Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
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category helps uncover the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary middle classes, as well as the ways in which these contemporary middle classes attempted to set themselves apart from rural, indigenous, and campesino status. Chola was a mestizo social category that reflected both the ideology of firm racial division mapped onto rural and urban geography in theory, and the more fluid identities of daily practice (e.g., Poole 1997; Weismantel 2001; Seligmann 1989; de la Cadena 2000; Albro 2000; Paulson 1996). Cholas were women who wore long, pleated skirts (polleras) adapted from Spanish colonial women’s clothing, petticoats, and stovepipe or fedora hats; they wore their hair in two long braids. Like new Bolivian middle classes more broadly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cholas have, since their emergence in the late nineteenth century, portrayed themselves as socially superior when interacting with people who identified as Indian but have taken on socially inferior Indian status during interactions with elites (Weismantel 2001; Seligmann 1989; de la Cadena 2000).
Despite some room for upward mobility for aspiring cholas, however, being a chola was fraught with anxiety (Gotkowitz 2003:115). Cholas wielded more economic and social power than Indians, but they were always subject to challenges to their middling social status from people who claimed to be above or below them. The 1952 revolutionary government’s declaration that Bolivia was a mestizo nation rather than a Europeandescended nation with an excluded Indian hinterland specifically recognized cholas as a socially legitimate intermediate group.
Following the revolution, class and racial identities and ideologies shifted further, though in contradictory ways. Education became more widely available after the revolutionary government ended the earlier restrictions on education for the children of rural serfs. Although the national government failed to deliver high-quality education in rural areas, and less than one-tenth of rural students remained in school through sixth grade (Luykx 1999:47), by the late 1970s the first generation of rural-born university students had earned professional degrees. These graduates began to challenge the longtime association of rural origins, including chola identity, with a denigrated Indian identity.
Yet as education became more widely available and the ranks of middle classes broadened in Bolivia, the meaning of chola identity inched down the class and racial hierarchy in the Cochabamba region, from an aspiring middling group (Gotkowitz 2003) to indigenous or campesina. Girls who attended high school were legally prohibited from wearing polleras and braids, the central symbols of cholas. Teenage girls throughout the region dropped their chola status by donning pants or straight skirts in pursuit of upward mobility through education. This prohibition held until the Morales government passed legislation in 2006 to remove this law. Within the Cochabamba region, though some individual cholas who wore expensive earrings, elaborate polleras, and immaculate braids might be recognized as prosperous or even wealthy, chola was often used synonymously with campesina and india (Indian) (see also Albro 2000). A wealthy farmer in Choro marveled approvingly in 2004 that a former president, General René Barrientos, had correctly foreseen the disappearance of cholas in the late 1960s. In a populist speech to Choreños, Barrientos had assured them that by the end of the twentieth century, Bolivia would have achieved such progress and prosperity that cholitas would have been replaced by chotas: girls and women wearing straight skirts and pants and presumably better educated and more prosperous.
From my perspective, the chola identity of the early twentieth century in the Cochabamba region established the anxieties and aspirations of those I am terming the emergent Sacaba middle class in the early twenty-first century. Both the early twentieth-century chola and contemporary new middle classes were relational categories: individual people experienced different statuses depending on whom they were interacting with in a given moment. Members of the contemporary middle class, like Marisol, defined themselves through alternating binary categories of socially superior or inferior, campesino or elite, poor or wealthy, Indian or mestizo. Both Sacaba’s early twentieth-century prosperous cholas and early twenty-first century profesionales occupied a middle race as well as a middle class, but this was an ambiguous, anxiety-provoking, and fluctuating position.
Economic and political convulsions during the second half of the twentieth century further shaped the emergence of intermediate social groups throughout Bolivia. These convulsions included massive foreign debt (1953–present); hyperinflation (1981–1985); extreme droughts and floods (1983, 1998, 2010); the coca and cocaine boom (the late 1970s to 1998); the sudden, massive drop in the price of tin, which had formerly served as the mainstay of the Bolivian economy (1985); and free-market reforms (1985 to 2005). The free-market reforms of 1985 caused severe hardship for most Bolivians, including middling groups (Healy 1986; Hylton and Thomson 2007). The reforms led to mass layoffs from government offices and government-owned companies, including mines, telecommunications, and railroads. Increased imports of cheap clothing, cosmetics, and food from neighboring countries that subsidized their industries also created stiff competition for Bolivian industries and led to widespread unemployment in private manufacturing industries and lost income for small-scale farmers.
Cochabamba Department was the epicenter of coca and cocaine production, which provided a temporary cushion in the region from the hardships caused by free market reforms in the 1980s. Coca farming drew people from rural areas throughout the country. Many coca growers saw their incomes jump dramatically. Some families’ yearly income from coca growing could reach tens of thousands of dollars and those who engaged in cocaine production or trafficking could earn many times more. This far surpassed what peasant farmers earned from potato or vegetable farming. Those who benefited from the boom did not feel the economic pinch from free trade reforms until 1998. That year, Bolivian antidrug forces under the supervision of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency eradicated thousands of hectares of coca plantings and arrested many low-level cocaine producers, transporters, and bystanders. The drug war contributed to the volatility of the price of coca leaves and cocaine and increased the risks for those involved in illicit cocaine production.2 This drew the final cushion out from under the Bolivian economy and led to another recession. In 2005, on the eve of Evo Morales’s election, the national poverty rate stood at 60 percent (Interamerican Development Bank 2008). The official unemployment rate was 10 percent, while real employment unemployment was widely recognized to be much higher.
A New Middle Class in Sacaba
Sacaba municipality’s proximity to the Chapare coca-growing district facilitated its status as a transit zone within the Cochabamba region. Sacaba residents flocked in large numbers to the Chapare, a mere seven-hour bus or truck ride from their homes. Many Sacabans fulfilled their aims to use their coca earnings to launch a business or pay for their children’s college educations and thus allow them to enter the middle class. But not all were able to partake in the coca boom’s bounty, given the need for start-up funds to invest in seedlings and land purchases, and the rapid erosion of soil fertility. This inequality fostered bitterness and invidious distinctions between newly prosperous and newly educated middling families, on the one hand, and still-poor laborers and farmers, on the other.
The coca boom also deeply shaped political culture in Sacaba. When a twelve-year-old girl in Choro told me confidently, upon meeting me in 1995, that there would be “a civil war and coup” unless the government ceased the militarized interdiction of coca growing, she was expressing the militancy of the coca growers’ (cocaleros) union to which her family—like nearly all coca growers—belonged. She was also echoing many Sacabans’ belief that their earnings from coca had saved them, or could in the future save them, from a life as destitute campesinos. Many in Sacaba saw coca as the means to achieving the dream of modernity and middle-class upward mobility that the Bolivian state had promised, but not delivered, since the 1953 Revolution. The frustration of these expectations following the drug war echoed the deep frustrations of people throughout the world confronting the bust of a boom economy, licit or illicit (e.g., Ferguson 1999; Shipton 1989). While some families managed to hold on to enough wealth to pursue their plans in higher education or commerce, the drug war made their project of upward mobility more precarious. The middle-class hopes and anxieties fed by the coca boom in turn sparked the rise of the MAS party in the late 1990s and helped propel Evo Morales to the presidency.
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