Indigenous Inclusion, Black Exclusion

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37, 285–310 f 2005 Cambridge University Press doi :10.1017/S0022216X05009016 Printed in the United Kingdom

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Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America
JULIET HOOKER Abstract. This article analyses the causes of the disparity in collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-Latin groups in recent rounds ofmulticultural citizenship reform in Latin America. Instead of attributing the greater success of indians in winning collective rights to differences in population size, higher levels of indigenous group identity or higher levels of organisation of the indigenous movement, it is argued that the main cause of the disparity is the fact that collective rights are adjudicated on the basis of possessing adistinct group identity defined in cultural or ethnic terms. Indians are generally better positioned than most Afro-Latinos to claim ethnic group identities separate from the national culture and have therefore been more successful in winning collective rights. It is suggested that one of the potentially negative consequences of basing group rights on the assertion of cultural difference is that itmight lead indigenous groups and Afro-Latinos to privilege issues of cultural recognition over questions of racial discrimination as bases for political mobilisation in the era of multicultural politics.

Introduction Latin America as a region exhibits high degrees of racial inequality and discrimination against Afro-Latinos and indigenous populations. This is true despite constitutional andstatutory measures prohibiting racial discrimination in most Latin American countries. In addition to legal proscriptions of racism, in the 1980s and 1990s many Latin American states implemented multicultural citizenship reforms that established certain collective rights for indigenous groups. This has been much less true for Afro-Latinos. The collective rights gained as a result of multiculturalcitizenship reforms include: formal recognition of the multicultural nature of national societies and of specific ethnic/racial sub-groups, recognition of indigenous customary law as official public law, collective property rights (especially to land), official status for minority languages in predominantly minority regions, and guarantees of bilingual education. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela have enshrined at least one type, and in many cases all, of these collective rights at the level of statutory or constitutional

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law. In addition, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil,Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela have also ratified Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.2 These multicultural citizenship reforms have been interpreted as attempts to restore the democratic legitimacy of the state after decades of authoritarianism and repression in somecountries by including previously excluded racial and ethnic minorities and redressing past racism.3 Yet there are significant disparities in the scope of the collective rights enshrined as a result of such reforms. In almost every case of multicultural reform in the region indigenous groups have been much more successful in gaining collective rights from the state than have AfroLatinos. Of the fifteenLatin American countries that have implemented some type of multicultural citizenship reform, only Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua extend (some) collective rights to AfroLatinos.4 Even when Afro-Latinos were granted collective rights, however, in almost no instances did they gain the same rights as indians. In fact, there are only three countries in Latin America where...