Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education, and Multicultural Development in Peru - Paperback

by Maria Elena García (Author)

Taking on existing interpretations of "Peruvian exceptionalism," this book presents a multi-sited ethnographic exploration of the local and transnational articulations of indigenous movements, multicultural development policies, and indigenous citizenship in Peru.

Front Jacket

Set against conventional views of Peru as a place where indigenous mobilization has been absent, this book examines the complex, contentious politics between intercultural activists, local Andean indigenous community members, state officials, non-governmental organizations, and transnationally-educated indigenous intellectuals. It examines the paradoxes and possibilities of Quechua community protests against intercultural bilingual education, official multicultural policies implemented by state and non-state actors, and the training of "authentic" indigenous leaders far from their home communities.
Focusing on important local sites of transnational connections, especially in the highland communities of Cuzco, and on an international academic institute for the study of intercultural bilingual education, this book shows how contemporary indigenous politics are inextricably and simultaneously local and global. In exploring some of the seeming contradictions of Peruvian indigenous politics, Making Indigenous Citizens suggests that indigenous movements and citizenship are articulated in extraordinary but under-explored ways in Latin America and beyond.

Back Jacket

Garcia has fashioned a book that's terrific in every way. Her subject is the politics of culture, tradition, and identity in the Andes, and it's the best thing I've read on the topic in as long as I can remember. Making Indigenous Citizens will become a key book in scholarship about the Andes and Latin America.--Orin Starn, Duke University
"...without question an essential new read."--Journal of Latin American Anthropology

Author Biography

María Elena García is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College.