The Indigenous State

Front matter

Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia i | karmii

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Part One. Refounding The State

1. The Emergence of Indigenous Nationalism in Bolivia:

Social Movements and the MAS State 25 2. The Constituent Assembly: Challenges to Liberalism 41 3. Wedding the Nation: Spectacle and Political Performance 64

Part Two. Development And Decolonization

4. Living Well? The Battle for National Development 91 5. Race and Racism in the New Bolivia 116 6. From Indigeneity to Economic Liberation 137 7. Charaguas Struggle for Indigenous Autonomy 158 Conclusion: Between Politics and Policing 178 Notes 189 Credits for Previously Published Materials 194 References 195

LIST OF FIGURES

Map of Bolivia xii

Guarani women at the inauguration of the 2006 Constituent Assembly 3

Celebrating the inauguration of the 2006 Constituent Assembly 4

President Evo Morales at an “Andean” ceremony at Tiwanaku in 2015 celebrating his 2014 reelection 36

Depiction of the anti-colonial leader Tupac Katari at the 2015 celebration at

Tiwanaku 36

Poster for the 2006 Constituent Assembly 45

Amautas, or Andean spiritual practitioners, at an international meeting in

Cochabamba in 2012 75 The advancing agricultural frontier in Santa Cruz 108

Morales election campaign poster 112

. Morales supporters at a 2013 rally in Cochabamba 113

. Morales supporter at a 2013 rally in Cochabamba 113

Indigenous women protesters in the 2011 TIPNIS march

. 2011 TIPNIS march 124

2011 TIPNIS march 125

. Middle-class neighborhoods in La Paz 147 vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I bring to a close nearly ten years of work on this project, I find myself enormously indebted to a huge group of people, both in Bolivia and the United States. My research, thinking, and writing are the products of many collaborations, and although I am the “author; this book, like all texts, is in reality multi-authored. (I do bear responsibility for the errors, of course.) I am grateful to all those who shared their lives, their ideas, their scholarship, and their passion with me. I hope it is adequately reflected in these pages.

First, let me acknowledge the generous support I have received for my research from the University of California San Diego Academic Senate Committee on Research (2012, 2013, 2015); University of California Center for New Racial Studies (2012); and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2008, 2015).

Turning to Bolivia, I start my thanks with the Guarani of Santa Cruz, with whom I have shared twenty years of discussions, endless meetings, long bus rides, late nights, and laughter. The Capitania Zona Cruz and its leaders and members continue to be my center in Bolivia, where I learn about politics in all its dimensions. No matter when I arrive, they invite me right in to the meetings, fill me in on all the latest, and share their opinions. I am honored by this trust and inspired by the practice of everyday politics they carry out. The family I call the Taperas in the community I call Bella Flor have made me feel like family for all these years. I thank them for the many hundreds of hours we have spent analyzing the Bolivian political scene together. I especially thank “Samuel” and “Monica” for their insights in and experiences with the politics and practices of lowlands indigenous organizations. Samuel also accompanied me to Charagua for the first time, connecting me to his kin and colleagues. Yasoropai.

vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In La Paz, I am lucky to have been embraced by another family, the Calla Ortegas. Julio Calla continues to amaze me with his life force and compassion. On his eightieth birthday in 2015, he swapped stories, told jokes, and danced all night. Thanks to him and the rest of the La Paz gang, Ricardo and Jenny, Nano and Gabby, Andrés and Kantuta, Pablo and Oriana, for many happy Sundays eating, talking, and thinking. To Pamela, Tom, Benjamin and Julia Elena, now in New York, my deepest thanks for the many years of friendship. Over thirty years of talking politics together and we're still going strong! And in Santa Cruz, I thank my dear friend Wendy Townsend, who always opens her house to me when I am in the lowlands. Thanks, sister!

I am grateful for the many discussions with engaged intellectuals and scholars across Bolivia. These include: Xavier Albó, Eliana Arkirakis, Walter Arteaga, Diego Ayo, Rosanna Barragan, Rafael Bautista, Luis Bredow, Hernando (Nano) Calla Ortega, Ricardo Calla Ortega, Isabel Combes, José de la Fuente, María Galindo, Fernando Garcés, Javier Gómez, Juan Carlos Guzmán, Roberto Laserna, Pablo Mamani Ramírez, Carmen Medeiros, Adolfo Mendoza, José Mirtenbaum, Ramiro Molina, Oscar Olivera, Julieta Paredes, Sarela Paz, Paula Peña, Pedro Portugal, Raúl Prada, Hernan Prudén, Pablo Regalsky, Carlos Revilla, Jurgen Riester, Gonzalo Rojas, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Alison Spedding, Leonardo Tamburini, Luís Tapia, Nico Tassi, Esteban Ticona, Jorge Viaña, Alcides Vadillo Pinto, Oscar Vega Camacho, Adrian Waldman, and Fabian Yaksic.

I thank the researchers and librarians of the following organizations, whose long-term on-the-ground research is essential for understanding Bolivia: APCOB (Apoyo para el Campesino-Indigena del Oriente, Santa Cruz), CEDLA (Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario, La Paz), CEJIS (Centro de Estudios Juridicos e Investigacion Social, Santa Cruz), CIPCA (Centro de Investigacion y Promoción del Campesinado, La Paz and Charagua), THOA (Taller de Historia Oral Andina, La Paz), UNITAS (Union Nacional de Instituciones para el Trabajo de Acción Social), and Fundación Tierra. These groups carry out their excellent work despite increasing threats and reduced funding. Special thanks to the staff of CIPCA Charagua for all their help during my visits to observe the autonomy process. I thank: Alejandra Anzaldo, Magali Gutierrez, María Elena Moreira, and Santiago Puerta, as well as their hard-working staff. I had critical assistance from the anthropologist Tatiana Ramos, who shared her work on the collective marriages research in La Paz, and Olga Yana, who transcribed audiotapes. I also thank the sociologist Jorge Derpic for introducing me to leaders of the El Alto community I describe in chapter 6.

I could not have carried out this research on the state without the generous cooperation of many people who work in government institutions, at the national, departmental, and municipal levels. To these officials and to their stafts, who coordinated my interviews and observations, I am very grateful. In La Paz, I thank: Vice

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Minister of Decolonization Felix Cardenas; Vice Minster of Indigenous Autonomies Gonzalo Vargas Rivas; directors of the Depatriarcalization Unit Esperanza Huanca and Dora Arteaga Alanoca. In Santa Cruz: Defensor del Pueblo Hernan Cabrera; Secretary of Indigenous Peoples at the Gobernación of Santa Cruz Julio César Lopez; staff at the Ministry of Autonomies, including Alfredo Carri and Mercedes Nossa; and the Asambleista Indigena to the Santa Cruz Legislative Assembly, Ruth Yarigua (Guarani, Charagua Norte). In Charagua, I thank Mayor Benjamin Solano and his staff (who put up with me right in the middle of their big Cumbre event), Diputado Abilio Vaca, and Consejal Silvia Eugenia Canda.

I particularly thank the lowland indigenous leaders who shared their organizations’ political projects and processes with me. In Santa Cruz, I thank the leaders of the Capitania Zona Cruz; the mburuvicha guasus (capitan grandes) of “Bella Flor” and “El Paraiso,” Justa Cabrera and Gregorio Flores of Jorori; and Ronald Gómez, president of the Consejo de Capitanes Guaranis de Santa Cruz. In Charagua, I thank the capitanes of the four capitanías (Charagua Norte, Parapetiguasu, Bajo, and Alto Izozog). I am also grateful to members of Charaguas civil society for their generous interviews, including Marco Casiano of Estación, María Antonia Arancibia, of the Comité Cívico, and the president of AGACOR, the Cattle Ranchers’ Association.

My work has been nurtured, critiqued, and augmented by the wonderful cadre of Bolivianistas who form a supportive international network. I build upon their work and hope to have many more years of conferences and collaboration with them. These include: Thomas Abercrombie, Emily Achtenberg, Rob Albro, Penelope Anthias, Michelle Bigenho, Anders Burman, Pamela Calla, John Cameron, Andrew Canessa, Nicole Fabricant, Linda Farthing, Molly Geidel, Daniel Goldstein, Mark Goodale, Bret Gustafson, Kevin Healy, Kathryn Hicks, Amy Kennemore, Ben Kohl, Chris Krueger, Gabrielle Kuenzli, Maria Lagos, Sian Lazar, John Andrew McNeish, Liz Monasterios, Pere Morell i Torra, Andrew Orta, Alessandra Pellegrini, Susan Paulson, Tom Perreault, Hernan Prudén, Helene Risør, Cristina Rojas, Salvador Schavelzon, Almut Schilling-Vacaflor, Sinclair Thomson, and Nieves Zuñiga. I am especially grateful to my fellow Charagua researcher Jason Tockman, who graciously read and improved chapter 7.

I also want to thank the intellectual community that has formed around the Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP) section of the Latin American Studies Association, and LACES, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 1 have been a part of this remarkable journal since its first issue in 2006, and I am enormously grateful for the hard work and generous service the board, authors, and reviewers have provided over these years. It has created a critical center of gravity around which a cross-disciplinary group of scholars focusing on race and indigenous peoples has developed. I especially thank Leon Zamosc, our editor in chief, who created the journal and has been its leader for

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS this first decade. My research and thinking for this book is very much a product of the engaged scholarship in the journal as well as the rich discussions at LACES- ERIP conferences. And of course, none of it would have been possible without the support of our wonderful editorial assistants, especially Rachel Soper and Amy Kennemore.

The findings in this book have benefitted from audiences and commentators at a number of venues over the past years. I thank those who invited me to present previous versions at the Anthropology Department, Bergen, Norway; Andean Studies at Brown University; California Western School of Law, San Diego; Carnegie Mellon University; the Anthropology Department at Harvard University; the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; University of Diego Portales, Santiago Chile; Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University; University of Kentucky, Lexington; Johns Hopkins University; Norwegian Latin America Research Network and Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) in Oslo, Norway; Latin American Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BG; the Human Rights and Humanitarianism Collaboratory at UC Davis; Architecture Department, Universidad Mayor de San Andres, La Paz, Bolivia; the Latin American Center at the University of Oregon; the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Riverside; and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. The comments I have received at these presentations have invariably helped me make better sense of my material. None has been as important as one I received in Kentucky from the political theorist Benjamin Arditi, who suggested I look at the theory of Jacques Rancière. Ben’s inspiring work on liberalism and his generous push towards Ranciére have altered the way I think about politics.

I spent a wonderful semester as a visiting scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, in 2014 when I was working through the material for this book. I thank my colleagues there for a rich introduction to Chile and for beginning what I see as long-term friendships and collaborations. Thanks to my dear friends Helene Risor and Manuel Prieto Montt, to Angel Aedo, Giovanna Bacchiddu, Piero Di Giminiani, Pedro Mege, and Marjorie Murray, as well as to the great postdocs. Special thanks to Amy Kennemore for sharing this fun time in Chile, and for all the stimulating co-thinking we have done—and continue to do.

At the University of California Press, I thank my editor Kate Marshall, who has been wonderful. I am indebted to the two external reviewers, whose comments helped me clarify the argument.

Closer to home, I thank my wonderful students at UCSD, who have always been the first to read and critique my work. Our Decolonizing Bolivia Workshop was an especially fertile ground, as we thought together about the proceso de

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi cambio under way in Bolivia. Thanks to all the members: Devin Beaulieu, Brooke Binkowsi, Tereza Harp, Patrick Kearney, Amy Kennemore, Penelope Anthias, Andrea Marston, Jorge Montesinos, Jorge Resina de la Fuente, and Paula Saravia. I am lucky to work at UCSD, where I have an extraordinary set of colleagues in the department and across campus. I am especially grateful to have friends and comrades like Jody Blanco, Joe Hankins, Christine Hunefeldt, Gershon Shafir, Natalia Molina, Pamela Radcliff, Leon Zamosc, and Elana Zilberg. Lynn Stephen, who visited UCSD, has become a great friend and colleague. I received helpful assistance from student interns Aisha Ali, Bryan Cassella, and Jackie Clavin.

This book is especially indebted to two people with whom I have collaborated most closely. Eli Elinoff and I have been working on and thinking about politics together for a decade. Comparing my work on Bolivia with his on Thailand has helped us both think through the complicated relation between politics and policing. Our shared intellectual work on our recent “post-politics” project was the culmination (so far) of a decade-long collaboration that deeply defines my own work. I can't imagine this book without Eli's continued engagement and encouragement. His careful reading of the early drafts was critical to the final version, as he helped me focus on the big issues at stake. How incredibly lucky to have such a generous and brilliant partner in this intellectual adventure. And I have two. In 2012, Nicole Fabricant and I decided to co-author a journal article about hunger strikes in lowland Bolivia. Since then, we have carried out joint fieldwork and written seven articles together. Building on each other’s strengths, we created a virtuous cycle that made writing and working together exhilarating. Much of that work is present in this book, especially in chapter 5, where I describe our collaborative research in Santa Cruz. I am inspired by her passion and commitment for social justice, and grateful to have shared so much with her. Thank you both so much.

Many thanks to my family and friends for all the support I have received on the home front. To Elizabeth Dougherty, Natalia Molina, and Elana Zilberg: thanks for your friendship. Road trips, dinner parties, dog walks, and yoga classes with you have kept me sane. To Fred and Suki Edwards, thanks for so many years of friendship. Much love to Steve and Nikki Postero, and the whole Harkness- Moncivaiz-Mehan clan. Parker, Jackson, and Ellie have kept me company while I wrote, making sure I knew what was really important. My greatest thanks are to Jeff Harkness, whose love and support have provided a happy refuge from the stresses of academic life. I am eternally grateful for the life we have built together.

Finally, I want to remember my mother Cissie Postero and my friend and fellow Bolivianist scholar Ben Kohl, both of whom died in the last few years. My life and work were greatly enriched by these two generous spirits.

BRASIL

PARAGUAY

FIGURE 1. Map of Bolivia. Credit: Peter Fitzgerald. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0.

Introduction

The “Cultural Democratic Revolution” of Evo Morales

In August 2006, Bolivia witnessed a historic event, the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly, a convention of popularly elected delegates to rewrite the constitution and “refound the nation” For many, this was the culmination of centuries of indigenous struggles against domination by white-mestizo elites. Colonized by the Spanish in the 1500s, Bolivias native peoples endured centuries of oppression and exploitation and were barred from cultural and political participation in colonial administration and later national affairs. Since the founding of the Republic of Bolivia in 1825, the white-mestizo political elite had written all the following constitutions, without meaningful representation by the indigenous poor who make up the majority of Bolivia’s population. But starting in 2000, the tables have begun to turn. A series of massive popular protests against neoliberal policies staged by indigenous peoples, peasants, and the urban poor forced the resignation of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and in 2005, Bolivia elected its first self-identifying indigenous president, Evo Morales. Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS; Movement towards Socialism) party gained the largest electoral majority since Bolivia’s return to democracy in the early 1980s, representing a sea change in the country's political landscape. Claiming to represent Bolivia's excluded peoples, Morales promised his government would inaugurate a "cultural democratic revolution" (Morales 2006). The next year, he convened the Constituent Assembly, a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution, a long-held demand by indigenous organizations, to begin this revolution and codify into law the "process of change" that would lead to a decolonized Bolivia.

The Constituent Assembly began on August 6, the day on which Bolivians celebrate independence from Spain, in the beautiful colonial city of Sucre, where the country’s original constitution had been written in 1825. The city was filled with delegates, visitors, media, and large contingents from each of Bolivias thirty-six indigenous groups, mingling in the noisy fiesta in the central plaza. My anthropologist credentials got me a press pass, so I was able to observe the ceremony with journalists from around the world. It was an amazing performance of indigenous pride and power. Right above us, from the balcony of the Palacio de Justicia, President Morales oversaw the festivities, flanked by his vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, and various international luminaries, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Guatemalan indigenous leader Rigoberta Menchu. The president of the Assembly, Silvia Lazarte, a former domestic worker and union leader, called the Assembly to order. The most striking part of the day was the introduction of the 225 delegates, many of whom were dressed in clothing marking them as indigenous. As the roll call of clearly recognizable indigenous names rang out, it became clear that the authors of this constitution were very different from those of previous constitutions. “Mamani? Presente! Quispe? Presente!” Many of the delegates responded in their native tongues: Aymara, Quechua, Guarani. All around me, faces were wet with tears, as we witnessed what would have seemed almost impossible ten years earlier: indigenous people making a new state. Vice President Garcia Linera congratulated Bolivia's indigenous peoples for “reclaiming their place in society not with bullets, but with votes and words? He said Bolivias strength is its “communitarian capacity,” from which the rest of the world could learn. “The jacha uru, the great day, for the indigenous peoples has arrived,’ declared President Morales (Spinelli 2006). Then a rowdy parade began, made up of all the different social movements whose struggles had made this day possible: indigenous peoples in colorful traditional clothes, labor and peasant unions, women’s organizations, students, and miners with their hard hats. With enormous pride, marchers sang and played traditional instruments, carrying signs encouraging the delegates to refound the nation and to begin the process of decolonizing Bolivia. “¿Nunca Mas sin Nosotros!” declared the signs, “Never Again without Us!” The whole day, the descendants of those excluded for centuries past marched through the streets declaring that it was their turn to write the future.

Over the next two years, Bolivia’s Constituent Assembly would be the site of tremendous conflict as its delegates struggled to rework the model of the state and the role of indigenous peoples within it. The resulting constitution, passed in a national referendum in 2009, declares Bolivia to be a plurinational, communitarian state, and establishes a series of rights for “indigenous originary and peasant peoples and nations,’ including rights to autonomy and self-government, to culture, recognition of their institutions, and the consolidation of their territories (Bolivia 2009: Article 2). More importantly, it declares the fundamental goal of the new plurinational state to be “decolonization.” Article 9 of the new constitution codifies the idea into law, specifying the first goal and essential function of the

FIGURE 2. Guarani women at the inauguration of the 2006 Constituent Assembly. Credit: Nancy Postero.

state as being to “constitute a just and harmonious society, cemented in decolonization, without discrimination or exploitation, with full social justice, to consolidate plurinational identities.”

This is the promise of the Morales government: to create a new form of state that will inaugurate a new kind of decolonized society. What does “decolonization” mean? How has the Morales government instituted this revolutionary idea and what have the effects been for Bolivia? Has the Morales government been able to fulfill the promises of this revolutionary idea? These are the questions this book seeks to answer. In this ethnography of indigenous state-making, I examine the discourses, policies, and practices of the Morales government to see what difference it might make for formerly oppressed groups to take state power. The Bolivian experiment inspired people across the world because it promised an alternative to both neoliberal economic policies and Western colonial legacies, especially racism. Because it drew from the repertoire of indigenous values and practices,

FIGURE 3. Celebrating the inauguration of the 2006 Constituent Assembly. Credit: Nancy Postero.

it challenged the fundamental tenets of liberalism, offering a chance to overturn them or at least modify them for the twenty-first century.

Yet my research shows that this did not happen. While the Morales government did enact policies that greatly benefited Bolivias indigenous citizens, the “indigenous state” continues to be fundamentally liberal, and the country has not only continued but expanded its reliance on market capitalism. Indigeneity and decolonization were the rallying cries for the Morales revolution, serving as what the French political philosopher Jacques Ranciére terms an emancipatory “politics” (Ranciére 1999). Yet, as the MAS government consolidated its control and defeated its political adversaries on the right, its support for indigenous self-determination waned. Morales continues to invoke indigenous history and culture, but he does so in performances of a state-controlled version of indigeneity that legitimizes state power. The new constitution subsumes indigenous local autonomy rights under a liberal government in which the central state retains decision-making power over most significant matters, especially as regards the extraction of natural resources. Moreover, the MAS government has made it clear that it will sacrifice some indigenous communities to its national development project.

The central argument in this book is that indigeneity has been transformed in Bolivia from a site of emancipation to one of liberal nation-state building. Since Morales came to power, inclusion and citizenship have increasingly been articulated in terms of class rather than of ethnicity. In recent years, Morales has argued for Bolivia’s “economic liberation,’ blending anti-imperialism with market development. This new discourse is especially popular among the emerging indigenous middle class, who have benefited from the expanding economy. Yet it is not shared by all indigenous people. I document a number of sites where local indigenous communities are reasserting centuries-old demands for indigenous sovereignty in opposition to this conjuncture of liberalism and development.

Throughout this book, I focus on the deep disagreements these circumstances produce. In what follows in this Introduction, I introduce four central sites of contestation. First, I ask what it means to be indigenous and who counts as indigenous in Bolivia. To what extent are the tensions in contemporary Bolivia questions of race and racism? Second, I consider the multiple meanings of the idea of decolonization, and inquire into what a decolonized society would look like. Third, I look at the liberal state and ask what alternatives an “indigenous state” might produce. Finally, I consider the political struggles under way in Bolivia, introducing a key theoretical framework for the book in the form of Ranciéres conception of politics. For Bolivias indigenous peoples, Moraless administration represents a historic change, but there are deep disagreements about whether his government is producing an emancipatory politics for indigenous people or whether, like all liberal regimes, it is introducing a new form of policing. This fourth section investigates performance as a key tool of both politics and policing, showing how the struggles I describe—for control of the state, for decolonization, and for local autonomy—are enacted at the discursive and symbolic level, including spectacular political performances and rituals that invoke Bolivian history, religion, and culture.

THE MEANINGS OF INDIGENEITY

Evo Morales is Bolivia's first “indigenous” president. I put the word indigenous in quotation marks, because defining and representing indigeneity is a subject of great debate in Bolivia, as elsewhere in the world (see, e.g., Albro 2005, 2007; Canessa 2006, 2012; Postero and Zamosc 2004; K. Webber 2012, 2013). In Morales's life and political identity, we can see the complex intersections between race and class that characterize indigeneity. He was raised in a family of Aymara-speaking highland peasants, but he spent most of his life in the Chapare region of the lowlands, where he rose to be the president of the coca-growers' union. As a cocalero leader, he originally emphasized class distinctions and anti-imperialism rather than ethnic demands, but during the multicultural 1990s, Morales gradually “Indianized” his position, making indigeneity a central part of his public persona and political agenda (Albro 2005). Yet he was careful in his 2005 electoral campaign to build a platform based on both class and ethnic demands, framing it in what Raúl Madrid has called “ethno-populist” terms (Madrid 2008). Robert Albro has demonstrated that one of the strengths of Morales’s MAS party was its ability to bridge between local, collective, and culture-based indigenous communities and identities, on the one hand, and an urban pluralist recognition of indigenous heritage not tied to specific localities, on the other (Albro 2005: 449). This gave indigenous politics a “new articulatory power” and made it an “effective tool for broad based coalition building,’ since it linked the common lived experiences of displaced indigenous peasants, urban workers in the informal sector, and poor mestizos, all of whom were suffering the effects of neoliberal restructuring (449-50; see also Postero 20074).

Once in office, Morales began to portray himself and his government as representing indigenous peoples, emphasizing indigeneity over class. Beginning with his Andean inauguration at the pre-Inca religious center of Tiwanaku in January 2006, where he was blessed by Aymara spiritual practitioners and recognized as Apumallku, or the highest authority (Postero 2007b), Morales has trumpeted his own indigenous identity and made indigeneity a central icon for his administration’s radical reforms. Over the years, he gradually formulated what Andrew Canessa calls the “new language of national political identity,’ a discursive representation of indigeneity as the solution to domestic and global problems (Canessa 2006). In international fora, Morales proclaims indigenous values like suma qamaña (living well), a model of sustainable development based on respect for Mother Earth, to articulate agendas on climate change and coca production (Postero 2012). At the domestic level, Morales has passed an important anti-racism law and established a Vice Ministry of Decolonization to put into effect a “process of change” to cleanse Bolivian society of racism and patriarchy and to recuperate indigenous identities and customs (Cárdenas 2011: 16). I concur with Canessa’s argument that in Bolivia, “political legitimacy rests on being indigenous” He notes that Morales has positioned indigeneity as a site from which to defend and protect the nation’s national resources and to push for social justice. “In short,” he concludes, “indigeneity is the foundation of a new nationalism" (Canessa 2012: 17-18).

How has indigeneity taken on such a positive valence, and how is it defined? Who counts as “indigenous” in any society is a fundamentally political question, since such representations emerge from struggles over particular social, cultural, environmental, and economic matters at particular moments (García 2008; Friedlander 1975). It is a historically contingent formulation that changes over time. Moreover, indigeneity is relational; like all forms of identity, it emerges from contested and co-constituting social fields of difference and sameness (see Bigenho 2007; Fuss 1995 Nelson 1999). As Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn point out, “indigenous cultural practices, institutions, and politics become such in articulation with what is not considered indigenous within the particular social formation in which they exist” (2007: 4). Thus, throughout this book, when I use the terms “indigenous” or ^white-mestizo;' I am referring to social categories that take on specific meanings in the Bolivian context.

Race is a central line of fracture in Bolivia, where somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of people identify in national censuses as indigenous (INE 2003, 2012). There is an enormous diversity among this self-identifying group, with big differences between highland and lowland communities and between urban and rural residents. Yet the dominant class has grappled with “the Indian question” in every era—trying to determine the proper role of indigenous people in society and the economy (Postero and Zamosc 2004; Zavaleta Mercado 1986). In some eras, this question was explicitly tied to race; in others, it was described in terms of ethnicity or subsumed under class. Following Peter Wade (1997), I use the terms “race” and “racism” to describe relations between Bolivia’s native peoples and the whites and mestizos who dominated them for centuries. Needless to say, scientists now agree that there is no basis for describing human differences in terms of race, but in Bolivia, indigenous people have been and continue to be subjected to overt racism. Thus, describing these relations as “racialized” draws attention to the ways creating and enforcing categories of difference can act as a form of domination. In Bolivia, racialized difference was created historically in part through long-term extractivist patterns of development that tore native peoples from their lands, exploited their labor, and denied them full membership in the polity (Galeano 1973; Larson 2004; Platt 1982). Racism in the form of discourses about the inferiority, savagery, and childishness of Indians justified this violence, but racism was also produced in the practices and power relations that resulted. That is, in wielding power over indigenous peoples and claiming the right to exploit their territories’ resources, white-mestizo elites enacted the situated practices of domination I am referring to as racism.

In the Bolivian case, Thomas Abercrombie argues that the colonial opposition of “Indian” to "European" was always a semiotic construction based in a system of inequality (Abercrombie 2001: 97). Before contact with Europeans, of course, no such overarching category united native communities and groups. Beginning in the colonial era, Indians were forced to pay tribute taxes and to work in near-slavery conditions on colonizers’ haciendas and in silver mines, the profits of which helped fuel Europe's industrial revolution (Galeano 1973). In the lowlands, native peoples were forced into servitude during the rubber boom. In the colonial period, difference was explicitly racialized; the casta system, based on “blood purity,” determined status. After the conquest, and with colonization by the Spanish, already fragmented Andean communities underwent radical transformations—their ritual-economic-political systems were replaced by Christian practices, and their noble authorities by town councils. These changes may have eliminated the differentia of Indianness and produced what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui calls a “cultural mestizaje”(1993: 64), but Abercrombie argues that the invented category persisted because it was the foundation of both Spanish landholders’ claims to labor and, ironically, for native peoples’ claims to limited autonomy (Abercrombie 2001: 104). These stereotypes were “invested with terrible power” (ibid): those categorized as Indians were forced to provide labor and tribute and restricted from living in certain places, like city centers (Platt 1982; Harris 1995). Anibal Quijano concludes that these colonial structures of political and cultural domination established new racialized social identities based on the distribution of work, which set in place a long-term system of classification and knowledge production he calls the “coloniality of power" (Quijano 2007). In Bolivia, Rivera Cusicanqui argues, this colonial opposition was a dialectical process. Through permanent confrontation of images and self-images, three fundamental identities were forged: indio (Indian), qara (white), and cholo (mestizo), the latter being a category filled with ambiguity and discursive insecurity (Rivera Cusicanqui 1993: 57-60).