Marisol was not alone in Sacaba Municipality in framing her relatively modest and sometimes uncertain means as acquired in comparable fashion to the fortunes of Bolivia’s tiny wealthy elite. Throughout Sacaba, many first-generation lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and newly prosperous merchants argued that their prosperity was available to all Bolivians willing to work hard, and, conversely, that poor people had probably been lazy or imprudent. They, like Marisol, asserted that campesinos and indios (Indians) had been tricked into supporting their socialist president and his promises that his government would redistribute wealth more equitably.
The very act of drawing such distinctions mirrors the practices of middle-class people throughout the world (see Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002; Bourdieu 1984). Yet, in other ways, Marisol’s response to inequality and her self-identification within hierarchies of race and class were particular to the Third World. In still other ways, she drew distinctions particular to Bolivia, and to the particular social world of a provincial municipality in central Bolivia. Marisol’s experience exemplified patterns shared by many in Sacaba whom I am terming the new middle class. At times Marisol, a first-generation pharmacist, allied herself rhetorically with Bolivia’s wealthiest elite. Yet in other moments she expressed discomfort when faced with wealthier, lighter-skinned, or generally more elite Bolivians. She conveyed a sense of anxiety over her social status and she alternated between professing values of egalitarianism and superiority and between subaltern and elite social identities.
This alternation between elite and subaltern identities was common in Sacaba, as a sample of incidents I witnessed reveals.
A doctor chastised me, as we ate roast guinea pig (a rural Andean delicacy) he had prepared, for not eating the skin. He declared with heat, “I’m poor; I eat the skin.” On another occasion, he told me proudly that his children insisted on his buying them cakes from Dumbo’s, Cochabamba’s most expensive bakery, for their birthday parties.
A lawyer remarked wistfully that he always felt out of place in law school because of his rural origins. He declined to marry his common-law wife, however, because her identity as a campesina and indigenous person from the countryside did not fit with the middle-class image he wished to project.
A rural family that had become wealthy through a trucking and logging business vied for superior status with their cash-poor but highly educated neighbors.
Marisol did not, in fact, call herself middle class; nor did most Sacabans. The term “middle class” (clase media) in Bolivia was most often reserved for well-established urbanite professionals and business owners. Like most other college-educated Sacabans, Marisol referred to herself as a professional (profesional) to convey her proud ascension of the Bolivian social ladder. Other prosperous but non-college-educated Sacabans similarly did not attribute to themselves any particular explicit term for being in the middle. Middling Sacabans instead, like Marisol, alternated between calling themselves subaltern—in terms like pobre (poor), campesina, and popular (working class)—and making statements of comradeship with Bolivian superelites. They also shared her anxiety over social status and alternation between ethics of social superiority and equality. Those I am calling Sacaba’s new middle classes also differed in their experiences and status from the prosperous urbanites termed “middle class” in the Bolivian press, political polling, and public debate because they were deeply shaped by the social connotations of living in or near a provincial town, a place viewed by many Bolivians as one step away from stigmatized rural spaces. I am calling them “middle class” because they had achieved some of their aspirations for upward mobility, because many elements of their experience were similar to experiences of self-identified middle classes elsewhere in Bolivia and the Third World, and because their self-presentations, preoccupations, and aspirations differed from the explicitly campesino-indigenous rhetoric of political leaders. These aspirations conditioned their political ideals and their relationships with their families and fellow townspeople.
Like members of middle classes elsewhere, Marisol made an effort to distinguish herself from poorer people through moral and intellectual, as well as economic, superiority (Bourdieu 1984; see also Ehrenreich 1989; Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). She rhetorically marked her intellectual superiority over Bolivia’s campesinos, who “blindly” believed in the Morales administration’s rhetoric of redistribution of wealth. She also aligned herself sympathetically with people much wealthier than herself when she suggested that Bolivia’s richest people, the large landowners, must have gotten that land through their own or their families’ hard work and “sacrifice” rather than through government handouts, as she suggested campesinos were attempting to do.
The notion that people who prospered did so due to their own hard work and sound money management, and that poor people remained poor because they lacked those values, were common sentiments among upwardly mobile Sacabans. Deysi, a schoolteacher from the rural community of Choro, similarly argued that her own and other first-generation professionals’ superior management of their lives came from the intellectual insight gained from a university education and from the moral worth gained by having “sacrificed themselves” to attain those professional degrees. “As a profesional, you know how to budget from your paycheck,” she declared in 2009. By contrast, her neighbors, “people from the countryside [gente del campo] … don’t know how to budget their money well. [They buy] a case of beer, then another case of beer. Meanwhile, a professional knows what he has sacrificed for his money; he isn’t going to waste it.” Her neighbor, a coca farmer who became a music teacher, echoed many upwardly mobile Sacabans in his criticism of poorer neighbors when he argued in 1998 that “if a person wants to work, he can prosper; if a person doesn’t want to work, he won’t …” Such sentiments mirror the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative prevalent in the United States that presents the middle class as more virtuous than the working classes and poor.
To be middle class was not an identity based solely on economic standing. Sacabans’ race and class identities were based as much on symbols with deeply charged meanings—a kitchen sink with running water, a trip to the orthodontist, a university diploma—as on a particular income or assets. As Mark Liechty reminds us, middle classness is a frame of mind, a set of behaviors, a “cultural project or practice … rather than a social category or empirical condition” (Liechty 2002:21).1 Middle classness is often defined by the practice of drawing distinctions between oneself and others who are poorer and using moral explanations for one’s success (O’Dougherty 2002:6). Marisol’s placing of herself in opposition to campesinos is emblematic of middle-class strategies for assuming social superiority.
Despite these similarities with middle classes throughout the world, many elements of Sacaba’s new middle classes’ identities are not shared by middle classes in places like the United States or Europe but are distinctive to the Third World. Given that impoverished people who struggle daily to earn enough to feed and house themselves make up a larger percentage of the Bolivian population than in the United States, new middle-class Bolivians experience more anxiety. The newly prosperous in Bolivia are faced continually with a grim reminder—in the 50 percent poverty rate—of what will happen to them if they fail in their quest for upper mobility (World Bank 2013; see Liechty 2002:10–11; Dickey 2000; O’Dougherty 2002; Cahn 2008). Like middle classes from Brazil to Nepal, newly middle-class Sacabans vigorously identified themselves with modernity and development and associated poor people with backwardness and underdevelopment. Bolivia’s superwealthy agribusiness landowners, the national class and racial elite, represented modernity and development, and Marisol, from her struggling