Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
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was just then booming, in 1975, and so Don Prudencio and Doña Saturnina decided to turn their efforts toward growing coca in the tropical Chapare region, seven hours away. Over the next twenty years, Doña Saturnina and Don Prudencio put four children through university largely on the proceeds of their coca farming. They were helped by the veteran’s pension of Don Prudencio’s mother, whose late husband had fought in the 1932 Chaco War with Paraguay, and by Doña Saturnina’s earnings from selling chicha and dry goods from their home.
Owing to the cost of the children’s education, Doña Saturnina’s family lived in a home whose symbols of status and comfort were only at the median for houses in Choro. In 2009, it had cement floors, excepting a dirt-floored kitchen that housed a small fridge. They had only recently replaced a small color television bought in 1995, whose channel dial had fallen off and could only be changed with a wrench. On the rough floorboards of the upstairs bedroom, shared by Doña Saturnina, her grandson, and Amanda, stood several varnished wooden wardrobes and a glass case that held a few decorative dishes and mementos from travels to the Bolivian capital, La Paz. They often lamented that their house lacked the flush toilet and shower owned by several more prosperous families in Choro. They had paved their interior courtyard with cement and built several new rooms during the previous few years. Rebar poked out of the roof of their new second story, some of their cement floors were crumbling, and the privy behind their house remained half-dug. In the context of their locality of Choro, their perpetually under-construction house gave off an air of modest prosperity.
The relationships between Doña Saturnina’s immediate family and her two daughters-in-law, the wives of Edgar and David, illustrated the family’s shifting articulation of their social position between social dominance and social inferiority. These relationships were characterized by both the hopefulness and social anxiety that afflicts middle classes in many places in the world. Of all Doña Saturnina’s children, Edgar, the eldest, expressed most explicitly a sense of uncertainty about his social standing. Most people in Choro, including Edgar himself, considered him to have been the first person from Choro to get a university degree. He had lived at home since finishing his law school degree at the public university in Cochabamba in 1995, except for one lucrative year practicing law in Ivigarzama, a boomtown in the Chapare. When the massive Drug Enforcement Administration–sponsored crackdown on coca growing and cocaine production in 1998 ended the boom in the Chapare and sparked a national recession, Edgar moved his operations to the provincial town of Sacaba, a short bus ride from Choro. He rented a tiny one-room office and opened his law practice. Since then, he earned a living but felt his income to be precarious.
Edgar often alternated between asserting an urban, professional identity and a rural, campesino identity. In keeping with his professional aspirations, he told me several times over the years that he was seriously considering moving to the city of Cochabamba. Edgar often bitterly denounced “backward” Bolivia and Choro and extolled the “advanced” nations such as the United States; he said that he could not wait to escape Bolivia. This was why his sisters called him by the nickname “Yanqui” (Yankee), an affectionate reappropriation of the term that among coca growers’ union or indigenous movement activists typically served as a harsh denunciation of U.S. intervention in Bolivia.
Despite these vocal longings to be a prosperous professional, Edgar signaled in other ways that he also remained drawn to a campesino identity. When he came home to Choro from his Sacaba office every evening, he immediately changed from the oxfords worn by urban professionals into red vinyl sandals in the rural style of many of his local friends who had not finished high school. On the weekends, he often went drinking with these friends; he socialized often with rural folk. He continued to live at his mothers’ house rent-free and ate his sisters’ and mother’s cooking. While this was certainly a way to save effort and expense, Edgar sometimes said that he relished the relative quiet and the clean air of Choro as compared to the bustle and pollution of the town of Sacaba or the city of Cochabamba. Edgar also told me wonderingly how he still remembered feeling like a “freak” (un bicho raro), out of his element, when he had begun attending the public university in Cochabamba during the late 1970s. At that time, he had been one of the only students from a rural background. Edgar appeared often bemused, as if he felt that his life embodied an unshakeable paradox. In 2009, he suggested for the first time in my hearing that he might remain living in the countryside for the rest of his life after all, because it was calmer (mas tranquilo) than urban living.
By day, Edgar sat at his desk in his small rented office several blocks from the Sacaba central plaza. He shared the office with his sister Amanda, who had obtained her law degree several years after him. Their clients, many of whom discussed their cases with Edgar in Quechua, appeared to feel more comfortable in this environment—with its cracked and stained walls, shabby chairs, manual typewriter, and piles of worn manila files—than in nearby law offices whose proprietors attempted to lure clients with computers and shelves of shiny legal tomes. During slack periods between clients, the lawyers played cards with Sacaba neighbors at Amanda’s desk. Both Amanda and Edgar complained that they earned much less than they had during the coca boom, despite having many clients, because few people could pay high legal fees without their boom-time earnings.
In part because of his reduced income, Edgar expressed ambivalence about having become a professional. It was only once he began practicing law full-time, he told me, that he realized that he had missed his true calling—to become an accordionist specializing in regional Cochabamba music. Edgar began traveling long hours on his days off to take lessons from elderly accordion masters living in provincial towns throughout the Cochabamba valleys, whose scratchy recordings he and his brothers and sisters played during parties and when they sold their mother’s chicha. Most evenings, the strains of Edgar’s accordion practice could be heard wafting from his bedroom on the second floor of his mother’s house. While the earnings and social status of a successful accordionist’s life could be a step up from those of his parents, only the most successful musician could hope to rival a lawyer’s prestige and earnings and Edgar never, in fact, left his law practice.
Edgar’s longing for an urban life and higher status showed marked similarities to members of other striving Third World middle classes, to their ethic of rising socially and their longing to take part in transnational modernity (e.g., Liechty 2002; Dickey 2000). Yet Edgar’s pleasure in the “calm” (tranquilidad) of rural life, in going out drinking in Choro chicha taverns with less-well-educated friends, in wearing old clothes and cheap sandals, in listening to provincial music, and in living in his hometown rather than renting an apartment in Sacaba or Cochabamba, also marked him as ambivalent about which lifestyle to pursue and which class and race to identify with.
Edgar’s anxiety about upward mobility, his apparent conflict between wanting to join the professional middle class and simultaneous comfort in lifeways defined locally as those of campesinos and Indians also emerged in his relationship with his common-law wife, Doña Cinda.2 Doña Cinda was a cholita like Doña Saturnina: she wore her hair in two braids and wore a pollera.3 Doña Cinda worked as a part-time housekeeper for a wealthy local family and also washed clothing for prosperous families in the town of Sacaba. She and Edgar began their relationship in 1995 and had two children together. Most Sundays, if he was not drinking chicha with friends, Edgar spent his time with Doña Cinda, who lived about a mile down the highway from Edgar’s mother’s house.
By 2006, Edgar’s sisters and mother had been nagging Edgar for years to baptize his daughter, Claudia, who was then six years old. Most parents with rural origins baptized and named their children on their first birthdays; urban middle-class parents usually baptized their children as tiny infants.4 Like the rest of his family, I took Edgar’s failure to baptize Claudia as a symptom of cruel disregard for his children and their mother. In 1998, he had taken his eldest son, Teo, away from Doña Cinda’s care to Doña Saturnina’s home, claiming that Cinda was irresponsible. His mother and sisters took primary responsibility for raising Teo. Edgar had often explained to me that Cinda was “not my real wife” and that his children with her—including Teo, with whom he lived—were “not my real children.” He often said, half defiantly and half longingly, that he expected to find another woman who was not de pollera at some unspecified future date, one who would be more suitable to his station