Creole elites romanticize indigenous peoples only after they have been largely extinguished.

Evidence

This reversed ventriloquism helped to open the way for a selfconscious indigenismo, especially in the southern Americas. At the edge: Mexicans speaking in Spanish ‘for’ pre-Columbian ‘Indian’ civilizations whose languages they do not understand. How revolutionary this kind of exhumation was appears most clearly if we contrast it with the formulation of Fermín de Vargas, cited in chapter 2. For where Fermín still thought cheerfully of ‘extinguishing’ living Indians, many of his political grandchildren became obsessed with ‘remembering,’ indeed ‘speaking for’ them, perhaps precisely because they had, by then, so often been extinguished. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 733

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘extinguish then remember’ dynamic parallels how Islamophobia scholarship shows Western discourse preserving a mythologized Arab past while dismissing living Muslim communities.