Charagua’s Struggle for Indigenous Autonomy

I take up the case of Charagua, the first indigenous community to win indigenous autonomy, in the Chaco desert region. I trace their long struggle to gain this legal status, as well as the racial politics in which this success has been negotiated, situating their struggle within the contemporary discourse of economic liberation and the government’s push for development. I theorize that for many indigenous subjects, politics is waged not through outright contestation or refusal of national forms of sovereignty, but through negotiating the spaces in between radically different but “partially connected” worlds. Taking advantage of ambiguities and overlapping discourses, they enact a strategic and pragmatic everyday politics and move toward an enactment of indigenous self-government