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Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador

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Description

Since the 1930s, government claims and popular thought within El Salvador have held that the country no longer holds any Indian population. Seeing Indians explores why this claim has endured in spite of the existence of substantial indigenous communities throughout the country’s territory. Drawing on history, anthropology, and archaeology, Virginia Tilley delves into the history of Salvadoran racial thought and nation-building to light up the political motives for eradicating Indians from the country’s national consciousness.

Part I draws from the writer’s own ethnographic research in El Salvador and Guatemala to turn how “Indian-ness” has persisted, in contested forms, within El Salvador. Part II traces how the Salvadoran definition of being Indian has been altered to suit throughout the country’s desired image as a racially unified society–and to erase Indians from public records after 1932. The writer explains in Part III the motives driving the myth of Indian disappearance and ends with a take a look at the debate that raged within the 1990s regarding El Salvador’s indigenous peoples’ attempts to precise themselves politically.

As Tilley notes, the transnational indigenous rights movement, translated into potent funding leverage by non-indigenous doner agencies, has “in truth generated new difficulties for the Salvador indigenous communities and their movements for national recognition by erecting new standards for ‘being Indian’ that clash with older ideas and local experience.”

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