'¿Que va a pasar con los indios cuando todos seamos indios?' Ethnic rights and reindianization in southwestern Colombian Amazonia

In this dissertation I study the processes of reindianization of indigenous mestizos and colonos in Putumayo, Colombia. The reindianization processes I study started in the late 1980s and developed in the 1990s after the constitutional reform which granted special rights for state-defined ethnic sectors of the population. I examine two different moments of this process: (1) the initial moment when heterogeneous communities of colonos and deindianized Indians started to claim an indigenous identity and create cabildos to conform with the state requirements of recognition of indigenous peoples; and (2) the moment when the state tried to control the ensuing multiplication of cabildos and the production of indigenous identities that the state itself had promoted.; In a context of a vague if defined ethnic membership, reindianization points to the centrality of the performative effects of the law in the definition of new ethnic identities. Once in the hands of the mestizo peoples who subscribe to it, the legal provision created the ethnic subject the law outlined, challenging the state to redefine the law again. This operation has not only allowed sectors of the poor mestizo population to access rights, but also, it allowed the state to effectively recompose its hegemony as it engendered and promoted competition among its "internal others."; As the reindianization process (a generic Indianness) transforms into a reethnization (particularizing and specific) one, the regional terrain hosted a competition of identity politics that unveiled an extraordinary and hierarchical diversity of subject positions, social experiences and cultural identities underlying both the category of indigenous as well as that of mestizo . Color, a colonial legacy used to measure the degree of the racial-ethnic mixing, proved to still be alive. Color supported the claims of reethnized colonos who could not display the cultural diacritics of their ethnic identity, and puts a limit on the mestizo crossing borders. Through the delineation of Indian and mestizo hierarchies among old and new 'Indians,' reethnicized populations have resignified mestizaje and Indianness, making clearer the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within the new pluriethnic imagined Colombian nation.