Remnants of the Colonial Past: Ethnic Mobilization and Nation-Building

• In Event: Ethno-National Conflict

Abstract

What is the impact of ethnic mobilization on nation-building in Latin America? While there has been a lot of attention devoted to recent ethnic movements and their impact of Latin America’s “multi-cultural turn”, we know very little about the consequences of ethnic mobilization at earlier stages of Latin American history. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that ethnic groups did not mobilize prior to recent decades, and argue that mobilization in this earlier period led or helped perpetuate the discrimination of these groups, given prevailing fears of a “race war”. We test these arguments using the novel Latin American Revolts Database (LARD), which measures instances of use/threat of violence from 1830 to 1930, focusing on revolts that are “ethnic” in nature. Additionally, we code an original list of rebellions by indigenous and Afro-descendant groups in the colonial period. Lastly, we back-date modern measures of access to power from the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset (Vogt et al. 2015) to cover the whole post-independence period. Using a sample of selected cases, the findings indicate that groups that mobilized during the colonial period and after independence have a higher likelihood of being discriminated, even after controlling for previous status. We also find evidence in favor of the “fear of race war” mechanism, as temporal distance to watershed events, like the Tupac Amaru II rebellion or the Haitian revolution, decreases the likelihood of discrimination for mobilized groups. These findings are relevant to understand the persistence of colonial racial categories long after independence, despite ethnic groups' attempts of reversal.

Authors

• Paola Galano Toro, ETH Zurich

• Raul L. Madrid, University of Texas at Austin

• Luis L Schenoni, University College London