Take a look at Jose Carlos Mariategui's "Nationalism and Vanguardism" (1925) and "The Indigenous Question" (1929) in _The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism_, for instance. Mariategui argues that "the new generation" of Peruvian socialists were inspired to "establish that the major demands of Peru's vanguardists are those of the Indian" (69). Mariategui asserts:
***** Nowhere in the world is socialism an anti-national movement. It might seem so in the empires. In England, France, the United States, etc., the revolutionaries denounce and fight the imperialism of their own governments. But the function of the socialist idea differs among the politically or economically colonized peoples. While in no way denying any of its principles, socialism acquires a nationalist attitude among these peoples by force of circumstance. Those who follow the process of the Moroccan, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, and other nationalist movements will observe the essentially popular character of such agitation from its origin. Western imperialism and capitalism always encounter minimal resistance, if not complete submission, from the conservative classes and ruling castes of the colonial peoples. The demands for national indepndence receive their impulse and energy from the popular masses....
One of the most interesting phenomena and broadest movements of our epoch is precisely this revolutionary nationalism, this revolutionary patriotism....
In Peru, those who represent and interpret _Peruanidad_ who conceive of it as an affirmation and not a negation, who work to return the nation to those who were conquered and subdued by the Spaniards, to those who lost it four centuries ago and have not yet regained it. (71-2) *****
What Mariategui says above was largely true during the days of anti-colonial struggles for independence. Now, long after the heyday of anti-colonial movements in the Third World, we need to assess each Third World nationalism, case by case, taking a close look at its social and ideological compositions, as well as its position vis-a-vis imperialism.
Still and all, what Mariategui called "the Indigenous Question" is an unfinished one anywhere in the Americas and especially important in the largely Indian nations in Latin America. I suspect that the combination of nationalism & indigenismo is in many ways meaningful to, say, peoples in Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, etc.
The Zapatistas too, while skillful at gaining international solidarity from abroad, have often drawn upon the idea of inflecting nationalism with indigenismo:
***** But _today we say enough!_ We are the heirs of the people who truly forged our nation, we are the millions of the dispossessed, and we call on all of our brothers and sisters to join us on the only path that will allow us to escape a starvation caused by the insatiable ambition of a seventy-year-old dictatorship, led by a small inner clique of traitors who represent ultra-conservative groups ready to sell out our countryŠ.
After we tried to do everything legally possible, based on our Magna Carta, to stop all this, as a last hope we invoke that same document, our Constitution, Article 39, which says:
"National sovereignty resides, essentially and originally, in the people. All public power emanates from the people, and is constituted for the benefit of the same. _The people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government._"
Therefore, as per the terms of our Constitution, we send this declaration to the Mexican Federal Army, one of the basic pillars of the dictatorship under which we suffer. This army is controlled exclusively by the party in power, headed by the federal executive officeŠ.
Congruent with this _Declaration of War_, we ask other _Powers of the Nation_ to take up the fight to depose the dictator and restore legitimacy and stability to this nationŠ.
The Mexican people are on our side; we are patriots and our insurgent soldiers love and respect our tricolored flag; we use red and black on our uniforms, the same colors working people use when on strike; on our flag are the letters _"EZLN," Zapatista Army of National Liberation_, and we always carry that flag into battleŠ. (_Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation_, pp. 52-3) *****
So, nationalism of one kind or another is likely to be with us in the foreseeable future. The questions are, of what kind? When? And where? To what effects?
Yoshie