Introduction: socialism and Indigeneity in historical perspective

Special issue: Histories of socialism and Indigeneity

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s memoir Blood on the Border describes an important and fractious moment in the historic encounter between US socialism and Indigenous resistance. Amid counter-revolutionary resistance to the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Miskito, an Indigenous community on the neglected Atlantic seaboard, launched a rebellion that won the backing of the USA and led to an international controversy over the policy of Nicaraguan socialists and their allies. Dunbar-Ortiz became a focus for attacks by Indigenous activists in the USA, where she was regarded as a prominent apologist for a policy of forced removal (‘Red Christmas’). Dunbar-Ortiz, for her part, fiercely defended her view that the Sandinista response to the rebellion was being widely misrepresented by anti-socialist forces proximate to US power, including some Indigenous activists.¹ The controversy over the Miskito rebellion was complicated by the US state’s decision to play against type and take up the cause of an Indigenous population to undermine a socialist project in Central America. Despite its apparent uniqueness, though, the Miskito case exposed long-standing fractures between US socialists and Indigenous communities.

These tensions have been so common a theme in decolonial writing that the inadequacy of non-Indigenous socialist traditions has become all but an article of faith. The sources of the undoubted tension are multiple. Socialism in the Americas, for instance, has commonly been advocated as a statist and centralist politics, with the consequence that the priorities of socialist movements and governments have clashed with Indigenous populations’ concern to preserve sovereignty at a local level. Equally, the influence on the official Left of European rationalism, scientism and secularism, as well as associated commitments such as economic developmentalism and historicist intellectual practice, have marked socialist movements as alien or even hostile to Indigenous cultural worlds. Finally, and partly an effect of the other factors, non-Indigenous leftists have frequently failed to credit Indigenous people with political agency. The traditional Marxist emphasis on the decisive political role of the industrial working class has served especially to enshrine the marginality of rural peasant populations in socialist doctrine.²

The separation between Indigenous struggles and those of the socialist Left has not, however, been solely a consequence of socialist failure. It also reflects a complex range of social, political and intellectual challenges. As with any colonised population, Indigenous peoples around the Americas have taken diverse ideological and strategic positions, which are reflective of the fact that ‘Indigeneity’ rarely denotes a uniform position vis-à-vis settler society. In other words, much as settler societies have had their Lefts and Rights, so have Indigenous populations been ideologically polarised in distinctive ways, and their societies have included elites as well as subalterns. The balance of power within Indigenous communities is therefore one consideration in attempting to understand this complex and fractious history.

Indigenous peoples have also navigated historical developments in the wider world in ways that mean their politics might not register as leftist. In the Second World War-era USA, for instance, Indigenous Americans’ investment in wartime patriotism has been emphasised by Paul Rozier as evidence of a complex sense of nationhood (‘hybrid patriotism’) that hardened ‘American Indian nationalism’ even as it also motivated white Americans to end the reservation system with its semblance of Native sovereignty. Native people’s approach to the war did not neatly align with the communist emphasis on defeating the Nazi invasion of the USSR as the overriding priority.³ Subsequently, leading Native activists struggled to sustain their demand for sovereignty amid Cold War-era anti-communist hysteria, striving to achieve political legitimacy for their political aspirations through the disavowal of any apparent leftism.⁴ In other contexts, the bifurcated vision of Left-Indigenous relations has been a result of misapprehension. Marc Becker has described how scholars and surveillance agents have shared an assumption that ‘one could not be both an Indigenous person and a communist militant or leader’, despite ample evidence to the contrary in the archive on the Ecuadorian Left.⁵ In this regard, the effort undertaken in this special issue is restorative of a long-established convergence between the organised Left in the Americas and Indigenous perspectives and struggles.

The articles in this special issue attest to some of the challenges of the twentieth-century history of socialism and Indigeneity in the Americas, but the thrust of many contributions is towards a recognition of how enriching the encounters between Indigenous peoples and the wider political Left have been. Salient, perhaps, is the term ‘vernacular’, which is used in Vaclav Masek’s article to describe the process by which the circulation of socialist ideas across oceans and borders has required their reinterpretation and dynamic application to new contexts.⁶ In their own way each article in this special issue addresses the vernacular expression of socialist politics in the Americas. In Mašek’s comparison of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui, we see a vernacularisation of Marxism at the level of theory. Both of these communist intellectuals were, Masek argues, concerned with applying Marxism in ways that were attentive to contextual particularity. Both Gramsci and Mariátegui were preoccupied with the specificity of national economies, histories and cultures. In Mariátegui’s case, of course, the outcome of this logic was a new emphasis on Indigenous Peruvians as agents of revolutionary transformation. In this way, the celebrated Gramscian move to centre cultural blockages to – and routes towards – revolutionary consciousness was rearticulated by Mariátegui as part of an effort to interpret Marxism for the Peruvian setting.

Peter Morgan, meanwhile, focuses on Mariátegui’s thinking about and grappling with nationalism.⁷ Mariátegui is often viewed as a genuine intellectual of Indigeneity because of his thoughts on a Peruvian version of Marxism. By examining Mariátegui’s views on Trotskyism and Zionism, Morgan identifies a clear tension and even discrepancy between his cosmopolitan ambitions and pragmatic nationalism. Morgan argues that the Peruvian’s focus on Peru and Indigenismo was a consequence of his frustration with internationalism and a result of his ideological battles with Haya de la Torre’s anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), rather than an intellectual reorientation per se.

In an article which is similarly concerned with revisiting the intellectual history of Marxism in Latin America, Tania Gómez finds that Trotskyist organiser Hugo Blanco articulated a novel and practical theory via his work among Indigenous peasants in La Convención, Peru.⁸ Pushing against elitist conceptions of vanguardism, as well as city-centred typologies of revolution, Gómez finds in Blanco a transformative model for what socialist political work might look like in Indigenous communities.

Meanwhile, in his research article, Thomas K. Lindner examines the relationship between global anticolonialism, Indigeneity and socialism during the Mexican Revolution.⁹ Focusing on the institutionalisation of the Revolution (1917–29), Lindner examines three case studies of anticolonial movements in China, India and Morocco. By connecting socialism, and the Mexican Revolution more generally, to anticolonialism in Asia and by aligning intellectual history with the social history of Mexico, the article argues that the Mexican Revolution was less internally focused than is often portrayed in historiography. Quite the opposite, the author argues, is true: the engagement with global anticolonialism inspired revolutionary actors in Mexico and shows that revolutionary protagonists often saw themselves as part of a broader, global movement against colonialism and imperialism.

Contributions here also consider the encounter between socialism and Indigeneity via on-the-ground practices of alliance and cooperation. Owen Walsh and Kathryn Berry, for instance, focus on the neglected significance of Indigeneity to the communist movement in the interwar USA.¹⁰ The US Left’s implication in the paradoxical condition of ‘settler memory’ meant that they were simultaneously capable of engaging with settler-colonial realities and erasing Indigenous presence and agency. While this meant that an Indigenous Marxism did not crystallise in the Communist Party of the USA, Walsh and Berry demonstrate that Indigenous people were vocally involved in the party’s grassroots and its front organisations, which were themselves integral to the wider Popular Front movement of the 1930s. Throughout this dynamic and turbulent period in the history of US communism, the party sought to ‘Americanise’ in ways that encouraged Indigenous activism and platformed Native voices, even as it fell short of becoming a major vehicle for Indigenous struggle.

The remaining contributions centre on the Mexican Revolution, and especially the Yucatecan experience, which evidently remains a key reference point for pre-Zapatista experiments in developing an Indigenous socialism. Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero’s article takes the mentioned ‘Yucatecan experience’ to make a broader intervention concerning individual agency, feminism and Indigeneity in the Mexican South.¹¹ Her portrayal and reinterpretation of Elvia Carrillo Puerto sheds light on the pro-worker and feminist elements of the ‘Southern socialism’ that remain overshadowed in historiography by the emblematic role of Elvia’s brother Felipe Carrillo Puerto. The creation of nursery schools and the fierce fight for better working conditions in the henequen industry made her aware of the poor living conditions endured by working Mayan women and she consequently used her position as an influential organiser and activist to fight for a socialism that explicitly addressed and actively engaged Indigenous women.

In his article, Ben Fallaw examines and contrasts two main protagonists of the Revolution in Yucatán – the well-known and previously mentioned Felipe Carrillo Puerto and the lesser-known García Correa.¹² Both were ‘Maya adjacent’ politicians who worked to improve the social conditions of the Indigenous population through their own respective versions of socialism. The introduction of García Correa alone, and the explicit aim to avoid painting him as a caricature and antagonist of the beloved and well-researched Felipe Carrillo Puerto, makes this article a worthwhile contribution to this special issue. But by taking two politicians (who were often interpreted as Indigenous voices) of a broadly similar ideological conviction at a certain time and place, Fallaw also manages to show how even the small ideological differences (e.g. cooperativism versus land reform) within the revolutionary factions mattered a lot. Different upbringings, languages and experiences made a difference for those discussing Indigeneity and socialism in a revolutionary context. With this example in mind, one is reminded of the impact of individual agency even within larger contexts of social unrest and revolution.

Sarah Osten’s article focuses, once again, on the remarkably influential socialist Felipe Carrillo Puerto and his creation of a local political model of reform that would become nationally significant.¹³ Carrillo Puerto was named ‘Mexico’s person of the year 2024’ by outgoing Mexican president López Obrador, a fact that emphasises his lasting impact on Mexican politics. As governor of Yucatán from 1922 to 1924, Carrillo Puerto worked on creating a model to liberate Indigenous people as well as urban and rural workers. Additionally, he established and refined a model of political reform and revolution that could be transferred from Yucatán to other southern Mexican states as well as also to Mexico as a whole. These transfers of ideas at multiple levels of government, and how Carrillo Puerto developed them pragmatically without losing their radical ambition, show how socialist ideas and Indigeneity could be combined and poured into revolutionary realpolitik if the situation demanded. Osten’s article thus sheds new light on a highly influential, yet often pragmatic, socialist leader without either mythologising or deconstructing his legacy.

Finally, William Booth discusses the defeat of the Yucatecan socialist project as one moment in a broad re-envisioning of the delahuertista rebellion, which he argues was decisive in the history of the Mexican Left.¹⁴ Booth’s article emphasises that this was not a moment of neat Left–Right conflict, but was instead a complex political crisis, whose salient outcome was the strengthening of centralising and statist factions against diverse localist and regionalist movements that in parts sought to radicalise the revolution. The delahuertista rebellion was not so much a case of leftist triumph over a counter-revolutionary right as it was a drastic narrowing of political possibilities, which can therefore offer clues as to why the Mexican Revolution failed to produce a Mariáteguian politics, ‘which saw Indigenous peoples … as potential revolutionary subjects’.

The contributors to this special issue are far from the first scholars to think about the relationship between socialism and Indigeneity, but as historians of Mexico, Peru and the USA, they can collectively challenge the assumptions that continue to guide discussions about these important and connected histories. Both socialist as well as Indigenous movements were incredibly heterogeneous – as the scope of examples in this special issue illustrates. Narratives that fixate on the separateness of these two movements, and on their respective misunderstandings, are therefore not convincing in the first place. Of course, movements for socialism and Indigenous sovereignty frequently developed out of different contexts, targeted somewhat different aims and campaigned around some different issues. But, as the example of Elvia Carrillo Puerto shows, the aims of feminists, socialists and Indigenous activists frequently overlapped: improving the working conditions of henequen labourers meant improving the living conditions of Maya-speaking women. Similarly, as discussions of Mariátegui and Blanco illustrate, making Marxist theories and practices workable in the Latin American context required a full reckoning with Indigeneity on the terms of Indigenous people themselves. The articles in this special issue are thus meant as a step towards thinking about histories of socialism and Indigeneity together, and to putting them in dialogue with each other without ignoring their inherent tensions, nor downplaying existing or past power asymmetries. Studying the encounters between leftist and Indigenous movements in the past can thus be a way to better understand the struggles, potentials and complexities of contemporary emancipatory movements.

Notes

1. Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border, especially chs. 7 and 16. ⮭
2. The classic discussion of these tensions is in Ward (ed.), Marxism and Native Americans, though notable efforts at a theoretical reconciliation have been made in recent years. See Anderson, Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads; Bellamy Foster, Clark and Holleman, ‘Marx and the Indigenous’; Nodrada, ‘Karl Marx’. Practical examples of an Indigenous socialism also proliferate, such as in the work of the Red Nation Movement in the USA and the (presently fracturing) Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia. ⮭
3. Rozier, Serving their Country, 9, 73. ⮭
4. Daniel Cobb discusses the force of anti-communism in Indian circles even post-McCarthy. See Cobb, Native Activism, 37–8. ⮭
5. Becker, CIA in Ecuador, 140. ⮭
6. Masek, ‘Parallel Marxisms’. Further insightful discussion of the vernacular in Marxism is found in Shanin, ‘Marxism’. Readers may also be interested in the related arguments in Fedaee, Global Marxism. ⮭
7. Morgan, ‘Cosmopolitan Marxism’. ⮭
8. Gómez, ‘Adopting the Indian heart’. ⮭
9. Lindner, ‘“In the same boat”’. ⮭
10. Walsh and Berry, ‘“Real red reds”’. ⮭
11. Álvarez Cuartero, ‘Elvia Carrillo Puerto’. ⮭
12. Fallaw, ‘Imagining socialisms’. ⮭
13. Osten, ‘“For the government to become good”’. ⮭
14. Booth, ‘The revolutionary road not taken’. ⮭