Emergent Conversation 27

This discussion is part of the series Indigenous Politics, State Relations, and Populism in the Americas
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 27

By Jorge Rodríguez Solórzano

This Emergent Conversation for PoLAR Online brings together a set of contributions by Native and non-Native academics—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars in Native American and Indigenous Studies—to discuss shifting relations among Indigenous nations and peoples and contemporary populist movements, parties, and leaders across Latin America. Together, the pieces collected here use populism as a lens through which to examine struggles by Indigenous collectives across the hemisphere, and to analyze the opportunities and constraints that working through and refusing populist politics generate for Indigenous actors. It underscores the relevance of ethnographic research for understanding populism’s evolving expressions through an emphasis on Indigenous experiences.

Social scientists tend to agree that populism is hard to define (Fierman 2025). Nadia Urbinati (2019), one of the foremost political theorists on the subject, has described the predominant tendencies in the study of populism as follows: “either it was simply conceptualized as a subspecies of fascism or it was studied as a form of government that was thought to be limited to the margins of the West, and particularly to Latin American countries” (2). The term has been used to encompass anything from Peronism in Argentina, which the historian Federico Finchelstein (2017) has called the first populist regime in the world, to the rise to power of Donald Trump in the United States (Ivy 2021). Populism did not enter anthropological discussions until relatively recently (Mazzarella 2019). Since then, anthropologists have produced a number of important works which, broadly speaking, may be categorized along the following subthemes: 1) the role of affect and sentiments in populist movements and parties (Ahmed 2004; Fierman 2018; Mazzarella 2010); 2) the politics of mediation, as well as the tensions between “direct” and institutional expressions of representative democracy (Poupeau 2024; Samet 2019); 3) charisma and the relationship between leaders and the politics of the crowd (Abreu 2021; Mazzarella 2010; Sánchez 2016). While this list is far from exhaustive, it is clear that Latin America has been one of the most prominent sites for theorizing populism ethnographically.

If, as Danilyn Rutherford (2026) has recently argued, discussions of populism are symptomatic of the moment, the contributors to this series document the multiple ways that Indigenous actors and collectives have responded to the opportunities and impasses that have emerged in response to a regional rise of populist movements. The following questions recur throughout the pieces in this series:

• What happens to the notion of “the people” and popular sovereignty when we acknowledge that Indigenous polities demonstrate the impossibility of a homogeneous nation-state, a singular people, or, indeed, a unitary “sovereign”?
• In what ways do seemingly progressive regimes incorporate or fail to include Indigenous perspectives in so-called “popular” state policies, legal reforms, and government practices?
• How does thinking alongside and through Indigenous perspectives and experiences change the ways we conceptualize both populism and popular social mobilization in the Americas?

Each piece—whether it is a podcast episode, an essay, or a conversation among Indigenous political leaders and social scientists—tackles these and other questions. The character of these interventions ranges from multidisciplinary theoretical engagement to improvisational, dialogical approaches.

Theories and Histories of Populism in Latin American

It would be impossible to begin a discussion on populism in Latin America without addressing the role of the late Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau in this field of thought. Laclau was influenced by his participation in the Kirchnerist movement in Argentina. In his book On Populist Reason (2005), Laclau built on a neo-Gramscian understanding of politics as a site of struggle and argued that populism was a way of redefining the political (xi). For Laclau, the category of “the people” was something akin to an empty signifier, an ideologically indeterminate rhetorical figure through which “the dichotomic frontier between ‘the people” and its antagonists” (Fierman 2018; 15) could be drawn and remade. It was this semiotically indeterminate and historically contingent character of “the people” that leftist movements could appropriate.

In a parallel move, Mouffe (1993) argued that liberal democracy had erased antagonism from public life and eroded class as the basis for political struggle. Writing about the future of the European left, Mouffe (2018) subsequently argued for the need to create a new kind of organizational form that could galvanize the millions who had been left out of meaningful political participation after decades of consensus-based liberalism. Both Mouffe’s and Laclau’s respective theorizations of leftist populism were influential beyond academic circles. Their conceptualizations of an antagonistic politics shaped the political agendas of new political parties, including Podemos in Spain (in the case of Mouffe) and Kirchnerism in Argentina (in the case of Laclau), and continue to have much influence.

Importantly, this series does not make an argument for an Indigenous populism. Anthropologists, even those sympathetic to progressive politics, have been skeptical about the capacity for a populist politics to advance progressive causes and agendas, both on theoretical and practical grounds. Some question the optimism around populism’s broad appeal, noting that, while populist leaders may champion the role of love and loyalty to party founders or the movements to which they gave rise (Fierman 2018), they also galvanize forms of political community that can be discriminatory of “internal enemies” (Lomnitz and Sánchez 2009).

Povinelli (2012) criticized Laclau’s emphasis on the rhetorical dimensions of “the people” as an empty signifier, pointing out that rhetoric is but one dimension of semiotic processes, which ignores how bodies are differentially situated and made to signify differently. Anthropologists have been more interested in attending to what we may call the embodied dimensions of populism, as well as the affective, malleable dimensions of collective political life (Mazzarella 2010). Despite the impossibility that representing “the people” poses to any party, leader, or group,  appeals to more authentic and direct modes of representation are a key feature of populist discourse (Chatterjee 2019). We observe this in Mexico, where I conduct my field research, and where former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador was praised for his perceived proximity to “the people” (el pueblo). López Obrador’s popular legitimacy largely rested on his personalistic political style, which included traveling to every municipality in the country, joining mass protests and labor actions, and allowing himself to be touched by his sympathizers. This mode of politics is reminiscent of what William Mazzarella (2019) calls a “politics of immediation,” namely, a form of politics that claims to incarnate “the people” and in which the mediating role of representation itself seems to disappear.

Indigenous Sovereignties and Contemporary Populisms

Here it is worth recalling one of the main questions orienting this series: What happens when Indigenous groups and nations challenge hegemonic, state-channeled forms of popular sovereignty? The regional focus of this series enables us to deepen our understanding of the distinctive histories and theoretical traditions of Latin American populism, Indigenous autonomy and sovereignty. The emergence of “the people” as a political subject belongs to the history of Republicanism and democratization in the early nineteenth century (Urbinati 2019). In this early history of national state formation in Latin America, political leaders led a wave of independence movements against Spanish colonial rule and sought to establish republics on the principle of popular sovereignty (Guerra 1992). To speak of the people of a nation at this time was necessarily to conjure up a fictional community that likely appeared as irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of those “citizens” of these emerging nations (Escalante 1992). The sheer social ethnic, racial, and linguistic heterogeneity of Latin American societies has been and remains one of the most enduring problems for the creation of a unified sense of “peoplehood.”

It was this model of national citizenship and peoplehood, one that was formally blind to social difference, that many Indigenous movements across Latin America put into question starting in the 1970s. Indigenous actors challenged the ideologies of racial assimilation that erased them from public life (de la Cadena 2000), sometimes claiming their place in the nation as citizens (Postero 2007) and, sometimes, as “ethnicities” requiring separate forms of recognition (Nahmad Sittón 2014). Some political processes, like the armed uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico (Speed 2008) or the establishment of autonomous zones by Miskito and Afro-Indigenous peoples in the coast of Nicaragua (Hale 1994), posed a fundamental challenge to national sovereignty.

In the 1990s, largely in response to Indigenous mobilization, multiculturalism—the recognition cultural plurality within the nation-state and the parallel recognition of the cultural rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples–gained grounds as a legal framework in the region (Speed 2008). Here, it is worth indexing a conversation among scholars in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Hale 2005; Speed 2005) and other forums (Hale 2002) on the role of neoliberal restructuring in Latin America. According to this influential debate, Latin American nations incorporated the recognition of cultural rights in ways that undermined the radical political demands that Indigenous actors made around self-determination and territorial rights.

The disenchantment with neoliberalism and the multicultural inclusion frameworks that accompanied neoliberal reforms in Latin America set the stage for the rise of charismatic leaders who critiqued market liberalization and privatization, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (Sánchez 2016) and Evo Morales in Bolivia (Poupeau 2024). In Bolivia, Indigenous movements and collectives engaged the new plurinational state in ambivalent ways, demonstrating that even where progressive, pro-Indigenous policies become state policy, the experiences of reform always exceed their legal promises (Winchell 2022).

In the podcast episode in this series, contributors Nohely Gúzman, Pablo Millalén, and Daniel Gamez examine some of these legacies, questioning the seemingly benign forms of recognition that multicultural (Chile and Mexico) and plurinational (Bolivia) states granted to Indigenous communities and groups. Gúzman, Millalén and Gámez ask what this means, in practice, for Indigenous peoples and citizens who exist within the borders of these nations. Even in Bolivia, which, as Guzmán reminds us, has been called the first “Indigenous State” (estado indígena), the state appears as a fundamentally regulatory and authorizing entity. Their intervention dovetails with the critiques by anthropologists (Povinelli 2002) and Native American Studies scholars (Coulthard 2014). Despite the progressive garb of multiculturalism and recognition, the state’s legitimacy in Indigenous worlds remains fraught.

A version of what political philosopher Charles Taylor famously called “the politics of recognition” (1994) is evident in populist regimes’ frequent acts of historical revisionism that seek to produce their own historical and aesthetic accounts of national histories and the roles of Indigenous actors within them. Ceremonial acts and state rituals in Latin America valorize what are sometimes highly stereotypical representations of Indigeneity. In this series, Andrés Ramírez, Maria Violet Medina Quiscue, and Fransico Pulido [español] analyze the key role of symbolism and political theater in forging continuities with prior models of national inclusion in Colombia, which has been governed by Gustavo Petro since 2022. Their conversation also examines how these relationships are reformulated and renegotiated with Indigenous communities in the present.

A recurrent question throughout the series is:  What are the strategic uses a that populism holds for Indigenous nations, movements, and polities? Nikola García Johnson’s piece on Mapuche social organizations in Santiago de Chile examines the performance of inclusion of Indigenous Mapuche residents through a municipal composting program. Indigenous citizens in Santiago reclaim their place in a popular neighborhood of Santiago, working within and critiquing the municipal government’s consultation procedures. In doing so, García Johnson demonstrates how Indigenous actors negotiate their position within existing local power structures, even as they draw on alternative forms of using space that challenge the assumptions of a progressive urbanism policy.

Taken together, this conversation series demonstrates that thinking with Indigenous social and political movements significantly adds to scholarly discussions on the main themes that have characterized anthropological studies of populism. Indigenous actors may, at times, strategically deploy the rhetorics and structures of popular sovereignty and state-power to further Indigenous agendas. This does not negate the power of Indigenous political movements, nor does it argue that a more “Indigenous populism” will necessarily lead to a better, more authentic expression of democracy. Ethnographic researchers are well positioned to document the promises and perils of populism for Indigenous communities and groups. As new populisms and Indigenous sovereignty movements emerge, this series is an exhortation for anthropologists and other scholars to continue that empirical work.

Jorge Rodríguez Solórzano is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Based on field research conducted in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Mexico City, Jorge’s dissertation examines how Indigenous state officials implemented a vision of Indigenous autonomy through a rural road building program financed by the Mexican government. Jorge’s dissertation contends that this politics of redistribution has paradoxically intensified the State’s sovereign reach in Indigenous worlds by recruiting Indigenous citizens to manage federal monies and state development. His dissertation attends to the hopes, anxieties and criticisms that Indigenous actors articulated in response to this model of state-funded autonomy and to the new regime of rights that sustained it. By demonstrating how autonomy became tethered to a populist politics of redistribution, Jorge’s dissertation interrogates how one model of administrative-financial autonomy became enshrined into law, thereby subsuming the demands of the 1994 EZLN uprising that sought territorial redistribution and self-determination in opposition to the State.

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