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Introduction

This book traces the experience of a new Bolivian middle class. Though seldom acknowledged, middle classes have deeply influenced politics and social life in Bolivia, as in much of Latin America and the Third World.¹ Over the past twenty years, with the rise of powerful new leftist parties, Bolivians have faced surprising dilemmas in their everyday lives. Those who aspire to become middle class—first-generation teachers, agronomists, lawyers, and prosperous merchants—have encountered daily conflicts over the question of whether to promote racial and class superiority or equality. Their personal struggles to assert themselves as morally upright, sometimes through ideals of equality and sometimes through ideals of superiority achieved by raising their economic and social status, deeply shaped their political participation. Focusing on upwardly mobile residents of Sacaba, a booming provincial municipality in central Bolivia, I examine the ways in which new middle classes shaped political culture in a moment of intense change.

Recent, local political conflicts in Sacaba have been exacerbated by a pervasive climate of mutual suspicion, fueled in part by the lack of fit between class and race identities and the binaries of wealthy or poor, and white or indigenous, in Bolivian political discourse. The very ambiguity of middling identities created a political context ripe for conflict. This was especially true given that most Bolivians professed the hope for an end to political patronage (clientelismo)—the exchange of favors, government jobs, and resources for political support between well-placed political leaders and their supporters—even as such patronage was one of few avenues for economic advancement in Bolivia’s provincial towns. Upwardly mobile people often faced accusations that they were “selfish” for not sharing their new-found wealth with neighbors or family members, or not letting others “take a turn” at a local government job.

Bolivia’s middle classes have not figured prominently in accounts of the country’s dramatic political transformations during the past two decades. In December 2005, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first self-identified indigenous campesino (peasant) president, was elected in a landslide victory on the ticket of the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, Movement Toward Socialism) party. Social movements had mobilized over the previous two decades to assert the rights of an indigenous and poor majority. Most studies of the region have framed Bolivian society in similar ways, providing an extraordinary example to the world of a long-marginalized and oppressed group working to rid the country of deep inequality and virulent racism against indigenous people. In response to Bolivia’s long-held status as one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest and most unequal countries with one of the largest indigenous populations, scholars, Bolivian activists, and sympathetic foreigners have greeted the rise of leftist and indigenous political parties in Bolivia and in many Latin American countries over the past decade with hope and excitement (e.g., Lazar 2008, Postero 2007; Gustafson 2009; Goodale 2009; Canessa 2012).

And yet middle-class groups comprise a significant segment of the population.² The characterization of Bolivia as split between a tiny, white, superelite minority and an indigenous, impoverished majority is true on a national level, but breaks down in some local contexts. In Sacaba, people could not live these categories in practice. In this book, I highlight the experiences of those Bolivians whose incomes and aspirations gave them the option of choosing to ally themselves either with elites or with the indigenous and poor. Middle classes are privileged relative to the poor majority, including the 37 percent of Bolivians classified as very poor who struggle to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families (Interamerican Development Bank 2008). Yet, though members of the new middle class have high hopes to leave behind their campesino parents and neighbors, they often have limited means to achieve this goal of economic and social upward mobility. Within the rigid binary opposition of elite and subaltern categories of identity in Bolivia, there is little room for them to identify themselves as being in the middle (see also Albro 2010).³ Despite the lack of acknowledgment of these middling groups, Bolivian politics and social life have been deeply shaped by the emergence of middle classes. The many Bolivians who aspired to join the middle class often brought to light the contradictions inherent in the goal of radically transforming Bolivian politics away from corruption and clientelism and toward redistribution of wealth and publicly minded governance.

Many Sacabans hoped to become middle class. They responded with a mixture of skepticism, disgust, and pride to the rise of a new left-wing indigenous movement and party. In the chapters that follow, I examine how this new middle class’s concerns and hopes responded to a dynamic political and economic environment: draconian free-market reforms, a government decentralization that gave increased power and funding to local governments but created new political conflicts, the rise of MAS with Morales at its head, and an unstable economy that had been sustained during the 1980s and 1990s largely through production of coca leaves—an ancient, sacred crop in the Andes and a key ingredient in the modern cocaine industry.⁴ In response to these multiple pressures and opportunities, rising middle classes often wavered between asserting ideals of their own social superiority and ideals of social equality in relation to Bolivia’s poor majority—including neighbors, friends, and family members. I focus on how middle-class identities shaped, and were shaped by, new models of citizenship and political mobilization. Angelique Haugerud and Tom Young have called our attention to the “no-man’s-land” between anthropology and political science: the gap between ethnographic attention to individuals’ and groups’ intimate experiences and large-scale studies of political institutions and their transformations (Haugerud 1995:15; Young 1993:307). In this book I show the mutual effects of everyday efforts to forge both new middle-class identities and political transformations of the Bolivian nation.

Middle-class concerns are all the more important to explore given that the Morales administration, now in its eighth year, has to date been unable to reduce unemployment significantly, and most Bolivians are disappointed at the seeming failure of Morales’s promises to enact a total transformation of political life. Indeed, four years into Morales’s second term, the buoyant public sentiment of triumph has ebbed considerably in Bolivia. For the past year, the Morales administration has been besieged by daily strikes, protests, and tumultuous marches, much as his elite predecessors were. The government and its allies stand accused of corruption, nepotism, continuing to pursue free-market economic policies in contravention of its political platform, and selling out the indigenous poor in favor of the old-time elites.⁵ This hard fall is not particularly surprising, considering the mismatch between the high expectations at the time of Morales’s election and the realities of Bolivia: the country’s precarious position in the global economy, elite opposition to change, the Morales government’s inexperience in governing, and the competing goals in Morales’s diverse left-indigenous social movement coalition. The actual practice of governing, as so often happens following the coming to power of groups promising radical change, has shown the difficulty of harmonizing competing groups’ interests. I contend in this book that some of these challenges can be understood as the outcome of the conflicted ideals, ambiguous identities, and moral dilemmas experienced by Bolivia’s new middle classes.

The Sacaba Highway: Metaphor and Conduit of Bolivia’s Moving Middle

To understand the connection between individual experience and these broad shifts in political practices—and to make research most useful to social movements with whose political aims we sympathize—we must look beyond core movement activists to the rank and file and those disaffected by movements (Hess 2007:465; Edelman 2001:309; Burdick 1998). In order to engage diverse experiences in Bolivia’s political life, I focused on people residing at least part-time within the municipality of Sacaba rather than focusing my work squarely on MAS activists. Between 1995 and 2009, I conducted research along the frenetically busy highway that serves as a vital artery for Sacaba Municipality and for the country as a whole.⁶ I interviewed Sacaba residents who were both enchanted and disgusted with electoral politics, as well as elected and appointed municipal officials in Sacaba, MAS and other political party leaders, Sacaba political activists, and agrarian union leaders. I watched municipal city council sessions, residents’ meetings with Sacaba mayors, and street protests. I attended meetings of local agrarian unions, women’s groups, youth groups, potable water associations, irrigation associations, church masses, and planning sessions inspired by the Popular Participation Law. These conversations in this highly bilingual region took place in the rich local mix of Spanish and the indigenous language, Quechua.

A central aspect of my work also involved accompanying people who resided and worked in Sacaba Municipality on their short and long commutes throughout the municipality, to the city of Cochabamba, and to the tropical Chapare coca-growing region to the east. Sacaba municipality hugs the eastern edge of the large central Bolivian city of Cochabamba. Most Sacabans spent considerable time traveling along the Cochabamba–Santa Cruz highway, Bolivia’s busiest, which runs through the municipality and leads to the Chapare and to agribusiness regions beyond. Bolivia’s eleventh largest municipality in 2006 and in 2005 and containing 150,000 registered residents, Sacaba Municipality was made up of a zone of explosive suburban sprawl bordering Cochabamba, a booming provincial town famous for its potato market, and rural districts that officially contained 30 percent of the municipal population but most of its territory. Sacaba has also been infamous as a “red zone” of cocaine production. As in many Bolivian and Latin American provincial towns (provincias), Sacaba town dwellers since the Spanish conquest have vigorously distinguished their social status from that of campesinos. Yet maintaining these racial and class distinctions remains a more difficult task than in cities because campesinos are so close geographically; share town dwellers’ physical appearance and often, indigenous language; and sometimes possessed comparable levels of wealth.

Racial and class identities were deeply connected to ideas about geography in Bolivia; people were often imagined to be tied rigidly to either rural or urban spaces. The active movement of people along the highway provides a strikingly immediate contradiction to that polarized social geography by which people are imagined to be stuck in place. A brief tour by bus of the travels made daily by Sacabans provides a sense of the constant movement of people in this region, their alternation between elite and subaltern identities, and the blurring in practice of spaces classified officially and in the popular imagination as urban and rural. The highway also serves as a metaphor for the anxieties and aspirations of the upwardly mobile in Sacaba, their fears of remaining trapped in a rural identity while also valuing the ideal of peasant community as a refuge from the hectic pace of urban life.

When Amanda, a lawyer from the rural Sacaba locality of Choro, took me with her to attend a monthly meeting of her parents’ coca growers’ union in the Chapare in August 2009, we began the trip from downtown Cochabamba City (see maps in Figures 1 and 2).⁷ Hopping on a minibus in the Cancha, Cochabamba’s enormous open-air market, in the early morning, commuters and long-distance travelers could take refuge from the smell of diesel fuel and the sounds of thousands of vendors hawking plastic bags, calla lilies, and bicycle tires. After inching through the market crowds, the minibus sped past the public university district, hospitals, a military base, and a botanical garden whose high walls were covered with competing graffiti from the early 2000s condemning or supporting road blockades pressuring for nationalization of natural gas.

The border between Cochabamba City and Sacaba Municipality was unmarked and unnoticeable amid the sprawl as the minibus passed a strip of triple-story hardware stores and rotisserie chicken restaurants, until we zipped past a large, battered, white aluminum sign perched in a traffic circle. This read, “First Sacaba. Municipal Government Working for Development. Onward, Sacabans!” We had reached Sacaba’s urban zone (eje urbano) that bridged Cochabamba City and Sacaba’s provincial town. A large upper-middle-class housing development was followed by a road leading to the Cochabamba Motorcycling Track Association, diesel truck repair shops behind grimy expanses of earth, and an enormous yellow elementary school founded by a deceased Bolivian beer magnate and populist politician. We passed mom-and-pop lumber companies displaying slender eucalyptus logs laid in rows on the ground; a ceramic tile factory; a hotel, its second and third floors still under construction; green fields filled with cows; a store selling steel rebar; a vacant lot filled with trash surrounded by a barbed wire fence; a one-room health clinic; a paint store; a cluster of chicha (corn beer) taverns with cauldrons of fried pork bubbling over fire pits, sending up clouds of greasy, savory steam; another field of cows.

The minibus left the highway and entered the provincial town of Sacaba. Hércules Gym fronted a vacant lot where ragged traveling circuses sometimes stopped to perform. The bus passed the spruced-up Sacaba Town plaza, freshly planted with pansies and orange trees, thanks to the influx of funding by the Law of Popular Participation. Plaza benches were filled with men and women hatching real-estate deals and keeping watchful eyes on people entering and exiting the yellow stucco archways of Sacaba’s hundred-year-old city hall. The bus wove through Sacaba’s crowded outdoor market in which vendors hawked grapefruit, nylon stockings, DDT, and potatoes. Ringing the market were a storefront flour mill, dusty jewelry stores, pharmacies, butcher shops, and money-exchange houses sporting signs that revealed the current exchange rates between euros and U.S. dollars and Bolivian pesos.

At a crush of passenger buses and trucks parked on the highway opposite Sacaba’s Transit Police headquarters, long-distance travelers disembarked minibuses from Cochabamba to find transportation to the Chapare. Some of them, women with weary faces and hair escaping their braids in large wisps, with bundles of clothing and food on their backs and often several small children in tow, had been travelling for days already and were still seven hours from their final destination. Amanda and I bought our bus tickets amid a cacophony of hawkers shouting out the price of tickets. Disheveled boys in shabby, navy-blue slacks called the buses’ destinations in exchange for a peso from the bus drivers. They shouted the names of Chapare boomtowns: “Ivigarzama, Ivigarzama, Ivigarzama! Puerto Villarroel!” Women and girls peddled bags of bread and plastic bottles of pink, green, and yellow sodas to passengers through bus windows. The smell of fried chicken wafted over from a restaurant named “Hong Kong,” mingling with the smells of diesel fuel, dust, and tripe soup bubbling over gas burners in small kiosks. Our bus was relatively high priced in exchange for well-padded seats, good shock absorbers, a gleaming exterior, and the presentation of a horror film.

Figure 1. Cochabamba Department showing Sacaba and the Chapare.

Figure 2. Bolivia.

After waiting an hour for passengers, the bus wound up the twisting highway through Amanda’s hometown of Choro, one of Sacaba Municipality’s rural localities. Despite its designation within Sacaba Municipality as a peasant community (comunidad campesina), few Choro residents worked solely in agriculture and few resided exclusively in Choro. From the bus, Choro appeared as a thick sprinkling of cement and adobe houses lining the highway, many marked by poles with small white cloths fluttering in the wind, signaling that their occupants sold chicha. Rolling hills were painted in a checkerboard of green, yellow, and brown. Large swaths of dry, brown, unirrigated land punctuated the verdant, irrigated potato, onion, and fava bean fields.

The steep grades of the highway beyond Choro were the terror of long-distance truckers; the groaning of the brakes on their secondhand Norwegian Volvo semis and tractor-trailers could be heard at all hours of day and night as they passed through Choro to deliver their cargo of tin roofing, natural gas, or tropical lumber to Cochabamba City. There were frequent accidents on nearby hairpin curves, and truck carcasses dotted the sides of the highway, attesting to the frequency with which brakes failed or drivers succumbed to sleepiness or alcohol.

Choro’s 2001 census count of roughly 1,400 inhabitants masked the constant ebbs and flows of this population during different seasons and during the periodic fluctuations in the price of the coca leaves and cocaine in the Chapare. Many houses remained empty for significant periods of time; at other times they filled to capacity when people returned for holidays, school, or to try their luck making a living back in Sacaba. People waited alongside the highway for bus rides to their coca fields in the Chapare, bundles of blankets and occasionally a bound sheep at their feet.

The bus groaned up through smaller hamlets and large herds of sheep. Increasing elevation thinned the trees and vegetation and chilled our toes. Eroded orange hillsides interspersed with green gave way to desertlike, spiky bromeliads and cactus. At a high pass through these foothills of the Andes, in the chilly market town of Colomi, Amanda bought a bag of boiled, salted fava beans and sheep cheese patties. As we turned down the eastern flank of the Andes and entered tropical elevations, the air that had been wintry became moist and warm. The roar of rivers penetrated the windows of the bus that had been closed against the dust. Lush greenery began appearing on the steep hillsides and our hair sprang to life in the humidity. The bus’s brakes squealed with effort as it miraculously clung to the twisting road. Amanda pointed happily and wordlessly to a thunderous river whose waters roiled and crashed against gigantic boulders, as if just seeing rushing water quenched the thirst of living in Cochabamba’s arid valleys.

When we arrived at the checkpoint that marked the entry to the Chapare, heralded by a plaster Virgin encased in glass, members of the drug control armed forces in olive and camouflage military uniforms were inspecting the contents of a long line of trucks and buses. Before the election of Evo Morales, travelers feared the checkpoint as a principal node of interdiction in the drug war. A bus passenger could be arrested for carrying items recently declared contraband because they could be used in cocaine production—sulfuric acid or even seemingly innocuous elements of cocaine base paste production like toilet paper and onions. Passengers leaving the Chapare feared arrest for carrying small amounts of cocaine for sale or unregistered stashes of coca leaves for their own consumption. Past the checkpoint, the bus then entered the flat tropical plain of the Amazon basin and sped along an arrow-straight highway flanked by lush vegetation until we arrived several hours later at the boomtown of Puerto Villarroel. We stayed for one day to attend the coca growers’ meeting as representatives of Amanda’s father, who owned a coca field nearby, and then hopped on a bus back to Sacaba. Amanda’s speedy round-trip journey along the highway, between Cochabamba, Sacaba, Choro, and the Chapare, was typical of the frenetic movement of Sacabans between places, between officially designated rural and urban spaces, and between identities, in their quest for upward mobility.

Middle-Class Political Culture in Bolivia

The conundrums of Sacaba’s new middle classes followed three threads that I examine in this book. First, I explore how middle-class people in central Bolivia confronted conflicting moral imperatives: the imperative to achieve individual upward mobility and therefore superiority over their poorer friends and neighbors, and, on the contrary, the imperative of social equality. The moral value of “bettering oneself” (superarse) was widespread, but so was the sanction on snobbery, as when neighbors and relatives accused the upwardly mobile of “selfishness” or when the MAS party’s powerful political movement declared its formal platform based on the redistribution of wealth, social equality, and indigenous power. Second, I trace the ways in which Sacabans attempted to reconcile multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideals about how politics should work. These multiple ideals of citizenship have been promoted successively by national leaders since the 1950s, including clientelism (patronage); ideals of anticlientelism shaped by free-market principles and Bolivia’s 1994 decentralization reform, the Law of Popular Participation (LPP); and the MAS party’s platform of anticlientelism, indigenous rights, and redistribution of wealth. Third, I examine how middle-class aspirations conflicted with the romanticized ideals of peasant communities that guided local governance in Sacaba in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The LPP had promoted the idea that rural Bolivian civil society could avoid the political conflicts and self-interest of earlier patronage politics. Yet this romantic vision bumped up against actual practices and ideals of community held by Sacaba’s middle class.

Highlighting the Presence of Middle Classes in Bolivian Politics

My principal aim in this book is to highlight the significance of middle-class experiences for social and political life in Bolivia. Bolivian politics are commonly characterized as a struggle between “two Bolivias” comprising the wealthy and white, on the one hand, and the poor and indigenous, on the other hand (for a critique, see Dunkerley 2007). This depiction is true, but incomplete. In fact, a significant segment of Bolivians possesses aspirations, wealth, and lifestyles in between those of the very poor and the very wealthy. In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, I trace many middling Sacabans’ active reflections on the long-standing racial and class hierarchies of Bolivian society. Their perspectives enrich our understanding of what it means to be middle class in a Third World country whose government has promised the imminent, massive redistribution of wealth from elites to the poor. Middle-class hopes and concerns have been little acknowledged but are significant in shaping politics in the local arena of Sacaba and in the country as a whole. Their discussions can help us understand the place of middle classes beyond Sacaba and to rectify their surprising absence in much anthropological scholarship on the Third World and in Bolivia.⁸

Bolivian middling groups’ responses to the rise of MAS and its platform of social equality were filtered through their diverse experiences during recent economic and political transformations. Though Bolivia is blessed with abundant natural resources from silver to timber, Spanish colonialism and the small exclusionary elite that governed the country since its independence in 1825 left a ravaged, deeply unequal economy. Bolivia is rare in that a majority of people speak an indigenous language. New middle classes in Bolivia, many of whom speak indigenous languages, emerged in the wake of a social and economic opening permitted by the 1952 Bolivian Revolution and 1953 Agrarian Reform. This nascent rural and provincial middle class expanded further with the explosion in the price of cocaine in the United States and Europe in the 1970s that led to a boom in the price of Bolivian coca leaf. In central Bolivia, where coca grew, a new cohort of prosperous farmers, merchants, and professionals arose. The coca and cocaine booms presented unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility until the U.S.-led war on drugs partially squelched the boom in the 1990s. The drug war and the subsequent decline of the coca and cocaine markets spelled frustrated expectations for many people in the Sacaba region, even as many hung on tenuously to a new middle-class identity as professionals or as well-to-do merchants.

Free-market neoliberal reforms in the 1980s led to a deepening of Bolivia’s massive unemployment, as the influx of goods from foreign industries and foreign-subsidized agriculture outcompeted the products of Bolivian factories and small farms. Mass layoffs among miners and workers at other state-owned industries that were required under the terms of Bolivia’s free-trade policies contributed to further job losses. This unemployment, coupled with the decline in state spending on social services under free-market reforms, contributed to a bleak economic climate for many Bolivians that has lasted until the present, though for a while mitigated by the coca boom.⁹

The historically unprecedented election of Evo Morales in 2005 on a platform of redistribution of wealth and social equality has led to dilemmas of self-identification for this new middle class in Sacaba. President Morales became a prism through which many Bolivians reimagined their own identities. For upwardly mobile Sacabans, Evo’s political persona as an indigenous and poor leader provoked opposition as often as it did pride and approval. A cohort of first-generation doctors, lawyers, teachers, and prosperous merchants wrestled earnestly with how to distinguish their identity as professionals from those of the campesinos and Indians who were their parents, brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbors—and their new president. Some people greeted Evo’s and the MAS party’s rhetoric with dismay. They rejected the new government’s promotion of indigenous pride, social equality, and the redistribution of wealth. Other Sacabans with similar levels of wealth and aspirations for upward mobility began to tout campesino, working-class, or indigenous roots and trumpeted the government’s rhetoric of social equality; still others praised the new government’s promise of an end to corruption while continuing to assert their own social superiority.

Middle-class identity in Sacaba was experienced as ambiguous in part because little language existed to name it. As a result, many Sacabans alternated between identifying themselves with wealthy national elites and with poor indigenous campesinos and the working class. I highlight the ways in which identification with rural and urban spaces was a critical binary axis along which Sacabans struggled to define themselves and their political actions. Given that markers of class and race had been historically fluid, Sacabans often found it difficult to define their own and others’ social status, even as MAS and its allied political movements rhetorically asserted that there were clear dividing lines between elite and subaltern.

Political conflicts in Sacaba fed in part on this poor fit between existing social life in the municipality and the popular vision of Bolivian society polarized between the indigenous poor and the white superelite. Following Morales’s election and the precarious realignment of national power after centuries of elite rule, a fundamental uncertainty existed regarding who held political and social power in Bolivia. On a national scale, MAS supporters held the executive branch of government while right-wing, very wealthy elites controlled the vast majority of wealth and most Bolivian television, radio, and newspaper outlets. On a municipal scale, Sacaba’s urban districts were home to the wealthiest residents and received the majority of municipal government resources, but the agrarian union members, the base of support for the MAS party, gained strength from their strong relationship with President Morales and the national MAS leadership. On both national and municipal scales, then, the rise of MAS upset historical imbalances of power without establishing a new hegemony: power relations were fundamentally unstable. These public conflicts were the product of and contributed to private self-questioning and social repositioning amidst Sacaba’s new middle classes.

Hybrid Political Cultures

Divergent ideals about how to be a good citizen and political leader also created moral dilemmas and conflicts of interpretation of other people’s motivations. Sacabans’ middle-class aspirations shaped this diverse political culture. I employ the concept of political culture to mean the repertoire of practices, meanings, and languages through which people struggle over power and attempt to act collectively. I draw on Sidney Tarrow’s (1998) concept of “repertoires” of political action to emphasize the ways in which Sacabans conducted their political conflicts through patterned forms of action that were familiar to each other. Moving beyond an understanding of national political culture as consisting of uniformity and unanimity, in this book I join a growing number of scholars who emphasize the essential contested quality of culture (e.g., Jacobsen and Aljovin de Losada 2005; Haugerud 1993; Glick Schiller 2003). As Angelique Haugerud notes, national political cultures are neither monolithic nor consensus driven, but rather consist of public rituals and symbols that are arenas of contest as well as acquiescence between people of unequal social and economic standing (Haugerud 1993:8).

Three principal political ideals circulated in Bolivia in the early twenty first century. First, clientelism (clientelismo)—patron-client reciprocity of gifts, favors, jobs, and votes—was a legacy of colonialism and of Bolivia’s revolutionary government that took power in 1952 and promised national economic development delivered through patronage networks. Next, liberalism, the emphasis on free markets and individual responsibility, reemerged in the harsh free-market reforms instituted in 1985 and in the state decentralization reform of 1994, the LPP. The LPP created new powers and resources for local governments and promoted multiculturalism, while LPP reformers condemned clientelism as antidemocratic and archaic.¹⁰ At the same time, the LPP’s increased funding and expansion of salaried positions for over three hundred municipal governments created new arenas for graft and competition for public-sector jobs and for development resources. This political competition often erupted, as in Sacaba municipality, in repeated municipal conflicts between factions of people seeking upward mobility by vying for municipal bureaucracy jobs and elected posts as mayor or city council members. Third, a model of grassroots democracy coupled with the rhetoric of socialism and indigenous pride gained force with the rise of MAS during the late 1990s, and became the official platform of government with Morales’s election in 2005. Morales and MAS officials also vehemently denounced clientelism as a legacy of elite dominance and heralded a new nation free of clientelism. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, MAS political leaders and development workers called publicly for Sacabans to reject politicians’ stealing of public funds, nepotism, vote buying, and the seeking of jobs and other favors through clientelism.

Many ordinary Sacabans agreed in theory with this condemnation of clientelism and expressed the hope that MAS or the LPP—or both—would deliver an end to clientelism. Sacabans, like MAS leaders, often termed clientelism as “selfishness,” individualism, and “envy,” because they deemed the seeking of patronage favors as the cause of local political struggles that obstructed local governments. Furthermore, many Sacabans—though not all—agreed fervently that clientelism maintained the dominance of Bolivia’s superwealthy and had to be extinguished for racial and economic equality to be born.

Yet in practice many Sacabans sought jobs and resources from the municipal government and were accused by others of clientelism. Often, this was the only path to finding a job and therefore, a route to middle-class status. Sacabans’ political practices in fact often blurred the theoretical line between clientelism, the liberalism promoted by the LPP, and grassroots democracy promoted by the MAS party. The widespread condemnation of clientelism as “selfishness” signaled the theoretical clash between political frameworks that many Sacabans combined in practice: liberalism, grassroots democracy, clientelism, and the imperative to enter or remain in the middle class, often through securing a patronage job.

Self-interest, like collective interest, is a central human motivation. When MAS leaders and development workers perceived that their attempts at political transformation had failed, they often blamed citizens’ moral failure. MAS leaders expressed disappointment when citizens were unable, in their view, to properly assume an attitude of public-mindedness over private interest. Such language of blame ignores both the structural constraints on Bolivians’ realizing their own middle-class aspirations and the practical ways in which individuals drew on multiple frameworks in participating in public life. These observations lead me, like Ernesto Laclau (1992:9), to argue that self-interest and individual interest often blur in political practice, despite the widespread assumption in political theory that we can analytically distinguish between the two (see also Seligman 1992).

In practice, many Sacabans described their hopes for the future in ways that combined individual middle-class aspirations, collective prosperity for indigenous and poor Bolivians, and the uplift of Bolivia from its subordinate position in the global geopolitical community of nations. Many prosperous Sacabans who fervently supported MAS in the early years of Evo’s government described themselves as members of the historically excluded indigenous majority and therefore asserted that their individual interests were the interests of the nation.¹¹

I suggest that these paradoxes are not confined to Sacaba but have broader reach. MAS leaders have claimed to have ushered in a new postneoliberal era in Bolivia,¹² three decades after scholars began analyzing the impact of neoliberal free-trade policies around the world and the ideologies that accompany them—such as the Law of Popular Participation’s depiction of clientelism as a form of immorality that public-minded citizens can root out (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Carrier 1998; Ferguson 2006; Greenhouse 2010; Phillips 1997). Anthropologists have begun to pose the question of whether some societies, such as Bolivia, are indeed creating post-neoliberalism (e.g., Gustafson 2009; Fernandes 2010; Goodale and Postero 2013). What might post-neoliberalism look like? Chapters 4 and 5 follow middle-class Sacabans’ own debates over these questions about whether a deep societal transformation was possible and whether clientelism could be stamped out.

Definitions of Community Shaped by Middle Classes

Concerns about clientelism as the expression of individualism and selfishness also emerged repeatedly in Sacabans’ intense frustrations at what they saw as a lack of collective action at the local level—a failure of community. My third aim in this book is to show how ideals of community became a central focus of political debate in Sacaba in the context of rising middle classes. In Chapter 6, I trace the mismatch between idealized definitions of Sacaba’s rural communities as organized civil societies or as indigenous campesinos, promoted by LPP reformers and national MAS leaders, respectively, and the more heterogeneous ideals and practices of community enacted by Sacaba’s new middle class. Bolivia’s LPP reformers often depicted rural communities as rigidly bounded geographically, and governed by indigenous communal institutions of solidarity that had remained little changed since pre-Columbian times. National MAS leaders, meanwhile, defined communities as agrarian unions composed of campesinos and organized politically in networks with regional and national unions to defend the interests of Bolivia’s peasant-indigenous (campesino-originario) majority. Measuring actual local communities against these standards, many Sacaba municipal officials and development workers regularly deplored what they saw as a lack of strong collective action in Sacaba’s localities. I contrast these idealized, rigid ideals of harmonious peasant community with the other forms of collective action that emerged in response to middle-class aspirations in Choro. Finding funding and building vital infrastructure like a sewer and a new high school, fervent goals of development workers, required intensive collective effort that conflicted with many Choro residents’ other ambitions. For example, when coca leaf prices were high, many Choreños sought upward mobility by joining in the highly organized coca growers’ union in the Chapare region where coca was grown, seven hours away, withdrawing their time and attention from collective organizing within the boundaries of Choro. The desires of upwardly mobile professionals, coca growers, merchants, and truckers resident in Choro diverged from poorer people who could less easily afford to buy services such as health care and education in urban areas like Sacaba or Cochabamba City. Community, like clientelism, was an important genre of political debate.

My Position in Bolivia

Finally, as is always the case when conducting ethnographic research, local perceptions of me as a researcher mattered in shaping the stories that I was told and can tell. When I had a baby part way through my fieldwork, I became newly privileged to conversations with other parents in which they expressed concerns about their children’s health and safety, their upward mobility, or their quest for jobs. As a red-haired blancona (light-skinned woman), I heard plenty about race from Sacabans, who often expressed the wish that their hair and skin were lighter. When I became a mother toting a red-haired, blancón infant with me, I began hearing plenty from parents who expressed the wish, often in front of their children, that their children’s hair and skin were lighter. As a graduate student, I was received as a kindred spirit by many in Sacaba’s first-generation middle class who aspired to or had recently earned professional degrees. As a foreigner who spoke Quechua, I was greeted with great warmth and generosity. As a citizen of a wealthy country, I was often seen as a potential patron: a supplier of funds for home improvement, medical bills, and community centers. Finally, as a citizen of the United States, my presence elicited the longings of many Bolivians for the prosperity and power the United States symbolized, on the one hand, and intense resentment at the U.S. government’s heavy-handed interventions, on the other hand, particularly regarding free-market policies and the war on drugs that had squelched the coca and cocaine booms.

One story that Sacaba friends often asked me to retell conveys the mix of generous hospitality, fascination, wariness, and resentment with which I was viewed in a region that owed its prosperity, even more than other regions of the country, to the coca and cocaine booms. As a college student studying abroad, I had traveled in 1995 with a group of U.S. students on a guided tour of the Chapare. Led by our leftist study abroad program directors, we toured modest “alternative development” projects—a palm heart plantation, a dairy factory—funded by USAID as an anemic sideline to the United States’ military focus in the drug war. We also had a cordial meeting with several Chapare coca growers (cocaleros) union leaders who invited us to a cocalero protest. Arriving in the boomtown of Villa Tunari for the protest, we watched, awestruck, as thousands of men and women marched by in well-practiced formation. They carried banners that read “Long live coca, our sacred leaf” and “Long live coca, die Yankees [Kausachun coca, wañuchun yanquis]” in Quechua, Bolivia’s most widely spoken indigenous language. A few marchers began shouting at us, “Wañuchun yanquis [Die, Yankees]!” Though we could not understand their words, the marchers’ meaning was clear. Our program directors hustled us onto our bus and whisked us away.

When telling this story in Sacaba, I attempted to make clear my opposition to the drug war by emphasizing that we students had cheered along vigorously with the protesters in Quechua, “Long live coca [Kausachun coca]!” And when the protesters shouted, “Die, Yankees [Wañuchun yanquis]!” I narrated to my always-rapt audience, we students echoed “Wañuchun yanquis!” before realizing what the Quechua words meant. I mimicked our embarrassment once we understood. This story was a hit. It always elicited shouts of laughter and a clamor to tell the story of “wañuchun gringuitos [die, little gringos]” once more.

When close friends in Choro requested this story time after time for an appreciative audience of their relatives and neighbors, they were giving me the opportunity to demonstrate my support for the coca growers’ unions, to which many of them belonged. At the same time, the ridiculous picture of twenty college students haplessly condemning ourselves in Quechua provided an opportunity for my friends to poke fun at an intrusive foreign power and express their anger at U.S. meddling in Bolivia. The U.S. government had created an area of intense violence in the Chapare and directly curtailed Chapareños’ possibilities for upward mobility while also deliberately protecting the wealth of the United States at the expense of Bolivians, many Bolivians believed.

These mixed sentiments—of admiration of the United States as a symbol of economic power to which Bolivians aspired for themselves as a nation and as individuals, and frustration at the continual squelching of these aspirations by foreign powers such as the United States—are common among Bolivians of many social classes but are particularly emblematic of new middle classes. The next chapter traces the origins of Sacaba’s middle class through historical shifts that provided opportunities for upward mobility and challenges to this mobility. I examine this cohort in the context of the Third World, Bolivia, and the regional space of Cochabamba.