A second stage of Indigenous Emergence in Latin America?

Abstract

In this work we sustain that the Indigenous Emergency has been the most important phenomenon in Latin America during the last two decades. We indicate that the first cycle of this process of ethnical identity reconstruction has begun to exhaust and to give way to a second cycle. This new phase is strongly marked by the experience of Evo Morales´s government in Bolivia and the indigenous municipalities that have surged in many countries, where the indigenous organization leaders have taken the local public institutions. This new situation debates the previous concept of autonomy, as not full belonging to the national community, and pose the challenge of a new indigenous citizenship, where to be a national citizen and a member of indigenous people do not cause a contradiction. In this new descolonization, the indigenous will search to appropriate of state instruments and institutions as ethnic citizen, but not to retire to their natives communities in a kind of withdrawal or “auto apartheid”.