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Indigenista writings marked an important shift in discourse regarding the majority indigenous population in early twentieth-century Latin America.Indigenismowas an ideological current that developed throughout Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century that focused on the Indian population and questions of nation and of citizenship. In Bolivia, penned in the wake of the 1899 Civil War in which the Aymara indigenous group played a central role, indigenista authors such as Manuel Rigoberto Paredes and the members of the Aymara Academy responded to this Indian initiative participating in national politics. The indigenista authors crafted a legitimizing discourse for the rising Liberal Party, headquartered in La Paz, that came to power as a result of the 1899 Civil War. The Inca became the axis within a liberal indigenista discourse that strove to address questions of progress and race. However, in this context the lauded ‘Bolivian Inca’ had an important ancestor: the Aymara. This indigenista effort to connect the Aymara past to the Inca past within the national historical narrative represents an alternative liberal discourse on the ‘Indian problem.’ In the wake of the war, the promotion of a specific Indian past was not the sole domain of the indigenista authors. As indigenista intellectuals crafted a glorified Inca past for Bolivia, residents of Aymara communities began to appropriate and enact theatrical performances of the indigenistas’ idealized Inca past in town celebrations, as demonstrated by the case of Caracollo, Bolivia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the connection between Aymara indigenous communities, Liberal intellectuals, and the nation-building process in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bolivia. The Liberal intellectuals' designs of nation in early twentieth-century Bolivia were shaped in part by the actions and political initiatives of the very "Indians" the intellectuals sought to categorize, define, and contain. Somewhat paradoxically, the national intellectuals and the local Aymara elite unwittingly collaborated in the construction of a preferred Indian identity, the Inca, to create a noble and progressive past for the nation and to marginalize the undesirable, non-elite Aymara indigenous population in the wake of the 1899 Civil War between Liberals and Conservatives. The process of narrating the native past was of importance to national intellectuals as well as to native peoples. Several types of sources inform these late nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of nation building, including judicial court cases, archival documentation, and theatrical performance. The narrative of the indigenous past and the role of the actual Indian population within the Bolivian nation in the early twentieth century was a site of negotiation located at the center of national politics, establishing the foundation for a nation that would maintain differentiated constructions of Indian identity at its core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]