Thomas Ward’s Decolonizing Indigeneity makes a valuable contribution to Latin American Studies by advocating for the need to center indigenous and mestizo perspectives.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

Written in the best tradition of the essay, Decolonizing Indigeneity is an informed, engaging analysis of a necessary subject that encompasses five centuries of the complex and diverse cultural histories in Latin America.

Juan J. Daneri, East Carolina University

In Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature, Thomas Ward, working with deep erudition and sharp analysis, questions the paradigm we have inherited for the teaching of Latin American literature. He argues that both the canon and methods in use privilege a Eurocentric approach that not only leaves out the indigenous past and present civilizations of Mexico, Peru and Guatemala but foments the massive erasing and forgetting starting with and by the Conquest. In trenchant chapters that push to the fore Indigenous thought past and present, Ward restores indispensable representations of Indigenous cultures and inverts the standing paradigm. He outlines a new intellectual organization that pulls the rug from under the hegemonic organization of knowledge of Spanish departments as well as departments of Modern Languages. Required reading for all scholars interested in deep historical cultural formations and curricular reorganization, globalization and the future of knowledge relative to the world’s demographies.

Sara Castro-Klaren, Johns Hopkins University

In Decolonizing Indigeneity, Thomas Ward both engages with and puts into practice a compelling

decolonial methodology regarding colonial and contemporary writings by and about Amerindians.

Understood in terms of the colonists’ historiography, religion, and science, portrayals

of indigeneity are in great need of correction. Ward’s book decolonizes such depictions of

indigeneity by viewing Mayan and Andean peoples in their own terms, identifying colonizing

mechanisms, and countering present-day readers’ colonized classification of knowledge that

conditions their critical analysis of texts.

Chapter 1 outlines three varieties of the colonial force (outright colonialism, intracolonialism,

and neo-colonialism), which provides the theoretical backbone of the book. These

varieties can also be understood as the successive stages of colonization in Latin America: the

Spanish invasion, domination and exploitation; the internalization of colonizing mechanisms by

original colonists’ descendants; and the current economic dependency on the United States and

other world powers. Ward contends that the enduring effects of colonialism can be approached

through an analysis of the coloniality of the mind. Intra-colonialists, neo-colonialists, and the

colonized reveal their coloniality of mind by (un)consciously repeating outright colonialists’

cultural paradigms. These cultural paradigms can be observed in the ways Amerindians were

and are still denied nationness and coevalness. Spanish chroniclers not only referred to diverse

Amerindian ethnic communities with the nationnes-negating term “Indian” but also assigned

them a time different than their own.

In chapter 2, Ward’s decolonial analysis of the Popol Wuj both foregrounds its Mayan epistemology

related to space and time and recounts its sociopolitical and literary meanings in many

post-Independence settings. Popol Wuj views society as temporally unified and uses a numerical

base and a geometric conceptualization of space. Its worldview has a binary formulation.

For instance, dualities organize people into moieties, and the pairs of moieties turn into quadriccentric

forms of social organization. Also, in the late twentieth century Popol Wuj served as the

foundation of a sociopolitical movement by Guatemalan Mayans who embraced it in their claim

for a political space and rights to live according to their native culture in Guatemala.

Chapter 3 focuses on the mind-set of Agustín de Zárate, author of Historia del descubrimiento

y conquista del Perú (1555). Ward contends that Zárate’s psychological coloniality—

grounded in a specific philosophy of his time—blocked out indigenous information and shaped

a conceptual vindication of the Spanish empire. Zárate manipulated information mainly by

analogy. For instance, the chronicler interpreted and explained the origin and culture of the

Inkas by comparing the Tawantinsuyo with the Atlantis from Plato’s Critias. Zárate could not

view the Andeans as his contemporaries; he pushed them back in time and considered them

primitive people. Ward states that not only Zárate but other letrados dismissed the notion of

Andean non-alphabetic historiography, such as the khipu. However, the critic’s affirmation is

not completely accurate because by the mid-1550s Andean leaders were allowed to use khipus

as evidence in their claims before Spanish judges. As Kathryn Burns and Carmen Loza have

pointed out, Andean leaders, aided by lettered Andeans, became adept at the use of legal petitions

to defend their communities’ resources.

In chapter 4, Ward both foregrounds the civilization status of the Acolhua-Chichimeca

nation as portrayed by Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and regards the defense of his people as

colonial Indigenism. Ward’s method uses Bartolomé de las Casas’s inversion of the Sepulvedan

paradigm of justifications to wage war against barbarians. Las Casas’s six traits indicative of civil

life are prudence, virtuousness, learnedness, nobleness, respect for the law, and spirituality. These

traits constitute a model for evaluating society in Historia de la nación chichimeca (ca. 1625).

Alva’s decoloniality resides indeed in the depiction of pre- and post-contact Nahua peoples as

societies who highly valued the same attributes of civilization that the Spaniards did. One civil

trait analyzed in an enlightening way is spirituality, which Ward breaks down into cosmogony,

sedentary religiosity, and monotheism. Like the Popol Wuj, Historia coincides with standard

Mesoamerican abstractions in which the number four configures space and time. However,

unlike the Popol Wuj, Historia ignores a multitude of the elements typical of Mesoamerican

cosmogonic formation and creates a confusing mix of entities and periods (123). Alva’s Indigenist

and pro-Catholic depiction of his Chichimeca civilization reveals his mestizo identity.

Chapter 5 compares Manuel González Prada’s Indigenist essay “Nuestros indios” (1904) with

Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s Indigenous expressional testimony “Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así

me nació la conciencia” (1985). Both texts share a main concern regarding the subordinating

mechanisms of the hacienda in their respective Andean and Mayan communities. Ward delineates

the four thematic issues related to the coloniality of the hacienda criticized in both texts:

(i.) the ethnic subordination of people by means of the role of the caporal, (ii.) the damaging

effects of alcohol, (iii.) the status of the Spanish language in the education system, and (iv.) the

continuation of acts of violence against the descendants of Amerindian peoples and their reaction

to such acts. In addition to a careful evaluation of each Indigenist writer’s insightful depictions of

and prescribed antidotes to the hacienda system, there is a suggestive critique of González Prada’s

stance on indigenous education. Ward decolonizes the Peruvian essayist’s idealized conception

of modernity as an end to be reached by a Western-style—although non-Catholic—system of

education. Ward finds his posture a “culturally insensitive pedagogical position” (160). Unlike

González Prada, Menchú Tum was not interested in modernity. She believed in a type of education

that would not only be conducted in Amerindian languages but also have as its main goal

the preservation of traditions.

Decolonizing Indigeneity derives from, and further develops, the decolonial methodologies

carried out especially by Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo. Its adaptation of Quijano’s

theory of “coloniality of power” and its application of Mignolo’s concept of “coevalness” in the

analysis of foundational texts provide an enlightening contribution to decolonial and postcolonial

studies. Indeed, it allows us to resist the colonial force that has distorted our understanding and

appreciation of Amerindian civilizations in all their complexity since the colonial period. This

book is a required reading for students and scholars of Latin American literature.



Hispania, Volume 101, Number 3, September 2018, pp. 466-468 (Review)

Alexander M. Cárdenas, University of Colorado, Boulder