Discover the Story of the Uru Communities

Fluid Identities:
Political Hydrohistory of the Urus of Lake Poopó

Michael Salama

For inquiries, reach the author at michaelsalama19@gmail.com

Abstract

The Nación Originaria Uru encompasses the indigenous communities of the Titicaca/Desaguadero/Poopó/Salares aquatic axis of the Bolivian altiplano. The Uru communities of Lake Poopó traditionally lived on floating islands of totora reeds, their way of life deeply intertwined with the hydrological resources of the lake, upon which they historically relied for subsistence fishing and hunting. However, various hydrological factors contribute to the intermittent drying of Lake Poopó, resulting in ecological degradation, loss of livelihoods for the Uru communities, and ultimately acculturation. Despite international attention to their plight, media coverage often oversimplifies the complex historical and environmental contexts of these crises, the most severe of which has been occurring since 2015. This study explores the sociopolitical status of the Uru people, who have been marginalized and excluded from political and cultural hegemony since well before the Spanish conquest, by combining close examination of colonial records and Uru oral traditions. Through investigation of Uru exclusion from pre-Hispanic tribute systems, forced assimilation through conversion in the colonial era, and a land-use regime shaped by political and hydrological power structures, this paper argues that environmental determinism was not as substantial a contributing factor to modern Uru vulnerabilities as were material socioeconomic impositions by ruling hegemonies.

Contents

I. Writing Uru Myth and Materiality

1.1 People of the Lake
1.2 Overview of TDPS Political Hydrology
1.3 Existing Literature
1.4 Uru Subalternity

II. Inca Exclusion and Spanish Conquest

2.1 Inca Reciprocity and the Systemic Marginalization of Non-Agriculturalists
2.2 Early European Encounters with Urus
2.3 Adoption of Inca Perceptions in the Colonial Period

III. Tribute and Acculturation in the Colonial Era

3.1 Spanish Tribute and the Materialization of Inherited Hierarchies
3.2 Ethnic Classification in Tribute Brackets
3.3 Shortcomings of Census Data for Understanding Uru Aymarization

IV. Uru Perspectives on Hegemony and Assimilation

4.1 Tracing Uru Perceptions of Social Change Through Oral Tradition
4.2 Baptism as the Genesis of State Incorporation
4.3 Folkloric Depictions of Qot’zuñi Relationships to Landed Society

V. Leaving Lake Poopó

VI. Notes

I. Writing Uru Myth and Materiality

“Somos netamente del lago,” Evarista Quispe told me without looking up from the braided threads of straw she held in her hand, as she sat on the side of the only street that ran through her town of Puñaka Tinta María. We are purely of the lake. She leaned back against the dusty, chest-high wall of stone and adobe that separated her house from the road and continued to interlace threads into what would eventually become a wide-brimmed hat. The street stretched only about 300 meters and served the 30 homes of the small village in which she had grown up, between the beige foothills of the Andes Mountains and the embankment where the Desaguadero River Delta flowed into Lake Poopó, the second-largest lake in Bolivia. But today the air was cold and dry, and there was not a drop of water in sight; hardly anyone could be found in the village at all. There was no embankment, no Desaguadero Delta, and no Lake Poopó—there hadn’t been for nearly a decade. 

Instead, Puñaka Tinta María sat on the edge of a 3,000-square-kilometer bed of chalky coipa, the Andean term for salty white earth left behind when water evaporates.1 Gusts of wind from the nearby 4500-meter ridges kicked up dusty squalls over the countless dilapidated fishing boats that once belonged to the Uru communities of Lake Poopó, and which now dotted the dry lakebed. Between the village's empty homes and the barren, windswept puna, an ominous field of iron crosses and weathered headstones outnumbered the handful of families that remained in the town. I couldn’t help but notice the silence. “Just as our ancestors told us,” Evarista said, finally breaking it. “We are qot’zuñis. People of the lake.”

***

People of the Lake

The Nación Originaria Uru is an officially recognized indigenous nation in the Republic of Bolivia, and its communities are native to the water-locked altiplano plateau that stretches across southern Peru, western Bolivia, and northeastern Chile.  Historically living on artificial islands of totora reeds in the lakes and rivers that make up the watery axis of the Titicaca/Desaguadero/Poopó/Salares endorheic basin (hereafter TDPS), the Uru are now settled in three primary zones: in Peru, on the western coast of Lake Titicaca near the city of Puno, and in Bolivia, in the municipality of Chipaya north of the Coipasa Salt Flat and on the eastern banks of Lake Poopó and the Desaguadero River.2 The communities of Lake Poopó, who used to identify as Uru-Moratos, now self-classify as the Tres Comunidades Uru del Lago Poopó (“the three Uru communities of Lake Poopó”), encompassing the villages of Puñaka Tinta  María, Vilañeque, and Llapallapani.3 These three localities, whose historical marginalization is explored throughout this thesis, are the only remaining subset of the Uru nation that had continued to rely predominantly  on the hydrological resources of Lake Poopó for subsistence into the twenty-first century.4

The partially saline Lake Poopó historically averaged about 1.5 meters in depth and up to 3,000 square kilometers in surface area, spanning seven provinces in the Bolivian department of Oruro in the central-southern altiplano. In part due to the extreme climatic conditions of the region and its distinct hydrological properties, the lake is particularly prone to seasonal and long-term variations in water levels.  Years of strong El Niño events, such as in 1983, 1997, and 2016, have corresponded directly with significant declines in water levels of the Poopó basin.5 The intensities of El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomena are expected to increase in the future as a result of climate change.6 Moreover, the effects of long-term trends of warming and drying climatic conditions in the altiplano have been seriously exacerbated by increasingly intense and unregulated water use in the region to meet a growing global demand for the department’s major outputs: quinoa and tin.7

In December 2015, the city of Oruro made a declaration that Lake Poopó had “disappeared,” triggering a global flood of popular media stories about the region and its people as direct victims of climate change.8 The extreme landscape of the altiplano provided a powerful and dramatic visual of fishing boats stranded in a desert that was once a thriving aquatic ecosystem; at the same time, the challenges currently faced by the three Uru communities of Lake Poopó, who depended on the lake for subsistence and,  increasingly, the sale of fish in the local markets, provided a flagship conduit for journalists and global environmental activists to tell an emotional story of both ecological and cultural loss. The sensationalism of its coverage, in this vein, can be seen in the headlines; a 2016 piece in The Guardian entitled “Bolivia’s second-largest lake dries up and may be gone forever, lost to climate change” begins by painting a bleak picture of dead birds and overturned boats (not unlike the one that starts this paper) before quoting a German glaciologist to say, “This is a picture of the future of climate change.”9 The New York Times published a piece about Lake Poopó and its three Uru communities later that year, entitled “Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity.” It began with the same somber lede about dead birds and overturned boats, stating that the Uru-Morato people joined “a new global march of refugees fleeing not war or persecution, but climate change.”10 The international narrative was clear and consistent: the Urus were a fishing society that, because of climate-change-induced drought, were being deprived of their way of life. In this regard, the international attention to Puñaka Tinta María, Vilañeque, and Llapallapani has largely overlooked the lengthy history of the Uru indigenous nation and their cultural dependence on the aquatic ecosystems of the TDPS endorheic basin. The framing of the lake’s dryness as a “disappearance” is, to begin with, an oversimplification of the long-term degradation of its hydrologic resources that has persisted since the introduction of industrial tin and rare earth metal mining in the Andean foothills of the Cordillera Central.11

Overview of TDPS Political Hydrology

The altiplano’s nature as an endorheic basin is its defining hydrogeologic characteristic, heavily shaping the ecological, climatic, anthropological, and political history of the region.12 Endorheic basins are landlocked hydrological systems that occur in predominantly arid and semi-arid climate zones, meaning that they are particularly susceptible to changes in water levels and precipitation, and that there is no outflow of contaminants that enter the system.13 As the collection of the regional watershed, therefore, the TDPS basin is the ecological backbone of the otherwise desert landscape. Lake Titicaca, with a surface area of 8,400 square kilometers, is the largest lake in South America by both area and volume, and its hydrological basin accounts for 39% of the TDPS system.14 The Desaguadero River is the primary riverine outlet of Lake Titicaca and its connection to the Lake Poopó basin. Most years, Lake Poopó acts as a terminus of the TDPS basin’s catchment, historically covering up to 3,000 square kilometers in surface area; in exceptionally wet years, the Laq’a Jawira (Lacajahuira) River connects Lake Poopó to the Coipasa Salt Flat, although this is very infrequent. For this reason, Lake Poopó is the location of the basin’s salt, sediment, and chemical accumulation.15

Lake Poopó’s primary input is the southward-flowing Desaguadero River, a historically deep and quickly-moving waterway connecting it to Lake Titicaca.16 The Desaguadero also constitutes the vast majority of outflow from Lake Titicaca, and as a result there is a significant relationship between the water levels of Titicaca and Poopó.17 A number of regional streams also contribute to the water level of Poopó, such as the Juchusuma, Pazña, Poopó, Antequera, and Huanuni Rivers; these rivers flow westward from the mineral-rich foothills of the Cordillera Central, a subrange of the Andes Mountains that compromises the Bolivian “tin belt” due to its high concentration of tin, silver, and other metals.18 Yet, these regional streamflows are highly seasonal, as precipitation strictly occurs between the months of November and April; moreover, extensive mining operations pollute and divert the headwaters of these rivers excessively, contributing immensely to the degradation of Poopó’s hydrological resources.19

Seasonal precipitation in the Poopó watershed of the altiplano has been closely monitored since the 1980s, and is a major contributor to Lake Poopó’s water levels through the aforementioned mountain runoff streams. In the altiplano, precipitation variability is the result of warming in the Austral summer, during which moisture as upper-tropospheric cyclones flows from the humid, tropical center of the South American continent into the altiplano region; in the twentieth-century Poopó basin, mean annual rainfall was approximately 350 millimeters, ranging from 270 to 420 millimeters between the lake’s northernmost and southernmost extremes. Precipitation patterns are also related to the effects of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon, and, although this relationship is not entirely understood by climatologists, it is clear that El Niño years result in precipitation levels in the altiplano that are below average, while La Niña years result in above-average levels; with some exceptions, this trend is strongest in the southern altiplano, which includes the Poopó region.20 Years of strong El Niño events, such as in 1997-1998 and 2014-2016, have resulted in significant declines in water levels of the Poopó basin, which has led to mass fish die-offs and, in 2015, the complete drying-out of the lake.21 The intensities of El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomena are expected to increase in the future as a result of climate change; moreover, the altiplano, like dry regions across the globe, is experiencing a long-term trend of drying.22

1992 - Photo taken by Victor Zabaleta, showing a healthy level of water.23

2023 - Photo taken by Michael Salama, nearing the end of an 8-year period of extreme drought.

2024 - Photo by Teodoro Blanco Mollo, following summer rains that brought back just a few centimeters of runoff water into the lake.

Apart from the natural and ecosystemic significance of the TDPS basin, its aquatic resources form what cultural geographers refer to as a ‘watery axis’ of societal epicenters, which have sustained human civilization in the altiplano for millennia.24 Lake Titicaca and the Desaguadero River served as the cradle in which agriculture in the altiplano developed, and were likely home to the first population centers of complex, organized civilization in the region.25 Humans began to inhabit the TDPS basin roughly 10 thousand years ago; macro-environmental changes in precipitation, lake levels, and subsequently soil fertility gradually led to the advent of agropastoralist practices in the surroundings of Lake Titicaca.27 Throughout the development of the Tiwanaku Empire and other predecessors to the Inca Empire, the regional dependence on the TDPS’s aquatic resources transitioned towards a far more controlled hydrological regime, with irrigation projects providing water to otherwise dry regions of the altiplano.

The origins of the Uru people remains unknown to scholars of the altiplano region; the fluid movement of their pre-Hispanic societies across the TDPS basin, as well as their non-permanent dwellings built from totora reeds in the lakes and rivers, has left no evidence as to the origins of Uru societies. The political organization of the Uru communities externally has shifted substantially throughout history, and consequent inconsistencies in jurisdictional assignment have stemmed largely from their territorial claim to bodies of water rather than to terrestrial boundaries. At the time of Spanish conquest, the Urus of Lake Poopó and the Desaguadero were classified by outsiders as distinct subsets of the larger Uru family: the Iru Itu and Villivilli people.27 The former inhabited the waters of the central and southern Desaguadero until its discharge into Lake Poopó, while the latter lived on the eastern half of the lake itself. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, droughts and food insecurity forced the Villivillis, at this point called Uru-Moratos, to establish numerous partial settlements on Aymara-controlled dry land, eventually consolidating into three communities.28 At present, the Three Uru Communities of Lake Poopó are governed by local corregidores and authorities, who make village-level decisions and resolve conflicts between community members. The three communities are unified by a congress of authorities, wherein delegates including the corregidores of each village and heads of households convene to make decisions regarding issues that affect the three communities at large, which is directed by the annually rotated mallku qotamallku being the Aymara word for “leader,” and qota being the Uru word for “lake.”29

Existing Literature

There is no dearth of scholarly historical research that investigates the history of the Uru people in the TDPS basin. Barring novel archaeological evidence that may illuminate the unknown timeline of early social development of the region, the existing historiographic literature about the Uru social and economic structures, as well as their role in the political hydrology of the region, has all but exhausted the conventional primary sources for understanding Uru history.30 The scholarship has been developed for decades by cultural and historical anthropologists; the initial ethnographic and ethnolinguistic fieldwork conducted by Uhle, La Barre, Potziniak, and Vellard in the early twentieth-century served as a foundational introduction, though an undeniably orientalist one, of the Uru-Morato and Uru-Chipaya cultures to Western social academia.31 These early anthropological encounters were cursory observations of Uru lacustrine culture, and they were later built upon substantially by the extensive archival research of Wachtel, Murra, Browman, and others who provided far more in-depth historical background of Uru social history and societal development throughout the late Inca and early Spanish Andean context. Nathan Wachtel, the French historical anthropologist, wrote the most extensive histories of the Uru people of Bolivia; though his ethnographic fieldwork focused on the sedentary and agrarian Uru-Chipaya subset west of Lake Poopó, Wachtel’s archival research and analysis of Spanish colonial census data from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have illuminated and quantified Uru acculturation and assimilation, both to Spanish social hegemony and to pre-existing hierarchies within the indigenous world.32

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Urus of Lake Poopó have become a frequent object of study. The 2006 election of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous-born president, as well as the widely-publicized Water War of Cochabamba in 2000, the 2015 declaration of Lake Poopó’s disappearance, and the recent expansion of lithium extraction in the southern altiplano have all brought international attention to the region. And yet, despite an abundance of literature and journalistic accounts about current challenges with water quality and access, environmental justice, and indigenous rights, there is little that sufficiently traces historical marginalization of the Uru in a way that adequately contextualizes their present-day socioeconomic vulnerability to changes in landscape and hydrology. Current analyses lack the longevity of historical perspectives on environmental factors like mining, resource extraction, diversion, and drought.33

Uru Subalternity

This thesis traces the historical roots of present-day vulnerabilities of the Uru communities of Lake Poopó. It explores their centuries-long status as a dually marginalized people: first by the Incas and, from the sixteenth century onward, also by the Spanish Empire, both of whom depreciated the Uru reliance on the TDPS hydrological basin. The term subaltern is one that carries great weight, as well as controversy, in the realm of postcolonial thought. After the popularity of “history from below” in the mid-twentieth century, the development of a postcolonial approach to South Asian history has been rife with theoretical and methodological division.34 Studies of the subaltern emerged from the myriad ethnic and social caste distinctions of the Indian subcontinent throughout the colonial and postcolonial period. At the time of British colonial rule, the Dalit caste, widely regarded as the prototype of Antonio Gramsci’s subaltern and the paradigmatic case upon which the subaltern studies movement was founded, had been long excluded from the Hindu varna hierarchy, marginalized, and almost entirely robbed of all historical agency.35 I posit that the modern-day economic plight of the Uru people of Lake Poopó, much like that of the Dalits of modern India, has roots in a comparable caste-like ostracization of lacustrine Urus throughout the altiplano’s history. 

Several scholars of postcolonial Bolivia have used the term subaltern to describe the social status of the Urus since the time of Spanish conquest, as they were largely excluded from the cultural and political hegemony in the colonial and Republican contexts.36 This paper seeks to further trace the subalternity of the Uru people, which was undeniably tied to their direct historical reliance on the TDPS hydrological basin, in the premodern context as well. Not only were the Urus excluded from the Spanish imperial hierarchy—they were equally, if not more severely, excluded from the preceding Inca imperial hierarchy as well. 

As it is applied to the post-colonial Latin American context, the subaltern studies framework “aims to be a radical critique of elite cultures, of liberal, bourgeois, and modern epistemologies and projects, and of their different propositions regarding representation of the subaltern,” at least in the view of Latin American subaltern studies scholar Ileana Rodriguez.37 Few critics within the Latin American Subaltern Studies movement have interpreted a subaltern paradigm to have existed entirely within the indigenous world; that is, in the premodern context. And yet, just as the South Asian subaltern studies movement did not, and could not, claim universal validity of its theoretical framework, the study of the subaltern in Latin America must be flexed to consider such a potentiality.38 Due to the rigid ethnic and political boundaries that characterized the histories of both the Inca and Spanish Empires, produced by expansive political control and the rigorous extraction of capital from their subjects, I posit that the subaltern studies approach is valuable when considering the social and political positions of the Urus of Lake Poopó for the past half-millennium. 

As qot’zuñi, or “people of the lake,” the Uru have left little historical evidence of their more distant history, and therefore an understanding of their historical agency is limited to conjecture. Uru dwellings were impermanent, made of totora reeds and straw, leaving little archaeological record; their modes of production were primarily subsistence farming and fishing, and little infrastructure was developed to give insight into early ways of life; they did not have a written language, leaving no transcribed documentation of their history in the TDPS basin. These facts, while certainly contributing to the mystery regarding Uru origins and more distant pasts, would not alone qualify the Uru as subaltern, as a lack of written history is ubiquitous across the pre-Hispanic Andean region. However, Spanish colonial observations and records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depict a clear exclusion of the Urus from the hierarchical system organized by the imperial regimes. As will be explored in depth throughout this paper, the Uru lacustrine way of life placed them outside of the Inca reciprocal structure of agricultural goods and infrastructure development, and outside of the tributary system of labor provision. As such, the Inca and the subsequent Spanish conquerors, who usurped the existing hierarchy and placed yet a new cultural and political hegemony upon it, had developed a system of extracting human capital and raw materials from their subjects, and had thoroughly marginalized the Urus within this system. This exclusion from the cultural and sociopolitical hegemonies, by both the Inca and the Spanish empires, constitutes the Uru as a subaltern group until the twentieth century, when a gradual transition to land-based lifestyle saw their collective incorporation into regional hegemony. 

In attempting to concretize Uru experiences of an era during which written documents were not produced, this paper draws upon both conventional and unconventional sources, including Spanish colonial records and Uru oral traditions. Section II, through analysis of early colonial documentation of Inca-era political economy, will explore the earliest roots of Uru marginalization tied to their centuries-long dependence on the TDPS hydrology; it will use early colonial-era accounts to provide important snapshots of encounters between the Spanish and the Uru that offer momentary glimpses into qot’zuñi living conditions across the TDPS region. Section III will deconstruct the transition from Inca-era to Spanish colonial tribute structure, illuminating the ways that shifting political and economic treatment of the Uru under the Spanish led to acculturation of lacustrine ways of life, corroborating these phenomena with demographic census data. The limitations of these colonial sources are substantial; even the most sympathetic and in-depth accounts authored by European explorers and missionaries give little insight into Uru perspectives, historical conditions, or the impact of political hydrology on their broader status in the altiplano, if at all. Such early-modern accounts, census data, and archives must be combed through to uncover brief and passing mentions of Lake Poopó (at times referred to as Paria or Pampa Aullagas) in order to identify potential windows into Uru exclusion and subalternity in the Spanish and pre-Hispanic contexts.39 Thus, Section IV will engage primarily with Uru-produced oral histories and traditional folklore in order to deal directly with subaltern perspectives on historical events. Although these oral traditions are passed through generations, and often refer to nebulous, broad-stroke trends with unclear chronology, they still provide valuable understanding of Uru communal dealings with the dry society (“el seco”). By cross-referencing against-the-grain readings of colonial texts with close analyses of Uru oral traditions, this thesis argues that environmental determinism was not as substantial a contributing factor to modern Uru vulnerabilities as were material socioeconomic impositions by ruling hegemonies. Although the hydrological conditions of the TDPS basin played an unquestionable role in shaping Uru experiences throughout history, their vulnerability to changes in hydrology, such as drought and contamination, have been more greatly impacted by political and socioeconomic constructions than the inverse.

The people identified by the term Uru were and continue to be connected culturally, geographically, and economically to the hydrologic conditions of the TDPS basin; throughout the various domineering forces that existed in the region, some simultaneously and others in succession, the Uru role as a peripheral, marginalized subaltern was a continuous product of their collective reliance on the river and lake ecosystems. To an extent, the inverse is also true, as living on the water was a deliberate method of state avoidance and the evasion of submission to the landed political and cultural hegemony. While environmental determinism played a clear role in the development of a socioeconomic hierarchy that placed the lake-dwelling Urus on the lowest rung, the geographic isolation of lake-based living meant that Urus intentionally avoided incorporation into the regional status quo. The Spanish colonial administration began to interact with Uru communities, demanding tribute, taking census, and converting them to Catholicism, and extractive industry eventually expanded in the tin belt of the Cordillera Oriental as the primary means of production by the twentieth century. The subsequent degradation of the TDPS’s hydrologic resources further marginalized the lake-dependent Urus of Lake Poopó, and they found socioeconomic stability only by complete incorporation into regional economies.

II. Inca Exclusion and Spanish Conquest

This section will consider the centuries-long history of the Uru cultural and sociopolitical standing, through the Inca-era political hydrology of the altiplano region into the early Spanish colonial period. Historically, the Uru were exclusively lacustrine during times of adequate water resources, and the terms Uru and qot’zuñi (as well as josh’uns in the northern stretches of Uru domain) were definitionally interchangeable. The origins of lacustrine Uru society are unclear, as archaeological evidence in the TDPS basin is sparse and written records were not kept, although the observations of European colonial record-keepers, missionaries, naturalists, and conquistadors provide a consistent narrative of Uru exclusion and subjugation within the premodern altiplano. From even these earliest depictions of Urus in relation to their Aymara neighbors, it becomes evident that the hydrosocial dependence on the fluvial TDPS ecosystem fostered a social stratification in which the Urus were excluded from the social hierarchy and marginalized by the dominant groups. 

Though the ruling societies in question—the Inca and their predecessors, and the Spanish colonial administration—were decidedly precapitalistic during these centuries, capital accumulation and wealth relations with the state were integral to the position of the Uru people within landed hierarchies. A broad understanding of their structural organization may suggest that these epochs of governance in the altiplano were vastly distinct from one another, yet the persistence of tributary structures, regional forms of land use, and hierarchical control between each of these periods meant that Uru quotidian realities, as well as their subaltern position, maintained certain consistencies, although with notable exceptions.40  Thus, this section chronologically outlines the ways that Uru political and economic categorizations were persistently tied to their lack of capital for the state economy during the colonial transition of the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries. The Inca tributary demands for corvée and agricultural products excluded the Uru almost entirely, leaving them out of reciprocal infrastructural investments and leading to a deeply pejorative view of their lacustrine culture and societal form. Upon Spanish conquest, these pejorative conceptions of the Uru—that they were worthless and ignorant laborers, and that they were less capable members of society than Aymara or Quechua counterparts—carried over into the colonial era and continue to affect the remaining Uru communities to this day.

***

Inca Reciprocity and the Systemic Marginalization of Non-Agriculturalists 

Presently, the remaining members of the Uru nation who continue to identify as qot’zuñis hold the collective understanding that their ancestors had been persecuted and marginalized by the Incan Empire and its dominating ethnic groups since well before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors.41 Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, oral histories and ethnographic interviews with Uru elders have pointed to long-standing historical “discrimination against [their] abuelos by the Aymara neighbors” as one of the primary roots of modern-day economic despair and cultural dissimilarity.42 Wachtel and other scholars of Uru social standing during the Incan and early Spanish colonial eras have sought to substantiate these claims through data-grounded conjecture about demographic changes and social hierarchies.43 To objectively hypothesize whether the Uru condition of extreme poverty and outcastedness, and the pejorative view that Spaniards held of them as a result, was inherited from preexisting marginalization within the indigenous world, a material analysis of Inca-era economic priorities that shaped agrarian hierarchies in the altiplano is required. 

Due to erratic precipitation patterns and the nature of the endorheic basin as a contained regional water supply, rural societies of the Bolivian altiplano have long depended directly on the hydrological resources of the TDPS system to sustain their water needs for consumption, domestic use, agricultural irrigation systems, and the sustenance of livestock. At present, approximately fifty percent of the altiplano’s rural population employs traditional farming or pastoral methods for subsistence and sale of foodstuffs in local marketplaces.44 Prior to the modern industrialization of mineral extraction from the altiplano’s tin-belt mountains, which now dominates and connects regional economies, direct dependence of altiplano communities on agriculture and animal husbandry was far greater.45 The watery axis of the TDPS basin was, therefore, a crucial environmental determinant of societal viability in the dry parts of the altiplano. Subsistence crops, such as potatoes and other tubers, do not require the same quantities of water as market crops, like quinoa, maize, and domesticated herbs. Throughout the Inca Empire and its immediate predecessors, a top-down emphasis was placed on agricultural production in the empire’s hinterland regions of the altiplano in order to ensure an interconnected regime of food production.46

Two contrasting models of pre-Hispanic agroeconomic organization dominate the historical hypotheses about modes of production in the altiplano: John Murra’s 1975 theory of the Incan “vertical archipelago” model, and David Browman’s alternative “altiplano mode,” first put forth in 1981. The former theory emphasizes the irreconcilable diversity of ecological floors, or elevation-based ecozones that had highly differing conditions for agricultural political economies, which required a vertical integration of production in each of these ecozones by a central imperial administration in order to produce surplus necessary to sustain the growth of the empire. In contrast, Browman’s altiplano mode theory speculates that the development of pre-Hispanic society depended on horizontal rather than vertical organization; dispersed settlements in the rural altiplano were interconnected via horizontal networks of exchange within the same ecoregion.47 At the center of Browman’s theory, therefore, is the significance of intercommunity social relations, whereas Murra’s places far greater emphasis on environmental determinism through ecological zones across the vast Inca Empire. Both theories rely on the assumption that the climatic and soil conditions of the altiplano cannot facilitate strictly subsistence agricultural production, and consequently claim that collective irrigation and calculated resource management was crucial to the continuity of this widespread reliance on the altiplano’s hydrology for food and economic security across various imperial institutions and ethnocultural divisions. Murra and his subsequent interlocutors have argued that predominantly Quechua and Aymara populations, along with ethnic minorities, practiced intensive agriculture throughout the region in order to meet the colonial demands of the mitmaq, the Incan administrative leader responsible for extracting surplus maize and sumptuary agricultural goods to urban population centers.48 In turn, the Incan system of agricultural production had substantive implications on water demand in the rural altiplano. Unlike in low-lying agriculture, irrigation is required in high-elevation maize cultivation; Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1609 that “not a single grain of maize was planted without irrigation” in the Incan altiplano.49 As such, water was shared as a collective resource, distributed communally through imperially-decreed and locally-managed systems of channels, ditches, and diversions to serve the irrigation needs of the altiplano.50 Archaeological evidence suggests that a number of these methods of vertical agro-economic organization employed by the Inca Empire—connecting regions of agropastoral production to regional population centers through roadways and water channels—may date back to the preceding Tiwanaku Empire and Aymara kingdoms.51

The Inca placed extremely high importance on the production of maize and in turn facilitated its cultivation, which resulted in specific state interest to expand the irrigational capacity of the altiplano. The development of a powerful imperial state depended directly on the peasantry’s ability to produce surplus that could sustain growing urban centers; while frost-resistant Andean tubers (such as potatoes) were the native crops of the region, whose yearly production levels served as indicators of food security, maize was the imperial administration’s preferred crop.52 The production of maize was encouraged by the empire due to its long-term storage properties, which made it ideal for urban stockpiling; early colonial chroniclers surmised that the Inca military forces were sustained with corn as well, indicated by the contents of food supply warehouses at the time of Spanish conquest. Various vegetables and roots were stockpiled, such as potatoes and other tubers, but maize constituted a disproportionate quantity of surplus crops.53 Still, the cultivation of non-maize crops, primarily potatoes, in the Andes and altiplano regions was extremely common during the pre-Hispanic era, used by local communities as core staples of the basic diet. 

Inca authorities demanded maize and sumptuary products—coca, pepper, and cotton—as tribute from agrarian communities, and, in order to stimulate their production, public works projects to expand irrigation infrastructure were often undertaken by the kings of the Inca Empire. Local lords and chieftains could not afford to build long-distance arterial canals, and consequently this task was sponsored by the empire, which then oversaw maintenance and distribution of water resources and the settling of water-related disputes in local and state-owned lands.54 The presence of Inca-era irrigation systems across the empire’s territory is associated with state-owned and state-managed agricultural lands, such as those that were terraced through imperial order.55 Whether systems of agricultural integration were vertical or horizontal, the Inca system of tribute and agrarian extraction was based on a system of reciprocity and economic codependency, and this led to a social structure in which material imperial resources were expended to bolster regions and communities that provided for the empire. Agriculture was a means of economic integration and reciprocity within the empire, such that the organization of islands of agrarian productivity, highly dependent on hydrological factors, put an imperial force behind communal water management and irrigation infrastructure. Communal water use for agriculturalists was built into the altiplano’s vertical economic organization for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish, as the Inca were known to construct canals in productive lands, whether or not they were under partial or complete state control.56

In lands that were not suitable for surplus food production, local reliance on agriculture was still a requisite for participation in the Incan tribute structure, and a method of political engagement with the imperial system. Apart from vertically-integrated collections of maize and other foodstuffs from the rural altiplano, the Inca demanded corvée labor from newly conquered communities with the objective of integrating them within the imperial political system. This system, too, was reciprocal: in order to normalize the extractive and dominant relationship between the empire and its subjects, the Inca allowed communities to retain control over only the agricultural lands necessary to remain self-sufficient in exchange for the provision of physical services to the Empire. Thus, the peoples conquered by the Inca Empire needed to directly control their own agricultural lands in order to partake in the reciprocal corvée tribute system; the empire effectively conquered these croplands and “leased” them back in exchange for labor services. These services primarily took three forms: agricultural labor on state-controlled lands, military conscription, and the weaving of wool. In order to be effective laborers for the state, the Inca considered prior knowledge of agricultural production and, in the case of weaving, access to camelids like vicuña, llama, or alpaca to be a prerequisite for conscripted workers.57

This paradigm served as the basis for Uru exclusion from Inca-era sociopolitical organization. If agriculture was another method of integrating imperial subjects into the Incan economic and cultural system, then it placed those who did not practice agriculture on the outskirts of that already hierarchical system. In essence, these agrarian communities were already marginalized and forced to be subservient agricultural laborers for the empire, but those who did not practice agriculture or pastoralism were excluded entirely from the model of subservience. The Urus would have fallen into this category. As hunters and fisherpeople, the Urus were neither pastoralists nor agriculturalists; they possessed neither the capital in land nor the capital in labor to engage in the reciprocal tribute system that the Incas implemented. In years of low water levels, when the Uru communities’ inability to be self-sufficient through lacustrine production led them to seek other forms of subsistence, the obstacles to capital accumulation remained. Sixteenth-century Spanish accounts depict interactions with Uru-identifying families who worked as laborers on Aymara land, herding livestock and sowing crops for local lords, yet records of Uru families controlling substantial land or agricultural surplus production before the nineteenth century are few and far between.58 Among the modern Uru communities, there is a continued contempt for Aymara control over the arable pampa that surrounds lake Poopó—a control that often led to agricultural subservience to regional landlords who controlled land and resource capital during times of drought.

With few resources to verify present-day claims of historical marginalization, however, one must consult the earliest available written chronologies of Incan socioeconomic stratification. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Italian historian and Jesuit priest Giovanni Anello Oliva compiled the landmark work of colonial historiography about the Incan empire in his Historia del reino y provincias del Perú, de sus Incas reyes, descubrimiento y conquista por los españoles de la corona de Castilla, con otras singularidades concernientes á la historia. Unpublished until the late-nineteenth century, Oliva’s manuscript outlines the various reigns of leadership in the Inca Empire, and includes crucial information about the sociopolitical status of lake-dwelling Uru in the altiplano prior to Spanish conquest. Writing about King Sinchi Roca-Inca, the pre-Incan dynastic ruler of the Kingdom of Cusco who established agricultural and infrastructural development programs in the mid-13th century, Oliva described the census data collected by the king, citing that he gathered demographic data “with the intention of knowing about all his provinces and by whom and how they were occupied, in order to impose tribute according to the quality of each one.”59 He then makes mention of the Uru and their position in the imperial tribute system: 

So that they would not be idle, [Sinchi Roca] ordered that everyone should be occupied in opening roads, clearing lakes, and building bridges over the Desaguadero River of the great Lake Titicaca, constructing buildings, sowing fields, and raising livestock, and subduing the wild and useless people, like the Uros, who were coarse and useless people in that each of them would give only a tube of lice as tribute each month, all in order so that no one would be idle.”60

Oliva’s account of the Uru payments under the Inca tribute system is revealing of their economic marginalization and cultural exclusion during the pre-colonial era. Deemed “useless” and “wild” in the context of imperial taxation, the Urus living in the TDPS endorheic basin were not participants in regional economies, and subsisted from the hydrologic resources of the Desaguadero River and Lakes Titicaca and Poopó. If the Inca Empire considered agricultural development, the construction of permanent buildings, and rearing of livestock to be economically advanced and useful for the kingdom, then the characterization of Urus as “useless” and “idle” suggests that their water-based culture and subsistence ways of life placed them on the socioeconomic periphery of the imperial system. With Incan taxation ubiquitous throughout the altiplano region, those who were unable to perform labor or pay in-kind tributes were forced to pay symbolic ones; for the Urus, according to Oliva’s manuscript, this was in the form of parasitic insects. Archaeological studies of human remains and lice combs in former Incan territory have concluded that, though they occurred in nearly every class of society, pediculosis epidemics were predominant among the lowest strata of social groups in the pre-Hispanic Andes.61 Moreover, Uru communities shared a unique cultural acceptance of body lice—a practice seen as uncivilized by the ruling Incan class—serving as further evidence of their cultural alienation from Incan society.62 The Inca administration, eager to demonstrate their authority and dominance over all of the Empire’s subjects, thus forced the Urus to pay tax in tubes of their body lice, as they were considered incapable of providing useful labor or tribute due to their lacustrine culture and inexperience in agriculture and animal husbandry.63 Although the lice, removed with artisan combs constructed from reeds, did not provide any material benefit to the Inca rulers, the payments were signals of submission to imperial dominance; even with no labor or foodstuffs to provide, the Uru were still required to give what little they had to the Inca. Although no direct archaeological evidence of lice tubes or combs has been uncovered among Uru territories in Lake Poopó, such evidence has been unearthed in other historically marginalized and rural communities in the altiplano; moreover, there has been a lack of archaeological excavation of the aquatic territories of the TDPS.64

Concurrent accounts of Uru marginalization and the Inca tribute system suggest that Oliva’s claims about the Uru standing in the pre-Hispanic empire are likely accurate. Yet, his work of historiography must also be read as a primary source; it may well serve as a reflection of seventeenth century European colonial perspectives on contemporary New World societies as much as an accurate piece of historical scholarship. The account of Uru people as “wild” and “coarse” claims to document centuries-old Inca attitudes toward lake-dwelling groups—at least as far back as the 13th century, when Sinchi Roca-Inca described the Urus as such—although it may have been influenced by Oliva’s intent to evangelize the people of the Andes with Jesuit teachings in the seventeenth century.65  Various accounts by European missionaries and conquistadors recorded that Uru communities living in the lakes and rivers of the TDPS basin did not willingly convert to Christianity at the same pace as their landed Aymara counterparts—notably, agricultural and pastoral modes of subsistence seem to have been related to faster adoption of Christian beliefs and religious practices.66 The role of religious conversion as a colonial tool for hegemonic control, and Uru perceptions of this trend, will be further explored in Section III.

Early European Encounters with Urus

One of the earliest mentions of Spanish encounters with local “Indians” who fit the modern understanding of the water-dwelling Urus was chronicled in an account by an anonymous author who accompanied conquistador Hernando Pizarro southward from Cuzco into the Cochabamba Valley in 1538. The term Uru was absent from this account of first European interaction with the Desaguadero River; indeed, no nominal identifier was used to describe the people who inhabited the lacustrine and riverine regions of the altiplano. Yet, given that the sole identifying characteristic was their adept navigation of the Desaguadero River and their tendency to utilize totora reeds for material constructions, it is likely that this is the first documented account of interaction between Europeans and the Uru-qot’zuñis of the TDPS basin. 

As the Pizarro Brothers and their Spanish forces followed the shore of Lake Titicaca, violently clashing with indigenous inhabitants, toward the central altiplano, the account references a conflict that arose between the European conquistadors and water-dwelling natives after a Spaniard was captured and killed near the Desaguadero River. “In this Desaguadero, [the natives] had a bridge made of rafts of totora, which is a kind of reed, tied together, and fearing that the Christians would come and search for them they untied it.”67 The Pizarros, eager to avenge the sacrifice of a Christian, constructed a large raft from the materials at their disposal—likely the same ones used by the Urus—and attempted to cross the Desaguadero. Upon entering the Desaguadero’s water with their quickly-assembled rafts in search of the natives, the Spanish forces were overwhelmed by the powerful current of the river; their makeshift rafts were overturned due to poor construction, or otherwise swept downstream, as the Spaniards had no working knowledge of effectively navigating the river’s currents. As the natives easily navigated across the rivers on totora rafts, launching arrows and other projectiles, they jeered victoriously at the Spanish for their apparent ineptitude when attempting to cross the river: “The enemies were so proud of this victory that they shouted out to Hernando Pizarro, asking why he did not cross.”68 The inhabitants of the TDPS basin deliberately and strategically used the Desaguadero River as a natural defense against the Spaniards. While the totora-dwelling natives possessed the culturally-relevant skills of raft building and aquatic navigation, it was clear to both parties that the Spanish forces, conversely, did not. The hydrological landscape, in this case, was not only a means of physically avoiding immediate defeat and subjugation to the colonial armies, but it served as a kind of cultural victory. The natives expressed great pride after seeing the conquistadors, as technologically and militarily advanced as they appeared, fall victim to the very ecosystem on which they themselves depended so closely. This underscores not only the cultural importance of the Desaguadero River to local collective identities, but served as a starting point for the ongoing colonial perception of the Uru people as linked culturally and materially to the hydrologic resources of the TDPS system.

This anonymously-authored account quite possibly marks the first European encounter with water-dwelling natives of the Desaguadero River. Although it does not explicitly depict the Uru people of the altiplano by name, the account closely matches the orally-recounted history of the Uru during the time of conquest, and its descriptions of natives who lived on linked totora rafts is similar to contemporaneous Spanish accounts that explicitly depict the Uru by name. José de Acosta, the Jesuit missionary who traveled the Americas documenting his observations of the natural world (in which he included indigenous people), provided one of the first descriptions of Lake Poopó, writing, “After Titicaca’s outlet river runs for another fifty leagues it forms a smaller lake; this is called Paria. It also has islands and is not known to have an outlet… I am inclined to believe that the waters of this lake evaporate by themselves due to the sun’s heat.”69 Acosta’s language, in this account as well as others, had a substantial impact on broader European perceptions of the New World; his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias was widely disseminated in the Old World. Uru leaders of the twentieth century have also described conquest-era Urus as the united families of a single indigenous group, living on linked artificial islands of totora rafts, who fought viciously against the invading Spanish forces within the waters of the Desaguadero River.70 Whether or not the natives encountered in the 1538 account were the direct ancestors of modern-day Uru people, the relevance of these encounters is clear; the Spanish perception of water-dwelling people in the altiplano at the time of first contact, regardless of their self-identification as Uru or not, denotes an undeniable link between water-dwelling natives and the TDPS hydrological regime that they inhabited. Further, it marked the first European acknowledgement of segregation between terrestrial communities and lacustrine ones in the altiplano, a distinction that would later become crucial in the development of corregimiento land hierarchies and tribute systems in the new colony of the Spanish Empire.

Adoption of Inca Perceptions in the Colonial Period

Later colonial accounts of the Uru people and their connection with the lake system appear to place particular emphasis on the socioeconomic status of lake-dwellers, and in doing so reveal a hegemonic paradigm in which the Uru material condition, tied to their lacustrine culture and modes of production, were looked upon unfavorably—even derogatorily—by those who sought to extract capital from the region. Spanish colonial writers such as Acosta, Juan Matienzo, Juan Lopez de Velasco, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and others documented the Uru ways of life, geographies, and position in society. In 1934, director of the Bolivian national archives Gunnar Mendoza Loza encountered and published an anonymously authored document from 1688 that describes the indigenous settlements in the Choro and Challacollo regions of the TDPS basin. The document gives insight into the economic, religious, and political conditions among Quechua, Aymara, and Uru families. Of the Villivilli Urus, believed to be the direct ancestors of the Uru-Moratos and the modern Urus of Lake Poopó, the author described poor living conditions and substantial economic dependence on both Aymara and Spanish landowners: “To the root of the lagoon, to the south… there are about thirty-one Indians more or less, among men, women, children, old men, and old women, very poor people, in huts like mats and reeds, called urus.”71 One of the ranking New World clergymen, Garci Diez Arias, admonished the Uru lacustrine way of life in 1567, describing them as “poor folk, who do not cultivate and live only by fishing and roaming about the lake.”72 Diez explicitly tied their status in the lowest stratum of colonial society to their lack of agricultural production, and other colonial observers did the same, Velasco writing that lacustrine Urus were “useless and idle people because they would rather prefer the fish and fowl of the lagoon.”73

The consistently-mentioned characteristic of the Uru people as impoverished among early Spanish records points not only to the lake-dwellers’ socioeconomic marginalization as a preexisting social paradigm, but also reveals that the continued perception of Urus’ inabilities to provide physical labor was adopted from the previous status quo. Acosta continued his account of the hydrological description of Lake Titicaca and the Desaguadero River, writing of the lake-dwelling inhabitants: “These Uros are so brutish that they do not even think of themselves as men. It is told of them that when asked what sort of people they were, they replied that they were not men but Uros, as if this were another species of animal.”74 Acosta’s language here is revealing; his vague and passive reference, “it is told of them,” clouds the source of information behind the generalization he makes about the Uru communities at large, and therefore suggests that he had not drawn this conclusion from direct contact with the Urus. Balthasar Ramirez also chided Uru lacustrine life with similar language, adding that, “apart from the fish, they eat whatever they can possibly steal from the people living in firm land… they are rude and coarse and almost brutish people.”75 Both Ramirez and Acosta, who published their accounts within a decade of one another, use the word “brutish” (Spanish brutales) to describe the evasive lacustrine Urus; this is perhaps indicative of a broadly-embraced social perception of Uru people that circulated through the New World colonial hegemony via secondary, tertiary, and higher degree accounts that ultimately resulted in the caricaturization of Uru culture. Regardless, the seemingly universal Spanish opinion of lacustrine Uru society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which based its deprecations on Uru lack of capital and perceived ability to produce for the growth of the imperial economy, were closely reminiscent of the Inca’s. Following the trend of early Spanish colonial encounters, the hierarchies and preconceptions that had existed within the indigenous world had carried over as the Spanish conquered and organized New World societies. Thus, the negative and disparaging language consistently used to describe the lake’s inhabitants was likely a reflection of Inca attitudes toward the Uru people.76

The term “Uru” itself carries substantial historical and linguistic significance, and is indicative of the Aymara pejorative conception of qot’zuñis. The belief held by current members of the Uru communities is that the term, imposed upon their ancestors in the TDPS, meant “worm” in the Aymara language, connoting a belief that the Urus occupied a low level in society comparable to a parasite or bottom-feeder.77 Indeed, in the first Aymara-Spanish dictionary, compiled by Italian missionary Ludovico Bertonio in 1612, the meaning of the word Uru was listed as “a nation of Indians looked down upon by all others, who are ordinarily fishermen and of less ability to understand; of whom it is said that they are dirty, ragged, coarse, Sayaguese, and rustic.”78 The Aymara definition of Uru, which was directly adopted into the Spanish lexicon, was unquestionably derogatory. Bertonio’s definition also references the relativism of Uru social status—that they were despised (originally despreciado) by other groups in the indigenous world. Much like Acosta’s detached portrayal of Urus, which suggested that his negative perceptions were appropriated from preexisting ones, Bertonio’s definition reflected the dominant Aymara beliefs about those classified as Uru that were precedent to the altiplano. Like Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Bertonio’s dictionary was read widely by Spaniards—particularly other Jesuit priests who communicated in Aymara to convert indigenous people to Catholicism.79 In this way, the adoption of pejorative Aymara views of Uru people among Spanish colonial elites is directly evident; the precedential, negative conceptions of Uru Indians were transcribed, absorbed, and disseminated among European officials to orient the development of colonial hegemony to the preexisting status quo, which undoubtedly placed Urus at the bottom of the social ladder.

Through analysis of the various accounts and records written by European colonial travelers to quantitatively and qualitatively document the existing populations of the New World, it becomes clear that the perceived inability to participate in capital exchange was the primary driver of Uru exclusion in the indigenous world. The representations of communities identified as Urus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were largely based on geographic and cultural attachment to the watery access of the TDPS endorheic basin, not least because this association limited their value in the eyes of the Inca hegemony, thus dominating Aymara perceptions of the Uru. Acosta and his contemporaries provided the first written accounts of the Uru in the altiplano region, although Uru oral history proclaims that the group has inhabited the TDPS watery access since before the arrival of Aymara people, and were the first human inhabitants of the region. Scholars agree that this claim cannot be verified.80 The question of prior occupancy in the region is part of a broader anthropological debate about the nature and categorization of people identified as Uru. 

A substantial dividing line in the historical consideration of the Uru communities is whether the word Uru constitutes an entirely distinct ethnic group or, alternatively, a political and economic categorization used by the Incas and their successors, the Spanish colonial administration, to differentiate between levels of tribute payment. As the Spanish conquest of the altiplano progressed, increased wealth extraction and systematic conversion effectively accelerated the incorporation of the Uru people, once largely excluded, into the regional socioeconomic structures. It is clear, however, that the communities who identified themselves as qot’zuñis, or “people of the lake,” were given a separate socioeconomic classification within their hegemonic structures largely because of their fundamental association with and dependence on a lacustrine way of life.

III. Tribute and Acculturation in the Colonial Era

If you stand atop the hill that overlooks the town of Puñaka Tinta María, on weekdays around lunchtime, there is a cacophony of brass and woodwinds as the primary school marching band practices by the dry bank of the Desaguadero Delta. Flutes and euphoniums echoe off of the monte to the east and across the vast lakebed to the west. Perhaps fifty school children attend the school during the day—they wear purple uniforms and buy packaged snacks from Angelica, a stern-looking Uru woman who runs a limited kiosk in the center of the village, and are excited to speak to outsiders.

Around four o’clock in the afternoon, the students put their instruments back in the anachronistic schoolhouse, its blue aluminum roof and painted plaster walls standing out among the earthen, adobe homes that surround it. They then hustle toward several gray minibuses, about a dozen at a time. Clusters of students pile into the buses in a purple tide of wide-brimmed straw hats, leaving only a handful of children remaining in Puñaka as they depart up the dusty dirt road back toward the nearby population center of Poopó. The ones who stay behind kick a football between a makeshift goal of metal posts connected with old fishing nets. In just a few minutes, Puñaka went from a bustling site of music, football, and youthful socializing to an eerily quiet, nearly deserted village. 

Only a small number of the students who attend the primary and secondary schools reside in Puñaka Tinta María and are part of the Nación Originaria Uru—the majority of the children live in Poopó or the nearby Pazña and do not identify as Urus.81 The schooling committee of the village was established in 1998 by the community members of Puñaca Tinta María, with the stated goal for the Uru children to “no longer have to travel long distances and, above all, so they are not discriminated against due to their Uru condition in the nearby towns and communities.”82 In 2012, the primary school was expanded to include secondary education to teenagers, so that the future generation of the Urus could “train to become professionals while maintaining their Uru ethnic identity.”83 The remaining community members of Puñaka (as well as Llapallapani and Vilañeque, which saw concurrent efforts to establish schoolhouses and curricula for the town’s youth) consider education not only to be a way to provide upward socioeconomic mobility to their families, but also as a means to instill greater consciousness of Uru pride and sense of belonging. The schools were intended to provide a safe and discrimination-free education experience for the children of the three communities, who were reported being bullied and disparaged by non-Uru classmates when they attended schools in Aymara and Quechua majority municipalities, like Poopó; they were often taunted with pejorative terms related to the ethnic attributes of the Uru-Morato, as “Morato” is often used to deride the darker skin of this community of Urus.84 Therefore, the schools were developed to provide Uru-specific curricula, including a revival of Pukina, the ancestral language of some remaining Uru subsets, which is no longer spoken in the three communities of Lake Poopó.85

Yet, in the past two decades, a substantial demographic change in the student attendees in the schools of the three Uru communities of Lake Poopó reflected a sizeable outflux of Uru families to the local municipalities, like Poopó, Challapata, and Huari, and to larger cities like Oruro, La Paz, Cochabamba, and even Buenos Aires, Argentina. As attendance dwindled in the Uru schools and nearby population centers expanded in size, these municipalities began to send students to the schools in Uru villages.86 What was once a haven for Uru children to learn as the majority had become an Aymara-dominated student body. The demographic shift in student backgrounds in the Puñaka schools is reminiscent of a recurring historical phenomenon in the Uru nation: that of aymarization—the process of acculturation experienced by the Uru communities as their modes of production, political affiliations, language, and economic ties became progressively integrated into existing structures among landed Aymara communities, resulting in the loss of Uru cultural traditions and identity.87 As the following sections will explore, the continual processes of aymarization among the Uru people of the TDPS basin did not start with the Spanish conquest of the altiplano. Due to the marginalization and exclusion of the Uru people within the pre-Hispanic indigenous world, the Urus remained in the lowest socioeconomic stratum of the Inca Empire, increasing their material reliance on the hydrological environment of the TDPS basin in the forms of subsistence hunting and fishing. Without community control over arable farmlands or the control of sufficient livestock, which both fueled and was exacerbated by the cycle of Inca ostracization, the material implications of this historical marginalization led to heightened vulnerability to drought and the degradation of aquatic resources; in times of limited fish and waterfowl, the Urus were forced to till Aymara lands, participate in market economies, or otherwise integrate their lifestyles and modes of production into existing regional structures.

* * *

Spanish Tribute and the Materialization of Inherited Hierarchies

Upon the collapse of the Inca Empire at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors and the immense demographic, political, and economic shift that ensued, Europeans fitted their ruling structures to preexisting sociopolitics, although they certainly leveled the hierarchical composition of altiplano society to a degree and, in doing so, accelerated the process of aymarization among Uru communities. As Aymara-Quechua ayllus became Spanish colonial corregimientos, the Inca imperial mitmaqs replaced with European-born corregidores, and regional proprietary lords in the Poopó basin became caciques, there was also an adoption of the mita tributary structure, and along with it came the norms of tributary impositions.88 Thus, Uru exclusion from the reciprocal labor and agricultural structures of the Inca Empire, which undoubtedly placed them at the margins of imperial society within the indigenous world, was initially carried over into the colonial Spanish administration as a result of their persisting lack of capital in land, labor, and surplus. The many early Spanish accounts that emphasized the impoverished conditions of Uru people and their perceived unfitness for labor strongly suggest that the colonial administration adopted the Inca-era perspective that water-dwelling people existed outside of—even below—the tributary hierarchy that gave material and political agency to various ethnic groups in the altiplano.89 Just as many of the pre-Hispanic regimes ostracized Uru people for their lack of tributary labor provisions, instead demanding payments of tubes of lice, the Spanish also created distinct brackets of socioeconomic strata when levying tribute payments, but in doing so they slowly incorporated the Uru group into taxable status within the economic colonial hegemony. Crucially, the Spanish quickly shifted away from their upholding of Uru exclusion from tribute systems and eventually dispelled with the perception that Urus were not fit for labor, eventually conscripting them for work in mineral mining and enforcing taxation policies that were customized to the conditions and abilities of each Uru community. 

Even as the Spanish colonial administration sought to establish a new, more robust and objective structure of colonial extraction from its native subjects, the lingering organizational influences of the preceding Inca system were evident. The regional boundaries that delineated taxation provinces, for instance, were carried over directly from the Inca into the Spanish tributary systems in the mid-sixteenth century. The Inca magistrates, or kurakas, had established these boundaries via census information collected by their imperial administration prior to Spanish conquest, also for the purposes of tribute collection. Although administrative documents from the colonial era do not specifically cite a direct borrowing of these geographic partitions, Catherine J. Julien, a historian of Uru tributary shifts during the colonial transition, notes that the maps created by pre-Hispanic kurakas closely match those which the Spanish administration in the 1570s used for recruiting laborers to silver mines in Potosí.90  Yet, as the Spanish colonial administration permeated into the furthest reaches of the altiplano, interacting with and gaining more nuanced understanding of the material conditions of native subjects, their colonial tributary system became decidedly more commodified than the preceding one. Despite the clear traces of the Inca tribute structure in the colonial system, the exact methods of capital extraction from colonial subjects did indeed deviate significantly thereafter, becoming more objective in its taxation. 

Much like the Inca had, at times, pressured Uru lacustrine communities to move to dry land in order to produce exploitable capital, the Spanish had continued and greatly accelerated this policy in the colonial era. Pedro de Mercado de Peñalosa y Ronquillo wrote near the turn of the seventeenth century that “when the Inca came conquering this province of the Pacaxes, they made these Uru, who were close to the water, leave [the water] and made them live with the Aymara and taught them to plough and cultivate the earth and they forced them to pay tribute in fish and make cases of straw.”91 Indeed, the Spanish empire’s desire to extract value from all of its subjects led to a concerted effort within the colonial administration to further Uru assimilation into hegemonic systems of economic production, which in turn led to the suppression and acculturation of lacustrine ways of life.

In the Spanish colonial tribute system, three forms of payments were required of indigenous subjects, but tributary standards were distinctly lower for Uru individuals. Payments in kind (generally agricultural products), provision of precious metals as monetary payment, and manual labor, especially in mines, were the forms of capital extracted from communities of the altiplano by the Spanish administration.92 This tributary structure’s firm emphasis on commodity collection deviated from the Inca Empire’s system, which at the time of conquest demanded primarily corvée labor for mining, infrastructure projects, and agriculture. As discussed in Section I, the Inca also extracted in-kind payments of maize and a select few agricultural sumptuary products, but this was certainly less frequent than labor tribute, and generally practiced in a reciprocal fashion. Uninterested in such reciprocity and alongside the development of haciendas, encomiendas, corregimientos and yanaconajes, the Spanish demanded these agricultural goods as part of their direct tribute extraction.93

Urus were expected to pay to the Spanish colonial government one half of that demanded from their Aymara neighbors. In cases of cash obligations, Aymara households had to provide between 5.0 and 7.0 pesos to the colonial authorities, whereas the equivalent amount for Uru households was 1.5 to 3.0 pesos.94 Moreover, when labor was demanded for mine work (called mitayos), Spanish colonial law dictated that the work of an Uru miner was just half as valuable as the work of an Aymara miner; while Uru communities were to send the same proportion of workers (between 15 and 20 percent of the repartimiento population), each Uru worker’s obligation was half that of an Aymara worker. Julien posits that this was strictly an administrative reflex to the Uru’s assessed inability to provide the same quantity to monetary tribute, ratifying their lower status based on their lack of fitness for labor and lack of surplus capital.95 Ultimately, these distinctions in tributary obligations between Urus and the indigenous majorities did not directly translate to material limitations, as had been the case in the Inca system, when lacustrine Uru society was excluded from receiving the reciprocal benefits of the imperial regime. Instead, the dissimilar standards between Urus and Aymaras for the Spanish reflect the adopted conception that Urus were idle, incapable, and impoverished, but the insisted taxation and labor extraction from Uru people brought a level of objective exploitation to the colonial structure. If anything, the Spanish, by demanding some tributary obligations—even if attenuated to a significant degree—engaged the Uru with the imperial and regional economic systems to a degree that was previously unseen.

Documentation of widespread use of Uru employment and corvée since the later part of the sixteenth century also indicates a shift in the Spanish colonial administration’s perceptions of Uru fitness for labor, once again tying their material conditions and lacustrine dependence to the process of acculturation. Polo de Ondegardo, the Spanish civil servant and encomendero whose writings on imperial supervision of indigenous subjects were widely disseminated, stated in 1571 that thousands of Urus were absent from the census of his encomienda near Lake Poopó, as they had temporarily migrated to work as weavers and agricultural laborers for external lords, many of whom were indigenous non-Urus.96 This dynamic of subservient labor along ethnic lines was noted by numerous colonial administrators in addition to Ondegardo, and was associated with oppressive integration of Uru people into Aymara power structures of land and capital ownership.97 As Urus emigrated to other regions of the altiplano for employment on Aymara and Spanish land, they were coerced into complying with the customs of these territories, in turn losing their ethnic qualities as qot’zuñis, including lacustrine practices and linguistic distinctions.98

Ethnic Classification in Tribute Brackets

As the Spanish shifted the adopted forms of tributary structures that had been present in the Inca era, tailoring extractive policies to maximize the value produced by native subjects, the colonial administration employed a set of ethnic distinctions that determined variations in tributary obligations. The crucial distinction between the Spanish and Inca tax and corvée structures was that the ethnic divisions that came to define the colonial tribute system were not tools of exclusion, as they had been with the Inca, but rather tools of integration. 

Urus across the altiplano were required to provide labor for the Spanish empire’s textile production. The colonial administration provided the wool with which Urus weaved their tribute payments, while Aymaras were required to provide their own; in this sense, their ethnic identity was tied to an understanding that livestock rearing was not commonly practiced among the Uru as it was among Aymara, and those in the Uru tributary bracket never supplied their own wool for textile production. In fact, the practice of camelid husbandry was seen by the Spanish as a key distinguishing factor between Urus and Aymaras, although the strictness of this binary perception was likely erroneous. Similarly, the Spanish demanded dried fish from Uru tributaries with access to riparian and lacustrine resources, while this was never a requirement for Aymaras due to their lack of geographic and material attachment to the TDPS basin.99 In most instances, agricultural products were collected only from Aymaras, while Urus provided labor to produce these goods. Sometimes chuño, the freeze-dried native potato that was a dietary staple of the altiplano, was required of Uru tributaries in cases where they did practice agricultural production.100

Generally, as has been discussed in depth in the previous section, the Uru were considered less economically capable and were therefore not required to pay the same levels of tribute as their Aymara counterparts. Yet, Wachtel warns against the oversimplification of this dynamic; while there was undoubtedly a correlation between status as an Uru and belonging to the lowest socioeconomic bracket of the Spanish colonial tribute system, ethnic and economic statuses were by no means absolutely equivalent. The implications of ethnically-divided tributary obligations on modern understandings of capital relations in the altiplano is complicated by socioeconomic diversity within Uru and Aymara groups, which are well-documented in the colonial record. Whereas the bulk of recorded encounters and descriptions of the Uru during the time of conquest depict subsistence hunter-fishermen, living on totora rafts rather than permanent dwellings, there are various accounts of Uru families herding camelids, sowing crops, owning land, and accumulating wealth.101 Initially, the Spanish still imposed reduced tributary obligation on these more affluent Urus due strictly to their ethnic classification. However, following the trend of developing colonial consciousness of indigenous diversity and consequently capitalizing on those nuances, the Spanish administration was ready and willing to recalibrate their tribute brackets in order to increase the amount of capital they could extract. 

In the province of Chucuito, for instance, on the western shores of Lake Titicaca, the Spanish realized in the sixteenth century that the indigenous people labeled as Uru was a socioeconomically heterogeneous group, and subsequently divided them into three distinct tribute-owing brackets. The majority of the 3,000 or so Urus continued to pay half of that owed by their Aymara counterparts, while smaller subsets, deemed to lie at each extreme of wealth and poverty, had distinct obligations. Around 500 Urus were considered “elites,” and had to pay the same amount of tribute as Aymaras, while 100 were counted as the lowest status, and exempt from all tribute. Wachtel links the economic and the cultural transformations experienced by the Urus succinctly: “At the two extremes we can indeed speak of a ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ community: some were becoming more and more land oriented and thus aymarized. At the other end of the continuum were the ‘savages,’ insisting on life in the reeds, ‘inside’ the lake.”102 In this sense, a spectrum of qot’zuñi lacustrine culture was not only a useful framework for ethnographically mapping the cultural shift of Urus political hydrology in the abstract, but it was a direct reflection of Spanish colonial treatment and economic classification as well. Once more, those Urus who depended directly on the hydrological resources of Poopó and the TPDS system were poorer and ostracized as uncivil, but avoided acculturation and aymarization even as the socioeconomic fabric of the altiplano transformed around them.

Proportions of Uru and Aymara in the Toledo corregimiento, one century apart.103

The census data of the Toledo colonial corregimiento on the northern shores of Lake Poopó shows an immense decline in the Uru population between 1574 and 1683, a change that Wachtel attributes not just to migration and disease, but primarily to the process of aymarization. While the overall population of the corregimiento’s indigenous inhabitants did fall significantly—by 38,000 people, 55 percent of the total—the proportion of Uru decline was astoundingly high in relation; as shown in Table 2, more than 91 percent of the Uru population disappeared in this hundred-year period, as opposed to 43% of the Aymara population in Toledo. Spatial demographic shifts may have played a role in Uru decline, seeing as how the number of native subjects decreased in the corregimiento as a whole. Yet, there is no clear reason to believe that Urus emigrated from the region at rates any higher than their Aymara counterparts, who also traveled throughout the altiplano as agricultural laborers. Data regarding susceptibility to disease and birth rates between Aymara and Uru populations is unavailable from these times, but there is no historical evidence to suggest that there would have been notable disparities. Thus, one might conclude, as Wachtel does, that the discrepancy in rates of decline between Uru and Aymara can be attributed to changing ethnic categorizations, as Urus assimilated into the Aymara-dominated indigenous culture of the corregimiento and became aymaricized.104

Whether this speculation is correct, or whether disease, birth rates, migration, or reasons for declining populations are more accurate, the trend indicated by these census data is clear: the ways of life once associated with Uru qot’zuñis in and around the TDPS basin came under certain threat during the Spanish colonial period to an extent not experienced by other indigenous groups, namely the Aymara. This disproportionate vulnerability of the Uru people, as this section has explored, was the result of socioeconomic and hegemonic forces that the Spanish colonial administration deliberately applied to integrate Uru people into the colonial system of capital extraction.

Shortcomings of Census Data for Understanding Uru Aymarization

Wachtel’s speculative analyses of colonial-era census data can only reveal so much about the acculturation process as experienced by the Uru communities in the early modern period. A decidedly hegemonic source, census numbers cannot entirely depict everyday realities of those that they quantify. Even continuing well into the establishment of the Spanish colonial tribute system, the Inca-era kurakas and the systems of knowledge from the pre-Hispanic hegemony remained the primary arbiter of assignment to Uru and Aymara status for tax purposes, though it remains unclear how this classification was carried out.105 Regardless of the specific methods of classification as Uru or Aymara, it must be noted that an individual’s personal affiliations with an ethnic identity—the maintenance of language, customs, knowledge, and spiritual practices—was decidedly not a factor in late Inca and early Spanish ethnic categorizations in tributary census data.

Even well into the twenty-first century, superficial analysis of census data regarding the Urus of Lake Poopó can be highly misleading of everyday realities, especially those relating to ethnic identity; Alva and Mendoza, for instance, wrote from the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz of an 88 percent decline in Uru populations along the shores of Lake Poopó between the 2001 and 2012 censuses.106 Generating an understanding of Uru life from top-down quantitative analyses, as these authors did, would inaccurately suggest that the Uru population approached 1200 individuals during the turn of the century, but that just a decade later this number was fewer than 150.107 Alva and Mendoza conclude, as other scholars have, that mass out-migration as a result of degraded water quality and a loss of the subsistence capabilities in the TDPS decimated the Uru population. However, a closer examination of census discrepancies—not unlike those interrogated by Wachtel in his analysis of sixteenth-century census and tributary data in Uru-populated repartimientos—can be illuminating of a far more complex portrait of self-identification and a process of modern acculturation that is both practical and nominal in nature. In the 2001 national census of Bolivia, respondents were asked to self-identify with an indigenous ethnicity, if applicable; Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, Chiquitano, Mojeño, and “Other Native,” accompanied by a line for the respondent to write in their indigenous affiliation, were the options presented on the ballot.108 Beginning in 1992, a concerted effort by the Uru communities of Lake Poopó and Chipaya was undertaken to gain official recognition as a nación originaria (“First Nation”) by the national government of Bolivia, and this was realized in 2007 by then-president Evo Morales.109 Thus, in 2001 there existed a sentiment of ethnic unity among different Uru subsets, a possible cause for respondents of the census to list their indigenous identity as “Uru,” rather than distinguishing between different Uru categories (such as Chipaya, Iruhuito, or Morato). The results of the 2001 census ultimately tallied 1190 members of the Uru indigenous community.110

The 2012 census ballot approached the question of indigenous identity differently, with far more affiliate options listed on the ballot.111 Census takers were given the option to categorize recipients into enumerated Uru subgroups, in addition to the general “Urus”—Chipaya and Morato—as well as a write-in space. The resulting official report generated by the Bolivian government, then, tallied 207 respondents who were counted as Uru-Moratos, 1,988 as Uru-Chipayas, a mere two as Uru-itos, and 1,353 as Urus.112 A visit to the three Uru communities of Lake Poopó, too, makes clear that there are far more individuals living in Puñaka Tinta María, Vilañeque, and Llapallapani than these numbers suggest. The Centro de Ecología y Pueblos Andinos (CEPA), which focuses much of its research on the Uru communities of Lake Poopó, argues that this methodology was flawed, and destined for misrepresentation of Uru populations, due precisely to the nuanced conceptions of identity and ethnic categorization. In fact, CEPA has independently determined the population of people belonging to the communities historically labeled Uru-Morato exceed the national census number by a large margin, and that their numbers were 636 in 2012. Moreover, while the national census reports only two Uru-itos, it discounts the sizable population of Iruhito, the settlement of this Uru subset on the bank of the Desaguadero River.113 However, this contradiction of Uru population data is less a result of a flawed census methodology than of a misinterpreted analysis of the data. Scholars and journalists alike have failed to acknowledge the overlapping categorizations in the census—the members of the Uru communities of Lake Poopó who were not tallied under “Uru-Moratos” in the census were likely accounted for as general “Urus.” 

Without passing judgment on the Bolivian National Institute of Statistics’s census-taking strategy, we can understand the contradiction in data to be indicative of the great ethnocultural flux that has been characteristic of Uru communities throughout their long history. “Uru” itself was an assigned term, as was “Morato,” meaning that state-level identifications of qot’zuñi people have always been subject to conflict with individuals’ self-denominations. If this problem is relevant in the twenty-first century, when institutional outreach and statistical science are well advanced, then we must consider that the centuries-old Spanish colonial and early republic census data, too, suffers from contradictions between state-imposed labels and self-ascribed identities. 

Even Wachtel’s ubiquitously-cited analysis of census and taxation data to track aymarization, upon which the entire recent body of literature on Uru studies is founded, suffers from this shortcoming. Wachtel cites an example in Coro as the epitome of viewing aymarization through this demographic data: “In 1838, there were 22 taxable Uru living in Coro [...] but only one generation later, in 1860, only two taxable Uru were left. Together with 41 other persons addressed as Uru they formed the Uru group of Coro, while eleven years later, the whole group consisted of 54 individuals, seven of them considered as taxable.”114 By this framework, which has definite roots in the pre-Hispanic notions of Uru as sources (or, rather, scarcities) of economic capital, the population of Urus traced by Wachtel’s research is a state-determined taxation bracket rather than a cultural identity. Solidifying their ongoing historical role as a subaltern group, there is little to remedy the lack of agency granted to Urus prior to the mid-twentieth century in determining their own cultural denomination.

This is a striking, though arguably inevitable, shortcoming of subaltern scholarship; the agency of Uru assimilation shifted onto Uru people themselves as a result of top-down historiographic methodology. The only understanding of Uru identity before the twentieth century (prior to the publishing of any direct-contact ethnographic studies) is drawn from state-generated taxation data, and, as this section has outlined, this data organized subjects into hegemonically-determined categories that blurred the lines between socioeconomic stratification and ethnic identity. There is no doubt that the process of aymarization occurred; it was widespread and indefinite, as self-identifying Urus today cover a far more limited geographic area, and are much fewer in number by all accounts.115 However, the previous analysis of present-day census discrepancies strongly confounds these analyses. Therefore, in order to understand the processes of aymarization as phenomena of identity and cultural transformations rather than of political economy, we must look to Uru-produced historical sources that depict the perceptions of those impacted by the acculturation in question.

IV. Uru Perspectives on Hegemony and Assimilation

Tracing Uru Perceptions of Social Change Through Oral Tradition

Existing investigations of sixteenth and seventeenth century Uru history under the Spanish colonial system and local Aymara lords tells the story of evasive, water-dwelling natives from the distinct perspective of the ruling hegemony: the colonial administration. It is clear from the previous deconstruction of modern census discrepancies that the historical narrative abstracted from quantitative data can be misleading, particularly when nominal categorization itself is the variable of inquiry. Conversely, strictly ethnographic studies tend to consider only the momentary conditions of Uru people, in turn overlooking centuries of historical conditioning that both explains and confounds present circumstances. The following analysis of primary texts will construct, through a combination of oral histories, folkloric tales, and colonial documents, an understanding of Uru history from the subaltern perspective of the Urus themselves. In doing so, this section will explore how the primary metrics of assimilation from the Uru perspective were conversion to Christianity (and more specifically the Catholic ritual of baptism carried out by Jesuit priests), altered forms of land management and control, and linguistic transformations in the sixteenth through twentieth centuries.

Following the theoretical framework of isolated subsistence societies put forth by historical anthropologist James Scott, one can understand the ongoing association of Uru communities of Lake Poopó to lacustrine ways of life as a method of utilizing their environmental isolation to avoid incorporation into state-dominated economy and politics.116 Modern Uru testimony unveils a paradigm of deliberate state avoidance that was core to the Uru communal ethos prior to the twentieth century, as will be discussed in this section. Scott’s study of the Southeast Asian Zomia highlands provides a useful paradigm off of which to base our reading of Uru history; he describes tribal residence in remote ecological zones, independent subsistence modes of production, and malleable social and political structures as the primary means of avoiding corvée, conscription, taxation, linguistic assimilation, economic dependency, and other forms of incorporation into the oppressive lowland state.117 These trends can also be found in Uru history; their environmental isolation and independent subsistence in the totoras of Lake Poopó, as well as their use of mobile settlements to evade Spanish forces during conquest, has been well-documented.118 In his interrogation of the anthropological history of stateless tribal groups in Zomia, Scott also contends with a lack of historical documentation to corroborate his claims about environmental determinism and state avoidance, mostly analyzing lowland, state-enveloped sources.

Improving upon Scott’s methodology, this study will attempt to focus on Uru sources themselves for a better understanding of the intentionality of Uru state avoidance, using oral history, present-day anthropological approaches, and folkloric traditions that depict otherwise inaccessible Uru pasts. Notwithstanding the accuracy of these oral traditions, which serve, at best, as loose representations of the pre-colonial Uru past, the communal desire to avoid incorporation into the cultural, economic, and political hegemonies of the post-conquest altiplano is apparent throughout the depictions of Uru interactions with outsiders. Even after near-complete incorporation into dry society, oral traditions have persisted in Uru communities to preserve the qot’zuñi culture of centuries prior; these traditions are kept and disseminated through sabios, or sages, in the communities. The sabio elders, usually highly-respected ex-authorities, pass these oral histories and folklores to younger generations as a form of retaining a sense of cultural pride and identity.119

The modern understanding of the Uru past commonly held by community members today is closely intertwined with longstanding claims to geographical and hydrological boundaries, pointing explicitly to marginalization within even the pre-Hispanic indigenous world. The most substantive insight into centuries of Uru frames of reference comes from the oral testimonies of Daniel Moricio Choque and Lucas Miranda Mamani, two distinguished twentieth-century leaders, elders, and cultural historians of the Uru communities of Lake Poopó whose accounts were recorded and compiled by Rossana Barragán in 1992. In describing how the Uru communities came to inhabit the shores of Lake Poopó and the Desaguadero Delta, Moricio noted that members of the Uru families had entered the central and southern parts of the altiplano through the aquatic axis of the Desaguadero River, but added that ancestors of the Urus also settled the dry land and Andean foothills on the banks of the river, including the hill on which the modern-day city of Oruro is located. In Moricio’s orally-disseminated recounting of his people’s history, he cites an Uru-dominated regime in the modern day city of Oruro and the TDPS basin that was in power one millennium ago: 

At that same time, there were also tribes of the hills; … the Urus had been living on the hill that is now the city of Oruro. In that time, there was already a small town of the Spaniards or the Aymaras and Quechuas; the Urus did not know that the people were there in those places, or that they existed at all. The Uru governors forced each person to work; they ordered mandatory daily hunts to bring fish, birds, lurumas, kuykas, miwilas from the totora, as sustenance for all Urus families.120

The Urus of the pre-Hispanic and early colonial period, therefore, may have had sedentary communities in the dry highlands of the altiplano. Moricio’s’s oral history describes a robust Uru leadership capable of demanding labor and food tribute from each Uru family, in order to diversify and stabilize their societal reproduction. His conception of early characterizations of Uru identity, therefore, comes into direct conflict with the contemporary conceptions held by Spanish observers and leadership of what it meant to be Uru in the altiplano in the sixteenth century. While the likes of Oliva, Acosta, and Garci Diez were clear that sedentary, agropastoral Uru communities did exist in riparian and lacustrine coastal regions, these accounts are equally clear that, even when these communities practiced subsistence with their own means (as opposed to with Aymara-controlled land or livestock), it was not carried out in such a way that was organized by a greater gubernatorial authority, nor in order to serve the needs of a united Uru “nation.”121 On the contrary, as explored earlier at length, the Urus were perceived by the Spanish and Inca as historically impoverished, uncivilized, and disorganized hunter-fishermen—there was no headroom in the hegemonic view of this subaltern to allow for the historical possibility of advanced society. Yet, the notion that the Uru ancestors were the first to occupy both aquatic zones of the TDPS basin and the dry regions of Oruro, in a large, organized, and sedentary fashion, remains universal throughout modern Uru communities. 

In the Uru view of their community’s past, there is a distinct and pervasive narrative of regional marginalization—one which does not necessarily distinguish between Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish groups as oppressors. “Many people had entered the totoral, but it could have been any of the three, Aymaras, Quechuas, or Spaniards.[…]Then they had entered and had taken with deceit, with exchanges, with provisions, it was like that until the end,” Moricio stated in his testimony, suggesting that they did not distinguish between outsiders—all who entered the lake did so in a way that was associated with theft and deceit. Moricio states that Spaniards and Aymaras worked in collaboration to exploit the socioeconomic conditions of the Uru in Lake Poopó; he speaks of a time in the early colonial period when they built wooden boats and rafts, entered the lake, and dispossessed the Urus of “quintals of gold.”122 This solidifies the historical narrative of environmentally-determined social stratification; the Urus were people of the lake, qot’zuñi, and all outsiders were from dry land, el seco. Landedness, for the Uru, was associated with deceitful dealings and oppressive attempts at political and hydrological control just as lacustrine culture was, for the Inca and Spanish, associated with savagery and poverty. In this sense, the Uru perception of their history values lacustrine culture largely as having been an effective method of state avoidance that was eventually infringed upon by oppressive landed societies. 

The longstanding, generational skepticism held by the Uru community towards landed outsiders has been corroborated through various ethnographic studies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even within the scope of this research, Uru skepticism of outsiders has been pervasive; as I conducted semi-structured ethnographic interviews in an attempt to construct more extensive oral histories, and attempted to access local archives in the remaining Uru communities of Lake Poopó, the authorities, heads of households, and elders of these villages cited their lengthy history of experiences with resource exploitation and cultural suppression at the hands of outsiders.

Baptism as the Genesis of State Incorporation

In the seventeenth century, baptism was a highly symbolic marker of acculturation and assimilation to the Urus, and avoiding baptism, even when still having converted to Christianity, was a prideful act of defiance among Uru communities. Forceful conversion of all encountered natives in the New World was a practice to which the Spanish Colonial regimens held steadfast, as it served as the ideological justification for subjugation of Indians and the usurpation of existing governments. The Requerimiento declaration of 1510 was among the first to explicitly establish an ultimatum for the natives of the American continent. Written by the Council of Castile, the decree was to be read aloud to natives as a means of asserting Spanish political and religious authority over the entire New World; those who did not accept this authority, including by accepting Christian doctrines and becoming baptized, would be subject to immediate subjugation, enslavement and even death.123 The Requerimento, as its title (meaning “Requirement”) aptly suggests, was an enforcement that Indians of the New World “acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen Doña Juana our lords… and that you consent and give place that these religious fathers should declare and preach to you the aforesaid.”124 The Leyes de las Indias, which were compiled in the eighteenth century from various declarations and decrees in the prior years of Spanish colonial rule, codified many of the official baptism requirements that were enacted by the Spanish royal administration in conjunction with the Catholic Papacy.125 Baptism had to be performed by a designated colonial official, meaning that the process of baptism was not only a religious one but also a method of enumerating and monitoring—it became synonymous with being a subject of the colonial system, under the supervision of Spanish corregimientos for political and economic purposes as much as (if not more than) religious ones. Friars and missionaries were responsible for contacting isolated indigenous communities in the altiplano, for instance, as a method of incorporating them into the colonial missions via the process of conversion.126

Uru oral histories repeatedly reference the decree of baptism in the colonial era as a signifying form of subjugation under the landed hegemony. As was evident through the discussion of early Spanish colonial records that provided testimony on the first interactions between Europeans and the mysterious “water people” of Titicaca, the Desaguadero, and the then Paria, or Pampa Aullagas Lake (prior terms for Lake Poopó), the primary points of contact between Europe and the Uru-qot’zuñis of the TDPS basin were largely religious. Acosta, Oliva, and Antonio de la Calancha, were, first and foremost, Jesuit missionaries tasked by the Spanish royalty and the Church to convert the indigenous people of the Americas to Catholicism. Yet, it is also evident from their observations of Uru people that these Jesuit missionaries interacted indirectly with the Urus, if at all. Notably, the Urus who were most directly contacted by the Jesuit observers of the sixteenth century were those who practiced agriculture—yet, it was extremely uncommon for Urus to be described as controlling their own means of agricultural production or livestock, and, as discussed in section II, they much more commonly performed agricultural labor in the service of Aymara governors.

As the Spanish conquest of the altiplano region led to mass conversion to Christianity as part of the structure of European colonial hegemony, rates of conversion and baptism among the Uru were lower than those of their Quechua and Aymara counterparts.127  Lacustrine Urus, mostly because of their geographic isolation from the evangelical doings of nascent Spanish conversion efforts, posed a specific challenge to the Augustinian missionaries who sought to convert all of the indigenous inhabitants of the altiplano.128 In the 1688 anonymous document published by Mendoza, for instance, the author reported most of the indigenous communities to have been converted to Christianity and practicing baptisms, with the exception of island-dwelling Urus who, avoiding taxation and “they have unbaptized children living without law or reason and without paying tributes, because they are hidden”; Antonio de la Calancha, in his Coronica moralizada del Orden de San Augustin en el Perú con sucesos ejemplares en esta Monarquía, gave the perspective of the Augustinian missionaries and Friars who were tasked with converting the Uru people, who were “not inclined to the worship of our Faith.”129 Calancha denigrates the Uru people strongly in his extensive account; he called them barbaric, without order, unclean savages who were averse to communication, explicitly as a result of their unwillingness to convert.130

It is worth noting the potential link between Uru aversion to baptism and their strong cultural and spiritual ties to water. As qot’zuñis, their lacustrine way of life gave them constant, immediate contact with water, and they explicitly regarded aquatic resources to have divine spirit; Urus have, ever since the earliest ethnographic records of their traditional belief systems, regarded the Qotamama, or “Mother Lake” to be an ultimate spiritual power, analogous to Pachamama, or Mother Earth.131 For the Urus, the TDPS and its heavenly bodies of water represented a direct connection to the natural environment that shaped animistic spiritual practices; rejection of baptism was a symbolic rejection of oppressive hegemonic influences from landed society in its entirety, and an ideological as much as a material form of state avoidance. However, it is impossible to confirm this speculation, and Uru systems of belief before the Spanish conquest remain conjecture, as they were fully converted to Catholicism during the centuries after conquest. Christian beliefs are now so ingrained into modern Uru culture in Lake Poopó that, by the twentieth century, the creation story of the Uru nation became intertwined with the creation story of Genesis; the Uru dependence on abundant hydrological resources is connected to a “Great Deluge,” from which the Uru were saved on the ark of Noah.132

For the elders who hold the Uru family history, the earliest account of forced baptism, and the origin of the term Uru-Morato, is the story of Miguel García Morato. As Daniel Mauricio Choque recounted it in 1992, other subsets of the Uru people had already been practicing Christianity at the time of Miguel García Morato’s conversion in 1646; he specifies that the oral history he possesses is only that of his direct antecedents, the Villivilli (later called Uru-Morato) of eastern Lake Poopó. Moreover, European-authored documents from the seventeenth century corroborate the claim that Uru communities which practiced agriculture had been converted quickly after conquest, while those that remained qot’zuñis (in this case, the Villivillis) were the last to become named through the process of baptism.133 In Mauricio’s recounting, a regional Spanish corregidor, José de la Vega Alvarado, gave an ultimatum to an unnamed Uru man whom he had befriended. The Uru man, who had learned to speak in Aymara due to his relationship with the lord, was told that if he did not allow himself to be baptized, he would be killed by the Spanish regime. José de la Vega Alvarado, hoping to prevent his Uru companion from being killed, strongly urged him to convert to Catholicism with the Jesuit priest in the canton of Poopó. Finally accepting, the Uru man traveled to Poopó with his wife and de la Vega, and the two were baptized on March 25, 1646. Unfamiliar with Spanish naming conventions, the Uru man deferred to Alvarado, who gave him the name of Miguel García Morato, and his wife María Cocha Morato. Since that baptism, according to Moricio, the descendents of that Uru family were known as the Uru-Moratos.134

From Moricio’s depiction of the Uru colonial encounter in this history, we can draw two significant conclusions, though both substantially qualified by the very fact that the story is being recounted 350 years after it transpired. The first conclusion is that the Uru ancestors of the communities in question did forge amicable, professional relationships with Spanish conquistadors; that is to say, the twentieth century conception of Uru-Spaniard relationships three centuries prior allowed for the possibility of professional collaboration and even companionship. The second conclusion is that, whereas the Villivilli Urus of the mid-seventeenth century existed unquestionably outside of the Spanish cultural hegemony—unaware even of Spanish doings and decrees—Spanish officials were not opposed to the principle of hiring Uru individuals for consequential administrative positions. In this case, the Uru Miguel García Morato was entrusted with accompanying José de la Vega Alvarado and notarizing the surveyal of land in the altiplano. Notably, he would likely have had to interpret between Aymara and Spanish, a complexity that Moricio’s oral history references, saying that his ancestor likely interacted with the “Aymara-Quechua” (that is, landed indigenous society).135 Furthermore, Moricio does not regard Alvarado with contempt in his recounting; although Alvarado is strictly responsible for shifting García Morato’s cultural ties and incorporating him into the hegemonic colonial system, Alvarado was considered a friend with García Morato’s interests in mind, to a degree. As a high-ranking administrator, Alvarado served as a buffer between the Spanish hegemony and the Uru subaltern. He ultimately insisted on drawing the Villivilli Urus out from their isolation within the lake (an isolation that Moricio firmly establishes in his telling, as Miguel García Morato, who was “captured,” was the only Uru who interacted with de la Vega) and pushed them to convert to Christianity, else they would be killed by the Spanish. 

The Uru traditional story of Miguel García Morato, the first Uru-Morato as told by Moricio, must be read in parallel with co-confirming colonial documents as well. In the archives of Santuario de las Quillacas, an Aymara municipality at the southern end of Lake Poopó that had historical significance for its relationships with governing authorities of the Inca Empire as well as with the Spanish conquistadors, we can find a number of juridical and administrative colonial documents, one of which is entitled “Composición y amparo por el juez visitador Joseph de la Vega Alvarado el año de 1646.”136 This document outlines the visit of colonial corregidor Joseph de la Vega Alvarado, who visited the southern reaches of Lake Poopó to collaborate with the Aymara lords of Quillacas in order to survey the land, take measurements, and delineate property for sale and titling. Miguel García Morato is mentioned five times throughout the document, each as Alvarado’s notary.137 The document records the legal proceedings in which Alvarado grants land titles to various unnamed indigenous communities in and around Lake Poopó, in order to ensure their ability to sustain their people.138

The comparison of these two sources—the archival document about Joseph de la Vega Alvarado and Moricio’s orally-recounted history about the same Spanish colonial figure—represents the challenges of understanding subaltern perspectives in a landscape of historical and historiographic domination by a colonial hegemony. Considering the two vantage points in tandem, however, can be quite revealing of the interaction between ideological and material transitions as the Urus became incorporated into the Spanish colonial system. The colonial documents regarding Alvarado’s land surveys provide specific details about the material realities of Spanish control over the Poopó basin, while the traditional Uru story of Miguel García Morato gives insight into the social changes that occurred within the Uru communities themselves as a result of these material land use shifts.

 The baptism of the first Uru-Morato, as described by Moricio, was undoubtedly a watershed event for the Villivilli; it not only had a profound impact for their social standing, as it marked their first integration into the cultural and religious systems imposed by the Spanish, but it also opened the door to the incorporation of qot’zuñi Urus into the land title system and altered the paradigm of land use along Lake Poopó. The education, recruiting, and baptizing of Miguel García Morato was part of a larger colonial process to build economic dependency between the native populations of the altiplano and the Spanish administration, and it manifested clearly in both Uru oral traditions and colonial documents. From a testimony provided in a 1718 legal proceeding between indigenous people in Toledo and Corquemarca—both on the northern shores of Lake Poopó—documents in the Poopó municipal archives state that Uru people had been settled next to the Toledo chapel; when the judge of the case asked how the Urus arrived in the town, it was stated (by whom, it is unclear) that they had been “extracted out of the lake” by Friar Thomas de la Torre. The friar had then reportedly granted the Urus a legal title to the land in Toledo in order to prevent them from returning to lacustrine life in Lake Poopó and their “pagan” beliefs.139

There are multiple additional accounts of baptism and conversion to Christianity being directly tied to a transition away from lacustrine culture among the Uru. Calancha wrote of the surprising success of the many friars tasked with converting the Uru, whom he described as particularly averse to interacting with missionaries. He stated that the local friars “would make them fishers of men,” referring to the fishing and hunting ways of the Uru-qotzuñis and alluding to Christ’s teachings of his disciples as written in the Gospels: “For it has been the same to draw an Indian out of the hiding places of his lagoon as a fish from the depths of its caves.”140  Calancha stated that the Augustinian Friars first had to resettle the Urus of Lake Poopó to dry land and end their lacustrine ways of life, in order to convert them to Christianity. Similarly, In 1568, Spanish encomendero Lorenzo de Aldana was attributed with relocating the Urus of Lake Poopó from their dwellings in the totora to his encomienda in Challacollo “for the purpose of their evangelization.”141 After his death, Aldana ordered in his will that the converted Urus would be the universal heirs to the property of the encomienda, thus tying their ability to become landed—and their loss of qot’zuñi culture—directly to their conversion to Christianity.

This trend is echoed once again in Moricio’s oral history about Miguel García Morato. Moricio stated directly: “After being baptized, Don Miguel García Morato had wanted to purchase the Lake for his families, so that they would be left alone and not be abused in the Lake.” He refers to an incessant threat from the Spanish administration during the sixteenth century, as there was an organized effort to convert the Urus of Lake Poopó to Christianity and to encourage agricultural modes of production, so that they would pay higher rates of tribute to the colonial government.142 The delineation and privatization of the TDPS basin’s land, which the Urus themselves linked to the broader process of conversion and hegemonic incorporation, effectively marked the end of the Uru people’s statelessness; by the eighteenth century, nearly all Uru communities were paying tribute, speaking Aymara, practicing Christianity, and were dependent on colonial land deeds to legally inhabit their lands. In Moricio’s telling, the Uru ancestor, Miguel García Morato, was eventually able to purchase a title to Lake Poopó, although this claim is highly contested in modern times, when fishing rights for various cooperatives, both Uru and Aymara, have claimed legal control over its aquatic and ecological resources.

Folkloric Depictions of Qot’zuñi Relationships to Landed Society

Another source for understanding customary Uru perspectives on their relationship with landed society can be found in folkloric oral tradition. A pair of common tales told to schoolchildren by the Urus of Lake Poopó that were compiled and transcribed by Uru educator Félix Sequeiros Quispe provide substantive insight into the water-related interactions between the Urus of Lake Poopó and their neighbors. “The Girl and the Young Lizard,” translated in Appendix I, depicts the relationship between Aymaras and Urus: an Aymara girl encounters an Uru boy while herding her sheep in Uru territory, and continues to meet with him habitually until they form a close connection. One day, however, the Aymara girl arrives late to their meeting and finds a lizard, which attempts to caress her hand, only for the girl to injure the lizard with a rock. The following day, the Uru boy returns with an injury, telling the girl that she had injured him with a rock the previous day. The girl runs home in confusion and is scolded by her parents, who conclude that the Uru boy had truly been a lizard all along.143

While fictional, this story reveals traditional Uru perceptions of everyday Uru-Aymara conflicts. The Aymara girl initially enters the Uru territory of Llapallapani in order to lead her sheep towards grazing lands. The Uru boy does not herd livestock, continuing the historical notion that this was not often practiced by Urus. The land in the story is matter-of-factly described as “the original territory of the valiant Urus”—notably, the use of the term originario (meaning “original”) has a certain political charge, as in modern Bolivian the word is commonly used to legitimate proprietary and sovereignty claims of indigenous groups. The word is used in such a context over one hundred times in the 2009 Constitution of Bolivia, whose writing was led by indigenous President Evo Morales. Notably, Morales was born to an Aymara family in the town of Orinoca, on the western shores of Lake Poopó.144 With this context, it becomes clear that this children’s story depicts the Urus as the rightful and sovereign proprietors of the pampa that lined the shores of Lake Poopó. As this land was productive for grazing of camelids and other livestock, the story heavily implies that outside Aymaras have historically exploited Uru territory for their pastoral practices. Moreover, the Aymara parents’ scolding of their daughter for interacting with an Uru boy and their subsequent acknowledgement that the incident took place in Uru territory suggests an Uru belief that Aymara neighbors were knowingly and intentionally exploiting Uru lands, while simultaneously looking down upon the Urus and promoting cultural disassociation with the qot’zuñis of Lake Poopó. At the same time, the story of the Girl and the Young Lizard is a folkloric depiction of Uru connection to outsiders as well as to the regional ecology of the altiplano—a depiction that echoes the creation story of the Uru nation.145

The second story, “The Girl and the Two Lizards,” depicts many of the same sentiments of the first, but reversing the roles of the characters; in this story, the cholita girl is Uru, whereas the two lizards, once again first appearing as young men, are the outsiders. The girl, during a time of stability and happiness in the Uru-qot’zuñi communities of Lake Poopó, attends a party and meets two young men. The men have rough hands, they say, owing to the lack of water where they live, as they are outsiders and live far from the shores of the lake, where the party is being held. In an attempt to provide these young men with water, the girl ties the end of a long string to one of them. Later, she fills a jug with water from Lake Poopó and follows the string a substantial distance away, leading her to the dwelling of the two young men—where, to her surprise, she encounters only two lizards, still attached to the string. In a time when the surroundings of the lake were extremely dry (the young man says, “Where I live, there is no water, it is a dry place. To get the water that gives life, we have to go to the lake, and the journey is very long.”), the Urus are depicted as the guardians of access to the lake’s water.146 Indeed, much like the first story, the outsiders have a clear understanding that the shores of the lake, and its water, are under the control of the Uru communities of Lake Poopó, and that their regional clout is derived from this territorial claim over lacustrine resources. The lizards, as outsiders, have no access to water, and must take advantage of the Uru community members in order to gain such access.

These stories, to even greater degree than the oral histories, are modern Uru constructions that are highly conditioned by the contexts in which they are told. The recent transcription and publication of these stories had a clear didactic aim—to foster cultural ties to Uru-qot’zuñi identity—but their role in the oral tradition is illuminating of Uru reactions to increasingly overbearing hegemonic systems of land and resource use. The interface of these outside systems with lacustrine Uru culture is clear; as with various other stories often told by Urus, the conflict is driven by the interaction between qot’zuñis and Aymara, Quechua, or otherwise non-Uru people. Thus the stories serve as literary reflections of the ideological reality that the struggles and conflicts faced by the Urus are largely the result of unequal control over material and environmental capital: Aymara control of dry land surrounding the TDPS system, Spanish extraction of wealth and resources from the lacustrine communities, Quechua linguistic domination, and, though a more modern phenomenon, upstream impacts on TDPS tributary streams by large infrastructure projects to divert water for mining operations. In essence, the folkloric traditions of the Uru communities points must be read in two ways: first, the contents of the stories suggest that the Uru attachment to lacustrine modes of production and daily ways of life was not only a continuation of centuries-old culture, but a material form of state avoidance that allowed for segregation of lacustrine society from el seco, which was routinely considered to be the source of conflict and discrimination. 

As windows into historical paradigms and Uru perspectives on their own social standing in the altiplano, “The Girl and the Young Lizard,”“The Girl and the Two Lizards,” and the linguistic circumstances of their publications in 2016 typify recent efforts within the communities to work against the material and environmental factors of acculturation and ongoing aymarization. Félix Siquieros, working with the Foundation for the Multilingual and Pluricultural Education in the Andes, transcribed these stories from Quechua and translated them to Spanish and Puquina, citing it as the original language of the oral traditions. Educational programming oriented toward a cohesive, ancestral understanding of Uru-qot’zuñi culture among the new generation centers largely on the revival of the Puquina language in the communities’ primary school curricula, as is echoed in Siquieros’s translations. In modern Uru accounts of their ancestral struggle with marginalization in the altiplano, linguistic suppression is an ever-present thread. As of 2018, the members of the Uru communities of Lake Poopó speak predominantly Quechua and Spanish, with most citing Quechua as their first language.147

Antonio Gramsci wrote that the shifting of linguistic paradigms in society is related to “the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to recognize the cultural hegemony.”148 Modern Uru communities, faced with declining numbers and an increasing cultural detachment from the TDPS’s hydrological resources, echo this Gramscian notion that their shifting linguistic traditions are closely related to outside coercion and language discrimination on behalf of their Aymara neighbors. There is a universal sentiment that, when the Uru-Moratos settled permanently on Aymara lands in the 1930s, they were derided and pressured into adopting the Aymara language.149 It is unclear at what point in the twentieth century there was a broad linguistic shift towards Quechua, although it has since overtaken Aymara as the most common mother tongue of the Uru.

The communal effort to revive Puquina learning in the three Uru communities of Lake Poopó is telling of the historically systematic nature of Uru-qot’zuñi acculturation. The lacustrine people of the Uru nation—the Villivilli, their descendents the Moratos, and the Iruhuito of the Desaguadero—did not speak the Uru language that the communities are now attempting to reinstate through schooling. In fact, there is much scholarly dispute about the ancestral languages of the Uru inhabitants of the TDPS basin, owing to the lack of historical documentation on Uru daily life. Linguistic historians of the altiplano refer to two distinct language families: Puquina and Uru-Chipaya. The Puquina language family became extinct in the seventeenth century with the domination of the Inca Empire, while the Uru-Chipaya languages persisted. These languages were Uchumataqu and Chipaya, the latter of which is spoken by Urus in the municipality of Chipaya, west of Lake Poopó. The degree of relationship between Uchumataqu (also called “Chholo” and “Uru”) and Chipaya has been likened to that between French and Spanish.150

Uchumataqu, Chholo, and Uru would have been the various names given to the languages in which the folktales were initially communicated. The very fact that they were more recently told in Quechua and Aymara is a clear marker of linguistic acculturation and the adoption, coerced or voluntary, of new languages at the cost of an ancestral form of communication. Moreover, the effort to revive Chipaya in the Uru communities of Lake Poopó, rather than Uchumataqu, the more directly ancestral language tradition, is indicative of the total and irreversible nature of Uru acculturation and the dominance of the landed hegemony.

V. Leaving Lake Poopó

Lake Poopó and the TDPS basin had once served as a cultural refuge for the Uru indigenous nation, far predating the Spanish conquest. It offered physical protection from invasion of Uru aquatic territories, provided a source of food, water, and livelihood, and yielded a spiritual framework that saw the lake itself as the “Mother and Father” of the qot’zuñis—the people of the lake. Yet this function of Lake Poopó as a provider and protector of Uru culture had evaporated long before its waters “officially” dried out in 2015. The processes of marginalization and acculturation had been ongoing for centuries, ever since the development of extractive political economy in the altiplano.

Today, Uru vulnerabilities to environmental changes are on clear display as worldwide reports of Lake Poopó’s dryspell, and the economic and cultural plights that have ensued in consequence, enter a ninth year. Following these depictions, which seldom engage the expansive body of historical scholarship, the casual reader may be forgiven for assuming that the Urus of Lake Poopó have been freshly stripped of their lacustrine ways of life by unprecedented drought, highly industrial mining operations, and inequitable water use regimes across the TDPS. Although it is unquestionable that these factors have irreversibly altered the ecohydrology of the endorheic basin and greatly degraded its water quality, this paper has demonstrated that modern-day vulnerabilities to changes in the aquatic environment among Uru communities have been so strongly influenced by centuries of historical marginalization that it cannot be considered a novel phenomenon by any stretch. Since the fifteenth century, the pervasive influence of hegemonic structures, slowly but surely, eroded the Urus’ avoidance of incorporation into landed society: obligations of tributary taxes and corvée labor were gradually imposed upon them, seeing geographic isolation within the lake eventually reach its end; Augustinian missionaries baptized and resettled entire Uru communities to dry land, causing them to adopt agrarian practices; the Quechua and Aymara languages supplanted and eventually replaced the Uru mother tongue entirely, making the loss of yet another cultural distinction. 

* * *

When it was time to leave the Uru communities of Lake Poopó, I stood at the fork in the dirt road at the edge of Puñaka Tinta María. Orlando, a young Uru man who looked about my age, was pulling into the village in a new-looking white SUV. It looked out of place as he parked it in front of a rustic adobe home, its silver hubcaps barely blemished by the chalky dirt of the altiplano roads. Orlando no longer lives in Puñaka—he lives in Poopó, the nearby Aymara-dominated town of nearly 15,000, whose municipality technically encompasses the Uru village where he was born—now, he had come only to drive me up to the highway, where I would flag down a minibus and head back to the city of Oruro. As I got into the passenger seat, I could tell that Orlando was upset. His car, which he had just bought for $7,000 USD, was having issues with its transmission. In a place where a three-course lunch costs twenty-five bolivianos ($3.50 USD), I felt inclined to ask Orlando why, and how, he had paid so much for the car. 

“Worker’s comp,” he told me. “I moved to Poopó to work in the mine. But I broke my leg while on the job, so I can’t go into the socavón anymore.” He used his compensation to buy the new car, which he planned to use as a taxi driver in the greater Poopó area. Now that the transmission was having problems, that plan was under threat. Orlando grumbled in frustration as he started the car.

We began to bounce up the bumpy rural road away from Puñaka, and I looked back to see Florencio, the mallku qota of the Urus of Lake Poopó, standing at the edge of the village, seeing us off. Barely thirty years old, he was the youngest authority that any living Uru could remember, and he was tasked with leading the three communities through the worst drought in recent decades. Florencio’s goal, he says, is to ensure that qot’zuñi culture continues on to the next generation of Urus, like Orlando, who are finding it increasingly necessary to leave the communities in search of work. Today, the mallku qota was wearing a thick blue polyester mining uniform, himself having just returned from a night shift in the Poopó Mining Cooperative.

Florencio stood at the corner where the road forked, one path leading up the hill into the town of Poopó, where Quechua-speaking women sell vegetables from colorful sacks in the Plaza Principal, the other leading back toward the center of the lake. He stared out across the vast puno of the altiplano. As we headed up the road into town, I watched Florencio, his wide-brimmed straw hat, the round adobe homes, and the massive white patch of earth, dotted with overturned fishing boats, shrink behind us, until they disappeared behind the hills.

Notes

1.  Coipa is a locally-used term in the regions where it is found—the salar regions of northwest Argentina, northeast Chile, and southern Bolivia. It is the white earthen soil found in arid landscapes of the Atacama, Andes, and Altiplano that is rich in alkaline metals, especially sodium and potassium. Often used interchangeably with “salitre,” coipa is frequently used to refer to saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, which was a long-extracted resource from the region’s salt flats, especially in northern Chile. 

2.  Nathan Wachtel, El regreso de los antepasados: los indios urus de Bolivia, del siglo XX al XVI: ensayo de historia regresiva, Second edition, Biblioteca del bicentenario de Bolivia. Historias y geografías 58 (La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2022): 75-82; Mario M. Revollo, “Management Issues in the Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo System: Importance of Developing a Water Budget,” Lakes & Reservoirs: Science, Policy and Management for Sustainable Use 6, no. 3 (2001): 225–29; Ramiro Pillco Zolá and Lars Bengtsson, “Long-Term and Extreme Water Level Variations of the Shallow Lake Poopó, Bolivia,” Hydrological Sciences Journal 51, no. 1 (February 1, 2006): 98–114..

3.  After a long and mobile history of fluid settlement locations, the modern-day Urus of Lake Poopó refer to themselves as the “tres comunidades uru del lago Poopó,” The spellings of these three communities varies significantly (Phuñaka, Vilañique, Llapa Llapani).

4.  Nathan Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed. John V. Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel, Anthropological History of Andean Polities (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1986), 305; Rufino Choque Chachaque, in-person interview with author, Puñaca Tinta María, July 23, 2023.

5.  Zolá and Bengtsson, 102.

6.  “El Nino and La Nina Years: NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Boulder, CO: 2015).

7.  The former requires irrigation supplied through diversions from Lake Poopó’s primary intake, the Desaguadero River. The latter, produced by the vast number of private, public, cooperative, and unregulated mineral mines in the Andean “tin belt,” involves a water-intensive refinement process that heavily diverts and contaminates the streams that flow from the Andes into the TDPS basin, terminating in Lake Poopó.

8.  “Informe Especial Sobre la Desaparición del Lago Poopó,” La Patria (Oruro: December 12, 2015), 8.

9.  Associated Press, “Bolivia’s Second-Largest Lake Dries up and May Be Gone Forever, Lost to Climate Change,” The Guardian, January 22, 2016, sec. World news.

10.  Nicholas Casey and Josh Haner, “Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity,” The New York Times, July 7, 2016, sec. World.

11.  Víctor Zabaleta C., La degradación ambiental de los recursos pesqueros del Lago Poopó (Centro Diocesano de Pastoral Social, 1993).

12.  The hydrological conditions of the TDPS basin must be understood as inextricably bound to the political and economic structures that surround it, as well as vice versa: the political and economic structures are heavily influenced by the hydrological conditions. Just as the interdisciplinary field of political ecology emerged to better understand environmental challenges through the concepts and methods of political economy, the hydrological conditions of the TDPS basin must also be considered in an approach centered on hydrosocial relationships: this approach, I call political hydrology; R. P. Neumann, “Political Ecology,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009), 228–33.

13.  Gary Nichols, “Endorheic Basins,” in Tectonics of Sedimentary Basins (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2011): 621–32.

14.  Revollo, “Management Issues in the Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo System,” 225-227.

15.  Revollo, “Management Issues in the Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo System,” 225-227.

16.  As is central to the motivation for this paper, the historical hydrological conditions of the Titicaca/Desaguadero/Poopó/Salar de Coipasa endorheic regime are not the same as the present-day hydrological conditions. The description of the Desaguadero River as historically deep and fast-flowing is a reflection of primary accounts of sixteenth-nineteenth century texts, and scientific surveys of the regional hydrology in wet years, as opposed to the current state of the Desaguadero River, which is nearly empty. 

17.  Zolá, 113.

18.  “Río Challapata, Department of Oruro, Bolivia,” Mindat Mineral Data (Hudson Institute of Mineralogy).

19.  Tom Perreault, “Climate Change and Climate Politics: Parsing the Causes and Effects of the Drying of Lake Poopó, Bolivia,” Journal of Latin American Geography 19, no. 3 (2020): 26–46.

20.  René D Garreaud and Patricio Aceituno, “Interannual Rainfall Variability over the South American Altiplano,” Journal of Climate 14, no. 12 (June 15, 2001): 2779–89.

21.  As of April 2024, a rainy season from December to March in the department of Oruro brought the water level of Lake Poopó between 10 and 20 centimeters. Some waterfowl have returned, but fish have not been reported.

22.  Anji Seth et al., “Making Sense of Twenty-First-Century Climate Change in the Altiplano: Observed Trends and CMIP3 Projections,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 4 (2010): 835–47.

23.  Photo edited by Byron Zhang and author.

24.  Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed. Murra et al., Andean Polities, 287. Synonymously, “aquatic axis.”

25.  James Edward Mathews, “Population and Agriculture in the Emergence of Complex Society in the Bolivian Altiplano,” in Emergence and Change in Early Urban Societies, ed. Linda Manzanilla (Boston, MA: Springer US, 1997), 245–71; David L. Browman, “New Light on Andean Tiwanaku: A Detailed Reconstruction of Tiwanaku’s Early Commercial and Religious Empire Illuminates the Processes by Which States Evolve,” American Scientist 69, no. 4 (1981): 408–19.

26. Erik J. Marsh, “The Emergence of Agropastoralism: Accelerated Ecocultural Change on the Andean Altiplano, ∼3540–3120 Cal BP,” Environmental Archaeology 20, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 13–29.

27.  Jehan A. (Jehan Albert) Vellard and Priscilla Reynolds, “Contribution to the Study of the Uru or Kot’suñ Indians,” Travaux de l’Institut Francais d’Etudes Andines 1 (1949); Weston La Barre, “The Uru of the Rio Desaguadero,” American Anthropologist 43, no. 4 (1941): 493–522. Arthur Posnansky, Antropología y sociología de las razas interandinas y de las regiones adyacentes (Editorial “Renacimiento,” 1937). Max Uhle, “Über Die Sprache Der Uros in Bolivia,” Globus, no. 69 (1896): 328–32.

28.  The origin of Uru-Morato is unknown. It is speculated that it is a derivative of an ancestral Uru word for paja, or that it denotes the darker skin of these families in comparison to their Aymara neighbors. Traces of this can be found in primary literature: “Inca founded [estancias] there, to be masters of those Uros, but they could not (as the Friars have not been able) to make a black man white with soap; they are somewhat less barbaric today, but always without order.” Antonio de la Calancha et al., Coronica moralizada del Orden de San Augustin en el Perú con sucesos ejemplares en esta Monarquía / compuesta por ... Fray Antonio de la Calancha de la misma Orden ... ; dividese este primer tomo en quatro libros ; lleva tablas de capítulos i lugares de la Sagrada Escritura (Barcelona : por Pedro Lacavalleria, 1638), 648. 

29.  K. Hannss, Uchumataqu: The Lost Language of the Urus of Bolivia. A Grammatical Description of the Language as Documented between 1894 and 1952 (Leiden : CNWS, 2008). The Uru people of today call their ancestral language Pukina. However, Western linguists claim that the Urus of Lake Poopó did not speak Pukina, but Uchumataqu, a different extinct language. In some ethnographic documents, the people of the lake called their ancestral language just ‘Uru.’ Because of this contradiction, I will refer to the language of the communities in question as the Uru language. 

30.  Virginia Sáenz, Symbolic and Material Boundaries : An Archaeological Genealogy of the Urus of Lake Poopó, Bolivia (Uppsala: African and Comparative Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2006): 39-40.

31.  Dick Edgar Ibarra Grasso, “Los Desconocidos Urus Del Poopó,” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 87, no. 1 (1962): 77–92; La Barre, “The Uru of the Rio Desaguadero”; Posnansky, Antropología y sociología de las razas interandinas y de las regiones adyacentes; Uhle, “Über Die Sprache Der Uros in Bolivia”; Vellard, “Contribution to the study of the Uru or Kot'suñ Indians.”

32.  Wachtel, “Men of the Water: the Uru Problem (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)” ed. John V. Murra et al., Anthropological History of Andean Polities; Nathan Wachtel, El regreso de los antepasados.

33.  Wachtel, Murra, Saénz, Hannss, and others all have all considered the Uru in highly specific, historical temporalities; on the one hand, this helps avoid anachronistic misapplication of certain historical realities, but as a result these authors have failed to contextualize modern Uru anthropological studies with historical trends. John V. Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel, Anthropological History of Andean Polities (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; Cambridge University Press, 1986); Virginia Sáenz, Symbolic and Material Boundaries : An Archaeological Genealogy of the Urus of Lake Poopó, Bolivia (Uppsala: African and Comparative Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2006); Nathan Wachtel, El regreso de los antepasados: los indios urus de Bolivia, del siglo XX al XVI: ensayo de historia regresiva, Segunda edicion., Primera edición en esta colección., Biblioteca del bicentenario de Bolivia. Historias y geografías 58 (La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2022); K. Hannss, Uchumataqu: The Lost Language of the Urus of Bolivia. A Grammatical Description of the Language as Documented between 1894 and 1952 (Leiden : CNWS, 2008); Adalberto Kopp, Uru Chipaya y Chullpa: soberanía alimentaria y gestión territorial en dos culturas andinas, 1. ed. (La Paz, Bolivia: Centro de Servicios Agropecuarios y Socio-Comunitarios, CESA, 2009).

34.  Ludden, David E. Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia. Anthem South Asian Studies. London: Anthem, 2002: 1-4.

35.  Sagarika Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” Social Research 70, no. 1 (2003): 83–109.

36. Sigrid Zdenka de la Barra Saavedra, Exclusión y subalternidad de los urus del lago Poopó: discriminación en la relación mayorías y minorías étnicas, Informes de investigación (La Paz: Programa de Investigación Estratégica en Bolivia, 2011).

37.  Ileana Rodríguez, “Reading Subalterns Across Texts, Disciplines, and Theories: From Presentation to Recognition,” in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, Latin America Otherwise (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

38. Ranajit Guha, “Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and Their Convergence” in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, Latin America Otherwise (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

39.  Early accounts like Acosta’s and Velasco’s refer to Lake Poopó as the nearby Spanish colonial provinces Paria and Pampa Aullagas. José de Acosta and Fermín del Pino, Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias, De Acá y de Allá. Fuentes Etnográficas 2 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008); Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y Descripción Universal de Las Indias [Texto Impreso] / Recopilada Por El Cosmógrafo Cronista Juan López de Velasco Desde El Año de 1571 al de 1574 ; Publicada Por Primera Vez En El Boletín de La Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, Con Adiciones e Ilustraciones Por Justo Zaragoza - López de Velasco, Juan - Libro - 1894, accessed April 15, 2024, http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/1866345.

40.  This will be discussed at length in the coming chapters. Major exceptions discussed later include the eventual religious conversion, military conscription in the nineteenth century (notably only for the Pacific war at the end of the century, and not for the war for independence from Spain at the beginning of the century), and of course the modernization of the regional modes of production in the twentieth century, but this is such a vast and profound change in Bolivian society that it requires a different analysis entirely.

41.  Evarista Flores Choque, interview with author, July 24, 2023; Rufino Choque Chachaque, in-person interview with author, Puñaca Tinta María, July 23, 2023. Francisca Carniviri, interview with author, Llapallapani, July 26, 2023; Murra and Wachtel, Andean Polities, 283-307.

42.  Evarista Flores Choque, in-person interview with author. July 24, 2023. It is also worth noting that the Urus say abuelos in reference to any number of generations prior; it means ancestors. Translation by author.

43.  Murra et al., Andean Polities; Humérez and Zárate, “Conflictos Intercomunitarios Por El Control Del Espacio. Aymaras y Urus En La Región Del Lago Poopó, 1770-1900,” 46–64.

44.  M. Garcia et al., “Agroclimatic Constraints for Rainfed Agriculture in the Bolivian Altiplano,” Journal of Arid Environments 71, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 110.

45.  Morris, “The Agricultural Base of the Pre-Incan Andean Civilizations,” 286.

46.  John V. Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inka State, [1979 ed.]., Research in Economic Anthropology. Supplement 1 (Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press, 1980); John V. Murra, El mundo andino: población, medio ambiente y economía, 1. ed., Historia andina, 24 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2002); John V. Murra, Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations : Transcript of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, April 8th--17th, 1969, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (Chicago: Hua Books, 2017).

47.  David Browman, “New Light on Andean Tiwanaku: A Detailed Reconstruction of Tiwanaku’s Early Commercial and Religious Empire Illuminates the Processes by Which States Evolve,” American Scientist 69, no. 4 (1981): 408–19; David Browman, “Central Andean Views of Nature and the Environment” in Helaine Selin, ed., Nature Across Cultures, vol. 4, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2003): 289-310.

48. Mary Van Buren, “Rethinking the Vertical Archipelago: Ethnicity, Exchange, and History in the South Central Andes”; Browman, “New Light on Andean Tiwanaku”; Mathews, “Population and Agriculture in the Emergence of Complex Society in the Bolivian Altiplano”; Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inka State.

49.  Garcilaso de la Vega, “Comentarios Reales de los Inca,” bk V, chs i-iii (New York, 1960) [Lisboa, 1609]: 149-54 in Murra, Economic Organization, 7. 

50.  R. Tom Zuidema, “Inka dynasty and irrigation: another look at Andean concepts of history,” in Murra et al., Andean Polities, 195.

51.  Morris, Arthur. “The Agricultural Base of the Pre-Incan Andean Civilizations.” The Geographical Journal 165, no. 3 (1999): 286. 

52.  Steve Kosiba and R. Hunter, “Fields of Conflict: A Political Ecology Approach to Land and Social Transformation in the Colonial Andes (Cuzco, Peru),” Journal of Archaeological Science 84 (June 1, 2017): 41

53.  Murra Economic Organization, 13

54.  Murra, Economic Organization, 18.

55.  Murra, Economic Organization, 20.

56.  Zuidema, “Inka Dynasty and Irrigation,” in Murra et al., Andean Polities, 177-183.

57.  Murra, Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations, xviii.

58.  Wachtel makes sure to clarify that wealthy Urus, even landowning Urus, did exist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed. Murra et al., Andean Polities, 292.

59.  Anello Oliva, Libro primero del manuscrito original del R.P. Anello Oliva, S.J. Historia del reino y provincias del Perú, de sus Incas reyes, descubrimiento y conquista por los españoles de la corona de Castilla, con otras singularidades concernientes á la historia, (1671): 38. Translation by author.

60.  Oliva, Historia del reino y provincias del Perú, 39. Translation by author.

61.  Pediculosis is head lice infestation; Bernardo Arriaza et al., “Tributos, Piojos y Dioses: Implicancias Culturales y Prevalencia de la Pediculosis en Individuos del Sitio Incaico de Camarones 9, Norte de Chile.” Chungará (Arica) 54, no. 4 (December 2022): 785–95.

62.  Marie-France Souffez, “Los piojos en el mundo pre-hispánico, según algunos documentos de los siglos XVI y XVII y unas representaciones en ceramios mochicas,” Anthropologica 4, no. 4 (April 9, 1986): 165.

63.  Oliva, 39.

64.  Souffez, “Los piojos en el mundo pre-hispánico,” 165-167.

65.  Carlos Galvez Peña, “La censura al interior de la Compañía de Jesús: notas sobre un manuscrito desconocido del P. Giovanni Anello Oliva S.J. (1639),” (2001): 214-228.

66. Hans van den Berg, “Las ediciones del Vocabulario de la lengua aymara,” Revista Ciencia y Cultura, no. 28 (June 2012): 9–39.

67.  “A Spanish Vision of the Conquest,” in The Bolivia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2018): 58.

68.  “A Spanish Vision of the Conquest,” 59.

69.  José De Acosta, Walter D. Mignolo, and Frances M. López-Morillas, “Book II,” in Natural and Moral History of the Indies , ed. Jane E. Mangan (Duke University Press, 2002), 83.

70.  Lucas Miranda Mamani, Daniel Moricio Choque, and Saturnina Alvarez de Moricio, Memorias de un olvido: testimonios de vida Uru-Muratos (ASUR Antropólogos del Sur Andino, 1992): 24-26.

71.  Gunnar Mendoza, “Posición Geográfica de Los Indios Urus Del Lago Poopó: Un Documento Colonial,” Revista Del Instituto de Sociología, 1940 in Dick Edgar Ibarra Grasso, “Los Desconocidos Urus Del Poopó,” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 87, no. 1 (1962): 77–92.

72.  Garci Diez de San Miguel, Visita hecha a la Provincia de Chucuito por Garci Diez de San Miguel en el año 1567 (Casa de la Cultura del Perú, 1964): 27, in Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed. Murra et al., Andean Polities, 285.

73.  Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias, 1574: 505 in Sáenz 50.

74. José De Acosta, Walter D. Mignolo, and Frances M. López-Morillas, “Book II,” in Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Duke University Press, 2002); 83.

75.  Balthasar Ramírez, ‘Descripción del reyno del Pirú, del sitio, temple, provincias, obispados y ciudades; de los naturales, de sus lenguas y traje.’(1597) in Paul Rivet and Georges de Créqui-Montfort, Linguistique bolivienne. La langue uru ou pukina, par G. de Créqui-Montfort et P. Rivet, 1925, 96.

76.  Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, translated by Harold V. Livermore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966): 410.

77.  Evarista Flores Choque, interview with author, July 24, 2023; Rufino Choque Chachaque, in-person interview with author, Puñaca Tinta María, July 23, 2023. Francisca Carniviri, interview with author, Llapallapani, July 26, 2023.

78.  Ludovico Bertonio, Dictionary of the Aymara Language: First and Second Part, (Juli : Francisco del Canto, 1612), bk ii, 380. “Uru: una nación de indios despreciados entre todos, que de ordinario son pescadores y de menos entendimiento. Dicen que uno que anda sucio, handrajoso, safio, sayagues, rústico.”

79. Hans van den Berg, “Las ediciones del Vocabulario de la lengua aymara,” Revista Ciencia y Cultura, no. 28 (June 2012): 9–39.

80.  Nathan Wachtel, El regreso de los antepasados: los indios urus de Bolivia, del siglo XX al XVI: ensayo de historia regresiva, Second edition, Biblioteca del bicentenario de Bolivia. Historias y geografías 58 (La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2022): 75-82.

81.  Delicia Escalera Salazar, “Entre el deseo de reaprender la lengua uru y la realidad de las voces de los comunarios Urus del lago Poopó” (Master’s Thesis, Cochabamba, Bolivia, Universidad Mayor de San Simón, 2018).

82.  Guido Machaca Benito, “Phuñaka Tinta Maria: Una comunidad ancestral de la Nación Uru en Bolivia,” Funproeib Andes (Cochabamba, 2017): ; Carlos Esteban Callapa Flores, “Llapallapani: Hombres del agua y orgullo de la Nación milenaria Uru,” Funproeib Andes, (Cochabamba, 2019): 72-75.  

83. Benito, “Phuñaka Tinta María.”

84.  “No818: Los Urus del lago Poopó en el Censo 2012; 2 de agosto Día de los Pueblos y Naciones Indígena Originario Campesinos, 02-08-13,” CEPA, August 5, 2013.

85.  Felipe Filemón Mamani, interview with author, Vilañeque, July 25, 2023.

86.  Rufino Choque Chachaque, in-person interview with author, Puñaca Tinta María, July 23, 2023.

87.  The word “aymaricize” comes from the Spanish “aimarizar,” literally meaning “to adopt the Aymara language.”

88. David L. Browman, “New Light on Andean Tiwanaku: A Detailed Reconstruction of Tiwanaku’s Early Commercial and Religious Empire Illuminates the Processes by Which States Evolve,” American Scientist 69, no. 4 (1981): 408–19; John V. Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inka State, [1979 ed.]., Research in Economic Anthropology. Supplement 1 (Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press, 1980); John V. Murra, El mundo andino: población, medio ambiente y economía, 1. ed., Historia andina, 24 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2002).

89. Nathan Wachtel, “Hommes d’eau : Le Problème Uru (XVIe-XVIIe Siècle),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 33, no. 5–6 (December 1978): 1142.

90. Catherine J. Julien, “The Uru Tribute Category; Ethnic Boundaries and Empire in the Andes,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 131, no. 1 (1987): 55.

91. Pedro de Mercado de Peñalosa, Relation de los pacajes [1586] in Jiménez de la Espada (ed.), Relaciones Geograficas de Indias.-Peru, Volume II. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 336.

92.  Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” in Murra et al., Andean Polities, 293.

93.  Julien, “The Uru Tribute Category,” 63-70.

94.  Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” in Murra et al., Andean Polities, 293.

95.  Julien, “The Uru Tribute Category,” 73.

96.  Polo de Ondegardo, “Notables Daños de no Guardar a los Indios Sus Fueros,” 1571.

97.  Garci Diez de San Miguel, Visita hecha a la Provincia de Chucuito por Garci Diez de San Miguel en el año 1567 (Casa de la Cultura del Perú, 1964); Julien, “THe Uru Tribute Category,” 84.

98.  Nathan Wachtel, El regreso de los antepasados, 423; Froilán Mamani Humérez and Raúl Reyes Zárate, “Conflictos intercomunitarios por el control del espacio. Aymaras y Urus en la región del lago Poopó, 1770-1900,  47.

99.  Julien, “The Uru Tribute Category,” 74-78.

100.  Francisco de Toledo, Tasa de la visita general de Francisco de Toledo [1571-1579]. Introducción y versión paleográfica de Noble David Cook. (Lima: Universidad Nacional, Mayor de San Marcos,1975) in Julien, “The Uru Tribute Category,” 63.

101. Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed Murra et al., Andean Polities, 293.

102.  Murra and Wachtel, Andean Polities, 294-295

103.  Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed Murra et al., Andean Polities, 298.

104.  Wachtel, “Men of the Water,” ed Murra et al., Andean Polities.

105.  Francisco de Toledo, Tasa de la visita general de Francisco de Toledo [1571-1579];  Julien, “The Uru Tribute Category,” 87.

106. Deisy Calle Alva and Gladys J. Chipana Mendoza, “La etnia Uru Murato de Bolivia,” CIPyCOS 2, no. 1 (June 30, 2023): 5.

107.  “Censo de Población y Vivienda Bolivia: Caracteristicas de Poblacion,” National Census (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, February 2015).

108.  “Bolivia Enumeration Form 2001 Census” (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2001); “Censo de Población y Vivienda Bolivia: Caracteristicas de Poblacion,” National Census (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, February 2015): 174.

109.  “Presidente Entregará Título de Nación Originaria ‘Uru,’” Agencia de Noticias Fides, May 21, 2007, Ed. 3256.

110.  “Censo de Población y Vivienda Bolivia,” National Census (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2001).

111.  The different groups listed on the ballot were: Afroboliviano, Araona, Aymara, Ayoreo, Bauer, Canichana, Cavineño, Cayubaba, Chácobo, Chipaya, Chiquitano, Esse Ejja, Guaraní, Guarasugwe, Guarayo, Itonama, Joaquiniano, Kallawaya, Leco, Machinerí, Maropa, Mojeño, Moré, Mosetén, Movima, Morato, Pacahuara, Quechua, Sirionó, Tacana, Tapiete, Tsimane/Chiman, Urus, Weenayek, Yaminagua, Yampara, Yuki, Yuracaré, Yuracaré - Mojeño.

112. “Censo de Población y Vivienda Bolivia: Caracteristicas de Poblacion,” National Census (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, February 2015): 29.

113.  “No818: Los Urus del lago Poopó en el Censo 2012; 2 de agosto Día de los Pueblos y Naciones Indígena Originario Campesinos, 02-08-13,” CEPA, August 5, 2013.

114.  Nathan Wachtel, El regreso de los antepasados, 235; K. Hannss, Uchumataqu, 18.

115.  Centro de Ecología y Pueblos Andinos data, national census data, and common knowledge within the Uru communities themselves agree that this is the case. “No818: Los Urus del lago Poopó en el Censo 2012; 2 de agosto Día de los Pueblos y Naciones Indígena Originario Campesinos, 02-08-13,” CEPA, August 5, 2013; “Censo de Población y Vivienda Bolivia: Caracteristicas de Poblacion,” National Census (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, February 2015); Florencio Inocente Aguilar, interview with the author, Puñaka Tinta María, July 23, 2023.

116.  James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009): 178-219.

117.  James C. Scott, “6. State Evasion, State Prevention: The Culture and Agriculture of Escape,” in 6. State Evasion, State Prevention: The Culture and Agriculture of Escape (Yale University Press, 2009), 182.

118.  As José de Acosta wrote, “Whole communities of Uros were found living on the lake on their rafts made of totora, which were fastened together and tied to a rock; it sometimes happened that a whole settlement would leave there and go to another place, and thus if they were sought one day in the place where they had been yesterday no trace of them could be found” p. 84.

119.   Rufino Choque Chachaque, in-person interview with author, Puñaca Tinta María, July 23, 2023.

120.  Moricio, Sobre una historia de los Uru, compiled in Miranda et al., Memorias de un Olvido, 26.

121.   Oliva, Historia del reino y provincias del Perú; José de Acosta and Fermín del Pino, Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias; Garci Diez de San Miguel, Visita hecha a la Provincia de Chucuito por Garci Diez de San Miguel en el año 1567.

122.   Daniel Moricio Choque, Sobre una historia de los Uru (Oro) hoy Muratos en Bolivia, compiled in Lucas Miranda Mamani, Daniel Moricio Choque, and Saturnina Alvarez de Moricio, Memorias de un olvido: testimonios de vida Uru-Muratos (ASUR Antropólogos del Sur Andino, 1992): 27.

123.  “Requerimiento, 1510,” National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, (Durham, 2011).

124.  “Requerimiento, 1510.”

125. “Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las indias,” [Madrid, 1791], Leyes Históricas de la monarquía hispánica, book I (Madrid 1998): 22.

126.  Calancha, 647.

127.  Miranda et al., Memorias de un olvido, 9.

128.  Hans van den Berg, “La Orden de San Agustín En Bolivia,” Organización de los Agustinos en Latinoamérica (Villanova University).

129.  Gunnar Mendoza, “Un Documento Colonial,” in Grasso, “Los Desconocidos Urus Del Poopó,” 81; Calancha et al., 647.

130.  Calancha, 645-50

131.  Qotamama is an Uru term for “mother lake.” It is similar to the common Pachamama, the Aymara and Quechua “Mother Earth.” “Qot,” like in qot’zuñi, means lake in Uru. Hannss, Uchumataqu, 58-63.

132.  Daniel Moricio Choque, Sobre una historia de los Uru (Oro) hoy Muratos en Bolivia, compiled in Miranda et al., Memorias de un Olvido, 23-24.

133.  Moricio, Sobre una historia de los Uru, compiled in Miranda et al., Memorias de un Olvido, 30-35.

134.  Daniel Moricio Choque, Sobre una historia de los Uru (Oro) hoy Muratos en Bolivia, compiled in Miranda et al., Memorias de un Olvido, 33-34

135.  Miranda, Testimonios de Vida, compiled in Miranda et al. Memorias de un Olvido, 71.

136.  “Composición y amparo por el juez visitador Joseph de la Vega Alvarado e año de 1646,” in “Estudio histórico técnico sobre el problema limítrofe entre Oruro y Potosí,” Pensamiento Universitario - Universidad Técnica de Oruro, No.5 (Oruro, 2014): 10.

137.  “Composición y amparo por el juez visitador Joseph de la Vega Alvarado el año de 1646,” in Estudio histórico técnico sobre el problema limítrofe entre Oruro y Potosí, 10-17.

138.  “Joseph de la Vega Alvarado el año de 1646,” 10.

139.  Archives of the court of Oruro, Derechos Reales, Registro de comprobantes de Poopó (1,939-40), f. 158r.

140.  Calancha, 649; Matthew 4:19 (New Revised Standard Version).

141. Froilán Mamani Humérez and Raúl Reyes Zárate, “Conflictos Intercomunitarios Por El Control Del Espacio. Aymaras y Urus En La Región Del Lago Poopó, 1770-1900,” Reunión Anual de Etnología XVIII (n.d.): 47.

142.  Moricio, Sobre una historia de los Uru, compiled in Miranda et al., Memorias de un Olvido, 33-34

143.  Félix Sequeiros Quispe, Cuentos de los Urus del Lago Poopó, Primera edición, Nación Uru (Cochabamba, Bolivia: FUNPROEIB Andes, 2014), 16.

144.  “Bolivia (Plurinational State of) 2009,” translated by Max Planck Institute (Oxford University Press); 

145. Lucas Miranda Mamani, Daniel Moricio Choque, and Saturnina Alvarez de Moricio, Memorias de un olvido: testimonios de vida Uru-Muratos (ASUR Antropólogos del Sur Andino, 1992): 23-25.

146.  Quispe, Cuentos de los Urus del Lago Poopó, 42.

147.  Guido Machaca Benito, “Phuñaka Tinta Maria: Una comunidad ancestral de la Nación Uru en Bolivia,” FUNPROEIB Andes (Cochabamba, 2017): ; Carlos Esteban Callapa Flores, “Llapallapani: Hombres del agua y orgullo de la Nación milenaria Uru,” FUNPROEIB Andes, (Cochabamba, 2019): 72-75.   

148.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, translated by William Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp 183-184.

149.  Evarista Flores Choque, interview with author, July 24, 2023; Rufino Choque Chachaque, in-person interview with author, Puñaca Tinta María, July 23, 2023. Miranda et al., “Memorias de un Olvido.”

150.  Pieter Muysken, “Spanish Grammatical Elements in Bolivian Quechua: The Transcripciones Quechuas Corpus: Procesos Interculturales En El Contacto de Lenguas Indígenas Con El Español En El Pacífico e Hispanoamérica,” in Lo Propio y Lo Ajeno En Las Lenguas Austronésicas Amerindias, 2001, 59–82.