Along the Bolivian Highway - Miriam Shakow Contemporary Ethnography

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Sacaba, people could not live these categories in practice. In this book, I highlight the experiences of those Bolivians whose incomes and aspirations gave them the option of choosing to ally themselves either with elites or with the indigenous and poor. Middle classes are privileged relative to the poor majority, including the 37 percent of Bolivians classified as very poor who struggle to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families (Interamerican Development Bank 2008). Yet, though members of the new middle class have high hopes to leave behind their campesino parents and neighbors, they often have limited means to achieve this goal of economic and social upward mobility. Within the rigid binary opposition of elite and subaltern categories of identity in Bolivia, there is little room for them to identify themselves as being in the middle (see also Albro 2010).3 Despite the lack of acknowledgment of these middling groups, Bolivian politics and social life have been deeply shaped by the emergence of middle classes. The many Bolivians who aspired to join the middle class often brought to light the contradictions inherent in the goal of radically transforming Bolivian politics away from corruption and clientelism and toward redistribution of wealth and publicly minded governance.

      Many Sacabans hoped to become middle class. They responded with a mixture of skepticism, disgust, and pride to the rise of a new left-wing indigenous movement and party. In the chapters that follow, I examine how this new middle class’s concerns and hopes responded to a dynamic political and economic environment: draconian free-market reforms, a government decentralization that gave increased power and funding to local governments but created new political conflicts, the rise of MAS with Morales at its head, and an unstable economy that had been sustained during the 1980s and 1990s largely through production of coca leaves—an ancient, sacred crop in the Andes and a key ingredient in the modern cocaine industry.4 In response to these multiple pressures and opportunities, rising middle classes often wavered between asserting ideals of their own social superiority and ideals of social equality in relation to Bolivia’s poor majority—including neighbors, friends, and family members. I focus on how middle-class identities shaped, and were shaped by, new models of citizenship and political mobilization. Angelique Haugerud and Tom Young have called our attention to the “no-man’s-land” between anthropology and political science: the gap between ethnographic attention to individuals’ and groups’ intimate experiences and large-scale studies of political institutions and their transformations (Haugerud 1995:15; Young 1993:307). In this book I show the mutual effects of everyday efforts to forge both new middle-class identities and political transformations of the Bolivian nation.

      Middle-class concerns are all the more important to explore given that the Morales administration, now in its eighth year, has to date been unable to reduce unemployment significantly, and most Bolivians are disappointed at the seeming failure of Morales’s promises to enact a total transformation of political life. Indeed, four years into Morales’s second term, the buoyant public sentiment of triumph has ebbed considerably in Bolivia. For the past year, the Morales administration has been besieged by daily strikes, protests, and tumultuous marches, much as his elite predecessors were. The government and its allies stand accused of corruption, nepotism, continuing to pursue free-market economic policies in contravention of its political platform, and selling out the indigenous poor in favor of the old-time elites.5 This hard fall is not particularly surprising, considering the mismatch between the high expectations at the time of Morales’s election and the realities of Bolivia: the country’s precarious position in the global economy, elite opposition to change, the Morales government’s inexperience in governing, and the competing goals in Morales’s diverse left-indigenous social movement coalition. The actual practice of governing, as so often happens following the coming to power of groups promising radical change, has shown the difficulty of harmonizing competing groups’ interests. I contend in this book that some of these challenges can be understood as the outcome of the conflicted ideals, ambiguous identities, and moral dilemmas experienced by Bolivia’s new middle classes.

       The Sacaba Highway: Metaphor and Conduit of Bolivia’s Moving Middle

      To understand the connection between individual experience and these broad shifts in political practices—and to make research most useful to social movements with whose political aims we sympathize—we must look beyond core movement activists to the rank and file and those disaffected by movements (Hess 2007:465; Edelman 2001:309; Burdick 1998). In order to engage diverse experiences in Bolivia’s political life, I focused on people residing at least part-time within the municipality of Sacaba rather than focusing my work squarely on MAS activists. Between 1995 and 2009, I conducted research along the frenetically busy highway that serves as a vital artery for Sacaba Municipality and for the country as a whole.6 I interviewed Sacaba residents who were both enchanted and disgusted with electoral politics, as well as elected and appointed municipal officials in Sacaba, MAS and other political party leaders, Sacaba political activists, and agrarian union leaders. I watched municipal city council sessions, residents’ meetings with Sacaba mayors, and street protests. I attended meetings of local agrarian unions, women’s groups, youth groups, potable water associations, irrigation associations, church masses, and planning sessions inspired by the Popular Participation Law. These conversations in this highly bilingual region took place in the rich local mix of Spanish and the indigenous language, Quechua.

      A central aspect of my work also involved accompanying people who resided and worked in Sacaba Municipality on their short and long commutes throughout the municipality, to the city of Cochabamba, and to the tropical Chapare coca-growing region to the east. Sacaba municipality hugs the eastern edge of the large central Bolivian city of Cochabamba. Most Sacabans spent considerable time traveling along the Cochabamba–Santa Cruz highway, Bolivia’s busiest, which runs through the municipality and leads to the Chapare and to agribusiness regions beyond. Bolivia’s eleventh largest municipality in 2006 and in 2005 and containing 150,000 registered residents, Sacaba Municipality was made up of a zone of explosive suburban sprawl bordering Cochabamba, a booming provincial town famous for its potato market, and rural districts that officially contained 30 percent of the municipal population but most of its territory. Sacaba has also been infamous as a “red zone” of cocaine production. As in many Bolivian and Latin American provincial towns (provincias), Sacaba town dwellers since the Spanish conquest have vigorously distinguished their social status from that of campesinos. Yet maintaining these racial and class distinctions remains a more difficult task than in cities because campesinos are so close geographically; share town dwellers’ physical appearance and often, indigenous language; and sometimes possessed comparable levels of wealth.

      Racial and class identities were deeply connected to ideas about geography in Bolivia; people were often imagined to be tied rigidly to either rural or urban spaces. The active movement of people along the highway provides a strikingly immediate contradiction to that polarized social geography by which people are imagined to be stuck in place. A brief tour by bus of the travels made daily by Sacabans provides a sense of the constant movement of people in this region, their alternation between elite and subaltern identities, and the blurring in practice of spaces classified officially and in the popular imagination as urban and rural. The highway also serves as a metaphor for the anxieties and aspirations of the upwardly mobile in Sacaba, their fears of remaining trapped in a rural identity while also valuing the ideal of peasant community as a refuge from the hectic pace of urban life.

      When Amanda, a lawyer from the rural Sacaba locality of Choro, took me with her to attend a monthly meeting of her parents’ coca growers’ union in the Chapare in August 2009, we began the trip from downtown Cochabamba City (see maps in Figures 1 and 2).7 Hopping on a minibus in the Cancha, Cochabamba’s enormous open-air market, in the early morning, commuters and long-distance travelers could take refuge from the smell of diesel fuel and the sounds of thousands of vendors hawking plastic bags, calla lilies, and bicycle tires. After inching through the market crowds, the minibus sped past the public university district, hospitals, a military base, and a botanical garden whose high walls were covered with competing graffiti from the early 2000s condemning or supporting road blockades pressuring for nationalization of natural gas.

      The border between Cochabamba City

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