Highlighting the Presence of Middle Classes in Bolivian Politics
My principal aim in this book is to highlight the significance of middle-class experiences for social and political life in Bolivia. Bolivian politics are commonly characterized as a struggle between “two Bolivias” comprising the wealthy and white, on the one hand, and the poor and indigenous, on the other hand (for a critique, see Dunkerley 2007). This depiction is true, but incomplete. In fact, a significant segment of Bolivians possesses aspirations, wealth, and lifestyles in between those of the very poor and the very wealthy. In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, I trace many middling Sacabans’ active reflections on the long-standing racial and class hierarchies of Bolivian society. Their perspectives enrich our understanding of what it means to be middle class in a Third World country whose government has promised the imminent, massive redistribution of wealth from elites to the poor. Middle-class hopes and concerns have been little acknowledged but are significant in shaping politics in the local arena of Sacaba and in the country as a whole. Their discussions can help us understand the place of middle classes beyond Sacaba and to rectify their surprising absence in much anthropological scholarship on the Third World and in Bolivia.8
Bolivian middling groups’ responses to the rise of MAS and its platform of social equality were filtered through their diverse experiences during recent economic and political transformations. Though Bolivia is blessed with abundant natural resources from silver to timber, Spanish colonialism and the small exclusionary elite that governed the country since its independence in 1825 left a ravaged, deeply unequal economy. Bolivia is rare in that a majority of people speak an indigenous language. New middle classes in Bolivia, many of whom speak indigenous languages, emerged in the wake of a social and economic opening permitted by the 1952 Bolivian Revolution and 1953 Agrarian Reform. This nascent rural and provincial middle class expanded further with the explosion in the price of cocaine in the United States and Europe in the 1970s that led to a boom in the price of Bolivian coca leaf. In central Bolivia, where coca grew, a new cohort of prosperous farmers, merchants, and professionals arose. The coca and cocaine booms presented unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility until the U.S.-led war on drugs partially squelched the boom in the 1990s. The drug war and the subsequent decline of the coca and cocaine markets spelled frustrated expectations for many people in the Sacaba region, even as many hung on tenuously to a new middle-class identity as professionals or as well-to-do merchants.
Free-market neoliberal reforms in the 1980s led to a deepening of Bolivia’s massive unemployment, as the influx of goods from foreign industries and foreign-subsidized agriculture outcompeted the products of Bolivian factories and small farms. Mass layoffs among miners and workers at other state-owned industries that were required under the terms of Bolivia’s free-trade policies contributed to further job losses. This unemployment, coupled with the decline in state spending on social services under free-market reforms, contributed to a bleak economic climate for many Bolivians that has lasted until the present, though for a while mitigated by the coca boom.9
The historically unprecedented election of Evo Morales in 2005 on a platform of redistribution of wealth and social equality has led to dilemmas of self-identification for this new middle class in Sacaba. President Morales became a prism through which many Bolivians reimagined their own identities. For upwardly mobile Sacabans, Evo’s political persona as an indigenous and poor leader provoked opposition as often as it did pride and approval. A cohort of first-generation doctors, lawyers, teachers, and prosperous merchants wrestled earnestly with how to distinguish their identity as professionals from those of the campesinos and Indians who were their parents, brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbors—and their new president. Some people greeted Evo’s and the MAS party’s rhetoric with dismay. They rejected the new government’s promotion of indigenous pride, social equality, and the redistribution of wealth. Other Sacabans with similar levels of wealth and aspirations for upward mobility began to tout campesino, working-class, or indigenous roots and trumpeted the government’s rhetoric of social equality; still others praised the new government’s promise of an end to corruption while continuing to assert their own social superiority.
Middle-class identity in Sacaba was experienced as ambiguous in part because little language existed to name it. As a result, many Sacabans alternated between identifying themselves with wealthy national elites and with poor indigenous campesinos and the working class. I highlight the ways in which identification with rural and urban spaces was a critical binary axis along which Sacabans struggled to define themselves and their political actions. Given that markers of class and race had been historically fluid, Sacabans often found it difficult to define their own and others’ social status, even as MAS and its allied political movements rhetorically asserted that there were clear dividing lines between elite and subaltern.
Political conflicts in Sacaba fed in part on this poor fit between existing social life in the municipality and the popular vision of Bolivian society polarized between the indigenous poor and the white superelite. Following Morales’s election and the precarious realignment of national power after centuries of elite rule, a fundamental uncertainty existed regarding who held political and social power in Bolivia. On a national scale, MAS supporters held the executive branch of government while right-wing, very wealthy elites controlled the vast majority of wealth and most Bolivian television, radio, and newspaper outlets. On a municipal scale, Sacaba’s urban districts were home to the wealthiest residents and received the majority of municipal government resources, but the agrarian union members, the base of support for the MAS party, gained strength from their strong relationship with President Morales and the national MAS leadership. On both national and municipal scales, then, the rise of MAS upset historical imbalances of power without establishing a new hegemony: power relations were fundamentally unstable. These public conflicts were the product of and contributed to private self-questioning and social repositioning amidst Sacaba’s new middle classes.
Hybrid Political Cultures
Divergent ideals about how to be a good citizen and political leader also created moral dilemmas and conflicts of interpretation of other people’s motivations. Sacabans’ middle-class aspirations shaped this diverse political culture. I employ the concept of political culture to mean the repertoire of practices, meanings, and languages through which people struggle over power and attempt to act collectively. I draw on Sidney Tarrow’s (1998) concept of “repertoires” of political action to emphasize the ways in which Sacabans conducted their political conflicts through patterned forms of action that were familiar to each other. Moving beyond an understanding of national political culture as consisting of uniformity and unanimity, in this book I join a growing number of scholars who emphasize the essential contested quality of culture (e.g., Jacobsen and Aljovin de Losada 2005; Haugerud 1993; Glick Schiller 2003). As Angelique Haugerud notes, national political cultures are neither monolithic nor consensus driven, but rather consist of public rituals and symbols that are arenas of contest as well as acquiescence between people of unequal social and economic standing (Haugerud 1993:8).
Three principal political ideals circulated in Bolivia in the early twenty first century. First, clientelism (clientelismo)—patron-client reciprocity of gifts, favors, jobs, and votes—was a legacy of colonialism and of Bolivia’s revolutionary government that took power in 1952 and promised national economic development delivered through patronage networks. Next, liberalism, the emphasis on free markets and individual responsibility, reemerged in the harsh free-market reforms instituted in 1985 and in the state decentralization reform of 1994, the LPP. The LPP created new