lecture 6, "expansion and slavery: legacies of the mexican war..."
david blight

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frederick douglass' 4th of July speech: "like Beethoven on steriods, with language as weapon."

given in 1852, in Rochester, NY, in the wake of the crisis that has gripped the country in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, as slavery expands into the West.

"why have you invited me to speak on your Fourth of July?" a critique of American hypocrisy--utilizing "by the rivers of Babylon" passage from Bible.

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in 1847, in the midst of that expansionist war (and a modest number of Northerners who opposed it; and certainly abolitionists, who saw it as a war for the expansion of slavery), Douglass called America a "nation of inconsistencies."

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the anti-slavery impulse that takes hold in the American north goes through various stages:

(1) 1830s-1840s: an expansion of organization of American abolitionisms--tended to be a kind of Garrisonian moral suasion. largely devoted to this idea of reforming or changing the heart of American people. driven very much by the Second Great Awakening.

(2) 1837, with the birth of the Liberty Party--we see this moral line take a political turn. a political party begun by some quite serious abolitionists. in the 1840s, after minimal political success, the Liberal Party becomes the Free Soil Party, in 1848 (directly in response to the expansionist war with Mexico). directly committed to keeping the West (and, America's future) free from the institution of slavery.

it is a fear of slavery, a fear of the way slavery as a system could control America's future that comes to the front and center in American politics after the Mexican War (1846-1848, following formal annexation of Texas in 1845--effective annexation had come 9 years earlier, in 1836).

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how did we get the Mexican War?

after the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1836, which was to be that great Western border that was seemingly limitless (for that matter, there was no Southern border decided upon). the US simply took Texas. Mexico never accepted the Rio Grande as the border. they assumed that, if there was a border, it would be the Nueses river, further North and East.

we've talked about how the Western expansion of the South was booming from 1820s-1840s--and there was a deep and abiding sentiment in American society, now known as Manifest Destiny, of inevitablity. a "racialism" that informed a deep commitment to these territories and their colonization.

this was seen, of course, in the policy re: Native Americans--Indian Removal Act (1830) under President Jackson in the 1830s physically removed Native Americans from their homelands. the five great tribes were, between early-mid 1830s were removed, outwest--to Oklahoma and further. that Indian removal was part and parcel of opening up this Southern frontier to the cotton boom. and the development of the greatest source of wealth in the Southern US.

in the presidential election of 1844, James K. Polk, an avid expansionist, Democrat, and a slaveholding cotton-planter from Tennesee, ran against Henry Clay (intellectual founder of the Whig party, which operated from 1833-1856 on a platform of supremacy of Congress, among other things), who also ran on an expansionist platform. But the Whigs tended to argue for expansion by negotiation(!). Polk said," negotiation=bullshit, elect me and I will give you Mexico and Oregon. "

it was a close election, Polk won by 36,000, out of 2.8 million. (Liberty Party won 16,000, mostly in NY). just before John Tyler left office, he pushed through the annexation of Texas in 1845 (not as a negotiated treaty, but as a State--i.e., without 2/3 approval of Congress). but James K. Polk became the sixth of the first ten American presidents who was a slaveholder. before the American Civil War, 2/3 of all American presidents were either slaveholders or deeply sympathetic. 2/3 of all members of the Supreme Court. James K. Polk was, as far as we know, the only president who bought and sold slaves from the Oval Office(!).

Polk ordered troops to move South to the Rio Grande in order to, in effect, see what the Mexicans would do. in early 1846, there was a brief attempt at negotiation (which was conducted in French, actually, because neither spoke the other's language). Mexico had never acknowledged the Rio Grande. there was a three-week stand-off along the river, and then on the 24th of April 1846 a Mexican cavalry contingent ambushed American troops on the other side. two weeks later, Zachary Taylor's dispatch reached to the White House, announcing that hostilities had commenced in Mexico. Polk received the news and immediately asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying "Mexico had invaded American soil(!)" Approved, even if with a number of abstentions from Northerners in Senate.

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the first major expansionist war of American history. a flurry of speculation about what soldiers, settlers might find in Mexico. Herman Melville said, "the people here are all in a state of delirium... nothing is talked about but the halls of Montezuma." Illionis paper arguing "reptiles on the path of progressive democracy."

many abolitionists had very serious things to say about the war. James Russel Lowell: "a national crime committed in behoof of slavery, our national sin." Ralph Waldo Emerson (in his private journals, however): "the US will conquer Mexico, but it will be as though a man swallows arsenic... Mexico will poison us..."

by the end of 1846, the US had established dominion over the southern half of California. in 1847, US forces conquered Mexico City. and, by the end, a treaty was negotiated, on dictated terms. Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo, in the US lost 13,000 Americans in a year and a half of fighting, the vast majority of disease. an estimated 50,000 Mexicans died.1848, gave the US all of the western part of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, parts of Colorado). Payment was $15 million.

that same year, 1848, was a tremendous turning point (as important in American history as in Europe, some argue). as these nationalistic revolutions against monarchy were breaking out all over Europe (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France--some will succeed, some will fail), republican America was seizing territory, and launching an Empire on its own continent.

sitting in House of Representatives, young Congressman from IL, Abraham Lincoln, voted against the Mexican War every chance he got, calling Polk's justification "a half-insane mumbling of a fever dream."

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why all the fuss? what did the war unleash?

Daniel Webster, the great Whig of MA, probably the most powerful and important Northern politician, kept trying to argue that this wasn't really all that important. (the Southwest was all desert--we won't expand slavery there, "an imaginary Negro in an [inhospitable] place"

but why did so many people care?

first, Northerners (prof is admitting that he is generalizing): (1) they cared about this because there was a belief that slavery could indeed take place in the Southwest (in mining, e.g.)--and, lo and behold, what was discovered in California, but gold! and why couldn't you build canals/railroads/etc. with slaves? (2) lots of Northerners in politics favored non-extension on constitutional grounds. (3) didn't want to be complicit in the expansion of slavery--"don't ask me to vote, to create a new territory, which will become a Slave state." Northerners wanted to confine slavery to the South--make slavery sectional, but free labor national. (4) there was also racism, involved in this. they saw the West as a place that would be free for small, white farmers--free from competition from a powerful Southern oligarchy. (5) and finally, of course, there were some abolitionists around, who believed in the immorality of slavery's expansion. (and sometimes there would be a mix of all this: racism, moral opposition, etc..--Abraham Lincoln, e.g.)

the South: (1) cared, in part, because an assumption had set in that it was not just because it was considered the South's destiny, but also a necessity for its economic system ("to check the expansion of slavery would be to strangle the Southern economy and way of life"). (2) the growing slave population in existing Southern states was a possible powder-keg--they feared the "shrinking" South as an economic entity, as a political culture--an economy turning in on itself, possibly. (3) political party in the Congress. new states meant two new senators. in 1850, the ratio of slave states to free states was 1:1 (15 to 15). they wanted to sustain that parity. California will be the test case. (4) and then there's a question of State's rights--did anyone have the right to prohibit anyone else from taking their property anywhere? "you Northerners have no right to stop me from taking my wagon, my horse, and my slave, anywhere I wish."(5) there's a sense of honor, here--the legal standing of slavery in the Western territories stood as a measure of its moral standing everywhere. if you tell me that slavery is not a part of America's future, then you're telling me that it's wrong in my home. and that's unacceptable.

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the fuss, then, is this is because this is really a debate about American's future.

there were four plans put in place:

(1) Wilmont Proviso: penned by a young Democratic HofR, who got up in the midst of the Mexican War, who got up during the debates and said, "in any new territory we gain from Mexico, there won't be slavery." it became the rallying cry of the Free Soil movement. all but one Northern legislature endorsed it; all the Southern legistlatures condemned it. it passed the House of Representatives, but did not pass the Senate (where the slave states still had parity). there was a good deal of racist support for the Proviso (and here we see the mixture of Northern anti-slavery sentiments)--"I have no sympathy for the slaves... I speak on behalf of the free white men..." Keep the West free of black people, essentially.

(2) State sovereignty (South's position): ultimately, no federal legislature, President, etc., had the authority to stop slavery's expansion.

(3) Popular sovereignty: the simple idea that there would be no act of Congress--take Congress out of the story, and simply let the people in the Western territory have a vote. let there be a referendum, popular democracy. "a charm of ambiguity"about this proposal. the problem, of course, was when do you hold the vote? do you establish a rule about the #'s of ppl there. Southerners wanted the vote later in the process, because it would take them a while to take slaves/their system out there.

(4) they went back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery North of the parallel. half of California, of course, was North of that line. in the 1850s, people suggesting that we continue to draw careful geographic lines across the West.

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the election of 1848 was crucial: Democrats ran on a popular sovereignty platform, candidate was Lewis Cass. Zachary Taylor was the Whig candidate, recent war hero, "ol' rough an' ready." problem was, of course, that he was a Louisiana slaveholder, not very committed to Whig principles.

there were two new political offshoots, at this time, over this furore: (1) the conscience Whigs--a group of abolitionists created in MA who broke with the Whig party (and would never go back, harbinger of its future demise) (2) Free Soil Party, created in 1848, and ran Martin Van Buren, a former president. and they stood for one thing--stopping slavery's expansion. they took 10%!

Zachary Taylor was elected.

and, lo and behold, gold was discovered in California--and so suddenly there was a desperate need to find a middle-ground. on a night in January 1850, Henry Clay gets together with Daniel Webster and they cut a deal, that became the Compromise of 1850 (they're drunk, prof is noting).

that month, Clay would announce the five provisions of the Compromise before the Senate (holding a piece of George Washington's coffin, to boot!). people were very worried that the Union was going to unravel, and fall apart.

and indeed, it almost did.

The origins of republican America were addressed above - to create a nominally democratic government Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor." The nation's founders achieved mightily, handing down their legacy to succeeding generations of leaders always mindful of who gave them power and who they had to serve. At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote; blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and homemaking appendages of their husbands. Religious prerequisites existed until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it. The 1865 13th Amendment freed black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier. Today those rights are gravely weakened for all through unfair laws still in force and a nation growing more repressive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary working people and the nation's least advantaged. The limited high-water mark of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has steadily eroded since in loss of civil liberties and essential social benefits.

Many of the most renowned national parks — Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon — were formed after the federal government forced tribes from the land. “The national park is a sort of wonderful ideal, but it’s an ideal that was created,” said Karl Jacoby, a professor at Brown University who studies Western history. “There weren’t empty wilderness areas in the United States. They had to be created by the removal of Indians.”

refusing to be silent:
Locking up Aboriginal people who are not prepared to ignore the atrocities of the state or suffer silently is certainly not without precedent in this country. In 1924 the Canadian Government employed the military to kill one Mohawk traditional Chief in an effort to break the Iroquois Confederacy and bring the Mohawks under the control of the current Indian Act Band Council system. Many others Chiefs were imprisoned for a total of seven seasons without valid charges. My husband is just completing the end of his first season behind bars and says: “I should sit with pride and honour sit for six more to equal the sacrifice my ancestors made for us, so that we might have a chance to exist.”

aboriginies in australia:
On the 40th anniversary of a vote that recognised them as Australian citizens for the first time, Aboroginal groups have signed two deals that will generate millions of dollars.
(...) In Queensland the Chinese aluminium group Chalco signed an agreement on Friday with a local group and the local council to develop bauxite reserves in the region. Elsewhere in the Northern territory another group agreed to have a nuclear waste dump placed on their outback land in return for millions of dollars in benefits.
(...) An early blueprint calls for 3,800 construction jobs over three years, including 700 for the mine and washing plant at Aurukun and 3,100 for the refinery. It would also require a permanent workforce of about 600.
(...) News.com.au reported Neville Pootchemunka, Aurukun’s mayor, as saying the agreement ushered in a new beginning for the community of about 1100 people in Cape York. Australia is experiencing a mining boom. "It's opening the corridors for employment and training enterprise and business. This is an historic milestone for my people." [when 600 permanent jobs is historic, we know that this world is not worth its weight in salt]
(...) [on the nuclear deal] Christine Milne, a member of the senate representing the Green party, sait the deal exploited Aborigines and showed Prime Minister John Howard's eagerness to embrace nuclear power.

the pope and genocide:
Benedict, of course, is the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Throughout the 1980s, he was Pope John Paul II's enforcer in the campaign to expunge the dangerously progressive ideals of Catholic "liberation theology" from Latin American soil. What could not be accomplished by state terrorists, who killed thousands of members of Christian "base communities" in the 1970s and '80s, Ratzinger and John Paul sought to engineer by installing conservative bishops who would stem the progressive tide. Fortunately, they seem to have failed. An account by Larry Rohter in the New York Times (May 7) notes that the movement which Ratzinger "once called 'a fundamental threat to the faith of the church' ... persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin America," with some 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone. It is fuelled, as it always has been, by the "social and economic ills" that pervade the region, and that have only "worsened" under the neoliberal prescriptions of the past two decades.
(...) Ratzinger/Benedict's bile was directed not at liberation theology, but squarely at the historical memory of the serial genocides -- probably the most destructive in human history -- inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. On the last day of his visit, in the city of Aparecida, the Pope "touch[ed] on a sensitive historical episode," in the blandly understated language of an Associated Press dispatch (May 13). In other words, he ripped the bandages off a still-suppurating wound. According to the official text of Benedict's comments on the Vatican website, the Pope declared that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean" were "silently longing" to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it ..." Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an "adoption" of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures "fruitful" and "purifying" them. Accordingly, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."
(...) The invasion and conquest of the Americas, which caused the deaths of upwards of 90 percent of the indigenous population, was something the Indians had been pining for all along. They weren't just "asking for it," as sexist cranks depict women as complicit in their own rapes. They were actually "longing" for it, since salvation and "purification" came with it.
(...) He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." His framing became the foundation of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and of the academic field of comparative genocide studies. Lemkin himself was keenly aware of the devastation of the indigenous people of the Americas, and considered it basic to his understanding of genocide, though most of his writings on the theme remain unpublished. (See the text of John Docker's excellent February 2004 talk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Raphael Lemkin's History of Genocide and Colonialism".)
(...) A May 13 Reuters dispatch noted blithely that, contrary to Benedict's claims, "many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide." This is rather like writing that "many Jewish groups believe that the Nazi Holocaust brought Jews enslavement and genocide."

democracynow summary (may 8, 2007):
Iraq's infant mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990 according to a new report by the charity Save the Children. One in eight Iraqi children now die of disease or violence before the age of five. In 2005 alone, 122,000 Iraqi children died before reaching their fifth birthday. Save the Children said Iraq's child-survival ranking is now the lowest in the world.
(...) The New York Times is reporting, the U.S. oil company Chevron is preparing to pay up to $30 million in fines for illegally paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein for access to Iraq's oil before the U.S. invasion in 2003. The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal. It appears Chevron began paying Iraq kickbacks in August 2000. At the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a member of Chevron's board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
(...) In Los Angeles, two high-ranking police department commanders have been reassigned over their role in the police department's violent crushing of a lawful immigrants rights rally last week. Police dressed in riot gear fired 240 rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas. Officers were seen on video clubbing protesters and journalists with batons. Overall 10 people – including seven journalists -- were taken to hospitals with injuries. On Sunday LA Police Chief William Bratton took 60 members of the police department's elite Metropolitan Division's B Platoon off the street.
(...) Investigative reporter Tim Shorrock of Salon.com has revealed that former CIA Director George Tenet has made at least $2.3 million since he left the agency by working for four corporations that are directly profiting from the so-called war on terror and the war in Iraq. Tenet did not disclose any of his corporate ties in his new book "At the Center of the Storm." Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tenet is also a member of an advisory board for Analysis Corporation which is designing terrorist watch lists for the government. Tenet also serves on the boards of two other government contractors, Guidance Software and Kinetic.
(...) A new report from Amnesty International has revealed that Native American women are more than two and a half times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the United States in general. Studies show that one in three Native American women will be raped during their lifetime. Amnesty said many rape cases are never prosecuted because there is confusion regarding tribal and county jurisdiction. It is estimated that 86 percent of rapes against Native women are committed by non-Native men, but tribal councils have no jurisdiction over non-Native offenders even if the crime takes place on tribal lands.

first nations activism:
Mr. Brant is more than a voice. He has become a symbol for the new militancy that is spreading through first nations communities across the country. Sitting beside the campfire at the occupied quarry a few days ago, Mr. Brant told me that since he was a kid, people in his community have been telling him to keep quiet. “It used to be, ‘Shawn, shut up, don’t say those things about the government, they’ll cut off our funding.’ Now it’s ‘Shawn, shut up, they’ll walk away from the negotiating table.’ ”
(...) The reason Mr. Brant isn’t willing to let the negotiations take their course is that these talks are designed to take decades. And as the time passes, the land disappears. Forests are clear-cut, mountains are carved up, suburbs creep outward. Ineffective negotiations do not hold the line on an already unacceptable status quo - they contribute to the losing of very real ground.
(...) The quarry is on land never ceded by the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, a fact the federal government has acknowledged. The only question is what form compensation for the theft will take. The Tyendinaga band council and Ottawa have been negotiating over that question since last November. The problem arose because, as the two parties talked, trucks were carrying 10,000 loads of newly crushed gravel out of the pit every year - an estimated 100,000 tonnes. While they bargained for the land, the land itself was disappearing.
(...) Not surprisingly, the mine has become a powerful metaphor, a vivid illustration of the failures of the negotiation process, and the problems with being patient. While the experts talk, good land is trucked out and toxic junk is trucked in - and without direct action, there would have been nothing left to talk about.
(...) The budget blow prompted Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine to call for a national day of action on June 29. Though Mr. Fontaine insists he is not calling for cross-country blockades, many first nations are already planning them, with talk of a co-ordinated targeting of key infrastructure, from rails to roads. “It’s the same notion as a general strike,” Mr. Brant explains with a smile.
(...) There will be rivers of ink spilled explaining that, while native grievances are legitimate, there is no excuse for such disruptive tactics. Protesters will be told they are discrediting their cause, and they will be described as “violent” whether or not violence takes place. Mr. Fontaine has taken this finger-wagging to heart. “Let’s face it, if you irritate Canadians, they’re not going to listen to your message,” his spokesperson said recently.
(...) Mr. Brant has a different message for non-native Canada - don’t just listen to us, join us. He points out that Canadians, even those who tell themselves they support native rights, “still treat them as a government problem.” But that’s not how social issues ever gain the kind of critical mass that leads to real change. “The environment is an issue right now because people told the government it was an issue,” Mr. Brant says. “If they said our concerns were an issue, they would be addressed too.”

virginia in historical context:
"The worst in U.S. history." Really? It is certainly the worst shooting on a college campus in modern U.S. history. But if we think it is the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history, then we are a singularly uneducated nation.
(...) "I can't take one more of these headlines," said Joan Redfern, a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe who lives in Hollister. We met at First Street Coffee to talk while we scanned Internet stories. "Haven't any of these people ever heard of the Massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado, where Methodist minister Col. Chivington massacred between 200 and 400 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, most of them women, children, and elderly men?" Chivington specifically ordered the killing of children, and when he was asked why, he said, "Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice."
(...) At Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the U.S. 7th Cavalry attacked 350 unarmed Lakota Sioux on December 29, 1890. While engaged in a spiritual practice known as the "Ghost Dance," approximately 90 warriors and 200 women and children were killed. Although the attack was officially reported as an "unjustifiable massacre" by Field Commander General Nelson A. Miles, 23 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for the slaughter. The unarmed Lakota men fought back with bare hands. The elderly men and women stood and sang their death songs while falling under the hail of bullets. Soldiers stripped the bodies of the dead Lakota, keeping their ceremonial religious clothing as souvenirs.
(...) To say the Virginia shooting is the worst in all of U.S. history is to pour salt on old wounds-it means erasing and forgetting all of our ancestors who were killed in the past," Redfern said. "The use of hyperbole and lack of historical perspective seems all too ubiquitous in much of the current mainstream media," Redfern said. "My intention is not to downplay the horror of what has happened this week in any way. But we have a 500-year history of mass shootings on American soil, and let's not forget it."
(...) Most of all, may we never forget all those innocent civilian men, women, and children who lost their lives simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, just as the students happened to be this week in Virginia. May we always remember the precious humanity of these students, but may we also never forget the humanity of those who lost their lives simply for being born people Native to this country.

urban planning in vancouver:
The relatively small downtown of Vancouver has a highly fragmented geography, one in which a person can pass with an extraordinary abruptness from the spectacles of privileged lifestyles into pockets of severe poverty. Urban planning policy has allowed gentrification to accelerate in recent years, displacing low-income housing residents and disrupting well-established communities. For these residents, the words "urban revitalization" carry dangerous connotations, as they refer to a process by which new by-laws and re-zoning decisions effectively drive them out. One such community is the Aboriginal people living in the impoverished Downtown Eastside, who continue to be exposed to institutional racism as their needs are overlooked and rights are diminished in a variety of unspoken yet pervasive ways.
(...) Activist groups, representing Aboriginal people as well as other marginalized communities, have continued to advocate against the Olympics since Vancouver was selected as host in 2003. They criticize the Canadian government for channeling massive amounts of money into this event while failing to alleviate homelessness and other social problems, as expressed in the slogan "homes not games." Also, the Olympic project has shamelessly appropriated Aboriginal cultural and land-based property. For example, the official logo of the 2010 Winter Olympics is a stylized inukshuk, a traditional stone sculpture of the Inuit people, and construction of Olympics infrastructure is currently taking place on Aboriginal land.

racism in bolivia:
The Indians have had two approaches towards the Bolivian state and white or mestizo society. On the one hand, they have pursued integration. They have linked up with populist parties, principally the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (known in Spanish under the acronym MNR). But if you go back even to the colonial period, you can find many instances in which the Indians pursued negotiation and integration with white and mestizo society. Aymaras on the other hand have cultivated their own sense of identity and self determination.
(...) At certain times, we might speak of a white minority in Bolivia, although no one is really white here. As in the U.S. with the black codes, the municipal government of La Paz had certain established forms of discrimination in the beginning of the twentieth century. On buses and trams, you had to sit in the back. There was explicit and implicit discrimination. The possibility that Indians would ever attain important government positions was practically nil.
(...) No. I think actually what has happened is that the Indians´ discourse, which has tended on the radical side, i.e. that all whites have oppressed us, etc., has produced a reaction amongst the middle class which reside in the south of La Paz. As a result, the middle class has become more racist. There's a lot of fear, now that there's an indigenous president. The middle class has been excluded from the positions it occupied before, and has lost a bit of its social position.
(...) I think Morales didn't use to cultivate an ethnic discourse, he was someone who defended coca, who had a more worker oriented, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But then he incorporated Quispe's radicalism, i.e., "I am an Indian, that is why they mistreat me," etc.
(...) In Bolivia, armed movements have never achieved any kind of importance. The 1952 Revolution was much less bloody than the Cuban and Mexican Revolutions and it was also shorter. It was three days of struggle in the streets and boom!, the oligarchy fell. There's no culture of long term violence here in Bolivia. On the other hand we do have a tradition of participatory democracy which comes out of the ayllu [a pre-Inca form of political organization based on extended family groups] and labor movement, which de-emphasizes delegation of power towards leaders.