Review Essays Bolivia: Tracing the Roots of a Social Movement State

Tien-Ann Shih, University of Chicago

Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics. By Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson. (New York: Verso, 2007. xxiv + 217 pp., introduction, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $22.95 paper.) Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900 1950. By Ann Zulawski. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 253 pp., introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $21.95 paper.) Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia. By Javier Sanjins C. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 240 pp., introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth.) A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 18801952. By Laura Gotkowitz. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xiv + 398 pp., introduction, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $23.95 paper.) Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia. By Nancy Grey Postero. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, xii + 294 pp., introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 paper.) On 25 January 2009, Bolivians voted in a national referendum to approve a sweeping new constitution. Western news sources described the vote as the end result of a three-year effort by President Evo Morales to overhaul a political system that was a reflection of centuries of colonial rule and indigenous subjugation. In a televised victory speech broadcast after the referendum, Morales declared he had accomplished his mission to refound Bolivia. In his rhetoric, Morales made clear his view that the politiEthnohistory 56:4 (Fall 2009) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2009-028 Copyright 2009 by American Society for Ethnohistory

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cal mandate given to his party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), by the referendum was a harbinger of revolution to come in Bolivian society, and, further, that MAS itself was the embodiment of this revolution. Though MASs ascendancy to power is undoubtedly a signal of deep change, the temptation to view Moraless election as ground zero for the new era of revolution fails to recognize that the dramatic rupture in the political order that brought MAS to power was itself the product of a revolution, one whose current cycle began in 2000 with the Cochabamba water wars and which saw two popular uprisings in 2003 and 2005. lvaro Garca Linera, the current Bolivian vice president, has rightly characterized the most recent popular upheavals as symptoms of a profound state crisis having a dual nature. In the short term, according to Garca Linera, the crisis is one of the neoliberal model. However, he emphasizes, a la longue, the crisis is an institutional and ideological one of the republican state, premised since its foundation on a colonial relationship to the indigenous majority of the Bolivian people.1 Within this view, the current insurrectionary moment, then, is itself part of a much longer history of revolution in the Andes. The five books under review here consider the making of the current political crisis in Bolivia. Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomsons monograph Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics locates the roots of the contemporary revolutionary momentone that has brought about the collapse of the once triumphant neoliberal modelwithin an extended history of uprisings in the Southern Andean territory that is now Bolivia. Through a close analysis of the history of insurrection, Hylton and Thomson locate the distinctiveness of the current revolution in the convergence of both the Indian tradition of struggle, which they argue was most fully expressed in the 1770s to 1780s during a regional insurgency in Potos led by an Indian named Toms Katari, and the national-popular struggle starting in 1952, in which agrarian workers and miners overthrew the military regime and that introduced social and economic reforms, including universal suffrage, nationalization of tin mines, and land redistribution. Their use of deploying the Andean concept of tinkuwhich, as they describe it, is the coming together of two parts that are distinct and that may be in tension with each other, yet are also complementary and mutually constitutive (147)as a metaphor for the social and political dynamic underlying revolution in the Andes is especially apt. Echoing Hegels dialectic, they see that historical progress will depend on the charged encounterthe tinkubetween indigenous mobilizations and creole leftists and trade unionists representing national-popular interests. Hylton and Thomsons lapidary analysis of the malaise of internal

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colonialism, which existed not only in Bolivia but is characteristic of many post-colonial states, concludes that it has its roots in the contradictory impulses of liberal ideology. Bolivian liberalism, they write, has been described as ethnocidal, since its aim was to turn Indians into Bolivians without granting them the rights and status of citizens (47). Under Bolivian liberalism, land that had been previously held communally by Indian communities was converted into alienable private propertythe idea was that if Indians were to be modernized, they first had to be saved from themselves and their old Indian ways. In the 1870s, with taxes from mining and commerce proving new bases for state budgets and a lesser reliance on revenue from the collection of tribute, liberal nation builders attempted to overcome the colonial legacy of regional fragmentation by breaking up Indian communities in order to create a cohesive national space. The break up of Indian communities and the sale of community lands in the interest of nation building were liberal responses to the Indian problem. Ann Zulawskis fascinating monograph Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 19001950 considers another facet of the Indian problem by examining the relationship between medicine and public health and ideas about race, within larger debates about Bolivian national identity and the role of the Indian in the post-colonial modernizing nation. Unequal Cures is an elegantly written and accessible social history that investigates the role of scientific medicine in Bolivian state formation, where governing elites saw racial and cultural heterogeneity as an impediment to modernity. Using archival medical documents, Zulawski examines how shifts in ideological and social transformations of the era were reflected in debates over public health. Discussions about public health policy betrayed ambivalence about ethnicity held by medical professionals. Physical sickness was connected to ethnicity and gender; the habits and health issues linked to Indians and women in turn were viewed as an impediment to Bolivias attempt to modernize. In chapters based around four case studies, Zulawski analyzes how the Chaco War, the interventions of the Rockefeller Foundation, and attitudes toward Indians, women, and the mentally ill simultaneously shaped health policy and reflected anxieties held by the elite about a mestizaje heritage and future. Especially illuminating is her study of the rise of a nascent class of medical professionals trained in the Western European medical tradition. Zulawski explains how university-trained medical professionals, who found their progressive beliefs about healing challenged by those advocated by Andean healers practicing traditional medicine, mounted an effort to discredit indigenous healers by presenting their practices as ineffective, barbarous, or simply based on trickery (31) and Indian lifestyles as back-

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ward, unhygienic, and repulsive. Through this example, she demonstrates how expert discourses of the early twentieth century posited that Indianness was the root of Bolivias social and health problems and, as such, posed a challenge to modernity and progress. Later chapters trace the relationship between national crises and health care and public policy. Zulawski convincingly argues the Chaco War with Paraguay, which brought on political and economic instability that strained medical resources and exposed profound weaknesses in the health system, ultimately forced health care onto the governments agenda. Such failures of the public health infrastructure during the war years forced policy makers to reflect on the kind of public health system that would be appropriate to a nation with aspirations of modernity and democracy (51). Like Zulawski, Laura Gotkowitz and Javier Sanjins C. concentrate on the era between the Chaco War and the revolution of 1952. Laura Gotkowitz situates her meticulously documented study of Indian and peasant mobilization during Latin Americas least-studied social revolution, the 1952 revolution led by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario. Her study consciously moves away from the class-based movements that accompanied the rise of the peasant leagues and mine workers unions that were prevalent after the Chaco War, looking instead at the history of rural mobilization and its role in the 1952 revolution. In particular, she examines the struggles to control the meaning and power of laws during 19101920 and in the 1940s, when local officials abuse of power and disregard for laws were fundamental grievances. During this period of time, indigenous leaders worked to resolve the contradictions of Bolivian liberalism, testing the claims of the universality of the concept of liberal citizenship by demanding individual and collective rights while also asserting their difference as Indians. Progress made under liberalism, particularly with regard to land reform, was challenged as indigenous leaders appealed to the national constitution in order to assert their rights to collective representation and communal landholding (1819, 39). Weaving national legislative debates with close examination of Indian communities and larger estates in Cochabamba, Gotkowitz explores Indianstate relations and indigenous political projects from the period of the liberal oligarchic order to the 1952 revolution. Like the preceding projects reviewed, Gotkowitz pays especial attention to the particularities of the liberal project and the contradictions it unleashed into the sociopolitical order of the Andes in the first part of the twentieth century. By scrutinizing the 1952 revolution, she finds that the critical role of Indians and peasants in the origins of the insurrection has tended to be underestimated. Her contribution is an important one that situates itself within a critical historiog-

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raphy that seeks to resurrect the vital role of the peasantry in its own selfdetermination vis--vis revolution. In Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia, Javier Sanjins C. offers us a rigorously researched and eloquently written monograph about mestizajethe process by which Spanish and Indian have mixed, creating a racial, cultural, and natural synthesisand its role in the construction of Bolivian modernity in the twentieth century. Sanjins makes the compelling argument that mestizaje was critical for postindependence liberals in Bolivia because it allowed a claim for the racial unity of their countrya prerequisite to fulfill the enlightenment concept of the unified nation. Examining the period leading up to the revolution of 1952, he argues that it was in the period following the devastating defeat of Bolivia in the Chaco War that mestizo-criollo reformers, forced to reconsider the country, made mestizaje the dominant discourse in the project of nation building. Sanjins expertly deploys the writing of a controversial mestizo-criollo intellectual, Franz Tamayo (18791956), and pictorial representations of mestizaje by the Bolivian painter Cecilio Guzmn de Rojas, along with other literary and cultural artifacts, to offer an intellectual and aesthetic history of the period after the Chaco War. Through this adroit analysis, we are provided a critical rethinking of the role, and ultimately, the limits, of mestizaje in the construction of Bolivia and the Bolivian social imaginary after the Chaco War. Nancy Grey Posteros volume Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia gives a name to the social formation from which the current Bolivarian insurrection has emerged. Postero describes a movement she calls postmulticultural citizenship which she argues has mobilized around promises of full citizenship represented by the election of Morales. This social formation, she writes, is armed with the language of citizenship and the expectation of the rights it implies . . . and is demanding radical changes in the traditional relationship between state and civil society (1). Postmulticultural citizenship, while somewhat awkwardly named, is thusly prefixed to emphasize that this current moment of civic participation and popular protest in Bolivia is a particular response to a kind of citizenship that was formed as a direct challenge to the regime of citizenship that developed under Snchez de Lozadas administration (199397), which centered heavily on the trope of indigenousness. Postero demonstrates that the particularities of the current regime of popular-political participation came about in response to the failures of the previous multicultural reforms under neoliberalism to provide for genuine democratic participation in Bolivia. This direct response to indigenous neoliberal politics has ushered in a new era of citizenship practices that

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demands a redefinition of the relationship between the state and its members. In that sense, while Bolivias policy of neoliberal multiculturalism was not the wholesale reversal of centuries of domination, exclusion, and internal colonialism, contestation of this policy has resulted in a different kind of participatory politicsone from which stemmed the first revolution of the twenty-first century. Like Hylton and Thomson, Postero argues that what is striking about the new social formation is that its success and strength was dependent on the convergence in protest of indigenous groups along with those representing trade unions and other national-popular interests, in other words, that social movements are now integrating ethnic difference with issues of class (5). Posteros ethnography of the leadership of the Guaran of Santa Cruz examines the Bolivian experience of state-sponsored neoliberal multiculturalism to expose the contradictions of multicultural policy and recognition under an economic regime whose interest is in the rapid expansion and growth of the market. What makes the current moment of postmulticultural citizenship so successful, Postero argues, is that rather than framing its demands in term of class or race, the movement articulates its demands in terms of citizens rights. Bolivians are now asking for inclusion in public processes because as citizens, they have a right to the processes. Postero herself points to a fact that most threatens to undercut her argument: that a significant literature suggests that there is a marked disjuncture between the ideal of liberal citizenship and its implementation in society. As Hylton, Thomson, and Zulawski have pointed out, citizenship under Bolivian liberalism of the late nineteenth century was underlain by inherent exclusions based on race, class, and gender. And yet, while Posteros explanation for the success of the postmulticultural citizenship locates it in the movements ability to rearticulate the discourse and their demands around the concept of citizens rights, she concedes the limits of the notion of citizenship around which these demands are made. In doing so, she underscores a broader problem: that the contradictions of the liberal concept of Bolivian citizenship have yet to be fully resolved. Posteros solution to this conundrum is to propose a model for theorizing citizenship that takes into account that its enactment occurs in politically structured contexts. However, if as she suggests, the notion of citizenship is problematic in that it embodies manifold contradictions in practice, is it possible to argue that the strategy taken by popular social movements in Bolivia, framing demands around citizens rights, is therefore intrinsically flawed? To elaborate, if the understanding of liberal citizenship rests partially on the exclusion of some based on gender, class, or race in bourgeois society, to what extent can a movement constructed around the rights of

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the citizen make a legitimate claim to the universality to which it aspires? Further, what are the stakes for social movements composed principally of historically marginalized peoples in organizing itself around an inherently exclusionary concept like liberal citizenship? Through a series of decrees in 1824 and 1825, Simn Bolivar sought to liberate Indian society from the vestiges of Spanish colonialism by abolishing colonial era practices such as Indian tribute and the mita. However, liberation did not bring about the egalitarian ideal that the implementation of political liberalism promised: the ultimate irony of liberation was that the political ideology of liberalism, and its attendant institutions, held a concept of progress that viewed Indian ways of being as antithetical to enlightened rationality. Many observers have noted that Bolivian liberalism was fraught with contradictions, seeking to make Bolivian citizens out of Indians and peasants without affording them the full rights of citizenship. The five books reviewed here deal with the various ways the paradoxes and contradictions of liberalism have set the stage for numerous revolutions and the current state in crisis in Bolivia. While the rest of the world looks on with great interest to see how the watershed event of Moraless presidency will unfold, the stakes are high for Bolivians, who have been facing vocal calls for autonomy from the countrys richest provinces in the east as they continue to negotiate the meaning of citizenship and how it will be exercised in their social movement state. Note
1 lvaro Garca Linera, State Crisis and Popular Power, New Left Review 37 (2006): 74.