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Local people demand better quality, but sometimes disagree over bilingual education

By Roger Hamilton

The meeting of the board of education was coming to order, and the room grew quiet. The men took their seats in the front rows, their red striped ponchos and brown fedoras marking them as residents of Jesús de Machaqa, a village southeast of La Paz, Bolivia. Each carried his bastón de autoridad, or stave of authority, for each was a leader from the surrounding rural area.

In the back of the room sat the women, their peaked black headdresses recalling images from a medieval tapestry. They all faced the head table, which stood beneath a portrait of Simón Bolívar and the official seal of the republic.

The first speaker stood up:

“Brothers and sisters,” he began in the traditional way. “We are losing our youths. They are leaving Machaqa to study in the city. We need training centers here, but they must be good quality, with international standards.”

Another took the floor: “We must be careful when we deal with nongovernmental organizations,” he said. “We need their technical help, but we must make the decisions.”

They spoke in Aymara, the language of more than 1.6 million people in the country’s highlands. Their words were translated into Spanish for a visitor by their honored guest, Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, former Bolivian vice president and president of the idb-supported Indigenous Peoples Fund.

A woman got up and reminded the audience that female members of the community are starting to form their own organizations to work on education. They need a place to meet, she said. Another speaker wanted to know why their municipal government didn’t provide more money for projects in their village.

As the meeting went on, the people passed around a black plastic flask molded in the shape of a pre-Columbian effigy. Each shook a few drops of the harsh liquor on the floor as an offering before taking a sip.

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A CASE STUDIES
Altiplano case study: The Marka of Jesus de Machaqa
Background in: The Evolution of Indigenous Land Tenure in Bolivia

by Gerald Riverstone

The marka of Jesús de Machaqa is located in the La Paz Department’s Ingavi Province, and is centered approximately 40 kilometers from the southeastern shore of Lake Titicaca. The marka is rather famous in Bolivia for its historical role as a site of Aymara Indian rebellion on the altiplano, and for its preservation of indigenous culture. I had the opportunity to visit Jesús de Machaqa in August and September of 2004. The following case study of land tenure in Jesús de Machaqa is based on observations and interviews conducted during my visit to the marka, and a synthesis of the available secondary literature on the topic.

The marka encompasses over 100,000 hectares of Bolivia’s northern altiplano, and is comprised of a broad plain bordered on its northern edge by a range of hills. The plain lies to the north of the Desaguadero River, which drains Lake Titicaca. An outstanding feature of the marka is that its external boundary has apparently changed little since precolonial times. Currently the marka is divided into approximately 18 ayllus, some of which have a nucleated village center. The main town within the marka is called Jesus de Machaqa, and numerous other villages with 20 or more houses are scattered throughout the marca. In general, however, because the Aymara of the Machaqa region are pastoralists, their population is highly dispersed. The entire altiplano in the region is dotted with individual houses or small clusters of houses.

The population of the marka of Jesus de Machaqa according to a 2000 census was 13,615. An ayllu is typically comprised of 150-200 families. The population is almost entirely Aymara, although there are likely a small number of Mestizos who have married into the ayllus or who remain from the remnants of the few haciendas that existed in the area. There is also a small population of Urus, a minority indigenous group that has traditionally lived along the Desaguadero River. In recent decades the marka’s population has apparently increased, but the increase has been lessened by emigration. As the population has increased and land has become more scarce, many young people and families have emigrated to La Paz and the adjacent Aymara city of El Alto, in addition to Bolivia’s lowlands and Andean valley regions. As a result of the need to look for economic alternatives elsewhere, very few people between 30 and 40 years of age live in the ayllus.

The Aymara communities of the Province of Ingavi are characterized by extreme poverty. According to a recent report, 92% of households lack basic sanitary conditions and 84% lack electricity and access to adequate healthcare.

Prehistory and History

The marka of Jdm lies not far to the south of what was the heart of the Tiwanaku civilization from 700-1300 AD. The marka known as Machaqa replaced an earlier marka of Wankani, that existed during the time of the Tiwanaku civilization. Apparently the marka of Machaqa took shape following the decline of Tiwanaku. According to Ticona the archaeological ruins of Wankani, located in the present Ayllu of Qhunqhu, are located at the former center of the ancient marka. Prior to their absorption into the Inca Empire, three wealthy and powerful Aymara kingdoms called Lupacas, Collas, and Pacajes dominated the southern lakeshore of Lake Titicaca. The Aymara kingdoms commanded the highlands to the south of the lake from approximately 1200 to 1470, when they were incorporated into the Inca Empire. Under the Incas the Aymara were forced to pay food tribute to the Inca State and religious hierarchy, but retained their language and relative political and cultural autonomy.

The marka and its component ayllus are the basic social and territorial structures that have apparently characterized Aymara life since pre-Columbian and even preincan times. The Incas transformed a prexisting territorial and social structure into the marca of Machaqa. An Aymara family called the Warachi or Guarachi formed an alliance with the Inca, and later in 1535 with the Spanish.

During the colonial period the marka of Jesus de Machaqa was comprised of 12 ayllus, which were divided into two partialities, The upper partiality was comprised of six ayllus, as was the lower partiality. During this time Jesús de Machaqa also had land in the Yungas region, and caravans of llamas (and later mules) would carry goods between the altiplano marka and its Yungas outposts.

In 1585 Aymara caciques Carlos and Sebastian Llanqui formally purchased the land that is today Jesús de Machaqa and the two adjacent markas (San Andrés and Santiago de Machaqa) from the Spanish Crown. In 1645 another Aymara leader, Gabriel Fernández Guarachi, made a similar purchase of the Jesus de Machaqa land from the Crown, legally consolidating communal ownership. Land purchases from the Crown helped to solidify communal autonomy. The validity of the marka’s colonial land titles was reaffirmed by the Bolivian government in 1916. In the intervening years, the legal status of various of the component ayllus which comprise the marka evolved. While different types of exogenous land tenure and political-administrative frameworks were imposed on the marka over the years, the marka and ayllus remained basically intact.

During the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, the remaining free ayllus of the altiplano were under enormous pressure from expanding haciendas. A 1921 rebellion in Jesús de Machaqa was a landmark event in indigenous resistance to the encroaching haciendas.
During the 1920s and 1930s Jesús de Machaqa played a prominent role in the ‘cacique movement’ which resisted the dissolution of the ayllus and the imposition of neofeudal land tenure system. Throughout the twentieth century the ayllus of Jesús de Machaqa struggled for power and territorial autonomy.

Following the Agrarian Reform of 1953, a new social institution, the agrarian syndicate came to Jesús de Machaqa. Under the Agrarian Reform Law the syndicate was the local level political institution responsible for implementing the new reform policies. From the outset, the institutions and policies of the Agrarian Reform were met with ambivalence in the ayllus of Jesús de Machaqa. While the syndicates came to play a large role in local political and economic life, in many cases the traditional authority structures survived in an uneasy coexistence with the syndicates. Prior to the reform there were only four or five haciendas within the Marka of Jesús de Machaqa. Following the Revolution and reform, the land of the former haciendas was divided up amongst hacienda workers, in this case the primarily Aymara families who worked the hacienda lands. Some of the newly distributed lands were titled as individual landholdings. The majority of ayllus, however, apparently received collective land titles called títulos proindivisos.

In addition to the syndicates, in the decades following the Agrarian Reform a number of experiments were tried with implementing agrarian cooperatives in Jesús de Machaqa. These cooperatives were largely founded on a mistaken conception of the traditional collective work patterns of the Aymara. While the Aymara did historically perform collective agricultural work when forced to by Inca nobles or hacienda owners, apparently their preferred form of of labor organization was the extended family unit. Speaking of agrarian cooperatives in the nearby Titicaca region, Benton claims that they were largely unsuccessful, in part due to idealization of Aymara social organization, and in part due to misallocation of funds and a lack of trust in the cooperative leaders.

Morein, The Evolution of Indigenous Land Tenure in Bolivia. www.surv.ufl.edu