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Now We Are Citizens

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................ixList of Abbreviations......................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Bolivia.......................................11. Regimes of Race and Citizenship.........................................................232. An Indigenous Federation in Boomtown Santa Cruz.........................................553. A Crisis of Leadership in Bella Flor....................................................874. Multiculturalism and the Law of Popular Participation...................................1235. Forming Neoliberal Subjects: NGOs and "Responsible" Self-Government.....................1646. Popular Protagonism since 2000..........................................................189Conclusion: Toward a Postmulticultural Bolivia.............................................216Notes......................................................................................233References.................................................................................257Index......................................................................................285

Chapter One

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —Karl Marx

An Old Grief

One warm night in 1998, the leader of the Capitanía Zona Cruz (CZC), Don Álvaro Montero, took me with him to the community of La Cañada, about ten kilometers north of the city of Santa Cruz. Several of the young leaders of the capitanía's technical team, Equipo Técnico Zonal (ETZ), had just returned from a national Guaraní youth meeting and they wanted to share their experiences. There was also a birthday among the group, so we were invited to a small party at the home of Rosana Moreno, one of the ETZ members. The capitán grande drove his car, a run-down Toyota sedan of the kind Cruceños ironically call "transformers," after the children's toys. These used cars with the steering wheels originally on the right side have been imported from Japan and brought across the border illegally. Somewhere along its way, the steering wheel had been switched to the left side, leaving a gaping hole on the right. Don Álvaro filled the gap with cassettes, one of which he played at full volume during our drive.

We drove out of the crowded city, through the surrounding agricultural country. Vast cattle ranches owned by the elite stretched away from the highway, alternating with fields of tall sugarcane. Guaranís migrated here to work the zafras (sugarcane harvests) in the 1950s and 1960s and stayed to work on the large haciendas as peons for the local patrones (ranchers). The nearly twenty-five communities that made up the capitanía were scattered all around the city's periphery, especially near the cane fields and the large farming zones. The community of La Cañada had grown up around the sugar refinery of the same name and had a small Guaraní neighborhood for the workers. Rosana's father had worked at the refinery for nearly twenty years.

Rosana's house was in the town center, right in front of a large park under construction. It looked like any other home in the neighborhood, made of adobe and block, with a small backyard containing a latrine and washing post. Rosana proudly showed off her pig, which she had bought as a suckling and was raising for sale. Her mother had added on a small store to the front, where she sold sodas, bread, beer, and other essentials. We sat under the palm roof of the patio, listening to popular Bolivian dance music called chicha, and enjoyed a cold beer — always welcome in Santa Cruz's tropical climate. Rosana and fellow ETZ member Samuel Tapera told us about the youth meeting they had attended in Camiri, in the south, organized by the national Guaraní federation, the Asociación del Pueblo Guaraní (APG). The meeting marked the anniversary of the January 1892 massacre in Kuruyuki, where the Bolivian army had put down a massive Guaraní rebellion, ending a century of revolts and insurrections. (This history is discussed in more detail throughout the chapter.) Samuel, a young man in his early thirties, recounted the meeting and the ritual dances on the last night. "It was so moving to be with so many other Guaranís," he said. "It made me remember the warrior side of our people, the strength of being together. It was something I can't measure, just the feeling of being Guaraní. We danced for hours, listening to the Guaraní music, feeling the drums inside of us."

Don Álvaro retrieved a cassette from his car and popped it in Rosana's boom box. It was traditional Guaraní music and everyone got up to dance. "This is our music," he said. "My father played the violin, and whenever I hear it, I remember the old ones, the old ways." He arranged us in a circle and we all held onto each other's arms, moving slowly and rhythmically to the mournful violin and drum tune. The young folk, Samuel, Rosana, and the others who had joined us, eagerly followed his lead. As we danced and talked that night, Don Álvaro told them stories about the Guaraní past, especially about the queremba reta (warriors) who had fought their enemies so valiantly. They remembered their forebears' reputation for ferocity: only the Mapuche of Chile had resisted pacification by the Spaniards longer than the Chiriguano had. "Imagine," said Samuel, "this massacre was only a hundred years ago." For these young Guaraní leaders, raised in the suburbs of a large city, the tragedy — and the challenge — of Kuruyuki are not altogether in the past. "We are still forced to be queremba reta," said Rosana at the end of the evening, "but now it is in a different kind of struggle."

The bittersweet pride the Guaraní of Zona Cruz hold for their bellicose past reflects the long history of domination and subjugation of Indians in Bolivia. This struggle, which began more than five hundred years ago with the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, continues to affect the lives of Indians today in numerous ways. The evening at Rosana's house made clear that the long-lasting impact of such a devastating event is experienced at an emotional or psychic level: the pain and losses are seared into the memories of its victims' descendants, like the Guaraní. But this history also continues to affect Indians as contemporary members of Bolivian society. Domination of Indians did not only happen through massacres, but also through the establishment of regimes of social order that naturalized such domination. These regimes laid out categories of belonging and Otherness that continue to operate today. These governing systems and their accompanying "languages of contention" (Roseberry 1996) have changed since the colonial period, but each regime has left its cumulative traces in the culture and social relations of Bolivian society. This chapter examines regimes of the past, rendering visible the political and discursive techniques by which Indians have been included and excluded. Readers will note the troubling echoes between the present and the past.

The...