Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala

Shannon Speed

American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 4, December 2017, pp. 783-790

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0064

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680483

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 Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala | 783

Structures of Settler Capitalism in

Abya Yala
Shannon Speed

L
atin American states are settler colonial states, though they are rarely ana-
lyzed in this way.1 Indeed, there often seems to be a kind of entrenched
resistance to thinking about Latin America in settler colonial terms, for
reasons that are complex, but have to do in large part to an implicit adherence
to some premises of settler colonialism put forward by Patrick Wolfe, who is
often credited with having popularized the term and, intentionally or not,
generating the field of settler colonial studies.
Wolfe did not, of course, coin the term. Native scholars and activists had
been using it for some time, as he himself regularly pointed out. Further, a
group of prominent feminist scholars published Unsettling Settler Societies,
edited by Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval Davis, in 1995, three years before
Wolfe published Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.2
Notably, Latin America was included in that volume (see contributions by
Gutierrez and Radcliffe). That said, Wolfe’s lucid articulation of the structure
and logics of settler colonialism has been and remains tremendously influential,
and continues to undergird—at times a bit too rigidly—our understandings
of the workings of settler power in the field of Native studies.3 In particular,
the land–labor binary, the importance of which Wolfe elaborated in most of
his works and reasserted in the recent Traces of History (2016), has become an
often-unspoken and largely unexamined premise of the settler state in ways that
occlude significant complexity and foreclose recognition of settler structures.
I do not raise this in an antitheory sense, to challenge abstraction in favor of
empirical specificity per se. Rather, I think the specificity of cases all too often
discarded without further or sufficient examination may in fact add new rich-
ness and dimension to the overall theoretical analytic.
I met Wolfe several years ago through the Native American and Indigenous
Studies Association. I was one of a small group of Latin Americanists working
to stake out a place for indigenous Latin America in the newly founded associa-
tion and in dialogues about race and settler colonialism. Most people in the
association supported this effort, although they did not engage very actively

2017 The American Studies Association

784 | American Quarterly

with Latin America. Wolfe did, in his characteristically intellectually gener-

ous way. As a Chickasaw, I am a citizen of a tribal nation based in the United
States, but have worked much of my professional life with indigenous people
in Latin America, particularly Mexico. I have long been troubled by what I saw
as an artificial divide in the thinking on indigenous peoples north and south.
In particular, I have found unfortunate what I see as a dual theoretical gap that
corresponds to this divide: theorizations of the settler state (largely elaborated
in the north) have not grappled fully enough with neoliberal capitalism, and
theories of the neoliberal state (a primary focus in the south) fail to recognize
the significance of settler logics that structure the conditions of state formation,
including in its current iteration.
Wolfe had something to do with this. His elaboration of the concept of
settler colonialism was premised on his argument about the land–labor di-
vide. He outlined this in his work as early as the late 1990s and maintained
it through more recent work, like the 2016 Traces of History, in which he
discussed “historically produced differences . . . between a history of bodily
exploitation and one of territorial dispossession.”4 One reason Latin America
has been thought to be characterized by colonialism of the nonsettler variety is
the perception that, while colonial processes in the Anglophone north focused
on land dispossession and the correlated elimination of the native, in the south
the focus was on resource extraction and the corresponding marshalling and
control of indigenous labor. Wolfe was not focusing on Latin America with
his land–labor divide (with the exception of Brazil, which he did theorize, but
which has a very particular history in Latin America); he was talking about
the different experiences of Black slavery and Native genocide. I suggest that
looking at the experience of other parts of the hemisphere changes the picture,
because colonialism in much of Latin America has in fact been characterized
by both land dispossession and labor extraction, to which indigenous peoples
were simultaneously subjected. Indigenous land dispossession was a fundamen-
tal aspect of colonialism, combined with various regimes of labor extraction.
In places like Mexico and Central America, such labor regimes (encomienda,
repartimiento, hacienda) were often the very mechanisms that dispossessed
indigenous peoples of their lands, forcing them to labor in extractive under-
takings on the very land that had been taken from them. That dynamic, in
turn, necessitated distinct processes of racialization from those in other parts
of the world, and entailed a far more radical abrogation of their sovereignty.
Wolfe enthusiastically engaged my ideas, and in multiple conversations he
challenged my thinking and dialogically shaped my analysis. We did not agree
 Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala | 785

on everything: for me his formulation, reiterated in Traces of History, in which

the Lockean idea that “private property accrued from the admixture of labour
and land . . . in a formula that was color-coded on colonial ground . . . the
application of Black people’s labor to Red people’s land producing the white
man’s property.”5 felt overgeneralized to me and—I insisted—was troubled by
the complexities raised by looking at Latin America, where in many countries
“Red people’s” labor was applied to “Red people’s” land, leaving indigenous
peoples’ subject to both territorial dispossession and bodily exploitation.
The land–labor divide played out differently in different regions of the
continent and (settler-imposed) national contexts, and thus approaching the
area of the continent understood as Latin America provides ample fodder
for discussion and debate about the nature of settler colonialism. However,
I argue that Latin American states are settler states for reasons that are not
debatable. Another premise of settler colonialism as set out by Wolfe—a far
more fundamental one from my perspective—is that “the colonizers come to
stay,” making “invasion . . . a structure not an event.”6 Unlike metropole or ad-
ministrative colonialism imposed in other parts of the world, in Latin America
white Europeans came to stay. And stay they did. In much of Latin America,
the “colonial period” (the three-hundred-plus-year period from invasion to
independence) was characterized by evolving tensions between the metropole
and the settlers—the Crown and the Peninsulares and Criollos—precisely
because of the power dynamics created by developing settler power.7 Richard
Gott, one of the few analysts who has argued that Latin American states should
be understood as settler, argues that it is in fact with independence that they
fully realize settler character. He states:

The characteristics of white settler states of the European empires are generally familiar. The
settlers sought to expropriate the land, and to evict or exterminate the existing population;
they sought where possible to exploit the surviving indigenous labor force to work on the
land; they sought to secure for themselves a European standard of living; to justify or make
sense of their global migration; they treated the indigenous peoples with extreme prejudice,
drafting laws to ensure that those who survived the wars of extermination remained largely
without rights, as second or third class citizens. Latin America shares all of these characteristics
and clearly falls into the category of “settler colonialism,” even though the colonial pow-
ers are no longer present, having been forced out in the course of the nineteenth century.8

Gott locates the birth of the settler Latin American state with independence,
when outside settlers gained full control of the Native population and its land.
Importantly, he contests the notion that colonialism ends with Independence,
which is the prevailing wisdom in Latin America, leading most theorists to
786 | American Quarterly

view current conditions as neocolonial, “internal colonialism” (either in Pablo

Gonzalez Casanova or in Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s iterations), or “colonial-
ity” (Anibal Quijano), all theories that seek to address the ongoing colonial
nature of power relations but that view it as residual or a legacy of past colony
rather than an ongoing settler colonial process.9 This point particularly mat-
ters for indigenous people not only because it is inaccurate but because of the
counterpart narrative that Kahuanui has highlighted in relation to the United
States: “the myth that indigenous peoples ended when colonialism ended.”10
While certainly theorists of internal colonialism or coloniality of power are
not perpetrators of that myth, it can be said to have been the prevailing one
in much of Latin America until at least the 1990s, when quincentenary pro-
tests of 1992 and major revolts such as the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas took
nonindigenous people and their governments throughout the hemisphere
by surprise. The problem with internal colonialism and coloniality of power
analyses (and I do not mean to conflate the two; they are distinct positions
and emerge from distinct positionalities that are significant) is that by failing
to address settler colonialism as settler, they accept the basic premise that the
settler has settled, and is now from here, rather than acknowledging that there is
a state of ongoing occupation, in Latin America as elsewhere in the hemisphere.
Another matter often raised to avoid a common framing of Abya Yala as
settler is that processes of racialization, particularly the question of mestizaje
(racial mixing) in Latin America, blur the settler–settled divide. To accept this
at face value is to drink the Kool-Aid of nation-state hegemonic ideologies,
and far more reflection needs to go into the relationship of these processes in
the “north” and “south.” Of course, Wolfe raised the distinction between co-
lonialism based on land and based on labor to signal a distinction that is more
profound: that the underlying logics structuring societies based on different
types of colonialism give rise to distinct social relations, forms of oppression,
and affective understandings and subjectivities.11 In a general sense, in extractive
regimes there is an inherent impetus to maintain and control the productive
power of a labor force, and thus ongoing subordination operationalizes social
relations. In settler regimes concerned with occupying the land, the impetus
is to dispossess and eliminate. Destroy to replace. Presumably, then, the racial
and gender tropes that emerged in support of these projects should have been
fundamentally different, and they have been generally understood to be so.
Yet, when we look at the countries throughout the Americas, what we see
instead is a fair bit of similarity in the racialization of indigenous peoples as
uncivilized and savage, unfit for modern life and thus doomed to fade into
 Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala | 787

extinction. (Corresponding gender tropes of indigenous women as subordinate

and inherently subject to settler violation are equally present throughout the
hemisphere.) How those tropes have developed and been deployed over distinct
histories and landscapes is not uniform, but they nevertheless were directed
to similar aims of Native elimination through direct physical or assimilation-
ist violences, and to the ongoing control of what Lorenzo Veracini tactlessly
dubbed “remnant populations.”12
However, while the underlying premises of racialization were similar, na-
tional ideologies regarding race were (are) distinct, particularly around mis-
cegenation. While in the Anglophone Americas widespread racial mixing was
downplayed, and understood to eliminate Indianness (in a reverse logic of the
one-drop rule), in much of Latin America racial mixing, or mestizaje, became
the myth of national integration. Mestizaje was a racial ideology consciously
put forward by criollo elites seeking to consolidate national identity in newly
“independent” states characterized by the presence of large and diverse popula-
tions that did not identify with the national polity (e.g., “Mexican” or “Central
American”).13 The idea of a racial mix of Indian and Spaniard thus became
the hegemonic belief that there was one race, rendering indigenous peoples a
part of the racial mix and historic past. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo usefully
traces the different racialization processes taking place in Mesoamerica and the
United States, highlighting how different racial categories served distinct but
coordinated colonial ends and, far from describing racial difference, in fact
productively constituted it.14 While analysts have tended to view mestizaje as
something that distinguishes Latin America from the US experience, it should
be pointed out that racial mixing as an assimilationist strategy of Native elimina-
tion became a force in practice in most Latin American countries at the same
time it did in the United States—in the mid-nineteenth century—enjoyed its
strongest period in the early part of the twentieth century, and was deployed
in strikingly similar ways and directed to the same ends of elimination. The
major difference—as Saldaña elucidates—was that Latin American states
discursively retained indigeneity as part of the identity mix (albeit in ways
that rendered living Indians a part of the historic past), while in the United
States indigeneity was discursively eliminated (by mixing with whites, Indians
literally disappeared). This has played out differently in different countries, of
course: Mexico is notably different from Guatemala, where settler culture lent
itself to a more apartheid regime, leading eventually to a genocide in the later
twentieth century. In other countries of Central America, logics and practices
of elimination were also at work, both through combinations of the ideology
788 | American Quarterly

of mestizaje combined with overt killing and repression, as in El Salvador in

the 1930s, or mestizaje and geographic isolation, as Afro-descendant and indig-
enous groups on the Atlantic Coast were largely shut out of the mestizo state in
Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. While all of these are generalizations, I
outline them here to note that these dynamics are quite consistent with those
underway in other settler states, including the United States.
In Latin America, as elsewhere on the continent, white European settlers
invaded, occupied, and stayed. They deployed racial logics that worked to
construct indigenous peoples as uncivilized, unfit, and inevitably bound to
disappear in the face of modern civilization. While national racial discourses dif-
fered in significant ways, throughout the hemisphere they worked to eliminate
the Native from the present, locate Native people in history in particular ways,
and manage the present population through ongoing exploitation and dispos-
session. Here, there, and everywhere, states of the Americas also resorted to
violence periodically to further the work of elimination and continued control.
In my ongoing work I have been concerned with understanding how settler
logics structured the frames of reference that continue to define the colonial
exploitation in these countries and why that is crucial to understand the cur-
rent moment and its implications for indigenous peoples. European settler
colonialism was the catalyst of capitalism’s expansion and continues to structure
life under capitalism as it moves through different phases. Capitalism’s cur-
rent iteration—neoliberalism—continues to be shaped by the settler colonial
imperative of dispossession/extraction/elimination justified by racialized and
gendered logics that while shifting continue to emerge from that imperative.
I have approached these topics through the experiences of indigenous women
migrants from Mexico and Central America to the United States, as they cross
divides and move through various neoliberal settler spaces. This was a point of
convergence with Wolfe. As he and David Lloyd argued in a recent article, “The
ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which
to understand. . . . the formations and practices of the neoliberal state that
has emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of accumulation.”15 Latin
America’s similar but distinct settler colonialism has structured colonialism’s
most recent iteration—neoliberal colonialism, with its brutal extractivist log-
ics—that continues the work of forcing indigenous peoples to slave on their
own expropriated lands for others’ benefit while deploying interlocking race
and gender tropes against them in ways that further suppress their inherent
sovereignty as peoples and render their dispossession acceptable. Above, I argued
that there is a dual theoretical gap that coincides with a North–South divide
 Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala | 789

in indigenous studies, one in which northern theorizations of the settler state

have not grappled fully with neoliberal capitalism, and southern theories of the
neoliberal state fail to recognize the significance of settler logics that structure
the conditions of state formation, including in its current neoliberal iteration.
In this essay, there was space only to argue the problematics of one side of
that divide, in an effort to open a path for considering the settler structures
of Latin America. The significance of neoliberalism in the Native north will
have to remain for a later essay.
Why does settler colonialism in Abya Yala matter? Understanding Latin
American states as settler states has important implications for indigenous
peoples’ resistance. The crucial insight of settler colonial theory is that since
European colonial expansion began, the states that emerged from that colo-
nization and settlement (in my argument all of the Americas) are character-
ized by colonial occupation as a permanent structure. The racial and gender
logics that underpinned Native dispossession, slavery, and successive waves
of labor exploitation are structuring logics, inherent to those systems. This
has important implications, because it means that there can be no “post” set-
tler colonialism and similarly no “post” racial society, without fundamental
changes in the structures of power the countries of the Americas were founded
on. Neoliberalism, arguably, is in crisis. In that context, overt expressions of
white supremacy and misogyny—always structurally present but discursively
muted at a particular moment in time to facilitate a certain kind of capitalist
expansion—are deployed in new and more overt ways. These are not the same
iterations as those mobilized against Black and indigenous people in distinct
moments of history and across distinct geographies, but they similarly justify
ongoing European American “rightful” occupation and continued subjugation
of nonwhite others. The United States provides a key example, as settler logics
are still at work in Trump’s America: both racial logics of white supremacy and
gendered logics of masculine dominance remain intact and are reasserted in
a time of crisis. Neoliberalism will give way to the next phase of capitalism,
but settler logics will continue to undergird it and structure the possibilities
within it. To make real change, we need to create a society not structured on
native dispossession and capitalist exploitation, because it is the only way to
eliminate the racial and gendered logics that allow Euro-American men to
remain inevitably dominant and render indigenous peoples the subjects of
ongoing occupation.
790 | American Quarterly

Notes
I am grateful for comments on the draft of this essay by Bianet Castellanos. The text also benefited
from the shared dialogue with copanelists Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, Christopher
Loperena, and Korinta Maldonado at the Latin American Studies Association meetings in Lima, Peru,
and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meetings in Vancouver, British Colum-
bia. I particularly want to acknowledge the influence of the late Patrick Wolfe, who enthusiastically
engaged my ideas and indelibly influenced them, whether we agreed or disagreed.
1. Abya Yala is a term in the language of the Kuna indigenous peoples of Panamá for the Americas. Often
translated to mean Latin America, it in fact refers to the entire continent, and I use it as such in this
essay.
2. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999);
Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies (London: Sage, 1995).
3. This essay is intended to be an intervention in the field of Native studies. Settler studies that are not
overtly and purposefully directed to a better understanding of Native oppression and liberation hold
little interest for me. In other words, the settler state as an object of analysis in and of itself (or even
with Natives as an unspoken counterpart in an assumed dialectic).
4. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 3.
5. Ibid.
6. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 2.
7. Literally, Peninsulares are people from the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish-born migrants to the Americas;
Criollos are American-born descendants of Peninsulares.
8. Richard Gott, “Latin America as White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26.2
(2007): 273.
9. There is not space here to unpack each body of thought. Each in its own way views the post-Indepen-
dence nation-state as being characterized by a form of power relations that is colonial in nature, yet
fails to understand it as a permanent structure, suggesting that if we can achieve the right decolonial
struggle, postcolonialism is possible within the nation-state. For example, González Casanova’s re-
definition of the term internal colonialism faults forms of struggle in which “the existing correlation
of forces [is not] altered nor modified in a liberating sense that includes the disappearance of colonial
relations in the interior of the Nation-State.” See Pablo González Casanova, “Colonialismo Interno
(una redefinición),” Revista Rebeldía 12, 2003, www.revistarebeldia.org/revistas/012/art06.html 3;
Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the
South 1.3 (2000): 533–80; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Pachakuti: The Historical Horizons of Internal
Colonialism,” published in NACLA as “Aymara Past, Aymara Future,” NACLA 25.3 (1991): 18–23.
10. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigene-
ity,” Lateral 5.1 (2016): 1, csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-
enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/.
11 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism.
12. Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation,” Journal of
Palestine Studies 42.2 (2013): 26–42.
13. Originally annexed to the Mexican Empire at Independence in 1821, the Republic of Central America
separated two years later.
14. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). See also Wolfe, Traces of History, 10.
15. Patrick Wolfe and David Lloyd, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial
Studies 1.2 (2015): 1.