Indigenous Latin America in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In 2013 the World Bank set itself two
 ambitious goals: to end extreme poverty within a generation
 and to boost the prosperity of the bottom 40 percent of the
 population worldwide. In Latin America, the significance of
 both goals cannot be overstated. Indigenous people account
 for about 8 percent of the population, but represent 14
 percent of the poor and over 17 percent of all Latin
 Americans living on less than United States (U.S.) $2.50 a
 day. Though the World Bank has chosen two general indicators
 for measuring progress toward its twin goals - the
 proportion of people living on less than U.S. $1.25 a day
 (purchasing power parity, 2005) and the growth of real
 capital income among the bottom 40 percent of the population
 - this report acknowledges that these indicators offer only
 a partial view of the obstacles preventing many indigenous
 peoples from achieving their chosen paths of development.
 The report notes that in Bolivia, Quechua women are 28
 percent less likely to complete secondary school than a
 nonindigenous Bolivian woman, while Quechua men are 14
 percent less likely to complete secondary school than
 non-indigenous men. This report seeks to contribute to these
 discussions by offering a brief, preliminary glance at the
 state of indigenous peoples in Latin America at the end of
 the first decade of the millennium. The authors believe that
 this is the first, necessary step to start working on a
 concerted and evidence-based agenda for subsequent work in
 critical areas of development such as education, health, and
 land rights. The report makes a critical analysis of the
 many inconsistencies present in much of the data, which in
 many cases are intrinsic to the difficulties of approaching
 indigenous issues with tools and data sets not originally
 intended to account for or include indigenous peoples’
 voices and special needs. The report is divided into six
 sections. The first part, how many and where they are
 provides a demographic overview of indigenous people in the
 region, including population, geographic distribution,
 number of ethnic groups, and indigenous languages. The
 second section, mobility, migration, and urbanization
 describes a growing tendency among indigenous people to
 migrate to Latin American cities, which are becoming
 critical, though largely ignored, areas for political
 participation, and market articulation. The third section,
 development with identity briefly discusses the concept of
 poverty and reflects on how the use of predominantly Western
 indicators of well-being might condition the understanding
 of indigenous peoples’ situations and needs. The fourth and
 fifth sections broaden this argument by focusing on two
 particular instances of exclusion - the market and education.