On the Forms of Resistance in Latin America: Its 'Native' Moment

Abstract

In the last fifteen years Latin America has been the scene of very different kinds of resistance and struggle. Each case is at the same time universal and singular; a condensation both of the major fault-lines of the system of domination and of particular local practices of power and expropriation--and of self-determination and autonomous political organization. Every people involved in struggle has its own means of expression and spaces where its project develops and is articulated. In some cases people burst onto the streets, take over public squares or schools, or block roads. In others they rely on silence, absence, invisibility. Masked faces and uncovered faces, metal weapons and wooden weapons, or just paper weapons--the power of printed images; marches and hunger strikes; the seizure of lands, or staying away from work. The reasons for the protests are as varied as their forms, and as motley and complex as the individuals who come together and dissolve again according to the circumstances and motives of each struggle. In face of such diversity, all have to remain open to change; so different are they that people must be content to agree on essentials; so numerous are they that they are able to surprise each other. Among all of these new modes of struggle the most significant has been that of Latin America's Indians, its native Americans. In constant interaction with a culture and a way of running the world based on relations of domination, appropriation through dispossession, and the predatory subordination of the environment, they are engaged in one of their modest processes of 'everyday' resistance, not always clear or explicit, but this time leading towards the assumption of a leading continent-wide role: a role which also involves a new perspective on the meaning of life and a new conception of social relations.