Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
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their classically middle-class anxieties and aspirations. David was acknowledged as the most ambitious and the most successful of the family. Widely regarded as handsome and an enthusiastic dancer at parties, he told me that he had decided to become a pediatrician after seeing seven of his siblings die as infants from easily treatable diseases. He had graduated with excellent grades from a well-regarded public medical school, amassing prestigious scholarships. After several years working as a pediatrician in a large hospital in Sacaba Province, in 2008 he was named hospital director in a Cochabamba clinic, a distinct honor. He also ran a thriving part-time private practice on the outskirts of Cochabamba City. I sat in on several of his medical consultations with Choro children, during which he treated them and their parents with more respect than did urban-based doctors who were often cavalier or downright disrespectful toward their Quechua-speaking patients.
When David talked to me about his own social and economic mobility, he expressed an excitement and confidence that contrasted sharply with Edgar’s ambivalence and puzzlement. David seemed to feel that his economic and social plans for upward mobility were coming to fruition. While Edgar characterized himself as feeling out of his element during his entire time as university student, David told me he had quickly outgrown such sentiments. David talked with obvious pride about his close friends who were prominent Cochabamba doctors, his decision to send his son and daughter to private schools in Cochabamba, and his plans to tour Mexico and the United States with his wife and children. Part of his confidence may have stemmed from his more secure job. He had obtained a tenured physicians’ post in the public health system, while Amanda and Edgar, as lawyers in private practice, were subject to the vagaries of supply and demand for their legal services. It seemed to me, however, that David’s confidence also emerged from his own temperament and from the ways in which in-between, middling status could lead people down different potential life paths.
The relationship between Doña Saturnina’s family and David’s wife, Eliana, a nurse, contrasts directly with their relationship with Doña Cinda and shows the ways in which the family members were equally anxious and torn between ethics of hierarchy and egalitarianism when they perceived themselves to be playing the lower-status role in a social relationship. As soon as David began dating Eliana, conflicts arose between Eliana and Amanda and Deysi. The sisters claimed that Eliana acted socially superior to them. This outrage contrasted with the sentiment of superiority they expressed in regard to Edgar’s wife, Doña Cinda. It seemed that while they saw Doña Cinda as a drag on the family’s prestige because she was socially inferior, their sister-in-law Eliana was a drag on the family’s standing because she belittled them, albeit subtly.
I had assumed at first that Eliana would be popular with David’s sisters because she seemed to share so many of their amusements and their family history. Like them, Eliana was gregarious, laughed easily, loved dancing to Cochabamba valley accordion music, and happily passed her weekend afternoons chatting with friends while they treated each other to round after round of chicha. Eliana’s parents shared Doña Saturnina’s and her husband’s background: they were from another Cochabamba valley provincial town, had weathered faces that attested to lifetimes of agricultural work out of doors, and her mother, like Doña Saturnina, wore a pollera. Both sets of parents appeared equally rigid and uncomfortable in their lace-up shoes and constricting finery in David and Eliana’s wedding photos. Where Doña Saturnina and her husband had sent their children to college with the proceeds of their coca plots, Eliana’s parents had sent Eliana to nursing school with the proceeds of their several dozen hectares of soy and cotton in the eastern tropics.
While Amanda and Deysi eventually warmed up to Eliana more than they did to Cinda, they often muttered exasperatedly at her snobbery. Eliana was altanera and creída (stuck-up), they complained. First of all, they explained, she refused to spend extended periods of time in their family home in Choro. Whereas David nearly always visited home on the weekends and continued to sleep over many Saturday nights in his old bedroom, Eliana almost always went back to her and David’s house in Sacaba to sleep. Eliana confessed to me that she felt stifled sleeping in David’s small room that stood next to the family latrine. The sisters mimicked Eliana almost as savagely as they did Doña Cinda, exclaiming in Spanish in falsetto voices while pointing to different places in their home, “This is dirty! That’s dirty!” With this parody of Eliana, they echoed the widespread concerns of rural residents, inherited from the structural subordination of rural indigenous communities under colonialism, that rural homes, and the countryside as a social and moral space, were irredeemably dirty (Gotkowitz 2003; de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001; Larson 2005). This concern, which they and many other Choreños voiced to me at other times, expressed the fear that the countryside (campo) was inherently uncivilized and unbefitting to their professional, middle-class aspirations.
The baptism of Eliana and David’s daughter Magaly contrasted cruelly with that of Doña Cinda and Edgar’s daughter and illustrated the differences within the emergent middle class. Magaly’s baptism, like David’s marriage to Eliana, also sparked discomfort among David’s siblings when they confronted people who were indisputably of higher racial and class status than themselves. Following the baptism of one-year-old Magaly in the Sacaba provincial church, her godmother, a fair-skinned rheumatologist friend of David from Cochabamba city, drove us in her SUV to a local restaurant. We enjoyed a series of provincial luxuries: we ate roast duck, talked, and danced around a long table in a private room that David had rented, gazing out at a slightly scruffy courtyard rose garden. Throughout the afternoon, friends of David from Cochabamba, mostly specialist physicians and their families, arrived and left the party in a never-ending stream. With their Spanish unaccented by Quechua, their light skin and hair, and their expensive-looking clothes, they displayed signs of class and racial distinction above that of even David and Eliana. The arrival of a family in which parents and their two children shared startlingly pale skin, green eyes, and red hair—all rarities in Bolivia—evoked curious whispers from David’s siblings. They asked themselves if they were foreigners or simply very elite Bolivians.
The party following the baptism abounded with signs of class and racial discomfort. Eliana’s friends from nursing school, children born to campesinos like her and professionals of a lower rank than physicians, sat at the middle of the table. They joked with each more quietly than did the specialist physicians from the city, who sat at the end of the table, and few conversations arose between the two groups. The nurses’ skin was, on the whole, darker; the women’s long hairstyles matched those of Eliana, Amanda, and Deysi and attested to a more working-class aesthetic. At the far end of the table, conversing exclusively with the nurses, sat David’s sisters, Edgar, his parents, myself, and Edgar’s eldest son, Teo.
Figure 3. Magaly’s best friend’s sixth birthday in Choro, 2009, with a cake from Dumbo’s, one of Cochabamba City’s most expensive bakeries. Photo by the author.
David’s sister Julia, who had dropped out of high school and wore a pollera, told me surreptitiously during the party that she felt uncomfortable with David’s “high society” (alta sociedad) friends. Even Deysi, the math teacher, though she had lived in Cochabamba for several years and had attended an elite, private college, also said she was uncomfortable. She complained while we took a break outside the restaurant that, unlike at a party in Choro where you could relax and have fun, here you had to act “refined” (refinada). David’s green-eyed friend with her green-eyed children, the one who looked like a gringa, had seemed a particular snob (altanera), Deysi told me, though she had not actually spoken to her. It seemed to me that part of Deysi’s discomfort arose from this challenge to her sense of being on top of her social world as a professional, a privilege she enjoyed more securely within the social space of Choro.
In sum, the relationships between Doña Saturnina’s children and their intimate friends and family illustrated many of the aspirations and anxieties of Sacaba Municipality’s new middle classes, many of whom built their dreams for a new life on the coca and cocaine booms. They professed fierce ambitions for upward mobility, as well as warring ethics of superiority and egalitarianism. They identified themselves along racial and class binaries—sometimes as campesinos and sometimes as profesionales—with few words