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New Help or New Hegemony? The Transnational Indigenous Peoples' Movement and ‘Being Indian’ in El Salvador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2002

VIRGINIA Q. TILLEY
VIRGINIA Q. TILLEY
Affiliation:
Virginia Q. Tilley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York.
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Abstract

The transnational indigenous peoples' movement (TIPM) can convey important political leverage to local indigenous movements. Yet this study exposes a more problematic impact: the political authority gained by funding organisations who interpolate TIPM norms into new discourses regarding indigeneity, and deploy that discourse in local ethnic contests. In El Salvador the TIPM has encouraged the state to recognise the indigenous communities and has opened a political wedge for indigenous activism. Yet TIPM-inspired programmes by the European Union and UNESCO to support indigenous activism paradoxically weakened the Salvadorean movement by aggravating outside impressions that Salvadorean indigenous communities are ‘not truly Indian’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , August 2002 , pp. 525 - 554
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Research in El Salvador for material included in this article was conducted in 1995–96, and was supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. My particular thanks to Crawford Young, Bruce Magnusson and the especially insightful comments of an anonymous reviewer.