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Chapter 1

The Formation of a New Middle Class

Marisol, a Sacaba pharmacist, provides one example of the difficulties the MAS government faced in convincing most Bolivians to identify themselves as indigenous members of the working or campesino (peasant) classes. In August 2009, four years after Evo was elected president, Marisol was thirty-three years old. She had opened her pharmacy five years before in Sacaba’s busy provincial town plaza after becoming the first person in her family to go to college. Marisol wore her straight, jet-black hair long, in the style of many working-class women in Bolivia’s cities and provincial towns, and she was always immaculately groomed. The three large glass cases in which she displayed her medicines for sale were kept shining and dust free, no easy feat given Sacaba’s year-round wind and dust. Despite her fastidious cleaning, however, business was often slow; Sacaba was filled with competing pharmacies. Furthermore, the stalls of local street vendors—a key element of the informal economy that had sustained the majority of Bolivians since the beginning of free-market reforms nearly twenty-five years before—had gradually expanded to fill the street in front of the pharmacy. The pharmacy entrance was now almost hidden by rows of stalls selling school supplies, bootleg DVDs, and baby clothes. On most days when we chatted, Marisol and I faced only occasional interruptions by customers seeking a pregnancy test or aspirin.

On this particular day in 2009, as Marisol sniffled through a winter cold, she explained vehemently to me that she strongly opposed the Morales government’s promise to redistribute large landowners’ vacant property to landless campesinos. She did not believe the MAS government’s contention that the vast inequality of land tenure in Bolivia was caused by prior military governments’ illegal gifts of millions of acres of land to already wealthy families. Instead, she asserted, those landowners who owned hundreds of thousands of acres must have earned them through hard work and sacrifice, as her parents had earned a modest ten acres when she was a baby by moving from the drought-stricken central Bolivian countryside to settle a tropical homestead in eastern Bolivia. About the large landowners’ potential losses in Evo’s proposed land reform, she maintained,

What this government wants to do is take control of this land … and give it to other people…. That’s not good…. The campesinos are supporting him [Evo] blindly, but in the future, these laws will affect them [prejudicially], too…. Those people who have large landholdings, it’s not right [to take their land away] because they have perhaps bought it with their sacrifice or inherited it from a relative. What he [Evo] says is that they have stolen it from other people during previous governments. But to me, this doesn’t seem true. I believe that Evo just wants to make them appear bad, those he calls … what’s that term he uses? “Capitalists”?

Marisol asserted that the Bolivian superelite had gained their land lawfully and that campesinos had been duped. Campesinos were “blindly” supporting land reform even though they could suffer by having their tiny holdings confiscated in the future. Her characterization of land inequality as resulting from the hard work of the superwealthy contrasted with a barrage of scholarly studies that showed Bolivia’s land inequality rising dramatically during the previous forty years directly owing to government handouts of land and agricultural subsidies to the very rich (e.g., Prudencio Bohrt 1991; Gill 1987; Fabricant 2012). By 1984, 3.9 percent of landowners had come to own 91 percent of agricultural land through such government favoritism (Weisbrot and Sandoval 2008:2), and no land redistribution had taken place since. Marisol also disagreed with the assertion by social movements and the Morales government that Bolivia’s extreme inequality represented a moral wrong that required a remedy by the government.

Marisol instead narrated Bolivia’s history through the framework of her own family’s experience of modest upward mobility. Her parents had taken advantage of a 1960s-era government program for small-scale farmers from western and central Bolivia to receive free land and tools if they moved to the tropical lowlands to grow soy, cotton, sugar, and peanuts. It was through their hard work, Marisol and her father had told me, that her parents had built up prosperity measured proudly by their ownership of a mechanized tractor and enough disposable income to send her to the university. She and her parents had worked hard so that she would not share their self-identification as a campesina who spoke the indigenous language, Quechua, but rather as a middle-class professional. And they had succeeded: she was a pharmacist married to an agronomist who was also among the first from his rural community to earn a college degree.

Marisol’s views coincided closely with the statements of Bolivia’s tiny, light-skinned, superwealthy class. Kiko Aguilera, one of Bolivia’s wealthiest men, owner of thousands of acres of tropical ranch land and leader of an elite right-wing political opposition movement, declared in 2006 soon after Evo’s election: “I’ve worked hard for everything that I own…. We haven’t stolen anything from anyone. We worked for our land with the sweat of our brow. We won’t return it to anyone. Death, first!” (quoted in Leidel 2006).

Yet as Marisol reaffirmed her middle-class status by distinguishing herself from campesinos she also complained about her own lack of resources: the dearth of clients in her pharmacy, the difficulty of living for several years with her husband and daughter in a small rented room while they saved money to build their own home, and the challenge of taking care of her six-year-old daughter with little help while running her own business.

Why did Marisol so vehemently set herself apart from campesinos if her parents were small farmers themselves, and why did she argue that government redistribution of wealth was itself a moral wrong, given that her family had benefitted from prior government largesse? Her prosperity, significant by Bolivian standards, was by no means equal to the lifestyle of Bolivia’s tiny upper class, marked by enormous wealth, country club membership, plastic surgery, live-in maids, and often, college education at Harvard or Texas A&M. Their social circles in no way overlapped with hers. In spite of limited purchasing power, dark hair and skin, and knowledge of Quechua learned from her parents—all of which would lead a foreigner or a Bolivian census taker to classify Marisol as indigenous—Marisol drew firm distinctions between herself, a middle-class professional, and Bolivia’s poor and indigenous campesinos.

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 pharmacy, placed herself with them.

Furthermore, the middle class does not define national identity in the Third World to the same degree as it does in the United States and Europe, where most people term themselves middle class. In the First World, middle classes became a large segment of the population in the mid-twentieth century as a result of industrial expansion that employed large numbers of unionized skilled laborers, middle managers, engineers, doctors, and teachers (Bledstein and Johnston 2001). By contrast, in Bolivia and much of the Third World, economies based on natural resource exports rather than industry supported a much smaller proportion of the overall population as a middle class. In early twentieth-century Bolivia, these were skilled craftspeople, medium-scale landowners, and doctors. Following the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, which expanded the functions of government, the middle class grew. As education became available in the countryside, new university graduates were hired as white-collar workers in rapidly expanding government offices and state-owned enterprises, for example in mining, telecommunications, and railroads. In large Bolivian cities like Cochabamba and La Paz, middle-class neighborhoods filled during the midcentury with boxy, modernist, cement houses, with perhaps a Brazilian-made Volkswagen Beetle parked in front. With Bolivia’s free-market reforms of 1985, government offices and state-owned companies saw mass layoffs, shrinking the ranks of the urban middle class. Internationally funded development organizations (NGOs) became a fallback, but less secure, middle-class employer. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the slice of the Bolivian population calling itself “middle class” has grown but never become a majority.

Another important aspect of middle-class identity in Bolivia, as in much of Latin America, is the overlap in the meanings of racial and class terms (de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001). In Bolivia in the early twenty-first century, explicit class terms like pobre (poor) and campesino carried the racial meaning of “indigenous,” just as racial and cultural terms that indicated indigeneity (indígena, indio) connoted poverty. This overlap stemmed in part from the Bolivian revolutionary government’s decree in 1953 that indios (Indians), a racist term to describe the majority of the country’s people, would be called campesinos and that all Bolivians shared the same mestizo (mixed indigenous and European) race. Pejorative racial meanings persisted in class terms: Sacabans often identified each other as belonging to the “campesino race” and defined campesinos as ignorant, uneducated, unintelligent, or ugly, drawing on racial ideologies of the colonial Spanish and Bolivian elites. These racist meanings have persisted alongside the assertions of racial and cultural pride promoted by social movements and the Morales government during the past three decades. Most terms of identity in Bolivia, whatever their dictionary definitions, connote race as well as class. Middle classness was therefore experienced as racially—as well as economically, morally, and culturally—intermediate.

Class and Race Among Middling Folk in Cochabamba

Some elements of the experiences of members of the new middle class in the Cochabamba region were distinct from other regions of the country, owing to Cochabamba’s particular history as a crossroads of migration and commerce. Tracing this distinctiveness can help us understand why many Sacabans alternated between identifying themselves with the wealthiest and with the poorest Bolivians and how they confronted simultaneous social pressure from their neighbors and family members to treat others as both equal and inferior. Cochabambans historically possessed unusually fluid identities relative to other regions of Bolivia; individual people identified themselves by different racial and class identities in different social contexts (Larson 1998:350). The roots of this fluidity can be traced to political and social patterns established as far back as the fifteenth century A.D. when Inca armies conquered the Cochabamba valleys and forced most native Cochabambans to move to other parts of the Inca Empire (Larson 1998). They resettled the Cochabamba valleys with subjects from other regions of the empire. When the Spanish conquered the Incas in the 1530s, many people returned to their home communities as far afield as modern-day Ecuador and Colombia. In the power vacuum that ensued after this exodus, some ambitious indigenous leaders cobbled together new communities from the Cochabamba residents who remained, collecting taxes and conscripting labor for Spanish colonial mines. Compared to highland communities, whose residents the Inca rulers had left in place and where community identity tended to be strong, Cochabamba community leaders’ authority was always more tenuous and community identity was historically weaker. Cochabambans readily left their natal communities to escape Spanish taxes, deadly forced labor in Spanish mines, and abusive indigenous leaders. Many became merchants and traveled between the valleys and highlands selling food and clothing to miners (Larson 1998:80, 323).

Cochabambans’ geographic mobility as a strategy for gaining freedom had enduring effects on their class and racial identities. The Spanish colonial government had created two legal classes of people throughout Latin America: urban residents were known as the Republic of Spaniards while rural residents were the Republic of Indians. In Spanish colonial times, the racial terms indio (Indian), mestizo (mixed race), and blanco (white) were primarily legal categories rather than based on physical appearance. Indians were taxpayers and laborers who resided in legally designated Indian rural communities. That is why geographic mobility and social mobility were intertwined: when individual Cochabambans moved from rural communities to towns or cities to avoid taxes and forced labor, they deliberately jumped from the Indian category to become mestizos (Larson 1998:375). Unlike in most other parts of the country, in Cochabamba self-defined mestizos became the majority of the population, and Cochabambans generally held less rigidly defined social and economic status than in other regions of the country.

On winning independence from Spain in 1825, Spanish-descended elites attempted to deny indigenous people a livelihood and a legitimate place in the new Bolivian nation. In the Bolivian highlands, indigenous people contested elites’ oppression with militant battles and identified themselves as the oppressed descendants of powerful indigenous empires such as the Inca and Tiwanaku (Hylton and Thomson 2007). In Cochabamba, by contrast, Indians and mestizos often attempted to join the ranks of the local elite. While barriers of wealth and racial inequality were strong in Cochabamba, they were not insurmountable. Free-trade laws passed by elite Bolivian governments during the late nineteenth century that robbed highland indigenous communities of their land actually helped small-scale mestizo and Indian farmers to buy land in Cochabamba. As Cochabamba elite landowners were unable to compete with the cheap grain imports from Argentina and Chile following free-trade reforms, many Indian and mestizo Cochabambans determinedly bought their lands, freeing themselves from servitude on large estates. By 1900, 60 percent of land in the Cochabamba valleys was owned by self-identified mestizo and Indian small-scale farmers—a dramatic difference from anywhere else in Bolivia and from other Andean countries (Larson 1998:311; Jackson 1994).

By buying land, some new campesino landowners rose to a position in the middle of Cochabamba’s social world. And in keeping with their new-found wealth, they asserted a higher social status by wearing urban clothing and following elite social norms. For example, when elites argued that mestizos were morally degenerate because they were nonwhite or rural born, mestizos countered that they could move up the class and racial ladder by following elite moral norms of decency (decencia) (Gotkowitz 2003; see also de la Cadena 2000:180).

With these transformations in Cochabamba, by the early twentieth century urban and rural social norms and identities blended even further. Small-scale farmers who owned their own land often split their time between tending their own plots, during which time they identified as mestizos, and laboring as serfs on haciendas, identified as indios. Although self-styled mestizos regularly asserted superiority over Indian people, and whites asserted superiority over the other two groups, the vibrant weekly markets throughout the region, coupled with the rising market for chicha, cottage-industry corn beer, provided many opportunities for interaction between people of different social backgrounds. This emerging fluidity of rural and urban identities differed from the rigid social separation in the Bolivian highlands. Paradoxically, however, the Spanish colonial idea of rigidly separate rural and urban people and spaces persisted, despite the relative changeability of individual people’s identities.

Sacaba’s new middle class in the twenty-first century also had roots in the chola, a central social figure in the Cochabamba region since the late nineteenth century. Understanding the history of chola as a social 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.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the principal dimensions of middle classness in Sacaba, as shown by Marisol were ambiguity, anxiety, alternation between elite and subaltern identities, and tension between an ethic of equality and an ethic of social superiority. The expression of these hopes, frustrations, and ambivalence in intimate relationships between family members, friends, and neighbors is the subject of the next chapter. Tracing these intimate politics is crucial to helping us understand the everyday experience of members of the new middle class and their roles in Bolivia’s rapidly transforming political culture.