Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
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parade from the rooftop of David and Eliana’s apartment building. Amanda handed a plate of fried chicken to David’s seven-year-old son, Alejandro, from a previous relationship. “Me and my mom don’t like to eat chicken skin,” Alejandro said mildly, as he began to peel the skin off his drumstick. “Well,” Amanda replied with mock severity to her nephew, “you and your mother are classy people [gente decente]. We [his aunts and uncles] eat chicken skin because we are campesinos.” Her comment echoed the complaints of Choro parents that their children refused to eat the skin and entrails that Choreños had eaten during leaner times before the coca boom. Similarly, in 2005, David admonished me for not eating the skin of a roasted guinea pig, an Andean delicacy to which I never became accustomed, which he had prepared at his mother’s house. “I am poor [soy pobre]; I eat the skin!” He declared pointedly to me. Both Amanda and David were teaching cultural beginners—a child and a foreigner—to be egalitarian.
If Doña Saturnina’s children expressed irritation when they perceived that I, Eliana their sister-in-law, or David’s city physician friends belittled them, they also complained angrily when nonprofessional and de pollera, but wealthier, neighbors asserted a higher status than them. Such complaints surfaced, for example, when I lamented that a well-to-do, cholita neighbor who owned a trucking business with her husband hadn’t come to my son’s baptism party, which we threw at Doña Saturnina’s house in December, 2005. Amanda remarked in a sharp, ironic tone, “She’s loaded [ricachona]! She only goes to rich peoples’ parties. Because we are poor [pobres], she didn’t come.” Amanda explained that this woman’s discriminatory thinking was “clear from where she goes and how she speaks. For the weddings of rich people [ricachones], she shows up with presents; for poor people, she doesn’t show. These people are creídos [snobs].” Years earlier, in 1998, Amanda, Deysi, and David similarly condemned another wealthy cholita neighbor who owned a successful chicha tavern. The neighbor had reputedly proclaimed that she would reserve expensive bottled beer and cocktails for “rich people [ricos]” at her daughter’s wedding, while serving poor guests only chicha and making them leave early. Amanda, Deysi, and David did not expect the neighbor to treat them as poor and refuse to serve them the expensive drinks; indeed, they partook freely. They nevertheless expressed these episodes as an affront to them personally—they had less visible wealth and cash on hand than their wealthy neighbors—as well as an altruistic concern for the many Choreños who were even poorer. Their protests also illustrate the intense social competition within this middle group in Sacaba, between professionals with little disposable wealth and wealthy merchants and truckers with little formal education. In a manner emblematic of middle classes throughout the Third World, they jockeyed intensely for the social supremacy to be recognized as a middle class, in this case through competing claims of distinctions based on wealth versus education (Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). Finally, these complaints by David and Amanda also demonstrate how in the social world of Sacaba Municipality, this rivalry for moral superiority could entail, paradoxically, making claims to egalitarianism.
In fact, the sisters termed themselves campesinas and rural and asserted an ethic of egalitarianism in some situations when they were called out as being snobs. In 2003, for example, Deysi recounted a painful episode in which she and Amanda had unexpectedly lost a valued friend. During a party at their home, they had teased their friend, a fellow university student who hailed from a rural town in the Bolivian highlands, that he had no right to criticize them: “Don’t forget that you’re an Apaza!” Apaza is a common indigenous Aymara last name that immediately signals a person’s origins in the rural, Aymara-speaking Bolivian highlands. Deysi and Amanda were subtly marking Bolivia’s racial hierarchy, in which highland Aymara speakers have been viewed as more Indian than, and inferior to, Cochabamba valley Quechua speakers.10 In effect, they had admonished him, in mock severity, not to be an “uppity Indian.” He became angry and told them that they had insulted him with a racial slur, left the party, and never returned to Choro to visit. Thinking back on this event several years later, Deysi said that she and Amanda had spoken in a spirit of fun, but they had been too free with their characteristic, biting humor. “I regret it so much. We were joking around [bromeando], but we shouldn’t have said that…. It must have hurt him to the bone [even though] it was just a slip of the tongue. Surely he went and told his mother what we said to him, and his mother must have said, ‘How could they say such a thing, being campesinas themselves!’” In an assertion of empathy and equality with her friend, Deysi implied that Doña Saturnina could easily have just as easily found herself listening to her own children’s stories of racial and class discrimination. Deysi’s analysis of the joke gone awry seemed to be that she and Amanda had been justifiably reprimanded for asserting racial superiority. Doña Saturnina’s family, in sum, alternated between identifying with superior and inferior racial and class categories and between professing superiority and egalitarianism.
Envy (Envidia)
The common language of envy (envidia, qhawanaku, miramiento)11 in Sacaba marked the clash between the widespread ethic of egalitarianism and the equally widespread ethic of upward mobility. When David, for example, expressed a concern that his old friends and neighbors in Choro resented him as snobbish, he said that they were envious (miramiento) of him. He explained in an interview with me in 1998,
I treat my people well. I speak with them in their language … in Quechua…. In fact, I try to change them, right? I say “You shouldn’t do this…. We need to develop,” … or “Instead of spending your money on this thing, you could do another thing,” always thinking about how they can progress…. I haven’t kept myself apart from them … but people talk, you know? I mean … I’m a serious person, I have a calm demeanor, and people peg me as stuck up [creído]. But it’s they who are separating themselves from me, it’s not because I’m stuck up…. People my age say, “He’s a doctor, so now he won’t say hello to us.” Who knows what they’re saying! So, sometimes when we pass by on opposite sides of the road, they just … say “good morning” and go by, they don’t come up to me…. I think that they feel … I’m not sure … mmm … humbled, ashamed.
David described, with apparent pain, that he was misunderstood as being snobbish; that his intentions were egalitarian but his Choro neighbors and old friends misperceived him as acting socially superior since becoming a professional. In this instance, David did not condemn his former friends’ envy as a moral fault but rather lamented that their ill-will emerged from a misperception of his thoughts and intentions. The implication of their perceived criticism was that David, by believing in his own social superiority, was socially selfish. He suggested that his old schoolmates harbored particular rancor for him, beyond what they might feel toward a snobbish stranger, because they saw him as rejecting them despite belonging to the shared social community of Choro. David countered with the implicit argument that he was not selfish but actually generous, because he tried to contribute to the progress of those old friends by offering them helpful ideas for how to become upwardly mobile themselves. He found, however, that his efforts to present himself as egalitarian had been unsuccessful.
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