Long Live Atahualpa

Long Live Atahualpa is an innovative ethnographic study of indigenous political movements against discrimination in modern Ecuador. Exploring the politicizing of Indianness—the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination and political agency—Emma Cervone analyzes how the Quichuas mobilized in the country's central Andean province of Chimborazo and formed their own grassroots organization, Inca Atahualpa. She illuminates the complex process that led indigenous activists to forge new alliances with the Catholic Church, NGOs, and regional indigenous organizations as she traces the region's social history since the emergence of a rural unionist movement in the 1950s. Cervone describes how the Inca Atahualpa contested racial subordination by intervening in matters of resource distribution, justice, and cultural politics. Considering local indigenous politics and indigenous mobilization at the national and international levels, she explains how, beginning in the 1960s, state-led modernization created political openings by generating new economic formations and social categories. Long Live Atahualpa sheds new light on indigenous peoples operating at the crossroads of global capitalism and neoliberal reforms as they redefine historically rooted relationships of subordination.

"Long Live Atahualpa is a welcome addition to the literature on Latin American indigenous movements, which has been largely dominated by political scientists working on a macro scale. There has been a great need for ethnographies such as this one, an in-depth examination of local and regional indigenous organizing. In this sensitive, richly documented ethnography Emma Cervone deftly moves across political, economic, and cultural domains, not privileging one over the other but inquiring into their interconnections."—Joanne Rappaport, author of Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia, "This fascinating ethnography makes original contributions to the study of social movements, identity as lived within a social world of invidious stereotypes, and debates over whether multiculturalism as a national policy is empowering or disempowering for indigenous groups. Emma Cervone engages central issues in anthropology, political science, and ethnic studies. She offers a very effective analysis of the dynamics of political consciousness, the internalization of racism, and indigenous movement organizing at different levels. The result is a striking construction of ethnically inflected class issues in the central Andean region of Ecuador."—Kay B. Warren, author of Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala, “[P]rovides a rare glimpse into the micropolitics of indigenous rights realization through a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between the personal and political, between identity and unity, and among local, national and global forces in the promotion of meaningful social change…. [G]raduate students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and law could benefit from the interesting engagement between theories of everyday resistance and empirical evidence from an engaging, dynamic and understudied site of contestation.”, “...Long Live Atahualpa is a solid book that will be of interest to scholars who focus on the complex issues of indigenous identity and politics...” , “Long Live Atahualpa is a welcome addition to the literature on indigenous politics, most notably through its detailed ethnographic accounts of daily social and political interethnic relationships in Ecuador.”

Emma Cervone is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.