for educators and other reformers, who believed that medicine, technol- ogy, and schools would sanitize and improve the living conditions of the Indian race.Ω It was the possibility of racial regeneration that made the softer
doctrines of environmentalism so attractive to Bolivia’s new liberal vanguard. In his acclaimed 1903 essay on ‘‘the principles of sociology,’’ Daniel Sán- chez Bustamante, the university rector, endorsed the environmental doc-
Forging the Unlettered Indian 139 trine, proclaiming that if the psychological character of a people (or a ‘‘race’’) were primarily the product of the environment, then that character could be positively shaped by environmental factors such as education.∞≠ For this
young educator, public education would provide the antidote to ‘‘nature, which has been cruel to the uncivilized races.’’∞∞
Here, then, was an early Bolivian expression of what Nancy Stepan has called Latin America’s version of ‘‘pliant racism,’’ a construct that privileged environment over blood and left open the possibility of ‘‘social agency and purposive action.’’∞≤ Bolivian liberals heeded the hopeful words of the rec-
tor. Upon assuming the Ministry of Instruction and Justice in 1904, Juan Saracho, a liberal, went before congress to proclaim the need to sacrifice everything for the cause of ‘‘consolidating Bolivian nationality . . . through moral, intellectual, and physical education.’’ To educate was to ‘‘construct a new fatherland.’’∞≥
Saracho issued this call to arms at a propitious moment. There was grow- ing public awareness of Bolivia’s disastrous state of primary education in the early 1900s. Thanks to o≈cial inspections, it was public knowledge that primary and secondary school curricula were still cast in eighteenth-century molds of ‘‘scholasticism,’’ ‘‘verbalism,’’ and mind-numbing memorization. The university continued to produce legions of lawyers and other doctorcitos, for whom oratory, writing, law, and bureaucracy constituted essential profes- sional instruments, the same instruments of the colonial period. But where were the mining engineers, land surveyors, industrialists, and other stewards of capitalist development? Worse yet, the nation’s primary schools, where they existed, were failing their pupils on all levels. According to the Ministry of Instruction, most students entering secondary schools did not know their letters or numbers. Academic standards were abysmal, but the state could not regulate curricular standards since 95 percent of the nation’s primary schools were controlled by provincial authorities. Although the liberal state increased funding for education and established some sixty new rural primary schools over the course of the decade, it scarcely made a dent in the monopolies that municipal authorities and religious organizations exercised over schooling.∞∂
And, needless to say, Bolivia had one of Latin America’s highest rates of illiteracy in the early twentieth century.∞∑
The school inspector’s dismal reports added a sense of urgency to the Liberal Party’s project to build a federal system of compulsory education. Its first priority was to break down Bolivia’s landlocked isolation by training a cadre of schoolteachers in the latest pedagogic philosophies and methods. In
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1905, Saracho raised funds to send the first group of Bolivian students to study in Chile’s Escuela Normal. Soon afterward, he recruited Chilean educa- tors to change the outmoded methods and dangerous influences of Method- ist missionaries working among Aymara communities on the altiplano. But it was mainly to Europe that Saracho looked for inspiration, and he found the perfect emissary in his esteemed colleague, Sánchez Bustamante. In 1908 the young writer and educator set out on his grand tour of teacher-training institutes in Chile, Argentina, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, England, and Belgium. In Brussels, Sánchez Bustamante finally found the man he was looking for: an avant-garde Belgian educator who was eager to shape school reform according to the latest pedagogic fashions and thereby bring Bolivia into the modern, ‘‘civilized’’ world. Upon his arrival in 1909, Georges Rouma became the liberals’ chief architect of educational policies for the next eight or nine years.
Rouma’s first task was to mobilize a professional corps of teachers who would carry his enlightened principles and methods into the new federal schoolhouses, which were supposed to proliferate throughout the cities and the countryside.∞∏ With the blessings of the Ministry of Instruction, Rouma
established Bolivia’s first Escuela Normal (teacher training institute) in Sucre in 1909. The school’s opening was itself a foundational act, rich in patriotic symbolism. President Ismael Montes (holding o≈ce from 1904–9 and from 1913–17) consecrated the school’s founding with utopian hopes for Bolivia’s ‘‘second emancipation.’’ Leading this spiritual-cultural revolution to genuine nationhood would be the teachers and professors, armed with new pedagogic knowledge.∞π Only slightly more circumspect, Daniel Sánchez Bustamante,
the new education minister, viewed the Escuela Normal as the instrument through which the government could discover and mold ‘‘the Bolivian soul’’ and improve the race.∞∫ But as Rouma soon discovered, patriotic rhetoric was
cheap, political alliances transitory, and financial support almost nil. In spite of these structural obstacles and political shifts, however, Rouma managed to turn the Sucre school into an enclave of literary, social scientific, and profes- sional activities. By 1920, Bolivia had formed its first generation of nor- malistas, many of whom became leading public intellectuals and educators during the 1920s and 1930s.
Equally important was Rouma’s move to establish the Escuela Normal as a catalyst of educational and scientific inquiry into the pedagogic subject. From his research on abnormal children in Belgium, Rouma now turned to the ‘‘psycho-social character’’ of Bolivian children, so as to be able to design
Forging the Unlettered Indian 141 an educational program to improve it. Based on empirical observations, Rouma’s ‘‘Les indiens quitchouas et aymaraes de haut plateau de la Bolivie’’ depicted the collective character flaws of the nation: the lack of a scientific spirit, emotive excess, a lack of will power, and false patriotism. Rouma’s prescription? Bolivia’s pedagogic revolution had to mold normalista students into men of action, will power, and scientific spirit so they could carry these virtues into schoolhouses across the nation. Specifically, the Escuela Normal would instill in its students ‘‘el espíritu docente’’: work ethic, self-confidence, responsibility, and commitment.∞Ω
Rouma’s confidence in the power of pedagogy to mold men was scien- tifically confirmed in the anthropometric research of French scientist Arthur Chervin. Using hundreds of photographs and anatomical specimens, Cher- vin had compiled cranial measurements that shed new light on the coun- try’s prospects for racial improvement and economic development. Chervin’s study was optimistic. Bolivia’s racial destiny was bound to improve if the Indian races intermixed with the mestizos and the nation gradually whitened its racial stock through eugenic and cultural means.≤≠ His prescription for Bo-
livian racial progress was the prevailing one in most of Latin America in the early 1900s: whitening through the intermediate eugenic stage of mestizaje.
Rouma was encouraged by Chervin’s findings. Not content to rely on the French scientist’s evidence, however, Rouma conducted his own studies of bones and skulls dug up from graves at Tiwanaku in order to diagnose the ‘‘racial physiology’’ of Bolivian Indians, cholos, and mestizos.≤∞ His findings
lent scientific authority to his overarching goal: to civilize and assimilate the Aymara and Quechua (and eventually the Guaraní) races into a uni- fied, Spanish-speaking, mestizo Bolivia. Toward that end, Rouma’s peda- gogy would be organized around the principle of ‘‘castellanización’’; that is,