Indigenous Politics of Emancipatory Education in Bolivia: The Role of the Escuela-Ayllu of Warisata

Indigenous Emancipation Through Education

In the 1930s, building Indigenous schools in the Bolivian altiplano was a political act. Siñani was one of many Indigenous educators who understood that education and land rights were integral to their project of community emancipation from gamonalismo. These educators clandestinely taught Spanish to comunarios and raised awareness about how systemic origins of the community’s suffering stemmed from the early sixteenth century European invasion. They participated in the struggle spearheaded by Caciques-Apoderados, a group of community leaders from Cochabamba, Chuquisaca, La Paz, Potosí, and Oruro, who claimed their communities’ rights via official channels of the court and state institutions. This required schools to teach local people how to read and write in Spanish (Soria, 1996; Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and Taller de Historia Oral Andina, 1988). In their search for outside support, Caciques-Apoderados collaborated with leftist leaders and student militants who made the exploitative nature of gamonalismo a major theme of critical intellectual discussion and were committed to promoting education for Indigenous people (Gotkowitz, 2007: 57). One of these leftist leaders, Tristán Marof, was a Trotskyite who believed that Indigenous comunarios should be Bolivia’s revolutionary vanguard (López, 2018: 88-89). ⁵ Under the influence of indigenismo ⁶ , these intellectuals and radicals believed that their nation’s true potential stemmed from the Indigenous masses, a racial identity that was construed as an essential component of what Franz Tamayo (1994: 123) defined as “[Bolivia’s] national character.” They contended that the Indigenous race represented “the national energy” that had been numbed by colonial oppression and should be revitalized with the civilizing guidance of critical educators so that they could be fully integrated into national society (Tamayo, 1994: 142). In their view, Bolivia’s humiliating defeat in the Chaco War (1932-1935) confirmed that gamonalismo was responsible for the degeneration of the Indigenous masses into a wretched state through what was practically “rural slavery” (El Imparcial, 1941).

Caciques-Apoderados invited sympathetic priests of El Rosario, San Sebastián, and San Pedro parishes of urban La Paz to establish an education center that brought together different ayllus under a single system of community schools. As a result of the collaboration between Caciques-Apoderados and the priests, in 1930 the Centro Educativo de Aborígenes “Bartolomé de las Casas” was founded in Paula Jawira, a barrio now known as Chijini located in the Max Paredes District of La Paz. During the next year, at least ninety-six community schools, all self-funded and managed by the comunarios, were created in the provinces of Los Andes, Camacho, Inquisivi, Loayza, Murillo, Omasuyos, Pacajes, and Sicasica of La Paz. The Centro Educativo functioned as the nucleus of those schools and remained largely free from state intervention (Soria, 1996: 63-67).

Caciques-Apoderados insisted that the Centro Educativo advance Catholic education, strategically using Catholic evangelical language to reassure white Bolivians that their Centro promoted Christian values. Despite this, gamonales accused Caciques-Apoderados of teaching communist doctrines of subversion to Indigenous people. However, Caciques-Apoderados argued that the Centro Educativo made an important social contribution by cultivating the moral values of Christianity among Indigenous comunarios. This helped Caciques-Apoderados obtain the support of Catholic priests and other sympathetic white leaders who wanted to improve the living conditions of Indigenous people. The support of Catholic priests and other sympathetic white leaders was seen as essential by the Caciques-Apoderados to defend the Centro Educativo against gamonales’ accusations. Nonetheless, the Centro Educativo’s Estatuto (Charter) was explicit in seeking a system of community-run schools to “strengthen [the Indigenous] race” and turn Indigenous comunarios into “a powerful force [for change]” (Soria, 1996: 65).

Alcaldes Mayores Particulares, who separated off from the Caciques-Apoderados movement in 1936, were skeptical of promoting Spanish literacy and claiming communal rights via official channels linked to state institutions. From their perspective, Indigenous struggle needed to build upon the ancestral forms of communal organization and ritual practice, which were irreconcilable with the colonial system of the Bolivian republic. As Waskar Ari (2014: 8) argues, Alcaldes Mayores Particulares envisioned “a republic of Qullasuyu, a nation of Aymara ancestry” rooted in achachilas (ancestral spirits), ayllus, and the pachamama (Mother Earth). After they split with the Caciques-Apoderados, Alcaldes Mayores Particulares founded their own network of community leaders, which by 1944 incorporated comunarios and colonos ⁷ from 489 communities in the departments of Chuquisaca, Cochabamba, La Paz, Oruro, and Potosi. In these communities, they built escuelas particulares (autonomous Indigenous schools), arguing that “the path of Qullasuyu peoples” was separate from the “white republic” (Ari, 2014: 107).

Alcaldes Mayores Particulares reinterpreted the Laws of the Indies, which were promulgated by the Spanish Crown during the colonial period to regulate economic, political and social life in its colonial possessions in the Americas and the Philippines. Among the elements of the Laws of the Indies, which Alcaldes Mayores Particulares saw as useful, was “the idea of two republics,” the republic of Spaniards and that of Indigenous nations, which were ruled by separate and semi-autonomous town councils (cabildos) (Masters, 2021). Alcaldes Mayores Particulares conceived two separate republics (Indigenous and white) that were ruled by different peoples (Ari, 2014: 98-99), and they utilized the escuelas particulares to promote the Indian Law, ⁸ the ruling principle of the Indigenous republic of Qullasuyu (96-103). The escuelas particulares were central to Alcaldes Mayores Particulares’ Indigenous nationalism that made a Manichean distinction between the authentic inhabitants of the Andes and q’aras ⁹ (white colonial oppressors who parasitically live off the blood and flesh of Indigenous people). This was a nationalism that had been expressed earlier through Aymara anticolonial revolts in 1781 and that would be later articulated through the Indigenista discourse of Fausto Reinaga in the 1960s-1970s (Reinaga, 2001; Thomson, 2002). Alcaldes Mayores Particulares urged Indigenous people to reject the colonial religion of Christianity and worship achachilas, pachamamas, and wak’as (sacred beings) of the ayllus. The Indian Law defined these ancestral deities as the spiritual forces of decolonization, subverting the white republic of Bolivia. Alcaldes Mayores Particulares used the escuelas particulares to diffuse their discourse of decolonization and raise consciousness of the Qullasuyu nation among comunarios and colonos (Ari, 2014: 103-109, 176-179).

On May 14^th of 1944, Gregorio Titiriku, an Alcalde Mayor Particular from the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Province of Omasuyos in La Paz, wrote: “we are creating escuelas particulares. . .to educate our people in the path of the [Indian law] so that they can know our way of life.” Unless they followed that path, he argued, they would go down the wrong path of de-Indianization that “makes people Spaniard[s]” (Titiriku, 1944 cited in Ari, 2014: 108). Alcaldes Mayores Particulares outrightly rejected any path that they believed could result in the whitening of Indigenous people through mestizaje. ¹⁰ This partly explains their discord with Caciques-Apoderados, who relied on the white institutions of the Bolivian republic to advance their political project.

Alcaldes Mayores Particulares were very cautious to make sure that white and mestizo influence could not undermine Indigenous autonomy. Although Caciques-Apoderados considered autonomy to be central to their struggle, autonomy did not necessarily mean the outright rejection of the Bolivian state (Soria, 1996: 75). They envisioned an Indigenous citizenship that would materialize what Aymara educator Eduardo Leandro Nina Quispe ¹¹ called “the renovation of the Bolivian nation” through the complete integration of Indigenous comunarios into national society as equal citizens (Mamani, 1991). For them, integration did not mean assimilation, but rather a mode of empowerment whereby the national state recognized and respected their communities. They incorporated the liberal language of citizenship into their struggle, which considered Indigenous communities central to a national transformation that would lead to an inclusive nation-state.

Siñani saw in the inclusive language of liberalism a useful tool to materialize the empowerment of his community, although he was aware of its limits of emphasizing individual rights. He wanted to build a school that enabled the community to collectively exercise education and land rights. Franz Luis Quispe Ramos (2024), a community educator of Warisata, argues that Siñani utilized the Escuela-Ayllu to “give Indians the power to determine their fate.” Siñani wanted to convert the Escuela-Ayllu into “an Indian government.” In his view, “Indian government” was defined as a communal territory ruled by the communitarian principles of cooperation, reciprocity, and collective decision-making.

Escuela-Ayllu Of Warisata: Communal Organization Of Education And Democracy

Pérez believed that Indigenous communities should act as the agents of their own emancipation and that white intellectuals like himself should help them in their struggle. According to Carlos Salazar Mostajo (2015), one of Pérez’s most important colleagues in Warisata, the Escuela-Ayllu materialized what leftist intellectuals and militants, such as Tristán Marof, saw as an Indigenous communitarian socialism. They praised Pérez as “the Blond Inka” who revived “Inka communism” (Bosshard, 2010: 69; La Calle, 1939).

In Pérez’s account, he met Siñani for the first time in 1917, when he visited Warisata as the education inspector for the Department of La Paz. Siñani, according to his daughter Tomasa Siñani de Willca (1996), said to Pérez, “What I want to make is a greater school for our brothers” (131-132). Siñani “proposed nothing but Indian liberation by cultural means,” but recognized that his effort would not bear fruit unless his school obtained necessary material support. In Pérez’s words, Siñani was “the incarnation” of the communitarian principle of “ama sua, ama llulla, ama kella” (do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy) (Pérez, 2015: 76). For Pérez, Siñani and other Aymara educators, who unceasingly struggled for their community’s right to education and resisted persecution under gamonalismo, articulated “the culture of the ancient amautas ¹² of the Inka epoch.” Pérez saw in Siñani an Aymara with a “pure soul,” whose communitarian culture represented the spiritual energy of Bolivia’s Indigenous race. Education of, by, and for that race needed men like Siñani, who Pérez believed exemplified “the highest human virtues” (76-77).

Pérez maintained the urban intellectuals’ indigenista view of “the ‘natural aptitudes’ of the Indian,” based on a racial idea of hardworking Aymara peasantry who could be harnessed as a productive labor force for the nation. The indigenista discussion of the period assumed that Indigenous people should remain in their “natural habitat” (Larson, 2005: 37). When Pérez was appointed as the director of the Escuela Normal Indígenal de Miraflores ¹³ in April of 1931, he declined the position, arguing that “the school for Indians should be located in the Indian habitat, where they struggle” (2015: 75, 86). Pérez’s focus was on creating a communitarian Indigenous education that would produce rural workers and citizens, and he saw gamonales and other local powerholders, who opposed the communitarian school, as “the antinational oligarchy” (Montenegro, 2003).

After he arrived in Warisata in May 1931, Pérez lived among the comunarios, eating their food on chúa (mud plates), “sleeping on a stone bench covered with an Indigenous garment. . .and working like an Indian” (Pérez, 2015: 94). The comunarios were initially suspicious of his real intent, but after Siñani visited each house in Warisata to introduce him, they recognized Pérez’s sincerity and accepted him as their professor. Pérez’s efforts reinforced Siñani’s determination to build a school founded upon the communal organization of the ayllu. Siñani had run several clandestine schools for comunarios in the altiplano before the founding of the Escuela-Ayllu in 1931, with the assistance of other Warisata leaders affiliated with Caciques-Apoderados, including Clemente Rojas and Mariano Ramos (Siñani de Willca, 1996: 131). As other Indigenous community schools did, Siñani’s schools faced perennial accusations by gamonales of fostering subversion. The same accusations continued after the Escuela-Ayllu of Warisata was officially established.

As neither Pérez nor Warisata’s comunarios possessed land to build the school, they began constructing the Escuela-Ayllu on lands legally owned by hacendados of Achakachi. The hacendados accused Pérez and the comunarios of encroaching on their property and denounced him as an agitator who manipulated ignorant Indigenous people to violate the property rights of law-abiding citizens (Pérez, 2015: 95-97). The Escuela-Ayllu started on a very precarious legal basis, and while the Ministry of Education officially incorporated it into its General Office of Indigenous Education in 1931-1934, it sent little material support during this period (Pérez, 2015: 87-98, 142-143). Pérez enjoyed the personal backing of several powerful statesmen however, including José Luis Tejada Sorzano (who served as Vice President, 1931-1934, and President 1934-1936). ¹⁴ In May of 1932, Tejada sent a letter to Los Amigos de la Ciudad, a civic organization of La Paz, to ask for their contribution to a fund which he had created to financially support the Escuela-Ayllu (Pérez, 2015: 136, 139).

A key component of the Escuela-Ayllu pedagogy was the active participation of comunarios through the Parlamento Amauta, composed of elected communal authorities. From Pérez’s perspective (2015), the Parlamento revived “the old democratic tradition” of the ayllu, which better represented the Indigenous majority than the ‘“democratic’ game” played through formal political institutions of the state (105). Through the Parlamento, comunarios decided on their school’s administration and curriculum. An integral component of the school’s curriculum was collective work in agriculture and handicraft production, aimed at meeting the community’s material needs and putting into practice the communitarian principle of collective well-being. In this way, students learned to embody the communitarian values of cooperation and reciprocity. What the school’s comunarios produced were exchanged with products from communities in other areas based on one of two Aymara principles of reciprocity, the ayni and mink’a (Salazar, 2012: 23-25). ¹⁵

Under the military nationalist governments of Toro (1936-1937) and Busch (1937-1939), state support of the Escuela-Ayllu greatly increased. After Pérez was appointed as the General Director of Indigenous Education in January 1937, he led the initiative to expand the Escuela-Ayllu’s system of núcleos escolares across the Altiplano, the Cochabamba valleys, and the Amazonian lowlands (Pérez, 2015: 222). By 1937, sixteen núcleos escolares were established as zonas nucleares of community-led education that brought together different rural villages and lowland communities as a collective body of communal schools located in distinct ecological niches (Choque and Quisbert, 2006: 117-118; Ticona, 2010: 124). ¹⁶ Pérez viewed the núcleos escolares as “a rehabilitation of the marka,” ¹⁷ which reflected the communal force of the Indigenous race (Pérez, 2015: 65). In the núcleos escolares, Indigenous communities empowered themselves through democratic practices of participation and reciprocity (Salazar, 2012: 88-95). The community-led education of núcleos escolares brought visibility to a communal democracy that converted Indigenous comunarios into agents of their own emancipation through principles of reciprocity and participatory democracy in decision-making.

As noted by Victor Hugo Cárdenas (1996: 14), the Escuela-Ayllu brought together “two educative models.” Through Siñani and Pérez, the communities’ struggle for land and education became a central part of a white intellectual-led indigenista project of nation making, and vice versa. Land and education here meant not simply a means of agricultural production and formal learning but fundamentally a mode of decolonization that, in the words of Francisco Laura Nina (1996: 147), communal educator of the ayllu Japüma (located in the town of Colchani in La Paz), stemmed from “our lived experiences.” For Aymara educators in the rural altiplano, the Escuela-Ayllu “was not a work of the state” and “some outside men” but “of Indians’ own hands” (La Semana Gráfica, 1934). ¹⁸ They recognized that state support gave their school a legally sanctioned status and ample material assistance, but they did not want the state to take it over. They believed that the communal organization of the ayllu should decide “the destiny of the school. . .to serve the interests of the Indian masses” (La Semana Gráfica, 1934).

Siñani and Pérez fully recognized that by building a community-led school under state support, they were joining the broader struggle of Indigenous comunarios. The Escuela-Ayllu’s ultimate objective was the transformation of Indigenous groups into national citizens, a citizenship that expressed not only the liberal notions of equality and rights but also the ayllu’s communitarian principles, which Alcaldes Mayores Particulares called “our way of life.” By bringing together Indigenous communitarianism and citizenship, Warisata’s comunarios envisioned a communal citizenship that was more akin to “ethnic citizenship” as conceived in the 1990s debate on state-Indigenous relations under multiculturalism (Lazar, 2008; Montoya, 1998; Postero, 2007; Van Cott, 2000). According to Ramos Rojas (2024), the Escuela-Ayllu represented a mode of communal struggle that “aimed to liberate the community not by violence but by preparing Indians with knowledge and skills.” This differentiated it from the insurgent struggle led by José Gabriel Túpaq Amaru and Julián Apaza Túpaq Katari (Rojas, 2024).

What Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (2008; 2017) calls “lo comunitario-popular” was articulated through the Escuela-Ayllu’s dynamics of social change that were not subsumed under state politics of Indigenous incorporation. While the state supported the Escuela-Ayllu to facilitate the transformation of Indigenous groups into mestizo peasants, community-led education revitalized the communal force of the ayllu, transforming jaqis/runas ¹⁹ into the collective subject of decolonization (Ari, 2014: 104-106; Choque, 2014: 63-77). Titiriku stated that the Escuela-Ayllu “help[ed] our race to flourish” (1938, cited in Ari, 2014: 106). From his perspective, Warisata became an Indigenous nation that had been articulated through an autonomous community school. The Escuela-Ayllu never officially espoused Indigenous nationalism, but the communitarian autonomy it advanced impacted many Indigenous educators’ views on community education. It demonstrated that Indigenous people could only emancipate themselves when they were in control of their education. Titiriku suggested that, if they lost the autonomy of their schools, the consequence would be enslavement by ‘“the colonial Spanish who came to rob our lands and nation’” (1939, cited in Ari, 2014: 106).

Escuela-Ayllu And Military Nationalism, 1936-1939

Defending the community schools’ autonomy was a complicated issue in Warisata because of how the núcleos escolares flourished under state support (Pérez, 2015: 140). The communal territory they had created through the núcleos escolares was within the boundaries delimited by the state, whose paternalistic stance toward Indigenous people perpetuated colonial relations. The state placed Indigenous people in a subordinate position of passive recipients of the favors granted by a benevolent state, constructing its own indios permitidos (authorized Indians) (Hale, 2005; Rivera, 2015) in núcleos escolares and protecting its Indians from the oligarchical exploitation of gamonales. At the same time, this relationship prevented Indigenous groups from acting on their own, which the state feared could undermine government control over the countryside.

As many scholars (Larson, 2004; Rivera, 2010b) note, Andean states after the beginning of the twentieth century reformulated what was meant by “de-Indianization” by promoting the notion of mestizaje. The Bolivian state granted autonomy to the Indigenous schools, which it thought served its interest of de-Indianizing Indigenous people. From the state’s perspective, the Escuela-Ayllu implemented a nationalist solution to the “Indian problem,” using the culture of the majority population as an instrument of social change leading towards mestizaje (Rodríguez, 2014b). Community autonomy, under this scenario, was ironically dependent on the white-dominated state. When the military nationalist regimes of Toro and Busch made núcleos escolares a central pillar of their programs, Warisata’s comunarios did not fundamentally challenge the situation of dependency. A stronger tie with the state allowed the comunarios to defend their schools more effectively from gamonales. Dependency undermined the principle of their school’s autonomy, but a supportive state helped them guarantee communitarian education in their communities.

Both Toro and Busch fused progressive labor policy with elements of European fascism to create a state-centered reformist politics. They attacked La Rosca (the Bolivian ruling class), which they cited as responsible for the nation’s humiliating defeat in the Chaco War. Their nationalism, commonly referred to as “military socialism” in Bolivia, sought “to create a corporatist regime” that would integrate Indigenous peasants and workers under a nationalist banner of economic, moral, and political renovation (Gotkowitz, 2007: 112-113). In August of 1936, Toro decreed that “owners of agrarian, mining, and industrial enterprises with more than thirty school-age children are obliged to maintain a rural school with personnel appointed by the Minister of Education” (Presidente de la Junta Militar de Gobierno, 1936a). While the gamonales ignored the decree, they clearly recognized that the growing ties between the Escuela-Ayllu and the state undermined their domination. Núcleos escolares in the towns of Cliza and Vacas in the Cochabamba valleys functioned as the nucleus of the peasant unions that were founded following Toro’s so-called “decree of obligatory unionization” ²⁰ (Antezana Ergueta, 1982: 21-35; Gotkowitz, 2007: 112-114). In July of 1936, Toribio Claure, the director of the núcleo escolar in Vacas, wrote to a municipal official of Cochabamba, arguing that his school served peasant interests by restoring community land and “defending against the abuse of power and extortions of the gamonalismo” (El Imparcial, 1936). In this context, gamonales saw the Escuela-Ayllu as a primary site of challenging their dominance and instigating rural rebellions (Ari, 2014: 104).

Pérez understood the role that his school played in military nationalist politics. “Warisata’s destiny was already marked” as a nationalist battlefront against the oligarchy (Pérez, 2015: 315). In 1937, Busch designated the foundation day of the Escuela-Ayllu (August 2) as the Day of the Indian, symbolizing the marriage between the military nationalist state and Warisata’s comunarios (Rodríguez, 2014b: 81-82). This was a historic achievement from the perspective of Latin American intellectuals who were committed to educating Indigenous people in order to eliminate the feudalistic structure of power. In 1902, Peruvian educator Manuel Zúñiga Camacho built the Andes’s first Indigenous school in the community of Utawilaya in the Chucuito Platera district of Puno, Peru. David Ruelas Vargas (2016) argues that Utawilaya’s community school implemented an emancipatory pedagogy, advancing the cause of Indigenous empowerment. Now, in Bolivia, the state promoted this pedagogy as a pillar of its education policy. Intellectuals and statesmen of other Latin American countries praised the Escuela-Ayllu as a model of Indigenous education that could be adopted across the continent (Vilchis, 2014). In 1939, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) invited Pérez to join the First Interamerican Indigenista Congress in April 1940 held in Pátzcuaro, Mexico (Pérez, 2015: 329).

The organizers of the Congress originally wanted the Congress to be held in La Paz on Bolivian Independence Day (August 6) in 1938. Pérez stated that “[t]he realization of the Congress in our country would have undoubtedly meant the consecration of the work of Warisata” (2015: 322). The Bolivian Minister of Education appointed Pérez as the President of the Congress’s Organizing Committee, provoking the gamonales to launch smear campaigns against it. This forced Pérez and Mexican officials to postpone the event until 1940 and change its location. When it finally occurred, the Congress passed a resolution that praised the community-led education promoted by the Escuela-Ayllu, establishing Warisata as a leader in Latin American efforts to incorporate the region’s Indigenous populations into modern society (Pérez, 2015: 329-339).

On the Day of the Indian in 1938 (August 2nd), “more than 30,000 Indigenous comunarios” gathered in the Escuela-Ayllu to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the school’s foundation, a commemoration which “terrorized the gamonales” (Pérez, 2015: 305). The Ministers of Education of Bolivia, Mexico, and Spain attended, demonstrating the strong state and international support the Escuela-Ayllu enjoyed. The celebration demonstrated the extent to which the Escuela-Ayllu was organically linked with the military nationalist state and indigenista projects in other countries. In response, the Rural Society of Bolivia, the national organization of hacendados, intensified its attacks through assaults in Achakachi on various colonos who “collaborated with the [Escuela-Ayllu]” (Pérez, 2015: 302). Pérez published a letter in the La Paz daily El Diario denouncing the gamonalista violence, while the situation in Warisata and Achakachi became so tense that the La Paz District Attorney Julio Calderón visited Warisata in early August 1938 to investigate (Fiscalía del Distrito La Paz, 1938). Calderón listened to hacendados in Achakachi, who accused some of their colonos of not fulfilling their pongueaje duties. ²¹ Even if he saw no revolutionary upheaval in Warisata, Calderón noted in his report that colonos “should fulfill their obligations” (Fiscalía del Distrito La Paz, 1938). Nonetheless as the official representative of the Busch government, he supported the Escuela-Ayllu as it had “achieved noticeable results” (Fiscalía del Distrito La Paz, 1938). The government in no way wanted Indigenous communities to take matters into their own hands, rebel against gamonales, and violently overthrow the feudal order in the countryside. Yet, its active support of schools, such as the Escuela-Ayllu, undermined what gamonales considered to be the normative hierarchy that legitimized their dominance.

In one of his last conversations with Pérez, Busch said, “You and I, we’ll go down together, Elizardo.” When the gamonales intensified their attack on the Escuela-Ayllu in 1939, in Pérez’s own words, “[Busch] was our only friend in the government” (2015: 316). Even though state support of the Escuela-Ayllu continued after Busch’s suicide on August 23^rd of 1939, his death marked a turning point in the school’s fortune. The reactionary military regime (1939-1943) that succeeded him set up a commission to investigate activities in núcleos escolares and remove what it considered to be subversive elements. Under pressure from the commission, Pérez resigned as the General Director of Indigenous Education. The restructured Escuela-Ayllu shifted away from communitarianism and anti-oligarchical struggle to technical education in agriculture and modern hygiene (Larson, 2005: 48-49; Pérez, 2015: 378-383; Salazar, 1942). On January 30^th of 1941, when Vicente Donoso and Max Bayron, the heads of the investigative commission of the Education Ministry, arrived in Warisata, the comunarios led by Siñani “accused” the two gentlemen of “wanting to definitely destroy the Warisata school” (Siñani de Willca, 1996: 133) Siñani died next day, presaging the death of his community’s school.

Some basic elements of the Escuela-Ayllu’s communitarianism, such as the Parlamento Amauta, remained in place after 1940. The school continued to symbolize the birthplace of “the new Indian,” which “represent[ed] a solution to a problem” faced by “diverse American countries” (Última Hora, 1943a; 1943b). In the context of the crisis generated by rural insurgency across the altiplano and the Cochabamba valleys in the 1940s (Choque, 2014: 133-139, 195-225; Gotkowitz, 2007; Rivera, 2010a: 109-129), the state sought to exert strict state control over the Escuela-Ayllu and orient Indigenous education toward agrarian modernization. In 1940, the National Council of Education declared that “under the pretext of educating the Indian in his own ayllu, the [radical indigenistas] have crusaded unjustly and unpatriotically against whites and mestizos, turning countryside against city, and using racist doctrines to wage a dangerous war against national unity” (Larson, 2005: 49). Donoso (1946: 181) insisted that Indigenous education should promote peaceful change and social harmony instead of “a social revolution of the masses.” From the perspectives of educators such as Donoso, community-led education created a radical ideology that “followed the path towards world communism.”

According to Salazar (1942), after 1940 the Escuela-Ayllu degenerated into an “enemy of Indians” that was opposed to the communitarian principles of cooperation and reciprocity. Since the military nationalist state guaranteed a substantial degree of autonomy to the Escuela-Ayllu and other núcleos escolares, the ayllu remained as the organizing principle of Indigenous education in 1936-1939. Despite their differing perspectives, the communities and the state nonetheless shared a common goal—the empowerment of the Indigenous majority as citizens—even if the two parties disagreed on what citizenship meant. Despite his initial support, Titiriku declared that the Escuela-Ayllu had failed to overcome its dependency and in fact, the state takeover of the núcleos escolares after 1940 manifested the precarious nature of autonomy granted by the state (Ari, 2014: 106).

But Indigenous comunarios, who had built the núcleos escolares, were hardly passive recipients of favor granted by a paternalistic power as imagined by the military nationalist state: they made their own use of its support, a use which did not necessarily conform to its rules of popular struggle. As Laura Gotkowitz underscores (2007), the military nationalist state “could not control the practical effects” of its pro-Indigenous policy (114). Its anti-oligarchical politics encouraged many Indigenous groups across the Altiplano and Cochabamba valleys to directly act against their oppressors. Between 1936 and 1939, núcleos escolares, especially those in Warisata, Vacas, and Cliza, became focal sites of Indigenous-peasant struggle against Bolivian gamonalismo (Antezana Ergueta, 1982: 21-35; Gotkowitz, 2007: 112-114). The military nationalist state considered their actions to be legitimate if they were subsumed into a cross-class alliance of peasants and workers, which it believed it led. Yet, an increase in Indigenous demands and actions often prevented the military nationalist state from implementing an orderly change in the countryside.

While the Escuela-Ayllu officially maintained that it was opposed to violent rebellion and that its members should comply with government’s rules, in their conflict with gamonales, Warisata’s comunarios frequently resorted to direct actions, including sit-down strikes and land occupation, which undermined not only gamonalismo but also state control over the process of rural change (La Semana Gráfica, 1934; Fiscalía del Distrito La Paz, 1938). As the waves of rural rebellions in the 1940s significantly challenged Bolivian gamonalismo, Indigenous peasants emerged as central actors in national politics. The Rural Society publicly denounced the Toro and Busch governments as responsible for Indigenous rebellions against “the traditions and customs established since the colonial era” (Última Hora, 1942). Hacendados often expressed their concern through the language of the longstanding white fear of the cannibalistic and vengeful Aymaras, the race that laid a destructive siege to La Paz in 1781 and massacred more than a hundred Federalist soldiers in La Noche Triste (“The Night of Sorrows”) of Mohoza in 1899 (Condarco, 2011; Thomson, 2002). In the discourse of the Rural Society, Bolivia faced the immediate danger of collapse caused by “a general uprising” that was displacing the civilized world with “the communal regime [of the ayllu]” (Última Hora, 1942). The hacendados in Achakachi faced a more urgent situation because the Escuela-Ayllu empowered Warisata’s comunarios to undermine the feudal order in a real sense. Warisata represented a greater challenge to gamonalismo because it created the most extensive system of núcleos escolares that made the comunarios agents of their emancipation. While Busch’s death meant the fall of a pro-Indigenous state, the Rural Society understood that the communal struggle had generated its own dynamics of rural change, leading the state to impose a strict control on the Escuela-Ayllu.

On August 6^th (Independence Day) of 1942, anarchist activists and Indigenous leaders inaugurated an Indigenous congress in Sucre (Bolivia’s constitutional capital) that declared that they should take over haciendas and abolish gamonalismo by direct action. Indigenous peasants should “make a pact with workers to form an insurrectional alliance” (Choque, 2014: 205). As Tomasa Siñani de Willca (1996) suggests, much of these demands came from the Escuela-Ayllu, which planted the seeds of Indigenous comunarios’ struggle for communal empowerment (125), giving them a consciousness as collective agents of rural change. Despite the state takeover of the Escuela-Ayllu, in the communal territory of the núcleos escolares, the “legitimate owners [of the land]” were “the Indians” (Última Hora, 1942).

Conclusion: The Escuela-Ayllu In Revolutionary Bolivia

Warisata’s comunarios recognized that their school undermined the systems upheld by their oppressors and that they were part of a broader process of Indigenous struggle in the Bolivian countryside. The military nationalist state believed that it had subordinated an Indigenous school under its civilizing control. The priority of Warisata’s comunarios and their outside collaborators, such as Pérez, however, was always their community and what was most useful for its empowerment. In the Bolivian context after the Chaco War, the military nationalist state represented an ideological option that, on the surface, subsumed the Escuela-Ayllu under Bolivian nationalism. Yet, its practical political effects were more extensive: despite state efforts to control it, it contributed significantly to the making of a rural revolution that challenged the colonial order.

Indigenous rebels in the 1940s began to dislodge the Bolivia ruled by gamonalismo, turning the countryside into a site of emancipatory politics of decolonization. “The [European] Conquest amounted to the decapitation of a pueblo,” which explained the ongoing suffering of Indigenous people (La Semana Gráfica, 1934). Indigenous comunarios made the Escuela-Ayllu a laboratory of communal democracy that transformed their social organization of the ayllu into a nucleus of the rural struggle. The communal democracy, articulated through the Aymara insurgency of 1781 that continued to inform Indigenous struggles in the altiplano after 1825 (Thomson, 2002: 272-280), was fundamental to the Escuela-Ayllu, which utilized the liberal language of citizenship but interpreted it on its own terms. The citizenship that resulted from its communal democracy promoted a bottom-up transformation that led to “direct and broader political participation for community members” (Thomson, 2002: 273). Through this process of democratization, the ayllu became a decolonized territory and the linchpin of the community-led education.

A primary demand of rural rebels in the 1940s was the creation of Indigenous schools, a demand that was partially incorporated into the decrees that were promulgated by President Gualberto Villarroel (1943-1946) in the National Indigenous Congress in May 1945 (Choque, 2014: 215; Gotkowitz, 2007: 219). The expansion of Indigenous education became a major theme of political debate in the National Revolution of 1952 (Contreras, 2003: 260-267). Although intellectuals such as Augusto Céspedes (1998; 2004) and Carlos Montenegro (2003) argued that the revolution stemmed from the cross-class alliance between urban middle classes and workers that formed the backbone of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR), Indigenous comunarios had already instigated a rural revolution before 1952 (Gotkowitz, 2007). The Escuela-Ayllu was among the notable cases of rural struggle in revolutionary Bolivia. Even if it had become subordinate to the Bolivian state by the revolutionary decade of the 1940s, the country’s rural revolution originated in the struggle for communal education in the 1930s, which Nina Quispe argued was “the first step of the struggle” for Indigenous liberation and “the renovation of Bolivia” (Ticona, 2010: 16). Without a doubt, the community-led education promoted by the Escuela-Ayllu laid a critical foundation for social change in Bolivia.