Todos Somos Presidentes We Are All Presidents

Cultural Studies
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‘TODOS SOMOS PRESIDENTES/WE ARE ALL

PRESIDENTS’
Freya Schiwy
To cite this article: Freya Schiwy (2011) ‘TODOS SOMOS PRESIDENTES/WE ARE ALL
PRESIDENTS’, Cultural Studies, 25:6, 729-756, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2010.545426
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Freya Schiwy
‘TODOS SOMOS PRESIDENTES/WE ARE

ALL PRESIDENTS’
Democracy, culture, and radical politics
In light of recent discussions of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the political in

cultural theory and the ‘left turn’ in Latin America, exemplified in the election of
Evo Morales as the first indigenous president, this essay discusses concepts of
governance elaborated by Bolivian indigenous intellectuals and media activists. It
engages in detail with three examples of thinking through what is arguably a
broad de-colonial process: the work of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA)
and the movement to reconstitute the ayllu; Pablo Mamani’s analysis of the micro-
governments in El Alto; and CEFREC-CAIB’s indigenous media activism.
Thinking from the perspective of a long-standing struggle against global
capitalism and its colonial legacies, the political constitutes paradoxically a
complex and dynamic process of institutionalized consensus governance. Levels of
community, regional, and national governance are bound into a feedback loop
where representation gives way to the ideal of ‘mandar obedeciendo’ (governing by
obeying). The Bolivian ‘democratic revolution’ is hence not conceptualized merely
as a widening of the citizen base a form of inclusion that Rancière would call
‘police’-but rather as profoundly reshaping the relation between the social, the
cultural, and the state, and thus of democracy itself.
Keywords decolonization; political; democracy; culture; indigenous

media; Bolivia
When Evo Morales assumed office as president of Bolivia in a ceremony held in
the ancient ruins of Tiwanaku on January 21, 2006, he invoked a political
theory. Morales stated that 500 years of international indigenous anti-colonial
struggle have finally rendered results (‘La Revolución . . .’ 2006, p. 16).
Instead of representing the multicultural nation of Bolivia, his election signaled
that ‘por primera vez en la historia boliviana, aymaras, quechuas, mojeños
somos presidentes. No solamente Evo es el presidente, todos somos
presidentes’ (‘for the first time in Bolivian history Aymaras, Quechuas,
Moxeños are all presidents. Not only is Evo the president, we are all
presidents’) (p. 17). These words play on the readily recognizable Zapatista
slogan, ‘todos somos Marcos’ (‘we are all Marcos’) that stands for a new idea
Cultural Studies Vol. 25, No. 6 November 2011, pp. 729756
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2010.545426
730 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
of political movement, no longer centered on representative democracy or

even populist leadership. Morales’s inaugural address invoked a second parallel
between Bolivia and Chiapas: Explicitly quoting Subcomandante Marcos,
Bolivia’s new indigenous president announced: ‘mandaré obedeciendo’ (‘I will
rule by obeying’) (p. 43). Given the Zapatista’s ‘Other Campaign’ underway
in 2006 which reiterated the movement’s decline to bid for state power in
Mexico’s national election the reference to the Zapatista uprising and the
Mayan notion of ‘ruling by obeying’ in the Bolivian context appears
paradoxical. What notion of the political does this encounter between state
and non-state put forward? What becomes of the concept of democracy in the
indigenous discourses invoked?
In a recent article Etienne Balibar reminds his readers of the historically
contested notion of democracy in the European tradition: ‘the name of
democracy covers ambiguities which are so considerable as to make its use
almost impossible without declaring in which sense it is used, especially in a
period where the most questionable actions, ethically and politically, are
performed in the name of democracy (but was it ever really different?)’
(Balibar 2008, p. 524, original emphasis). Balibar partially agrees with Jacques
Rancière and others who (since Karl Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy)
understand democracy as a form of struggle, a process, rather than as the name
of a political regime (p. 526). The thrust of Balibar’s argument points to the
key importance of ‘class struggles in the form of the development of social
movements and revolutionary practices, collective ‘‘insurrections’’ in their
many forms, that have been the necessary prerequisites of institutional
recognition of collective rights and the emergence of social citizenship’ (p.
536). Balibar’s discussion, however, elides not only colonial history, or the
‘colonial difference,’ (Mignolo 2000) that motivates the desire for profound
transformations of nation states and democratic regimes in Latin America.
Balibar also remains wedded to the idea that by claiming rights and recognition
within an existing order, this order itself can be transformed. Although the
alliance of indigenous and other social movements as well as middle-class
intellectuals that elected Morales used some of the instruments of the existing
democratic system (e.g. elections, constitutional assembly, parliamentary
structure), the Bolivian indigenous movements have not merely appealed to
recognition. Rather, the Bolivian ‘democratic revolution’ (Harnecker &
Fuentes 2008, p. 136) points to a different relation between social movement
and state. As I argue here, the Bolivian democratic revolution does not seek
merely a widening of the citizen base a form of inclusion that Rancière
would call ‘police’ (1995/1999, p. 28) but rather to profoundly reshape the
relation between the social, the cultural, and the state, and thus democracy
itself.
‘TODOS SOMOS PRESIDENTES/WE ARE ALL PRESIDENTS’ 731
What’s in a name?
Political scientists commonly think of the state as the constitutional body of
government, its institutions and its division of power, including what Yashar
calls their ‘moorings in state and society’ (Yashar 1999, p. 78). Álvaro Garcı́a
Linera, a Bolivian political theorist and current vice-president of Bolivia, insists
that the struggle over the meaning of democracy and state takes place within a
discursive field shaped by the legacies of colonialism ongoing racial
discrimination along with economic exploitation and the corresponding
dismissal of indigenous and working-class political thought (Garcı́a Linera
2001, pp. 8788). He writes, ‘en términos estrictos no hay palabras ni
conceptos neutros; su significado es un determinado volumen de poder social
obtenido por el desplazamiento de otros poderes acumulados en otros signos, y
que además sirve directamente a la perpetuación, multiplicación o transforma-
ción de esta circulación de poderes’ (‘there are no neutral words or concepts;
their meaning lies in a determined amount of social power obtained through
the displacement of other powers accumulated in other signs, which, in
addition, directly perpetuate, broaden or transform the circulation of existing
powers. Behind every word, every discourse, there is a wordless war over
establishing the dominant forms of meaning in the world)’ (p. 79). References
to hegemonic genealogies of political thought (the Greeks and the Romans,
Hobbes and Rousseau, Marx and Weber, etc.) function as gatekeepers for
participation in political discourse where the supposedly ‘profane’ and
‘marginalized’ are separated from the ‘anointed’ and ‘knowledgeable’ (p.
78). Simultaneously denouncing and invoking these gatekeepers, Garcı́a Linera
concludes with Rancière that democracy is not consensus but ‘la presencia de
un diferendo, de un litigio manifiesto por la enunciación, la visibilización o
denuncia de una carencia, de una desigualdad, de una injusticia. No se trata
simplemente del reconocimiento del disenso, sino de la eficacia y poder
público del disenso en cuanto a capacidad de transformar las estructuras de
orden de la gestión de lo público’ (‘the presence of a diferendo, of a dispute
manifesting itself in enunciation, in making visible or denouncing a lack, an
inequality, or an injustice. It is not merely about the recognition of dissent, but
about the efficacy and public power of dissent in its ability to transform the
order which generates what is the public sphere’) (p. 105).1
Like Garcı́a Linera, Rancière’s notion of the political points to the
centrality of the word, that is the struggle over epistemic power. As Morales
articulates the principal of governing by obeying and the notion of collective
leadership in the context of a national presidential inauguration, thinking and
debate about the ethos of governance and alternatives to liberal democracy that
are anchored in a multipronged revival of indigenous traditions comes into a
new light. A national consensus relegated these forms to the margin, casting
this thought as a non-thought, an expression of a disappearing indigenous
world anchored in inefficient face-to-face interaction. Although this opinion
still holds some sway, now this despised tradition of thought articulates itself as
the majority state. With Rancière we could say that the Bolivian election
constitutes a moment where what was once considered ‘noise’ becomes
discourse (Rancière 1995/1999, pp. 2223). This understanding of the
political conceives of democracy as a radical political struggle or transforma-
tion challenging the principal of recognition. In Rancière’s sense, the political
manifests itself as a form, ‘the form in which confirmation of equality is
inscribed in the setting up of a dispute, of a community existing solely through
being divided’ (p. 32). Even as equality is claimed it unleashes a process of
acting politically which is capable of ‘shaking up the structure,’ as Gareth
Williams put it when thinking about the Zapatista’s Other Campaign (Williams
2007, p. 142). Rancière, nevertheless, casts aside the relevance of the colonial
difference that seems so crucial to understanding the political theory at the
heart of the Bolivian revolution.2
In order to gain a better understanding of the apparent paradox between
state and non-state invoked in Morales’s inaugurational address, this essay
focuses on a selection of discourses and cultural productions put forward by
the social forces behind Morales’s rise to power. It is suggested that these
discourses and practices make legible a political theory or political philosophy
that critically engages and transforms the ideas of democracy and the state
elaborated in the context of Western nation building. More specifically, three
examples of what is arguably a broad anti-colonial process are engaged: The
work of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA) and the movement to
reconstitute the ayllu;3 Pablo Mamani’s analysis of the micro-governments in
El Alto; and CEFREC-CAIB’s indigenous media activism.4 It is suggested that
the cultural politics of the diverse indigenous movements in Bolivia attest to a
longstanding process of profound social and political transformation that gained
momentum with the uprisings between 2000 and 2005. These transformations
have entailed mobilizing indigenous concepts of governance that are anchored
in the cultural memories of indigenous peoples rather than in European
traditions of political thought. First, however, there may be a need to briefly
remember the way nation and state have been culturally produced in the
Andes.
As cultural products, both state and nation share key characteristics. If the
experience of colonialism (beginning with the conquest of the Americas) has
inaugurated a global consciousness and a dominant economic system and
worldview (Quijano & Wallerstein 1992, Mignolo 2000), then generally
speaking, all states today are constructs of modernity and coloniality. They
have evolved within a modern world defined by capitalism and communication
technologies from the cartas de relación representing a ‘new world’ to
European royalty, to photography, film, and instant messaging and they have
been shaped by a complex colonial history. This means that nation-states have
been concurrently institutionally established and desired. Old and new media
have been major conduits for creating these desires. In Benedict Anderson’s
now classic formulation, ‘nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural

artifacts’ (1991, p. 4). In other words, ‘the nation . . . is an imagined political
community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is
imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). Nations are to be
distinguished, ‘not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined’ (p. 6). They constitute a particular kind of belonging that is
intimately linked to a bounded territory and state. Even though nations are
artifices that require continuous enactments (national holidays, pledges to the
flag, reading the same foundational fictions in classrooms, simultaneously
viewing national news and reality shows, etc.), that does not mean they are not
‘real;’ indeed they command ‘profound emotional legitimacy’ (Anderson
1991, p. 4).
Like in most other Latin American countries, the project of building a
modern nation state in Bolivia was inaugurated with its independence from
Spain in the early nineteenth century (1826). Bolivia constituted itself as a
national territory, thus contributing to splitting the former administrative unit
of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The ideas of state, territory, and nation (to be)
were fused in this process. Following European imaginaries, the Creole elite
that took power after independence cast a modern state. This model demanded
a bounded territory and a homogenous ethnic and social make up of citizens
that would enable representatives to give voice to a common interest, a
persistent problem for the elites who continued throughout the twentieth
century to debate the possibility of assimilating a majority of multi-ethnic
indigenous peoples to a Creole dominated society (cf. Sanjinés 2004, Salmón
1997). The constitution itself was modeled on the liberal European state that
cast citizens as individuals endowed with individual rights and initially
relegated Indians to a special status. By no means did independence mean a
reconsideration of pre-colonial forms of state and social organizations that had
been dismantled by the Spanish invaders. Instead the project of state formation
was intimately bound to the debate over how to deal with what the elite saw as
either racial or cultural incompatibilities. The problema del indio in Bolivia was
to be solved either through mestizaje (Frantz Tamayo) or through segregation if
not outright genocide (Alcides Arguedas).
Subsequent reforms to the Bolivian constitution in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries did little to alter the social relations of power. Granting
citizenship to Aymaras and Quechuas in 1874 precipitated the loss of
communal land and reinforced labor on the great estates (Rivera Cusicanqui
1993, p. 50, Walsh 2009, p. 65). The Bolivian revolution of 1952 did not
change the paradigm of white-Creole dominance though it replaced the racial
term indio with the class category campesino. The work of words was part of a
politics of integration that sought to tie rural indigenous populations to the
state and in particular to the social base of the Movimiento Nacional
Revolucionario (MNR), governing with the support of miners and workers

organized in unions. Marcia Stephenson argues that the
organizational tradition of the ayllu had to confront various forms of state

intervention, notably that of rural syndicalism . . .. Rural syndicalism
flourished subsequent to the Revolution of 1952 with the desire of the
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) to reorganize the state
and ‘modernize’ indigenous communities. Revolutionary elites perceived
the syndicate system as a useful way of incorporating indigenous peoples
into the national economy as peasants or campesinos by promoting land
reform, the universal right to vote, and replacement of traditional
indigenous positions of authority with elected offices. The intent was to
align the rural community more closely with the miners’ and workers’
movement.
(Stephenson 2002, p. 112)
Pape maintains, however, that ancestral forms of indigenous governance

particularly leadership rotation and rule by consensus also characterize
syndicalist organizations originally instituted by the Bolivian post-revolutionary
state in an attempt to incorporate and control highland Quechua and Aymara
Indians (Pape 2009, pp. 105107). As Pape puts it, ‘Rotation, consensus, and
ascent through the ranks are long-standing practices in the peasant union and
appear to derive from communal consensus democracy’ (p. 109). The
construction of the Bolivian nation state through discourses and practices
entailed the partial but not complete destruction of indigenous forms of
government.
Nation states are then not natural entities but unstable products of
discourses and practices that themselves attempt to fix meaning. As the
Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writes, ‘la nación es ante todo el
monopolio de nombrar y normar’ (‘the nation is above all a monopoly on
naming and norming’) (Rivera Cusicanqui 2006b, p. 100). Charged with
creating an emotional investment in the national imaginary, the educated elites
have offered literary narratives, paintings, museums, monuments, as well as
popular media such as film and video. Urban spaces were cast as melting pots
where elites whiten an indigenous migrant population that sheds its indigenous
traditions and becomes increasingly Western (cf. Sanjinés 2004, pp. 170174,
Salmón 1997, p. 157). Writing about early cinema in Bolivia, Jeff Himpele
emphasizes that, ‘while the cinema was used to romanticize and popularize
contemporary Indianness by portraying continuities with the past, however,
the traveling film stock in the cameras of these filmmakers avoided indigenous
uprisings in the present. With such exclusions, the cinematic past and present
could be selectively edited together as a filmic sequence and connected in the
social imaginary as a national narrative culminating in the fantasy of a national
and cultural synthesis’ (Himpele 2007, p. 112).
If the national imaginary was compelling enough to enlist a generation of

indigenous peoples and mestizos into the defense of a territory (during the
Chaco war of 1935), it has not been powerful enough to mask the obdurate
internal colonialism where racism and class contradictions go hand-in-hand.
Mamani Ramı́rez recently emphasized that both ethnic and class domination
are frequently naturalized. In other words, emptied of its history of becoming
that is anchored in structural, physical, and symbolic coercion, the
subalternization of the majority of Bolivia’s population by a Creole and mestizo
elite is accepted on both sides as natural (Mamani Ramı́rez 2006, pp. 3537).
Both forms of colonial and modern domination work together. Social relations
are profoundly racialized and have created a sense of difference between those
identifying as indigenous or Afro-Bolivian, and those who claim European
decent. Based on the colonial exploitation of indigenous and imported African
slave labor, capitalism in turn cemented class domination and justified it in
terms of race and culture.
Racial violence survives in myriad forms, including the stunning abuse
brought upon a group of 20 Quechuas by wealthy landowners on May 24,
2008: ‘Veinte quechuas desnudos de la cintura para arriba, humillados,
golpeados, obligados a enarbolar la bandera blanca con la cruz de los tercios de
España y con el emblema de los cruzados medievales. Volentados [a]
arrodillarse, besar el suelo y pedir perdón en voz alta: compelidos a vivar la
‘‘ciudad de cuatro hombres’’ y maldecir al MAS; mientras ensordecı́an los
gritos de ‘‘indios de mierda’’, ‘‘llamas’’, ‘‘desgraciados’’’ (Pedro Portugal
‘Infamia, vergüenza y esperanza’, www.periodicopukara.com, quoted in
Walsh 2009, p. 87, note 76). In an essay on ethnic and class domination
and territoriality, Pablo Mamani argues that ‘therefore economic poverty in
Bolivia has an Indian face.’ He adds that the effect has entailed a ‘de-
indianization’ where indigenous people no longer feel Indian but rather
identify themselves as a social class (Mamani Ramı́rez 2006, p. 36). Modernity
and coloniality (the shape of power that remains after formal colonialism is
abolished) are constitutive of each other and inherently linked (p. 37). While
Mamani in this essay draws attention to what has been called the ‘colonization
of the soul,’ or what he prefers to term ‘de-indianization,’ others, including his
own study of the micro-governments emerging in El Alto during the uprisings
of 2003, offer a different emphasis, stressing a ‘re-indianization’ that has been
well underway since at least the early 1980s (Mamani Ramı́rez 2005). The
ongoing indigenous fight against colonial oppression each time revitalized a
sense of ethnic belonging and a political memory, thus laying the ground for a
differently imagined community.
Aymaras and other indigenous peoples have transmitted the memory of
anti-colonial resistance in the shadow of the educated elite’s cultural politics.
This indigenous politics of memory has strengthened a competing imagined
community of diverse indigenous peoples that does not fashion itself
from national literature, leading newspapers and their consumption, or other
state-sanctioned discourses and practices, but rather from the memories of

migrants and elders and the revitalization of cultural practices in rural villages.
Alvaro Garcı́a Linera argues that, ‘hay un buen pedazo de Bolivia que se mueve
bajo lógicas comunitarias, asociativas, en el mundo rural y en el mundo
urbano. . . . Los levantamientos, abril del 2000, octubre del 2003, febrero del
2003 son una manifestación patética y violenta de este desencuentro entre
lógicas comunitarias de la sociedad y lógicas liberales de la institucionalidad
estatal’ (‘there is a good part of Bolivia that in the rural and urban world moves
according to communitarian, associative logics. . . . The uprisings of April
2000, October 2003, February 2003 are an emotional and violent manifesta-
tion of the failed encounter between a society’s communitarian logic and the
liberal logic of the state’s institutions’) (Garcı́a Linera 2004, p. 24). In other
words, despite the tremendous impact of colonial violence and exploitation
indigenous peoples have survived throughout Bolivia, and they assert the
memory of alternative forms of society and state not only in the countryside
but also in the cities. Alternatives are enacted in the microcosm of indigenous
communities and neighborhoods and increasingly in intercultural relations
among diverse communities and indigenous ethnicities.
Reconstituting the ayllu

When Morales claims at once to embody the indigenous peoples’ presence in
the new state and to govern by obeying he is not referring to principals of
representative democracy and neither simply to a populist body politics.
Rather he consciously invokes a specific highland indigenous notion of
participatory democracy, a form of rule in direct response to decisions and
demands arising from face-to-face interaction. This form of participatory
democracy is grounded in interaction between authorities and families in rural
highland communities and between rotating community representatives at
regional assemblies, particularly in those areas where traditional ayllu
structures have been revived. This revival is the outcome of the socio-
cultural Movimiento para la Reconstitución del Ayllu (cf. Choque Quispe &
Mamani Condori 2003, pp. 158159). The movement began its work in the
early 1980s as a response to the austerity measures that neo-liberal reform
brought to bear on highland communities already suffering the consequences of
ongoing drought (Stephenson 2002, p. 111). The THOA, which was founded
around the same time by young Aymara university graduates, ‘recognized the
reconstitution of the ayllu as a political act of decolonization’ (p. 111) that
entailed ‘turning away from the organizational arrangement set forth by
syndicalism’ (p. 112).
Maria Eugenia Choque Quispe and Carlos Mamani Condori, who both
served as directors of the THOA at different times, describe the ayllu as a
kinship-based community that commonly ties different, not necessarily

adjacent territories into a tight relationship of economic exchange and
reciprocity. Ayllu societies are structured by duality, usually comprising two
complementary units; they extend relations with each other following the same
model. Authorities who are called to serve govern the communities. Criteria
for appointment are based on a couple’s economic abilities to redistribute
wealth, prior political experience (in minor posts), and at times their talent
(Choque Quispe & Mamani Condori 2003, pp. 157159). The reconstituted
ayllu recognizes collective property and, as Choque Quispe and Mamani
Condori highlight, it traces its origin to the most remote pre-colonial past (p.
152).5 The authorities are commonly required to be married, and the wives
are seen as sharing in the political responsibilities of their husbands. Political
representation is thus thought within a strictly hetero-normative mold that
extends the Andean paradigm of duality.6
The movement to reconstitute the ayllu, in which the work of the THOA
in the 1980s and 1990s was instrumental, has had tremendous impact in
revitalizing indigenous traditions of governance, laws, and relations among a
growing number of highland communities. Indeed the impact has been social
and epistemological. The THOA contends, for example, that Andean
indigenous uprisings are not disarticulated events that ultimately testify to a
history of increasing assimilation of indigenous peoples. Rather, they attest to
an historical awareness in the communities of the different strategies deployed
in a history of survival and anti-colonial struggle (Rivera Cusicanqui & THOA
1991, Stephenson 2002, p. 103). The THOA’s findings have been published in
inexpensive mimeographs and as radio shows, always with the goal of making
its research findings available to the communities they have worked with
(Stephenson 2002, pp. 104107). It has thus contributed to constituting what
Stephenson calls an ‘indigenous counterpublic sphere’ (p. 103) where
alternatives to the dominant Bolivian historiography and political and social
theory are elaborated. The layered network of local and regional ayllu
relations, connected through rotating representatives that report back to their
communities and whose services can be terminated when they are found to be
corrupt or inept, is the logic of governance that Morales claims to extend to
the presidential level through governing by obeying (mandar obedeciendo).
The interviews with several affiliates of the Movimiento al Socialismo
(MAS) conducted by Marta Harnecker and Federico Fuentes reveal what, at
first glance, might appear like a contradiction. On the one hand, Ramiro
Llanos calls Evo Morales at guide light (‘faro,’ Harnecker & Fuentes 2008,
24p. 83) and Alejandro Colanzi asserts that ‘el gran liderazgo lo acumula y
concentra Evo’ (great leadership is gathered and embodied by Evo) (p. 85) and
Rafael Puente expands this idea claiming that the MAS is leading the current
process and ‘aglutinando a la mayor parte de la población que quiere cambiar el
paı́s’ (‘bringing together the majority of the population who wants to change
the country’) (p. 91). On the other hand, Santos Ramı́rez and Leonilda Zurita
try to explain a bottom-up socio-political structure that controls Morales and

his party. Santos Ramı́rez states that ‘hay una relación compacta entre la
estructura del movimiento social y la del instrumento polı́tico. Y las decisiones
que se van tomando en esta estructura contemplan esta situación. La dirección
nacional no puede sacar una convocatoria, un instructivo, una circular si no es
previo consenso con las organizaciones matrices. La estructura del MAS está
bajo el mando de las organizaciones’ (‘There is a close relationship between the
structure of the social movement and the political instrument. And the
decisions made within this structure reflect this situation. The national
leadership cannot make an official announcement, instruct or order any actions
if not previously agreed upon by the leadership of the organizations’)
(Harnecker & Fuentes 2008, p. 78). Key in this assessment is the feedback
loop between leadership and social movement that ties leadership decisions to
a complex process of debate and consensus governance that traverses
community, local, regional, and national assemblies. At every level, leaders
are required to report back, submit themselves to evaluations, and take
criticism back up to the national levels of decision-making (pp. 7780, 108
109). The whole process is considered ‘horizontal’ (p. 80) and marked by the
party’s full acronym MAS-ISPN (Movimiento al Socialismo-Instrumento
Polı́tico por la Soberanı́a de los Pueblos/Movement Toward Socialism-Political
Instrument for the Sovereignty of the peoples. As Santos Ramı́rez insists, the
MAS-ISPS is not a political party where leaders call upon a constituency, but
rather a ‘political instrument’ that the social movement calls into being and
makes use of (Harnecker & Fuentes 2008, p. 77). Perhaps we can understand
the leadership role of Morales as one that keeps the MAS-ISPS operating in
accordance with the principles of horizontal, consensus governance espoused
by the social movements, an important achievement considering the number of
urban professionals that are ultimately called upon to serve, at least
temporarily, in positions of technical expertise within the Morales adminis-
tration.
Appreciating and understanding the political thought that underwrites
these practices (regardless of whether or not they are always realized in an
ideal fashion) requires taking distance from the concepts and genealogies that
the west usually esteems. Scholars like the members of the THOA or Pablo
Mamani Ramı́rez, an Aymara political scientist, who studied the 2003 micro-
governments formed in El Alto emphasize that rewording and rethinking
notions of state or democracy requires a similar epistemic shift in critical
analysis. The THOA, for instance, found it necessary to challenge established
historical narratives and methodologies in order to account for the political
memory of ongoing colonial resistance rather than defeat. They extracted an
epistemic potential for understanding cultural survival from the oral histories
passed on in Aymara communities (cf. Rivera Cusicanqui & THOA 1991).
Mamani Ramı́rez similarly sees himself compelled to modify Western social
movement theory.7 He argues that indigenous customary forms have become
defining means of organizing self-governance and creating networks in urban

areas. For Mamani social movement theory from the West his example is
Charles Tilly’s distinction between everyday life and social activism as an
interruption of the every day is not useful for thinking the Bolivian uprisings.
Rather, he states, ‘desde nuestro punto de reflexión tiene mucho que ver
también o se fundamenta en las prácticas cotidianas de la vida social’ (‘from our
point of view they [the uprisings] are based in the quotidian practices of
everyday life’) (Mamani Ramı́rez 2005, p. 18). This change in theoretical
approach allows him to trace the key continuities of what he calls ‘formas de
organización social y territorial como el ayni, los turnos y la relación cara a
cara’ (‘social and territorial forms of organization such as ayni, rotation, and
face-to-face relations’) (p. 7). These are the principals set to work in
organizing and coordinating the social uprising and self-government of a city
(El Alto) of somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 inhabitants.
Taking the ayllu to the city

As Mamani Ramı́rez explains, union leaders and neighborhood authorities
pushed for the concerted protest marches that intervened in the space of the
city of La Paz during the uprising of October 2003. Yet, like neighborhood
leadership, syndicalism was subordinated to a collective will that was
formulated out of neighborhood assemblies where Aymara forms of govern-
ance become dominant and at once more open through the active participation
of young people and women. The miners offered ‘delegados de la calle’
(‘street delegates’) and other persons in charge but, Mamani Ramı́rez is quick
to add, the historical neighborhood organization that represented the barrios of
El Alto to the state and the city of La Paz (FEJUVE, Federación de las Juntas
Vecinales de El Alto) as well as the major Union organization COR (Central
Obrera Regional-El Alto) no longer act on behalf of or in guidance of but in
response to the neighborhood assemblies (Mamani Ramı́rez 2005, p. 101).
Indigenous factors that influenced daily social life ayni (reciprocity), turno
(turns), rotación (rotation), apthapi (eating together) and tumpa (visits)
became activated and extended during the uprising (Mamani Ramı́rez 2005,
pp. 106107). These principals informed the growing population of the city
that had to take charge of urban infrastructure and construction themselves,
constituting an ‘ayni urbano’ (p. 108). According to Mamani Ramı́rez, the
neighborhood micro governments ‘se convierten en lugares de decisión
multitudinaira y de legitimación de las acciones y el control del territorio de la
ciudad. En resumen, son los lugares donde surgen las decisiones polı́ticas y de
tipo ‘‘militar’’ de los vecinos para autogobernarse a si mismos’ (‘the assemblies
are converted into places of multitudinous decision making that legitimize the
actions and the control over the urban territory. In short, they are the places
where political and military decisions arise, where the neighbors govern
themselves’) (2005, p. 100). Like in the movement to reconstitute the ayllu,
face-to-face interaction was a key element in shaping the micro-governments.
But diverse forms of communication among the neighborhoods also point to
the strategic appropriation of media in this process and to a multi-pronged
strategy that involved old and new technologies: the neighborhoods took
advantage of popular radio and television (RTP, Red Erbol and Canal 21 and
36), clandestine radio, ‘silbidos y pitos’ (whistles) and ‘golpes de luz’ (light
signals) (pp. 7172) cellular phones and ch’askis (young people running as
secret messengers) (p. 124).
Not nationality but race-class oppression becomes the defining experience
around which the uprising coalesces. The major point of articulation binding
this imagined community between neighborhoods that are home to thousands
of former miners (and their syndicalist traditions), recent migrants from the
countryside, and second or third generation migrants who have adapted to
urban lifestyle is what the people call ‘el llamado de sangre’ (‘the call of
blood’) (Mamani Ramı́rez 2005, p. 51). All suffer a common experience of
racism, ‘una misma realidad social’ (‘the same social reality’) that is often more
powerful ‘que la explı́cita conciencia étnica’ (‘than an explicit ethnic
consciousness’). This reality is characterized by a structure of discrimination
that is economic, social, cultural and political and is suffered in rural and urban
areas (p. 52). In synthesis, ‘lo indı́gena popular’ references shared social,
cultural and labor experiences (p. 56). Ethnicity here becomes a marker of
diversity but also of unity. What the term indio and its racial connotation
homogenize, etnicidad opens up to view of multiple ayllu affiliations, languages,
and cultures.8 Yet both because of the experience of racism on the one hand,
and common cultural and economic or labor practices such as reciprocity on
the other hand, these diverse ethnicities also find themselves sharing key
experiences (p. 56). Lo indigena popular unites a racially oppressed and poor,
working-class urban population that maintains language and often community
ties with their ayllus of origin. At the same time, the memory of the Andean
uprisings under Tupaj Katari, Bartolina Sisa and Gregoria Apaza (1781), like
the participation of Aymaras under Pablo Zárate Willka in defense of land and
territory in the Altiplano in 1899, become inscribed in the highland space now
home to the city of El Alto. These memories continue to play a constitutive
role (pp. 2327).
According to Mamani Ramı́rez, the uprisings had two major effects. They
contributed to changing urban consciousness. Instead of the shame and denial
associated with indigenous language, dress, and customs now emerges a new
pride in belonging to the Aymara and Quechua peoples (Mamani Ramı́rez
2005, p. 109). In the face of dominant discourses about indigenous
incompetence, they also offered the experience of having governed
autonomously (pp. 126127), by mobilizing and re-inventing Aymara and
Quechua ancestral traditions of governance marked by rotation and consensus.
In other words, the experience is not only marked by resistance to colonial

oppression, but also by experiencing the efficacy of ayllu governance inspired
urban social organizations. Efficacy here is not meant in a temporal sense, but
in one that privileges consensus building and long-term community involve-
ment. When Mamani uses the term multitude, commonly associated with
Antonio Negri and the radical Italian philosophers, he links it concretely to a
colonial history from which the multitude cannot be abstracted. Lo indı´gena
popular is then neither a generalized social force nor a depoliticized vindication
of culture that abstracts from class oppression. Rather it constitutes a
framework for understanding social transformation that insists on keeping
colonialism and capitalism analytically bound.
Indigenous media’s rescate cultural9

Commonly elided in accounts of the Bolivian democratic revolution,
community media has been another key in coordinating the reconstitution of
indigenous forms of governance and society. CEFREC-CAIB’s Indigenous
National Plan for the Audiovisual Communication of the Indigenous and
Original People’s of Bolivia connects indigenous peoples in the high and low
lands of Bolivia and beyond. CAIB is a multi-ethnic organization of rural
indigenous media activists who collaborate with CEFREC, a center for
cinematographic training, in the production of indigenous media. Signed in
1996, the Plan has no past or present links to the state but was endorsed by the
major union and indigenous organizations of the country (CSUTCB, CSCB,
and CIDOB).10 The ethnically diverse indigenous media activists associated
with CAIB bring traditions of community organization and rule from very
distinct and geographically distant villages to the video production and
distribution process. They collaborate with urban indigenous, mestizo, and
Creole film and video activists working in CEFREC’s post-production centers
across Bolivia. Indigenous media offer competing imaginaries to those
projected in commercial theaters. Their vast documentary and fiction
production circulates through the Indigenous National Plan’s rural distribution
network to an array of diverse communities free of charge. In communicating
large numbers of rural communities on a regular base through the Indigenous
Plan the media activists undermine the spatial logic of the modern nation state
from within. This is not a ping-pong relation between villages and cities, but
rather a decentralized, rhizomatic network of rural communities. While the
first 10 years of CEFREC-CAIB’s work was focused primarily on strengthening
cultural pride and awareness in rural communities, in view of the Constituent
Assembly and after a process of evaluation and workshops in various regions in
Bolivia, the media activists began to place additional emphasis on commu-
nicating with urban migrants in February 2005. Multimedia packages were
circulated in order to inform the villagers, create spaces for reflection and
debate; and to generate proposals from within the communities so that they
can be included and decided upon during the Constituent Assembly (CEFREC
2005, n.p.).
Together this group has developed complex forms of decision-making that
are bound back to the political structures governing the communities that
participate in the filmmaking. The videomakers call this a proceso integral, an
integrated process, (Himpele 2004) where not only acting, but also decisions
about topics, distribution, and often even editing choices are submitted to
community assemblies and their approval. But it is not only at the level of
production that indigenous media helps to reconstitute traditional indigenous
authorities and decision-making. As I have argued extensively elsewhere,
indigenous video production entails enactments as much as representations,
even if temporarily, the filming process causes to exist what the camera
represents (Schiwy 2009, pp. 185211).
The 50-minute fiction video Venciendo el miedo (2005), for instance, zeros
in on questions of governance and advocates reconstituting ayllu relations.
What begins like a road movie, soon turns inward as the plot follows a young
couple and their children’s migration from the highlands to the tropical Yunga
valleys. Abandoned by her husband the female protagonist organizes the
women in the community to rid themselves of the middleman who markets
their produce and to claim women’s land rights. A key scene portrays the
assembly that is supposed to govern by consensus. Resistance to both points
comes in the name of tradition. Most members of the village, nevertheless,
agree to the proposed re-organization in marketing their produce and to grant
land rights to women, thus reforming Quechua and Aymara patriarchal
traditions. During the film’s climax Bolivia’s internal colonialism enters
through the backdoor. Manuela’s husband returns years later, accompanied by
a new mestiza wife. On the basis of national law he demands his land and his
children. On the spot the community informs him of their decision in favor of
female land tenure. When the husband fails to acknowledge the new law, the
community joins forces and he is expelled. The village thus enacts itself as an
autonomous territory that is ruled by community assemblies.
This video no longer laments de-indianization but rather stages the
dynamic nature of what the media activists call rescate cultural. On the one
hand, the couple’s initial voyage from the highlands to the valleys counters the
exclusive ties between indigenous identity and the land as the video shows how
Aymara migrants incorporate elements of syndicalism such as voting to
traditional ayllu governance based on consensus in newly settled areas. On the
other hand, as the video looks to the past, it at once transforms tradition in
light of new conditions and constellations. It challenges indigenous patriarchal
rule and brings the abuse of authority under scrutiny. Venciendo el miedo
indicates that surviving and reconstituted traditions of community rule and
shared power are themselves under debate. In this video actors and community
members enact traditions of governance that fuse corporatist traditions of

peasant unions and highland ayllu democracy in the Yungas with an indigenous
feminist vision. In this video fiction the women are able to articulate
provocative demands that might be referred to again on later occasions. The
demands of the women in this community point to both, the relevance of
indigenous women’s rights organizations and their contact with international
agencies that promote feminist consciousness building. In this microcosm, the
new state is built from memories anchored in colonial difference, but adapting
them to new demands and needs.
Even though the focus of the recent communication strategy is national,
CEFREC-CAIB’s productions at once transcend the boundaries of the nation
state. Indeed regular video festivals such as the Premio Anaconda bring
indigenous communities in the Amazon basin and beyond into contact with
each other. The Ninth International Indigenous Film and Video Festival held in
Bolivia in September 2008 expanded the connections to a global indigenous
movement. Financing for these Bolivian videos, however, comes from
organizations such as AECI (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional),
Mugarik Gabe [a Bask non-governmental organization (NGO)], and the Bask
Government. Bypassing state sponsorship (even when the state is sympathetic,
as in the case of the Morales administration) points to the familiar strategies of
indigenous movements who seek support in global institutions and interna-
tional NGOs in order to eliminate state dependency or subvert the entrenched
discrimination they face at the national level (cf. Brysk 1995). The production
and distribution of indigenous media thus contributed to expanding and
strengthening the indigenous movement of cultural reconstitution, giving value
to forms of governance, which the West commonly sees as ineffective.11
Performing the new state

It is obvious that cultural forms including art, film, and performances of
various kinds help to constitute what is the order of the visible; they
characterize and make legible what counts as subjectivity and discourse. In this
sense, Morales’ electoral success signaled a subtle but crucial change in the
country. The bodies of Quechuas and Aymaras dressed in traditional attire
and gathered at the ancient ruins of Tiwanaku in January 2006 brought the
majority of indigenous peoples in Bolivia into national presence in a new way.
(Figure 1).
Instead of the familiar folkloric icons catering to the tourist industry,
Tiwanaku staged new participants in the political power structure. They share
little similarity with the image of destitute recent migrants from the
countryside begging on street corners. Rather, those attending the ceremony
attest to a constitutive presence that invokes the return of millions predicted in
the Inkarrı́ myth, according to which the Inca king will one day return to
power. Most readily the proliferation of indigenous symbols and body politics
multicolored wiphalas (flags), pututus (ceremonial horns), ponchos, awayus
(woven cloths), polleras (skirts), and the coca leaf resonate with the new
social imaginaries that the indigenous protests in recent years had brought to
bear on Bolivian society. As Mamani Ramı́rez puts it, ‘hombres y mujeres
exponen orgullosamente estos sı́mbolos para cuestionar los sı́mbolos estatales
dominantes tanto en el nivel de la lucha cotidiana como en el de la lucha
extraordinaria, y ası́ tratar de garantizar el devenir de sus hijos/hijas y la nueva
escritura del poder indı́gena’ (‘in daily life as well as during extraordinary
struggles men and women proudly expose this symbolism, thus questioning
dominant symbols of state. The goal is to guaranty their children’s future as
much as the new inscription of indigenous power’) (Mamani Ramı́rez 2006, p.
48).
The events in Bolivia are not dominated by the Quechua-speaking
descendents of Inca rule, however. They are symbolically embodied by an
Aymara president who aspires to a plurinational rule where Creoles, mestizos,
and the diversity of highland and lowland indigenous peoples living within the
boundaries of the Bolivian State have equal say.12 Languages and perspectives
that had been marginalized and dismissed including those of the Aymara,
Quechua, Guaranı́, the Chiquitanos, Moxeños, Trinitarios, and dozens of
Amazonian indigenous peoples are now entering into public debate. While
some of the formerly dominant social sectors seek secession from the
indigenous state and others insist that ‘el estado boliviano se ha caracterizado
por su neutralidad étnica y ası́ ha funcionado desde la república’ (‘the Bolivian
FIGURE 1 Photograph taken during Evo Morales’ inauguration as President of Bolivia on

January 22, 2006. Courtesy of Keith J. Richards.
State has been characterized by ethnic neutrality since its beginning as an

independent republic [in the early nineteenth century]’) (Kafka Zúñiga 2005,
p. 46) indigenous peoples are claiming their right to be heard with an
unprecedented sense of entitlement.
The self-confident enactment of indigenous cultural diversity claims a new
kind of state where the boundaries between state institutions and civil society
become blurred. Indigenous discourse and cultural enactment is proposing
ideas and processes of transformation that constitutes the political not only as
form but also as content, as ‘about autonomy and against tyranny and
[perhaps?] authoritarianism’ (Balibar 2008, p. 526). We are not facing a
proletariat that becomes the state nor a liberal democratic order where citizens
are represented within the state. Morales’s is not a general popular mandate
where those in power ultimately answer to their consciousness. Rather, the
notion of mandar obedeciendo indicates a desire for a form of accountability
practiced in local forms of indigenous community governance. It is an ethos
and also a threat: if the organizations and social movements that brought
Morales to power find him failing to pursue their decisions, they are likely to
force the president to step down.13 While the former ruling elite sees social
uprisings and the massive blockades of national transit arteries as an unruly,
authoritarianism of the mob, the Morales administration inscribed mandar
obedeciendo in constitutional provisions with the August 2008 referendum.
Indeed Morales decision to submit himself to the referendum may have been
motivated by a desire to explicitly acknowledge the power of a broad
indigenous social movement in what was esteemed a relatively safe context.14
Some might consider the social movements that Morales appeals to as
anarchic and spontaneous expressions of popular dissatisfaction or characterize
them as urban movements dominated by union leaders. The history of
uprisings in 2000, 2003, and 2005, which brought down successive
presidencies and helped strengthen the alliances across different social sectors
and ethnicities, however, might better be understood as tried and proven
strategies of anti-colonial resistance that rely on peasant mobilization, road
blockades and the sieges of urban centers. They revitalize a much longer
historical memory, particularly of the eighteenth century Quechua and Aymara
uprisings (Mamani Ramı́rez 2005, p. 27, Rivera Cusicanqui 2006a, pp. xii
xiii, Thomson 2006, pp. 68).
In a most stately and national context Morales’s inaugural performance
hence invoked indigenous, long subalternized notions of state and governance
within Bolivia and a transnational indigenous movement struggling against
ongoing colonialism. The struggle is highly invested with symbolic gestures,
theatricality and performance but it entails real, perhaps lasting consequences.
On the one hand, Morales’ body becomes a referent that signals the peoples’
access to the state. There is a conflation of individual and collective identity at
work here, grounded in body politics but ultimately transcending his person
(Landı́var 2006). On the other hand, Morales pledges to submit to an ongoing,
constant approval of his political actions by indigenous communities and

organizations. This continuous scrutiny takes the shape of reports (‘informes’)
and critical evaluation based on feedback that follows a complex structure
involving a highly structured socio-political system of community, regional and
national assemblies, laid out earlier. Evo is not Evita, we might say.
The performances of indigenous identity in the urban spaces formerly
dominated by the country’s Creole and mestizo elites similarly articulate body
and discourse. They indicate that nation and state, rather than separate, should
be seen as intimately linked. The idea is of course not unfamiliar to Western
political theory, where a social homogeneity is to establish the conditions of a
general social interest. In normative discussions the foundational colonial
underpinnings of democracy, however, are often sidelined, even as insurrec-
tional movements draw attention to the legacies of colonialism as they direct
themselves ‘against the generalization of various structures of institutional
violence, both military and economic, which are part of the oligarchic fabric of
contemporary states, and [which] form an essential means to achieve the
monopolization of power, the dispossession of the people’ (Balibar 2008, p.
528).
Revolution by constitutional reform?

Responding to the insistent demands of the social and indigenous movements,
Morales initiated the Constituent Assembly in August 2006. For the first time
in Bolivia’s history, this forum allowed for discussing different models of state
rather then mere reforms. The debate took place in the context of entrenched
racism. In September 2006, newspapers reported on an incident where
another delegate yelling racist expletives shouted down a woman speaking
Quechua in the Assembly. Again, as Garcı́a Linera pointed out in an essay in
2001, discourses on democracy and the state constitute a battleground that is
itself fractured by the legacies of colonial power (Garcı́a Linera 2001, p. 80).
Yet the Constituent Assembly also grows on the cultural and political changes
that indigenous movements have been pushing forward. A broad public debate
has opened up a space where proposals for a new state are heard beyond the
borders of indigenous organizations and communities. At stake is not merely
the possibility of uttering an opinion but rather of articulating a viewpoint that
might be understood even if it is not framed in the well-established language of
political science or the terms and concepts that frame the global discussion of
democracy and culture.
Without doubt, the cultural production of indigenous media activists, the
work of the THOA and the movement to reconstitute the ayllu, as well as
the micro-governments in El Alto, have hardened the grounds from
which indigenous movements demand and negotiate a new constitution.
CONAMAQ, the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of the Qullasuyu, that
is the umbrella organization representing the movement to reconstitute the
ayllu directly participated in the Assembly (Choque Quispe & Mamani Condori
2003, pp. 163168). Another proposal that entered the debates was issued by
the National Assembly of Indigenous Organizations that ended on August 5,
2006 (one day before the official beginning of the Constituent Assembly). Its
resolution was signed by all the major indigenous and peasant organizations of
Bolivia in the high and lowlands and massively distributed as a free, 19-page
booklet printed on inexpensive paper. It was also broadcast and discussed on
CEFREC-CAIB’s news show Entre Culturas (aired during the evening slot on
the national television channel 7) as well as on indigenous community
television. The National Indigenous Assembly’s proposal questions the
territorial and European liberal foundations upon which the existing Bolivian
nation state is imagined. It envisions an Estado Plurinacional Unitario, a united
plurinational state, headed by a president who serves for no more than five
years (rotational principle) and whose mandate can be recalled upon
misconduct. The document proposes ethnic and territorial autonomy, judicial
plurality, and gender parity in the executive. Resonating with the production
and distribution of indigenous media, the document sees a federal system of
allied territories that could potentially open itself up to alliances with similarly
constituted local autonomies once they become established in neighboring
countries.
Trans-border ethnic identifications are already being produced daily in
market interactions such as between the highland Aymaras in Bolivia and Peru.
As Rivera Cusicanqui points out, mutual ethnic recognition allows for
identification and trust, which is individually confirmed (or rejected) in
Aymara lending practices that base themselves on moral conduct (Rivera
Cusicanqui 2006b, p. 99). Similarly, the Guaranı́ in Bolivia identify on the
basis of language and culture closely with Guaranı́ in Paraguay, Brazil,
Uruguay, and Argentina (Castillo 2006, p. 82). From this perspective,
embraced by indigenous organizations in the highland and in the lowlands, the
nation state is experienced as a colonial imposition and not as a patriotic
community.
Germán Choque Huanca, who spoke in his role as delegate of the
Movimiento Indı́gena Pachakuti (MIP) at a university conference in March
2004, that is, before the election of Evo Morales, formulated this in perhaps
the most radical terms. He states that Bolivia has never been a positive concept
of national unification. Rather, the independent Bolivian state is modeled on
European ideas and constitutes an artificial division of indigenous territory into
nation states. Its constitution destroyed and denied indigenous authorities and
forms of government (Choque Huanca 2005, p. 85). Bolivia is not a symbol of
unity for the indigenous people but rather signals destruction and exploitation,
the robbing of our minerals and now of our gas (p. 86). The argument is quite
unlike that of Benedict Anderson, of course. Choque Huanca does not
deconstruct the successful naturalization of the nation state as an emotionally

compelling idea. Rather, he insists that the idea of Bolivia has not interpellated
indigenous peoples who instead have bonded over the historical memory of
colonial oppression and its daily experienced continuity. In this short
presentation Choque Huanca only briefly complicates his statement in light
of Bolivia’s lost access to the Pacific ports: ‘solamente cuando hablan del mar,
nuevamente hacen renacer el concepto de Bolivia’ (‘only when they [the
Aymara] speak of the ocean do they make the concept of Bolivia come back to
life’) (p. 86).15 Instead this member of the MIP stresses the existence of a
different imagined community. In words that resonate with the THOA’s
argument about successful survival and ongoing resistance Choque Huanca
highlights particularly the reconstitution of the Kollasuyu in Chuquiago (La
Paz) under the leadership of Eduardo Leandro Nina Quispe in 1930 (Choque
Huanca 2005, p. 86) as a milestone. The task now is to create a second
Tawantinsuyo with a four-fold division of power, modeled on the reconstitu-
tion of traditional forms of government under way in the ayllus since 1992 (p.
86). Instead of regional autonomy he suggests dividing the Bolivian territory
into four sectors or ‘suyos,’ thus reinstating the four-fold model of the
historical Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyo) that mirrors geographic divisions, a
complex gendered life world, and the distribution of power among two
complementary heterosexual couples at all levels of community, region,
nation. Power is to be held on a rotational basis, changing every seven years
(the number seven derived from the seven colors of the wiphala, the Andean
indigenous flag). Choque Huanca thus advocates a post-national understanding
linked to the memory of the Inca Empire that glosses over any internal
conflicts (e.g. present day highland ayllus competing for land, past Aymara
resistance to Inca Rule, the Aymara marginalization of the Uru, highland
arrogance toward Amazonian indigenous peoples, etc.). His is not necessarily a
democratic framework either, especially if measured by the categories of
Western political thought. For instance, Choque Huanca suggests the new
system of governance ‘no necesitamos que sea bicameral, va a ser una no más y
va a ser rotativo acá, rotativo’ (‘we don’t need it to be bicameral, its going to
be only one and it will be rotational here, rotational’) (Choque Huanca 2005,
p. 88).
Choque Huanca’s passionate assertion of Indian power differs markedly
from the conventional views of one of Bolivia’s leading political scientists,
Jorge Kafka Z., who insisted at the same conference that ‘en el estado sólo se
admite un nacionalismo, el que se corresponde con el estado nacional. Los
nacionalismos son incompatibles y excluyentes entre ellos’ (‘the state only
allows for one nationalism, the one that corresponds to the national state.
Nationalisms are incompatible and exclusive of each other’) (Kafka Zúñiga
2005, p. 47).16 He also offers a different nuance than the other indigenous
speaker at the conference, Antonio Peredo who represented Morales’ party,
the MAS. He states that all representatives in the executive and in the juridical
system shall be elected and subject to recall (Peredo 2005, p. 69). Without
explicitly contradicting Choque Huanca, Peredo’s presentation emphasized
instead that the new state shall strive for agricultural self-sufficiency and
control of its natural resources as a means of ending economic dependency
(Peredo 2005, pp. 6667, 73). Choque Huanca would not disagree, but his
vision is more ambitious.
Perhaps most threatening for many of his listeners, Choque Huanca urges
the task to universalize ‘nuestro pensamiento, hacer de que la ideologı́a del
Tahuantinsuyo [sic] sea estatista, hacer de que aquı́ primero nos establezcamos
como un nuevo estado’ (‘our thinking, make the Tawantinsuyu into a state
ideology, to first of all establish ourselves as a new state’) (Choque Huanca
2005, p. 90). In the face of those who he sees as long having denied indigenous
peoples the ability and intellect for self-governance, Choque Huanca insists:
‘aquı́ el que va a mover y el que va a hacer transformación es el pueblo
indı́gena, es capaz de revertir al neoliberalismo y al capitalismo, es lo único
porque ha fracasado el marxismo leninismo, ha fracasado la democracia liberal,
ha fracasado la derecha, el capitalismo, entonces nosotros queremos
universalizar este pensamiento de la reconstitución del Tahuantinsuyo como
segundo Estado’ (‘the ones who are going to move things and shape this
transformation are the indigenous people. MarxismLeninism has failed,
liberal democracy has failed, the right and capitalism have failed. So we want to
universalize the notion of the reconstitution of the Tawantinsuyu as a second
state’) (p. 90). Choque Huanca, calls the process a pachakuti (p. 88), a turn-
around in space and time, equivalent to the other pachakuti brought on by the
Spanish conquest. This pachakuti of the twenty-first century does not indicate a
return to a pre-colonial order and neither does it merely indicate taking over
the Bolivian state. Rather the vision is a reterriorialized, post-national
reconstitution of what many Aymaras see as a just order that is based on
frameworks rooted in indigenous memory and already under reconstruction
particularly in the highland communities (p. 90).
Morales appeals to and negotiates the differently nuanced positions of
indigenous social movements that sustain the proposals discussed earlier.
During his inaugural address he acknowledges their power and legitimizes
them when he states that he will govern by obeying. And although the MAS
does not put forward the reconstitution of the Tawantinsuyo, it relativizes the
vision of a territorially bounded nation state by invoking the Mexican Zapatista
uprising as a continental indigenous movement. Morales’ international policy
of seeking alliances with Cuba and Venezuela, as well as with the neighboring
countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile could be seen as a logical extension of
the concept of a plurinational Bolivia, articulated nevertheless within the
framework of the strategically possible. Yet, as this essay has sought to
demonstrate, the process of decolonization and the transformation of Bolivia is
not anchored in state policies or constitution reforms, nor does it seem to be
dependent on usurping the state. Rather, all seems set for the process of
reconstituting indigenous forms of governance to continue regardless of

whether or not Morales stays in power. While the Aymara political theorist
Mamani Ramı́rez critically interjects that Morales’s election strengthens a state
that was already in demise (cf. Mamani Ramı́rez 2007, p. 1), Choque Huanca
downplays the importance of the Constitutional Assembly for his organization:
‘nosotros no necesitamos de Asamblea Constituyente’ (Choque Huanca 2005,
p. 88) since the process of change is already underway. He argues that the
problem with the Constituent Assembly is that this is again a structure
modeled on European ideas (the French Revolution) and that this is precisely
what the indigenous movements want to get away from (pp. 8889). The
indigenous movement is willing to go along with the Assembly, but Choque
Huanca assures his listeners that if constitutional changes resulting from the
Assembly do not reflect the profound transformations already under way in
indigenous communities, the people will rise up again (p. 93).17
Given the long-term and diverse efforts to reconstitute indigenous forms
of governance and society this essay has only highlighted three sites of
transformation: the rural highland movement to reconstitute the ayllu, the
micro governments in the city of El Alto, and CEFREC-CAIB’s multi-ethnic
indigenous media activism the pachakuti heralded by Quechua and Aymara
speakers indeed seems to transcends the Constituent Assembly and Morales’
presidency. Indigenous movements are reshaping social, political, and
economic relationships on a wider scale, both within and across the borders
of nation states. The new utopia that grows from the process of strengthening
indigenous cultures in South America is inspired by surviving indigenous forms
of government and the social memory of idealized pre-colonial forms of state.
To this reader the utopia seems both appealing and deeply problematic it is
based on a heterosexual model of duality and some forms of local justice are
profoundly misogynistic. However it is a transformation in progress where
indigenous feminists are a key force in driving what could be a conservative
cultural politics toward realizing a utopian potential. The new utopia in this
sense looks to dialogue. The relation shall be based on interculturality: ‘La idea
de la interculturalidad, muy distinta a las relaciones de subordinación existente
entre los q’ara y los nativos; entonces un objetivo que subyace en la propuesta
de los ayllus es el establecimiento de la comunicación. Sentarse en la mesa y
hablar de igual a igual, en la común preocupación de solucionar problemas de
carácter general’ (‘The idea of interculturality is very different from the
subordination of natives by whites. One of the objectives proposed by the
ayllus is establishing a communication. Sitting down at the table and talking
among equals with the goal of finding solutions to a common problem’)
(Choque Quispe & Mamani Condori 2003, p. 167). In Mexico the Zapatistas
have sought to expand these reflections by engaging a diverse society of
discontent (feminists, students, the traditional Left, anarchists, etc.). Given
our still dominant tendency to see cultural and political theory as anchored in
European traditions of thought, can a critical cultural studies engage in this

dialogue?
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Randall Williams for recommending and sending me a copy

of Marta Harnecker and Federico Fuentes’s MAS-ISPS de Bolivia, which
provided key support for the argument made here. This paper also benefited
from discussion with the members of the University of California Multi-
campus Research Group, ‘Subaltern and the Popular’, directed by Swati
Chattopadhyay at UCSB in November 2006; from comments and questions
during the conference ‘The Discourse of Autonomy and Social Movements in
Political Theory Today’ organized by Horacio Legrás at the University of
California, Irvine in May 2006; and when it was presented at LASA 2007. It
further matured at the ‘Left Turns’ working group in Vancouver in April
2008. I would like to thank Maxwell Cameron and Benjamin Arditi for their
detailed and thought-provoking comments.
Notes
1 There is a risk in calling upon the terminology of the public sphere, shaped
as it is in contrast to an apparent ‘private’ realm which feminist scholarship
has long shown to be inherent but invisible to the construction of a public
sphere. Public sphere also seems to be invariably associated with Habermas’s
notions of rational discourse. None of these are implied when we speak of
‘lo público’ in places where the legacies of colonialism have created societies
marked by racism and sexism.
2 Rancière believes that living in France, there is no need to engage with post-
colonial theories of the subject. See Dasgupta (2008, p. 75). Williams
(2007) similarly manages to produce an eloquent and detailed discussion of
the political in the context of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico without
reference to the anti-colonial struggle at its heart.
3 Ayllus are Quechua and Aymara communities linked through kinship. Their
ties often reach from the Andean highlands to the valleys and thus encompass
relationships between communities living in different ecological zones. As a
social organization the ayllu informs almost all the indigenous populations of
the Andean highlands including those in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador,
Colombia (Choque Huanca & Mamani Condori 2003, p. 152).
4 CEFREC (Centro de Formación y Realización Cinematográfica) and CAIB
(Coordinadora Audiovisual Indı́gena Originaria de Bolivia) have been
collaborating in the production of documentaries, docudramas and fiction
videos since 1996. The videos are filmed in indigenous and peasant villages
and distributed regularly throughout a rural audiovisual network that

connects communities in Bolivia and the transnational Amazon basin.
5 Esteban Ticona Alejo describes the ideal and reality of governance in
Quechua and Aymara communities and at regional levels. Compare,
especially, Ticona Alejo (2003, pp. 137 144).
6 Pape (2009) states that in the ayllu communities he studied women were
altogether absent during the governing assemblies, while in sindicalist
organizations there were no formal limits to women’s participation (p. 116).
For a discussion of Andean heteronormativity and indigenous feminism see
also Schiwy (2009, pp. 109 138).
7 Mamani’s use of the term ‘multitude,’ for instance, alternates with the
phrase lo indı´gena popular, but unfortunately he refrains from explicitly
contrasting these concepts.
8 In Spanish the term etnia (ethnic group) is rejected by most Aymaras and
Quechuas as another derogatary term.
9 For a more comprehensive narrative see Schiwy (2009).
10 The acronyms stand for Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores de
Bolivia (CSUTCB), Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia
(CSCB), and Confederación de los Pueblos Indı́genas de Bolivia (CIDOB).
11 In an article forthcoming in the volume Resolutions 3: Video Praxis in Global
Spaces, edited by Ming-Yuen S. Ma and Erika Suderburg, I further discuss
consensus governance in light of Jacques Rancière’s critique of democracy
(Schiwy forthcoming).
12 Catherine Walsh (2009) offers an insightful discussion of the concepts of
interculturality and plurinationalism in the context of the Ecuadorian and
Bolivian decolonization processes. She argues that while interculturality is a
key concept in the Ecuadorian context (even as the decolonizing process
there is dominated by indigenous movements that marginalize the presence
of Afro-Ecuadorian peoples), the Bolivian discussion is centered around the
idea of multiple nations (or peoples) co-existing in the same nation-state.
See especially Walsh (2009, pp. 69 122).
13 In a book of interviews edited by Marta Harnecker and Federico Fuentes,
several members of the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, the party or
‘political instrument’ that brought Morales to the presidency) point to the
productive tension between a leader that strengthens and guides a process of
socio-cultural and political transformation, particularly within his party and
those participating in his administration, and a broad social movement that
guides his actions and holds him accountable. See for example Harnecker
and Fuentes (2008, pp. 78 85).
14 Around 63% of voters nationwide expressed support for the president with
the highland cities of La Paz, Oruro and Potosı́ turning out more than 80%
supportive votes. In the lowlands, in contrast, those clamoring for autonomy
in order to continue the political dominance of large landowners and
capitalist economic development have also achieved wide gains (Stephanoni

2008, p. 1).
15 Choque Huanca refers to Bolivia’s loss of access to the Pacific Ocean since its
war with Chile and Peru in 1879 1883. Bolivian’s largely blame their
country’s landlocked status as at least partially responsible for its poverty.
16 For a detailed discussion of ‘interculturality’ and ‘plurinationalism’ see
Walsh (2009).
17 This position is echoed in several of the Bolivian contributors to the second
volume of Movimiento indı´gena en América Latina: resistencia y proyecto
alternativo, edited by Raquel Gutiérrez and Fabiola Escárzaga (2006).
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Todos Somos Presidentes We Are All Presidents

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‘TODOS SOMOS PRESIDENTES/WE ARE

Democracy, culture, and radical politics

In light of recent discussions of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the political in

Keywords decolonization; political; democracy; culture; indigenous

of political movement, no longer centered on representative democracy or

now classic formulation, ‘nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural

Revolucionario (MNR), governing with the support of miners and workers

organizational tradition of the ayllu had to confront various forms of state

Pape maintains, however, that ancestral forms of indigenous governance

If the national imaginary was compelling enough to enlist a generation of

state-sanctioned discourses and practices, but rather from the memories of

Reconstituting the ayllu

kinship-based community that commonly ties different, not necessarily

try to explain a bottom-up socio-political structure that controls Morales and

defining means of organizing self-governance and creating networks in urban

Taking the ayllu to the city

In other words, the experience is not only marked by resistance to colonial

Indigenous media’s rescate cultural9

members enact traditions of governance that fuse corporatist traditions of

Performing the new state

FIGURE 1 Photograph taken during Evo Morales’ inauguration as President of Bolivia on

State has been characterized by ethnic neutrality since its beginning as an

constant approval of his political actions by indigenous communities and

Revolution by constitutional reform?

deconstruct the successful naturalization of the nation state as an emotionally

reconstituting indigenous forms of governance to continue regardless of

European traditions of thought, can a critical cultural studies engage in this

Special thanks to Randall Williams for recommending and sending me a copy

and distributed regularly throughout a rural audiovisual network that

capitalist economic development have also achieved wide gains (Stephanoni

Gutiérrez, R. & Escárzaga, F. (eds) (2006) Movimiento indı´gena en América Latina:

Mignolo, W. D. (2000) Local Histories, Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern

Stephenson, M. (2002) ‘Forging an indigenous counterpublic sphere: the taller de

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