The Role Of Resguardo Land Access And Languages In The Income Disparity Affecting Colombian Indigenous People

This paper addresses the question ?Do land access through resguardos (reserve lands) and ethno linguistic alienation/integration contribute to the relative income poverty of Colombian Indigenous peoples?? To answer this question this investigation regressed the (log of) income unmet basic needs (IUBN) gap between Indigenous and non-minority people on a set of explanatory variables that included: the mean resguardo land size per family (as an indicator of land access) and the percent of Indigenous populations (at the municipal level) that speak Spanish and those that speak their Native language (as indicators of ethnolinguistic alienation/integration). The research results suggest that, for the Andean region, ethnolinguistic integration (speaking a Native language) was in important factor in decreasing the IUBN gap but, for the Amazonian region, ethnolinguistic acculturation (speaking Spanish) increased the IUBN gap. More resguardo land per family, however, tended to be associated with a larger IUBN gap. Further investigated suggested that this was likely due to the fact that resguardos tend to be large where lands are marginal and/or remote, making them economically unproductive.