Unsettling the Language of Settlement: Imaginaries of Race and Experiences of Settlement in Contemporary Bolivia

Abstract

This article seeks to bring into question some of the assumptions that lie behind what constitutes ‘settlement’ in settler colonial theory by focusing on the case of the recent history of indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia. The first part of the article discusses two of the defining features which have characterised settler colonialism as a specific type of colonialism in the literature: the transformation of the land and the settler-native binary. I show that whilst most of the Latin American and Caribbean region has rightly been disqualified as settler colonial on both accounts, a closer look at the assumptions behind what constitutes settlement for settler colonial theory and the uneasy place of the Latin American and Caribbean region within this framework reveals a need to create a more nuanced, differentiated understanding of settlement which can help to analyse such cases. Focusing on the shift in racial discourses that took place with recent indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia from the 1960s onwards and the legacy of discourses of racial mixing, the article seeks to show how narratives of race served to underpin and legitimise processes of settlement in this Andean country.