Events in Latin America – from the recent visit of Pope John Paul to canonize an Indian saint to the rise of Indian political leaders – are throwing a spotlight on a continental population coming out of the shadows: millions of indigenous. Their number and clout are growing.

Bigotry and discrimination remain ugly. What is tolerable and even acceptable in public discourse about Indians is appalling, much like the promulgation of negative stereotypes about blacks in the United States 50 years ago. The indigenous are the unwashed and unwanted of the hemisphere, an underpaid labor backbone for lucrative export crops and nearly every other kind of hard labor, often unable even to speak the dominant Spanish language. For centuries, they have lived on the margins of social and political life.

But change is in the air.

One reason: demographics. The Indians' population growth rate now often surpasses that of Spanish-descent neighbors. The middle class, generally white, is simply having fewer children, while the poor – almost always count Indians among them – are having as many as ever, while progress in health care access cuts into their infant mortality rate. When I first lived in Mexico in the l970s, the average family had seven children, but now has 2.5, working toward a government goal of 2.1. Go into the countryside, however, where the 10 per cent of Mexico’s population that is Indian lives, and you’ll find families with five or more children is the norm. In Guatemala, where Indians are already 60 percent of the population, big families mean that after 500 years, the indigenous Maya have recouped their pre-conquest numbers.

And don’t even talk to most Maya women in Guatemala about family planning programs. After a 36-year war ended in the l990s, a U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission reported that about 90 percent of the 200,000 who died were unarmed Maya, and said the government was responsible for incidents of genocide. Suspicion that birth control pills and devices are bad for you is widespread enough in villages, and even greater is the suspicion that outsiders with their programs – and that includes the national government – do not have the best interests of the Maya at heart.

Yet Guatemala is one of the countries where indigenous leaders are becoming most politically prominent. They are members of Congress, mayors of towns. Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Maya woman who received the Nobel Peace Prize in l992, is promoting a hands-on program aimed at encouraging indigenous women to run for political office. Many already have public experience, lobbying to find disappeared family members, or organizing local literacy programs.

The story of Latin America is also the story of Indian uprisings, alive in the collective memory but often missing or barely mentioned in the history books. However Mexico's Chiapas Zapatista uprising of the l990s, which shook our southern neighbor to its core, was an unhidden, media-savvy Indian uprising that maintains regional influence – modern Mexico will never be the same. The demand for indigenous rights feels permanently on the table.

In Brazil, Latin America's largest country and the twelfth largest economy in the world, Amazonian Indians are demarcating their territories, making it illegal for outsiders to enter without permission. Brazilian Indians are pressuring the government to recognize their intellectual property rights to pharmaceuticals developed by international drug companies after the Indians shared their traditional knowledge and plants with researchers.

What to look for now is how the growing strength of the indigenous in public life may cross over to link up with the fury and disgust of other Latin Americans with status quo politics. The time is ripe as leaders out of the traditional mold are capturing the public imagination: Hugo Chavez, more popular than ever in some sectors in Venezuela; Lula da Silva, the leftist leading candidate for Brazilian presidential elections. In Bolivia, the story of Evo Morales may be a premonitory tale.

Morales is an Aymara Indian leader who lost the recent presidential election by a hairsbreadth. A former coca farmer who protested eradication programs because they hurt Indian growers dependent on the crop, Morales’ fame spread in 2000 when he stood at the forefront of protests against the government sale of a water utility to the Bechtel Corporation. Privatization of water, electricity and telephones in Latin America has fallen hard on the poor and even some of the middle class. Governments are privatizing in conformity with demands of global financial institutions, and in order to move toward free market economies.

Non-Indian Bolivians overcame the racism that is a fact of life to vote for Morales, because he represented opposition to traditional parties when few others did, and spoke out against economic policies that hurt. The fact that the U.S. ambassador threatened an aid cut-off if Morales were elected did not hurt his image at all; it helped among an electorate sick and tired of perceiving its leaders as marionettes in the hands of Washington and the banks. Morales heads the most powerful party in Congress, and the new Bolivian president will not be able to govern effectively without taking the Aymara Indian into account.

Pope John Paul, whose support of Solidarity and Polish dissidents was a landmark event in the fall of European communism, addressed himself to Indians at the July ceremony to canonize Guatemala's Hermano Pedro, who served poor Indians in the 1700s. "You have a right," the Pope said, "to justice and a dignified life."

E-mail Mary Jo McConahay at