Latin American Indigenism and Economics
I once received a courteous e-mail from one of my American editors. I cannot resist quoting an excerpt:
“As an ordinary American, I don’t know very well what it ['indigenism'] means or connotes. It’s apparently a term that has come to have a lot of connotations in Latin America. To a native English-speaking reader like myself trying to make sense of it, the word ‘indigenous’ suggests native peoples—that is, the people who inhabited Latin America before the Spanish explorers ever arrived there. A word like ‘indigenism’ might suggest that they—the people who lived there before the Spanish ever arrived—should have greater influence in modern politics. But obviously the fact that there is a new word also suggests that maybe the word means something more complex and modern—for example, that there is a modern culture, perhaps intertwined, involving both the originally-indigenous peoples and whatever influences have occurred since.·
