The Notion of “Rights” and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial

Modernity: Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Molly Geidel

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 18, Number 2,
Spring/Summer 2010, pp. 29-54 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/qui.0.0014

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/380655

Access provided by Universidad de Los Andes (14 Jun 2018 01:21 GMT)
The Notion of “Rights” and the
Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity
Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia

silvia rivera cusicanqui

Translated by Molly Geidel

This article attempts to undertake a reading of “gender” as it oper-

ates in Bolivia’s juridical history, in order to propose some issues
of debate that I consider pertinent to any discussion of the “rights
of indigenous peoples” and their close ties, at least as I see them,
to “the rights of women” (whether indigenous, cholas, birlochas,
or refinadas).1 First I focus on the masculine and lettered aspects
of the juridical process that has produced the documents known
as the Laws of the Republic. In Europe both the law and the mod-
ern historical formation of what is known as “public space” are
anchored in the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,
whereby the rebirth of the human being was implicitly imagined
as a masculine Universal Subject, who was by nature a bearer of
“rights.” Up to now the notion of “human rights” means noth-
ing more than what were known as “the rights of man” (droits de
l’homme) in the eighteenth century. Jacques Derrida and Judith
Butler have noted this conflation, writing of a “phallogocentric”
version of the modern Subject, the enlightened heterosexual indi-
vidual.2 This representation of the modern individual has been in-
scribed in European history and imposed on the rest of the world
30 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

over the course of the last two centuries through multiple processes
of political, military, and cultural hegemony.
In Bolivia the initial act of colonization was gendered: the very
idea of rights arrived already tainted by the subordination (formal
and real) of women in the household, governed by the pater famil-
ias. Rossana Barragán has illustrated how, during the early Repub-
lic, the Bolivian legislators copied and adapted a Victorian model
of the family, transposing it onto a much older matrix of habitus
and representations.3 This new hegemonic ideal of family relations
prescribed that (1) men act as the sole public representatives of
the “family,” subordinating wife and children under their author-
ity; (2) women dedicate themselves exclusively to reproductive and
decorative tasks, and thus become alienated, their agency denied,
their public voices silenced (thus, the idea of “public women” be-
came a cruel semiotic paradox, implying that the only “public”
action a woman could perform was the marketing of her own sex);
and (3) adolescents and children remain subject to the hierarchical
authority of adults, principally of the father.
The liberal reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury only reinforced this patriarchal imaginary, reinstating it with
new laws and behavioral codes. These reforms codified a notion
of “human rights” based on the subjugation of women, instituting
and upholding restrictions, legal elisions, and archaisms, as well
as a myriad of daily practices that ended up in the denial of the
very notion of “human rights” to the female sex. For example, un-
der the new liberal laws, the typical penalty for domestic violence
led to the punishment of the perpetrator only if the victim had
suffered at least thirty days of hospitalization or convalescence!4
Through legislative measures, the liberals further consolidated the
institutionalized inequality of property and inheritance rights that
had been imposed by the colonizers: practices like primogeniture,
unequal status between legitimate and illegitimate children, and
patrilineal inheritance were thus consolidated by the independent
state.5 Moreover, while juridical rhetoric recognized the equality of
the Indian in 1874, the structure of the republican habitus contin-
ued to function through the invisible axis of the “two republics”
(one of the subjects, the other of the citizens).6 As a matter of fact,
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 31

women and Indians only accessed a degraded and restricted form

of citizenship quite recently, with the declaration of universal vot-
ing rights after the 1952 revolution.

Historical Nexuses between Colonial

and Patriarchal Oppression in Bolivia

The latter example enables us to add a second thematic axis to our

discussion. How is it that the subjugation of women, the oppression
of indigenous peoples, and the discrimination against those who
exhibit residual traces of native identities have been historically em-
bedded in the subjectivity of each inhabitant of the Bolivian nation?
That is to say, how was the modern “universal” Subject inscribed in
each subject (individual or collective) through the erasure and sup-
pression of his or her psychic constitution and social trajectory?
In the gender system of Andean societies—at least as it has been
documented and reconstructed by ethnographic and ethnohistori-
cal research—women have public and family rights more or less on
par with those of their masculine peers (though these rights have
been eroding in recent decades). The gender system is governed by
a dynamic and contentious equilibrium, normatively oriented by
the model of the Andean couple. This relation between the genders
was founded in and continues to rely on a system of bilateral affili-
ation and inheritance, which forms the basis of the indigenous po-
lis. The bilateral scheme of inheritance allows daughters to receive
goods and rights along the maternal line (until very recently, this
did not mean formal property, but only rights of access to land)
while sons inherit another set goods and property rights along the
paternal line. An adult is socially recognized as a person when in
a partnered union, and his or her prestige increases in the course
of the family life cycle, with the growth and labor of children and
with the passage of a series of ritual and productive cargos (a set
of obligations known as the thaki or “road” to adulthood). The
Andean order of inheritance favors the younger son or daughter,
granting the youngest sibling arable and pastoral land as well as
the family house in compensation for having sacrificed migrato-
ry or educational aspirations to support his or her aging parents.
32 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

Women just as much as men have enjoyed bilateral ceremonial

rights, according to a symbolic order that projects the male/fe-
male dichotomy onto the wider realm of nature and the time-space
cosmos. At the smallest level of the community or ayllu, women
have participated in creating and enacting symbolic and kinship
systems, using their voices to shape the communal cargo system
and protocol from within. Although since the implementation of
colonial cabildos or community and town councils, men have usu-
ally represented the family at meetings (a practice that continues
today in the assemblies and gatherings of peasant unions), women
have still managed to preserve an autonomous space of social and
politico-symbolic power by performing crucial productive tasks,
organizing the domestic cycle and division of labor, and maintain-
ing their roles as weavers and ritual specialists. They have never
been completely segregated from the spaces of normative produc-
tion and public opinion in the ayllu or in its fragmented form, the
“indigenous community.”7
The frustrating and contradictory nature of Bolivian moderni-
ty—including the modern legal system—has thrown this intricate
gender system into crisis, threatening to break the delicate balances
and mechanisms that rule its internal reproduction. Denise Arnold
and Juan de Dios Yapita, for example, have demonstrated how
“modernity” (which arrived in the 1970s to the ayllu Qaqachaka
by way of “mothers’ clubs” and development NGOs) contributed
to the creation of a maternal image of women that resulted in a de-
valuation of their pastoral, textile, and ritual abilities. As a result
the new Qaqa generations have married at a younger age, and the
women have dedicated themselves to having more children, in or-
der to gain the social support and recognition they have lost due to
the agricultural crisis, the deterioration of textile activities, and the
migratory diasporas. Additionally, increasing emigration has had
a deep impact on gender relations, further revealing the intimate
relationship between Westernization and patriarchalization of An-
dean gender systems.8 Part of the patriarchal strategy of Qaqa mi-
grants to the cities or to the coca-producing lowlands consists of
leaving their wives pregnant each year in order to maintain control
over their fertility and enhance their family land rights.9
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 33

These changes in Andean practices indicate the slow incorpo-

ration of a hegemonic family model into the fabric of indigenous
community life, as well as the rapid change of behaviors—demo-
graphic, social, and cultural—that these communities have experi-
enced in the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of their
incomplete and illusory participation in Bolivian “modernity.” The
modernization process as a whole has meant a deepened patriar-
chalization of indigenous societies, as they live out the widening
gap between state law and a motley communal law constructed
through successive negotiations and tensions between the sacred
realm of rights and the legal norms imposed by the colonial and
republican regimes. This situation constantly degrades the eco-
nomic conditions for the majority of the population (a process ex-
pressed in post-adjustment reformist jargon as the “feminization”
or “indianization” of poverty), so that precarious labor conditions
and market inequalities go hand in hand with political disposses-
sion and human rights violations. These historic and continuing
dislocations, along with the attempts to reassert indigenous and
communal rights, provide a framework for articulating the present
condition of women and Indians.

A Male and Lettered Society: The Struggles

for Land and Territory

I have elaborated elsewhere that the model of citizenship that be-

came hegemonic in Bolivia from the 1950s onward was in fact
a cultural “package” of behavioral prescriptions designed to turn
the unruly but “passive” Indian into an active mestizo “citizen”:
property-owning, integrated into the capitalist market, and “castil-
ianized” (speaking Spanish). Invariably, this citizen was an urban
young male, dressed in a tailored suit, imitating the behavior of the
Westernized elite.10 The initial version of this modernization project
was expressed in the Law of Expropriation (Ley de Exvinculación),
which held that the only citizen “right” vested in adult Indian men
was the right to sell their families’ access to communal lands. After
the law’s approval by the government of Tomás Frías in October
1874, old and new hacendados (estate owners) proceeded to ex-
34 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

pand their haciendas (large estates with servile labor) with the help
of the army and mercenary forces recruited in rural towns, using
the letter of the law to hide the brutal nature of their forced con-
fiscation of Indian land. The section of the law that most severely
impacted the ayllus’ internal authority system was the declaration
that “communities or ayllos” (sic) were to be “extinguished” and
that caciques, kuraqas, or other ethnic authorities were prohibited
from representing their communities in court.11 Instead, a “power
of attorney” (poder general) was to be given to literate apodera-
dos, middlemen empowered to voice the complaints and demands
of the affected communities. Craftily combining translation and
betrayal, the early apoderados facilitated the expropriation of al-
most two-thirds of the land possessed by the Andean communities
in western Bolivia. In the province of Pacajes alone, more than sev-
enty thousand hectares were illegally transferred from the ayllus to
the haciendas between 1881 and 1920.12
The study of the indigenous legal struggles during the liberal
period reveals the traces of an ancestral system of rights and no-
tions of “justice” that legitimated the indigenous leadership’s tena-
cious questioning of the liberal laws—laws that superimposed the
notion of “human rights” onto the colonial legal horizon and the
pre-Hispanic normative and religious order—at local and national
courts.13 The colonial legislation recognized a certain degree of ayl-
lu autonomy and self-government, based in the Spanish notion of
separate fueros or jurisdictions, whereby the overall relations be-
tween Indians and Spaniards were regulated. In the Leyes de Indias
these norms were expressed through the notion of the “two repub-
lics.”14 According to this legal frame, which continued in practice
if not in name after the liberal reforms, the indigenous society was
a separate but subordinate republic. As constructed collectively in
the legal discourse, Indians were the inhabitants of a conquered
space, the subjects of a colonial state that deprived them of rights
and overburdened them with obligations. However, during the lib-
eral period, the lettered elite of the communities and ayllus also
used the notion of the two republics as a strategy for land defense
and political autonomy. They defended the organizational auton-
omy of the ayllus, markas, and indigenous communities by using
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 35

the colonial legislation of the two republics as a legal instrument

in their confrontations with the (formally) liberal Bolivian State.15
For example, to argue against the forced land expropriations per-
petrated by republican hacendados, the cacique-apoderado move-
ment in the 1920s and 1930s drew upon the terms of the sixteenth-
century colonial tributary pact with Viceroy Toledo: in what they
saw as sort of truce with colonial hacendados, ayllus had agreed to
pay tribute and labor in the Potosi mines in exchange for the pro-
tection of the Spanish Crown to their rights over land and other re-
sources, against the encroachment of hacendados and the abuses of
colonial authorities. This “pact” also involved the recognition of
a certain measure of political autonomy and self-government. The
movement’s use of the terms of this pact to enact their resistance to
the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century was an assertion
of juridical memory, reminding the Bolivian state that the equality
proclaimed in the law was fictional and that it actually served to
disguise and perpetuate a colonial habitus of brutality and abuse.
The land expropriations played out as a protracted and uneven
confrontation between hacendados—favored by the Ley de Exvin-
culación—and the Indian communities of five departments in An-
dean Bolivia. The latter were tightly organized under the leadership
of Santos Marka T’ula, Feliciano Inka Marasa, Faustino Llanki,
Mateo Alfaro, and many others, who jointly produced—with the
help of their own literate advisers—a coherent juridical discourse
aimed at uncovering the true nature of the liberal reforms, pointing
out that even as members of Parliament made flowery proclama-
tions on equality and citizenship, the army and the private forces
recruited by the hacendados were carrying out a colonial campaign
of expropriation and deprivation of land and political rights. From
the point of view of the caciques-apoderados, Bolivia was not a
liberal state, but a colonial state.
The cacique-apoderado movement evolved on the eve of the
Chaco War (1932–1935) to form the República del Kollasuyo, a
movement led by Eduardo L. Nina Qhispe and many other local
leaders representing their communities in a vast territory cover-
ing at least six departments of Bolivia. According to the research
by Mamani, Nina Qhispe was an Aymara intellectual with urban
36 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

experience and lettered skills who envisioned the “Renovation of

Bolivia” (see TM). The República del Kollasuyu had also a collec-
tive and pluralistic leadership, with representatives not only from
the altiplano and valleys of the Andean region but also from the
Guarani communities of the Izozog region in Santa Cruz. From the
1950s through the 1970s, the Antiguos Caminantes, the Apodera-
dos Espiritualistas, and the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares were In-
dian movements that inherited the networks and the legal skills
of their predecessors. All these Indian organizations had a rural
and an urban constituency. They struggled for economic, politi-
cal, and cultural rights. They demanded full rights and equality as
citizens and at the same time emphasized their right to cultural dif-
ference, political autonomy, and freedom from labor exploitation
and from the expropriation of their ancestral lands.16 Because of
the dual nature of their demands, the indigenous representatives
undertook a legal struggle appealing simultaneously to the colo-
nial legislation of the “two republics” and to the notion of equal
citizenship formally consecrated by the new laws. Through the use
of these legal and rhetorical strategies, which have left abundant
documentary traces, the resistance of the male and lettered elite
of the communities eclipsed the quieter daily practices of women.
The Indian and the state versions of communal land rights were
both masculine and emphasized territoriality, advocating the act
of mapping and cataloging of the Indian universe. They created a
“modern” stereotype of the Indian as a rural and backward sub-
ject, passive and stagnant, enclosed in an isolated community that
was therefore feminized as the object of (male) lettered reform and
progressive action.
The caciques-apoderados faced the tensions and challenges of
embodying a social space of mediation between two opposing ju-
ridical systems. They had to perform the exegesis of the new laws
in order to understand their logic and defend themselves against
their effects. At the same time, they had to translate the demands of
their communities into terms that could be understood by all. They
had to plan their legal strategy using the arguments of the colonial
pact of land and autonomy in exchange for tribute and labor and at
the same time shape in liberal terms the communal perceptions of
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 37

territorial rights and political autonomy. In other words, they were

charged not only with translating for both sides but also with dis-
covering the contradictions in the republican legislation on which
to base their juridical challenges to the usurpation of their lands.
In 1883 the community members of Paria, in the Oruro high
plains, had discovered just such a contradiction, realizing it would
be advantageous to present to the legislators their Títulos de Com-
posición y Venta with the Spanish Crown, acquired from the Visi-
tadores from the sixteenth century onward and kept in communal
archives under the custody of ayllu authorities. Since both hacen-
dados and ayllus had these colonial titles to land, the legislators
had to recognize them as valid and register them within the liberal
frame of the Ley de Exvinculación. To accomplish this act of ju-
ridical translation, they were eventually forced to approve the Law
of November 23rd 1883, by which those communities that had
bought their land from the Spanish Crown and could present their
Títulos de Composición y Venta were exonerated from the divi-
sion of communal property enforced by the liberal Law.17 The legal
figure of private property was a translation of the communal pur-
chase of land titles, done by colonial ayllu representatives (mallkus
and kuraqas) of the Andean altiplano and valleys, who had ac-
quired such titles as a settlement with colonial authorities. Thanks
to the 1883 law, the ayllus were able to claim that they actually
had private ownership rights over their communal lands. In face of
the land expropriations, intensified in the early twentieth century,
these colonial titles were used to claim the legitimate inheritance
rights held by the caciques de sangre as descendants of the colonial
ethnic authorities. The leadership of the cacique-apoderado move-
ment thus found a powerful legal argument to challenge the 1881–
1882 official commissions (Mesas Revisitarias) that granted indi-
vidual land titles to community members, without their consent
and using false apoderados. As a result, communities were forced
to sell vast tracts of land all over the Andes. We don’t know how
much more land the communities would have lost if it was not
for this fierce and persistent legal struggle by the cacique-apodera-
do movement, which eventually grouped more than four hundred
markas or Indian towns, with thousands of affiliated ayllus and
38 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

communities, mostly inhabited by Aymara- or Qhichwa-speaking

peasants. Nor do we know if the 1953 agrarian reform would have
been produced as it was—as a broad movement to recover land
and autonomy for peasant and indigenous communities—if not for
the social imprint of the cacique-apoderado movement. What we
do know, however, is that the memory of the indigenous leaders’
strategies to resist the conversion of the Indians into degraded citi-
zens played an important role in the formation of the modern eth-
nic movement in the Aymara region in the 1970s and 1980s.
This “long memory” of anticolonial and antiliberal resistance
and juridical debate has shaped the Indian resurgence of today.
The present reorganization of the country along ethnic and terri-
torial lines is rooted in these processes of resistance and political
action, facing the various successive reformist attempts by the Bo-
livian elites. The juridical memory of the ayllus’ struggles and the
image of Tupaq Katari (1781), Pablo Zárate Willka (1899), and
the caciques-apoderados of the 1920s have reemerged in the pro-
cess that led to the fall of the neoliberal regimes and the election
of Evo Morales as the first indigenous president in the history of
South America. The weight of the territorial demands of the Indian
movement, and the granting of territorial and political autonomy to
thirty-six “Indian peoples” of the highlands and the lowlands in the
new constitution approved in February 2009, bear witness to the is-
sues and conflicts aired in a long process of confrontation with the
colonial and republican regimes. The territorial and male-led In-
dian movements of today have had a partial though important suc-
cess, through the appeal to memory in their challenge to the liberal
and populist State, forcing the recognition of plural ethnicities and
plural forms of exercise of citizenship and personhood. They have
thus put forward a new model of citizenship that, far from erasing
cultural differences, has reinforced and multiplied them.

Indigenous Peoples and Neoliberal Reforms:

A Majority with a Minority Consciousness

But looking at the other side of the preceding argument, one can
see that the practice of liberal law in Bolivia, even in its modern-
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 39

ized and pluralistic version, has led to subtle exclusionary practices

that affect indigenous populations and women most intensely. The
exclusion began as Indians and women were made invisible in sta-
tistical data. It then continued as their demands were marginalized
to remote peripheral “territories” fragmented and controlled by
local powers, thus cutting off their potential impact on municipal
reform or the overall redesign of state policy and legal frame. This
process culminated in the mestizos’ enlightened hope that the Indi-
an portion of the population would finally extinguish, condemned
to an inevitable mestizaje inscribed in a long-term project of mod-
ernization and progress.18 At the end of the nineteenth century the
renowned liberal historian Gabriel René Moreno already celebrat-
ed this fate, imagining the Andean Indians pushed toward dissolu-
tion by the progressive impulse embodied in the elite entrepreneurs
and landlords. Rough versions of the same fantasies cloud the vi-
sion of today’s elites and prevent them from seeing that Bolivia will
be a colonial country as long as the dominant classes continue to
be colonized, and as long as the mestizo, educated sectors do not
proudly reaffirm their own cultural difference and establish equal
and dialogic relations with the Indian cultures that inhabit the na-
tional territory.
In contrast, we see what the mestizo political middle classes have
done during the neoliberal 1990s. Since the 1976 and the 1992
census, as was the case in the elaboration of the Indigenous Census
of the Low Lands (1993–1995), ethnicity has been consistently re-
stricted and made invisible. From 1988 onward the dismantling of
the Katarista ideological current within the CSUTCB (Single Boliv-
ian Confederation of Peasant Workers) led to a deep internal crisis
and loss of autonomy, a process that quietly continues up to the
present day.19 On the other hand, since the liberal reforms of the
1990s, the eastern lowlands have been turned into a showcase of a
“pure” and “clean” ethnicity, sponsored by the state and interna-
tional organisms such as the World Bank, the Inter-American De-
velopment Bank, and the United Nations Development Program,
whose universalizing approach to Latin America contributed to the
stereotype that Bolivian Indians had little demographic relevance
and were a marginalized minority located in remote and inacces-
sible tropical forest areas.20
40 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

During the 1990s the neoliberal state perfectly interwove such

visions of marginality with its own desire to modernize and to rid
itself of the cumbersome dead weight of ethnicity. This is verified
by even a superficial analysis of the censuses, which clearly shows
the evolving notions of “indianity” that permeate the elites’ legal
and social policy reforms. According to data analyzed by Xavi-
er Albó, out of 4,613,486 people living in the country in 1976,
36.3% were monolingual Spanish speakers. By 1992 those who
declared themselves monolingual Spanish speakers had ascended to
41.7%. Speakers of native languages continued to be the majority,
but among them monolingualism had proportionately decreased:
from 20.4% in 1976 to 11.5% in 1992. On the other hand, the bi-
lingual speakers (Spanish plus one or two native languages) had in-
creased, from 42.5% of the population in 1976 to 45.7% in 1992.
The data also confirm a peculiar reproduction of urban ethnicity
in the cities of Bolivia. According to the 1992 census, the percent-
age of speakers of an indigenous language in the main cities of the
Andean region was as follows: Aymara speakers made up 40% of
the population in La Paz and 60% in El Alto; Qhichwa speakers
made up 50% of the population in Cochabamba, 60% in Sucre,
and 69% in Potosí. In the case of Oruro, the speakers of Qhichwa
(22%) and Aymara (40%) added up to about 51% of the popula-
tion.21 Monolingualism in a native language as well as bilingualism
continued to be more frequent in women, showing the gendered
impact of universal castellanización since the Educational Reform
of 1955.
However, for both rural and urban areas, significant sources of
error in the census reveal persistent attempts by the state to make
indigenous people invisible. The census data show that in the pe-
riod between 1976 and 1992, there was a net decrease in the na-
tive-speaking population and a proportional increase in declared
Spanish monolingualism. However, despite authoritative opinions
to the contrary, the 1992 census excluded children under six years
of age from questions about language. Moreover, materials distrib-
uted by the census ignore data (thoroughly examined by Albó) that
indicate the net growth of the bilingual population, data that also
imply the growth of urban bilingualism through migration and the
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 41

reproduction of urban ethnicity in new generations. The fact that

in the same period the urban population shed its minority status,
growing to encompass a clear majority of 58% of the total popula-
tion, also contributed to a progressive imaginary that breathes life
into the state’s readings of the censuses. Based on this census data,
specialists made calculations and projections that tended to deny
the difficulty of assessing the percentage of the rural population
who maintain a double residence and live “straddling two worlds,”
officiating as “peasants” in the city and as mercantilist and urban
cultural brokers in the countryside. They also underestimate those
who, in the cities, because they exhibit visible symbols of their cul-
tural identity, are discriminated against as “indios,” despite their
fierce denial of being speakers of Aymara when responding to the
census and their equally stubborn declaration of being mestizos
when answering public opinion polls.
The Censo Indígena de Tierras Bajas (Indigenous Census of the
Lowlands), carried out by the United Nations Development Pro-
gramme, through the Instituto Indigenista Boliviano (Indigenist In-
stitute of Bolivia) and the Secretaría Nacional de Asuntos Étnicos,
de Género y Generacionales (National Secretariat of Ethnic, Gen-
erational and Gender Affairs), similarly contributed to indigenous
invisibility. Influenced by the Latin American experience—in the
majority of countries, indigenous people are effective minorities—
the authors of this census project a very strange image of the indig-
enous populations of the Amazon, the eastern lowlands, and the
Chaco. The Confederation of Eastern Lowland Indigenous Peoples
(CIDOB), which emerged in the heat of the Indigenous March of
1990, participated in the organization of the event (although not
in its design), with the goal of measuring the forces that could mo-
bilize their communities around land and political demands articu-
lated in relation to ethnicity, especially after the initial successes
on the legislative level gained by the Marcha Indígena por el Ter-
ritorio y la Dignidad (Indigenous March for Territory and Dignity)
in 1990. The architects of the census rejected the use of linguis-
tic indicators in the 1976–1992 census and instead adopted the
criterion of self-identification (most probably taken from Barth),
which claims to be more appropriate in regions like the Amazon
42 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

where, despite the population’s continued practice of ethnicity and

the prevalence of ethnic forms of political representation, linguis-
tic loss is notorious.22 However, by ignoring the fact that the en-
tire history of the urban population of the Amazon, the Oriente,
and the Chaco is rooted in the colonial Jesuit missions and that,
in addition, the asentamientos caucheros (rubber plantations) had
a large population categorized as indigenous, the census designers
inexplicably excluded populations of two thousand or more inhab-
itants from the census. An error of such magnitude produced a fa-
tal miscounting of the indigenous population in the lowlands, a sit-
uation that resulted in the discrediting of this instrument as official
data for the purposes of municipal reform. In an attempt to correct
this error, the creators of the census based their recalculation of the
indigenous population in these three lowland regions on linguis-
tic indicators. They determined that in departments such as Beni,
where the degree of linguistic loss reaches more than 50% (this
average would surely be higher if it had included the urban com-
ponent), the level of underestimation could not be corrected. These
problems of method and interpretation had profound implications
for defining “the rights of indigenous peoples.” For example, the
results of the census are not compatible with the territorial scheme
enforced by municipalities that articulate urban and rural constitu-
encies, and in which indigenous populations, above all in the areas
associated with historical Catholic missions, have been an integral
part of the urban structure for centuries. The census also does not
allow an accurate calculation of the impact of the migration pro-
cess on rural indigenous populations, which, in particular, affects
women (through the migration of indigenous women workers as
urban domestics, the feminine leadership of the household in areas
of majority masculine labor immigration, etc.). Indigenous women
are also problematically made invisible by the skewed definitions
in the census of “the head of the household,” definitions that fail
to recognize women’s contributions to the complex productive and
reproductive activities of indigenous households. Perhaps the only
(albeit dubious) benefit that we can ascribe to Censo Indígena de
Tierras Bajas is the gift of a meticulous inventory of the lumber
and forest resources in regions of tropical forest that fall under
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 43

indigenous control. We can only hope that those interested in un-

derstanding these results will not solely be the loggers and corpora-
tions that swarm these forests.
We are now able to elaborate fully the idea that informs this
section. The Censos de Población y Vivienda (Cenuses of Popula-
tion and Housing) of 1976 and 1992, and the Censo Indígena de
Tierras Bajas, the two principal political state instruments in the
area of population and development, subtly influenced the forma-
tion of the literate public opinion in Bolivia in the very definition
of the nature and scope of the notion of “indigenous rights.” In
this way, though the censuses have documented the well-known
growth in bilingual urban and rural populations, the Educational
Reform focuses principally on monolingual communities that are
isolated in rural areas and is able to ignore the demands for linguis-
tic recuperation that support intercultural and bilingual education
for all. In the same way, the Popular Participation Act (1994) did
not recognize indigenous territories consolidated at the beginning
of 1990 and indirectly excluded those ethnic organizations from
participating in urban municipal reforms (monopolized by the Jun-
tas Vecinales, or urban neighborhood councils). In the traditional
Andean zones, the demands of federations of ayllus and of other
groups organized around ethnicity were blocked by political par-
ties and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).23
Finally, indigenous women are further alienated by this space of
mediation in which literate culture, Western notions of develop-
ment, and patron-client politics impose a patriarchal political cul-
ture in which they figure solely as symbolic elements of transaction
within dominant (male) strategies of power.
Thus the state’s narrative of indigeneity, via the census informa-
tion and through the unconscious desires of the dominant minor-
ity, represents the Indians as a diminishing entity, with indigenous
languages in blatant and quick deterioration and with the rural
world persistently depopulating. All of these factors contributed to
narrow the consciousness as a majority that informed the political
consolidation of the Kataristas and Indianistas, who in the 1990s
began to acquire a minority consciousness.24 During the last two
decades of the twentieth century, the diminishing representation of
44 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

the demographic potential and autonomous politicization of indig-

enous communities was translated into a loss of historical memory,
an erosion of cultural self-esteem, and a series of subaltern charac-
teristics that led them to occupy a subordinated role in the public
sphere, thus perpetuating their discrimination and exclusion.

The New Indianity and the Plurinational State Reforms

Intense mobilizations of indigenous and popular sectors began in

2000 and continued with varying intensity until the overthrow of
interim president Carlos Mesa G. and the call for new elections
for December 2005. This complex and convulsive process revealed
the collapse of neoliberal promises of equity and market democra-
cy, and the emerge of a new style of ethnicity politics, represented
by the powerful coca producers’ movement in the Chapare and
the leadership of Aymara union leader Evo Morales. These pro-
cesses also bear the imprint of deeper trends in population move-
ments and ideological identifications. As we can see in the 2001
census, the linguistic indicators of ethnicity were supplemented by
self-identification, a trend that—contrary to the expectations of the
census designers—confirmed and expanded the recuperation of a
majority status. Speakers of a native language—whether monolin-
gual or bilingual—had slightly increased to become 49% of the
total population, but in spite of an accelerated urbanization pro-
cess, the self-identification with one or other native people rose to
62% of the population. Ethnicity, no doubt, had become a conten-
tious political arena, and its state effect was to reverse the trend of
marginalization that was so blatant during the neoliberal reforms
of the 1980s and 1990s. But on the other hand the predominance
of partisan politics, including the MAS (Movement toward Social-
ism, led by Evo Morales) has narrowed and subordinated Indian
demands and turned them into cultural inputs to the new mestizo
elite revolutionary project, which partially incorporated them into
the new laws, in the restricted form of “Indigenous Autonomies,”
enclosed in thirty-six TCOs (Original Community Lands) recog-
nized by the new Agrarian Reform Act (Ley INRA) and the new
Political Constitution of the Plurinational State (February 2009).
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 45

The localization of ethnicity in bounded rural territories leaves

aside the political imprint of urban ethnicity and multiethnic low-
land settlements. Even the coca-growers movement is deprived of
ethnic identity, since the lowland areas where it was born and ex-
panded to become a fundamental political force are not part of
the “Indigenous Autonomous Territories” recognized by the new
constitution. In spite of the radical discourses around decoloniza-
tion and a “process of change” that is being put forth by the new
government, fundamental aspects of the neoliberal reforms (par-
ticularly the Agrarian Reform and the Popular Participation Acts)
have largely remained untouched.

Women’s Rights or the Limits of Territoriality

Up to this point, by way of an exegesis of the normative produc-

tion and political discourse of the movements denominated as “in-
digenous,” both modern and historical, I have produced a reading
of how gender in the lettered masculine world is translated into
the laws and state practices of Bolivia. I end this article with some
ideas about the implications of all of these processes for women, be
they indigenous, cholas, or birlochas, or even for those who belong
to the lettered world of the mestizo elite.
The situation of women in Bolivia is shaped by a broader co-
lonial situation: the Western cultural and ideological matrix is
installed within the state, guiding its philosophy and policy. This
matrix names, enumerates, and oppresses the diverse peoples and
native cultures of Bolivia, inserting them into a hierarchy based
on the Western assessment of their relative humanity. Western co-
lonial ideology deems racial and cultural “others” semi-human,
marginalizing them for their differences and constructing them as
subservient subjects, originally bequeathed to the republic as spoils
of the conquest from which it was born. Even the most advanced
spaces of enlightened modernity and the new mechanisms of popu-
list mediation grafted onto the state from the 1950s onward have
reproduced these structures of colonial oppression. Yet, despite
more than a half century of homogenization through a constantly
renovated pact of citizenship with the state, Bolivia contains a pan-
46 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

orama of ethnicity whereby entire populations have, despite their

insistence in the fierce negation of their ethnicity, paradoxically
transformed this same act of negation into a new mark of ethnicity.
This is the case of the Andean cholaje. Despite their adoption of
the three-piece suit, private property, and many other Western cul-
tural characteristics, the cholo remains subaltern precisely because
he practices such strategies of cultural mimesis and social climbing
that end up reinforcing—by way of caricature—the dominant cul-
tural world and its appearance of equality.
The cholaje’s adoption of and containment by their own mi-
metic practices illuminates the situation of women in Bolivia. One
of the clearest examples of the stigmatization of cultural mimesis
has been the evolution, from the eighteenth century, of the fash-
ion of the chola paceña as studied by Rossana Barragán.25 Initially
conceived as a strategy that would allow indigenous migrants to
gain social mobility and access the mercantile dominant culture,
the practice of wearing the pollera (wide skirt), the Manila shawl,
and the Borsalino hat (adopted in the nineteenth century) has been
converted into a form a resistance against cultural assimilation,
as the clothing items have come to be seen as emblems of an op-
pressed and subaltern ethnicity. However, this attempt to re-ap-
propriate the markers of the dominant culture, to don them with a
difference, remains ambiguous: it both highlights and negates dif-
ferences of gesture and conduct, but it also masks the assimilation-
ist aspirations and self-perceptions as “mestizas” or “middle-class”
women, which are projected onto the working classes as a whole.
I have studied these processes elsewhere in an attempt to trace the
colonial construction of identities, particularly the identities of the
“cholas” and “mestizas” of contemporary Bolivia.26 What interests
me here is this question from the perspective of “rights,” under-
stood through historical examples, to which I prefer to adhere. The
following analysis draws on many ideas that have previously been
expressed in different forms.
Migrant women’s (cholas’ or birlochas’) construction as a de-
graded space of “mestizaje” within the structure of the urban la-
bor market constitutes a prime example of the phenomenon I have
been discussing: propelled by their desire to mirror the Westernized
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 47

dominant elite, they end up representing the characteristics of urban

modernity in an archaic and caricatured form. No doubt the segre-
gation and exclusion imposed upon these intermediate classes con-
tribute to the new fixity of borders surrounding the cholas, strand-
ing them halfway along the path to Westernization and citizenship.
Paradoxically, the most visible trace of this process appears in the
cholas’ attempts to render their own culture invisible and clandes-
tine. As a study by Elizabeth Peredo on market women in La Paz
shows, they pass on to their children this negation of their ances-
try, estranging the next generation from their rural cultures of ori-
gin.27 Historians have suggested that these spaces associated with
“mestizaje,”—of “scaled contempt” or “linked exclusions,”—have
been constituted through the ethnic uprooting, the shift in category
of origin, marriage to men of higher status, and many other prac-
tices.28 However, none of the indigenous rights discussed above
actually addresses the specific problems these women face: labor
discrimination, the lack of educational opportunities, and the frus-
trations of citizenship that affects precisely these emergent and up-
ward-climbing middle rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
The experience of ethnicity as it is lived daily in the highlands,
valleys, and lowlands (as well as in the cities) undoubtedly has
much to do with the structural forces that shape the labor, mar-
riage strategies, and cultural perceptions of hundreds of thousands
of women. The already discussed study of four different ethnic set-
tings in Bolivia (three rural and one urban), which I compiled in
1996, has shown how the invisible work of women contributes to
the reproduction of ethnicity, even in urban and mercantile con-
texts where they occupy the center of a wide social network that
enables the survival of the households and the family businesses of
migrant families. In this “third labor shift,” women complete aynis
(reciprocity arrangements), nourish social and fictive kinship rela-
tions of compadrazgo, and organize businesses or workshops on
the basis of circuits of nonmonetary labor and produce exchange.
The work time devoted to these practices permits not only eco-
nomic survival but also cultural reproduction and the prosperity
of their businesses and families, despite the barrier of discrimina-
tion that weighs against them. In all of these contexts, women’s
48 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

productive labor and enterprise does not enjoy social respect and
recognition, eclipsed by the avatars of the migration adventure of
men, as the classic study by Albó et al. showed some three decades
ago.29 As Lucila Criales has documented, women resist this patri-
archal model by returning to the countryside, where they convert
the patron saint celebration and its mark of origin into a fleeting
scenario of feminine empowerment, extravagantly spending mon-
ey and accumulating symbolic prestige. These acts both legitimate
and compensate for the profound inequalities of everyday life,
where the shortcomings and sufferings they experience as “cholas”
earn them the cultural contempt of the dominant urban society.30
Until now, no indigenous organization has reclaimed these settings
as terrains of struggle, and there is no notion of indigenous rights
that applies to these women, who in the state imaginary exist only
as “mestizas.”
It is possible to observe the same phenomenon from a differ-
ent angle by reviewing the history of labor union formation in the
valleys of Cochabamba in the decades following the revolution of
1952 and the agrarian reform of 1953.31 This history confirms the
systematic exclusion of women from the new public spaces con-
structed in the heat of unionization and the political mobilization
of the peasantry (sindicatos campesinos). Both in Mizque and in
Tiraque, the political process unleashed by agrarian mobilization
ended up blocking the entrance of women to the public sphere and
converting the labor unions, armed militias, and other organisms
into spaces of state patron-client relations and masculine media-
tion. Paradoxically, it was the secular mercantile and social activ-
ity of the women of Cochambamba—selling chicha, engaging in
long-distance trade and other activities—that permitted the men
to dedicate the majority of their time to union organization and
party politics.32 The exaltation of the chichería (chicha bar) and
of the maternal virtues of the women (across the urban-rural con-
tinuum of mestizaje) as well as the popular myth of “matriarchy”
prevalent in the valleys, demonstrates the perversity of the lettered
image of the citizen and its real consequences for women: when it
came to the relentless exploitation of mothers and grandmothers,
the unionist and itinerant workers of the valleys consented to a
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 49

degraded form of citizenship that was grafted onto the masculine

and patron-client networks of the dominant party. Shame and self-
loathing are in this way transferred onto women, who represent
rural backwardness, a pre-mercantile economy, and the family’s
barbarity of the past.
But perhaps there is an even more vivid example of ethnic seg-
regation and discrimination in the Andean region of Bolivia—al-
though this exists as well in other regions—and this is the remuner-
ated domestic service, which characterizes the structure of urban
employment in our country. According to a study published by the
Center for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA),
the contribution of this population to the urban EAP (economi-
cally active population) has grown, from 5.0% in 1985 to 6.2%
in 1991, reaching 47,909 domestic workers. Of them, 90% were
women and 70% were migrants, that is, “indigenous” women who
were born in rural communities and speak native languages. Aside
from domestic work, which provides a salary that usually does not
reach 50% of the normal minimum wage, the urban economy pro-
vides few spaces for indigenous migrant women’s labor.33 Certainly
a situation like this exacerbates gender segregation in the society
as a whole and alludes to the profound inequalities that have up
to now been ignored by radical feminist thinking in Bolivia. One
of these inequalities, in my opinion, is the postponement of the
debate over paternal and male domestic co-responsibilities made
possible by the existence of these other women at home, who carry
the burden of the women’s second labor shift. What remains out-
side of the discussion regarding this transaction between women
in distinct positions of economic power and cultural origin is the
representation of domestic labor as “naturally” belonging to the
feminine sex. Although this naturalization is something that femi-
nist theory has contested for many decades, in Bolivia it continues
to be nearly a taboo subject due to the invisible labor of domestic
women workers, who work in the households of even the most
radical feminist activists and ideologues.
In the context of the debate about indigenous rights, the ex-
amples given in this section point to a situation in which even the
most basic human rights are denied to people on the grounds of
50 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

their gender and ethnicity. While situations like the low level of
salaries for domestic work, the duplication of the burden of labor
by women who are heads of households, and selective emigration
affect indigenous communities in diverse regions of the country as
much as their migratory flow to the cities, these populations have
yet to find a space for their demands within ethnic organizations.
These organizations have confined their demands to a definition
of collective rights based on territory, which, paradoxically, lim-
its the very demands of indigenous populations that live outside
these narrowly defined spaces. While salutary in the moment in
which it emerged, the indigenous struggle for territory has been
an important site of interpellation to the Bolivian state. Neverthe-
less we continue to believe that the issue of “dignity” has not been
addressed in full, as it is expressed in a plurality of contexts, both
urban and rural, in which ethnicity is associated with the loss of
prestige and lack of fulfillment of human rights. The territorial-
ization of indigenous rights has prevented indigenous women and
their communities from escaping the ethnic straightjacket embed-
ded in the liberal conception of rights, a discourse that produced
a narrow literate and masculine space that erases numerous ques-
tions of human and citizenship rights implicit in the practices of
indigenous mobilizations.
Perhaps it is because neither the state nor indigenous organiza-
tions have taken up a “politics of ethnicity” capable of presenting
alternatives for women that they have been unable to sufficiently
advance the gains achieved by the recognition of the multiethnic
character of the nation in the new Constitución Política del Estado
and other similar measures.34 In the same way, as long as indigenous
organizations do not recognize female migrants—who work in the
degraded conditions of middle-class urban homes—as members of
their people and communities, their own notion of rights will re-
main limited and fragmented. As long as ethnic organizations are
not capable of facing the phenomena of gendered oppression that
is unleashed by the emigration of male labor force to the city or
to the zafra, and the increasingly extended problem of indigenous
households led by women, the notion of human rights will remain
empty rhetoric.35 If this is the case, we will have contributed to the
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 51

prolongation of the state’s aspiration to transform the conscious-

ness of a Bolivian indigenous majority held in the 1980s into a
consciousness of a minority that lives only off the crumbs of “de-
velopment” and the unequal ecological and economic transactions
within the mestizo-dominated power structure, which has not sub-
stantially changed with the recent electoral events leading to the
ascent of the first indigenous president. The implicit corollary to
this entire argument points to the need for a simultaneous decolo-
nization of both gender and indigeneity, of the quotidian and the
political, by way of a theory and a practice that links alternative
and pluralist notions of citizenship rights with rights inhering in
traditional indigenous laws and customs, as much in legislation as
in the everyday and private practices of the people.

Notes

1. The term cholo/a is used in Bolivia, generally, to refer to indigenous

people who have emigrated to urban areas and live somewhere be-
tween the cultural spaces of mestizo and indigenous identity. The term
birlocha refers specifically to chola women who adopt the dress style
and customs of what Rivera refers to in jest as the refinadas, the upper-
class and formally educated women associated with urban spaces.
2. See the preface to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
3. Rossana Barragán, “El espíritu de la modernidad boliviana: Ciuda-
danía, infamia y jerarquía patriarcal,” paper given at the Seminar on
Nation, Ethnicity and Citizenship, organized by Sephis (South-South
Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development),
New Delhi, February 6–8, 1996. Hereafter cited as EM.
4. It is hard to believe that this law remained in force until the 1995
reforms.
5. Juridical norms like the patria potestad are the living incarnation of
an even more archaic and patriarchal law, implicit in the multiple
normative products of colonial Catholicism, as has been shown by
Barragán in EM.
6. The notion of habitus has been used here in the sense proposed by
Pierre Bourdieu in El Sentido Práctico, trans. Álvaro Pazos (Barce-
lona: Taurus, 1991). Published in English as The Logic of Practice,
trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
52 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

7. The ayllu was the basic political and social unit since precolonial
times. It refers to a (sometimes discontinuous) territory where people
are tied together through kinship and symbolic networks. It encom-
passes religious, symbolic, and inheritance practices peculiar to the
people who belong to it. It loosely could translate as “community” in
English but goes well beyond the meaning of this term.
8. See Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita, “Aspectos de génereo en
Qaqachaka: Maternidad, textiles y prácticas textuales alternativas en
los Andes,” in Ser mujer indígena, chola o birlocha en la Bolivia post-
colonial de los 90, ed. Silvia Rivera (La Paz: Subsecretaría de Asuntos
de Género, Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, 1996). This edited vol-
ume is cited hereafter as SM.
9. Compare with Denise Arnold, “Hacer al hombre a imagen de ella:
Aspectos de género en los textiles de Qaqachaka,” Chungará: Revista
de Antropología Chilena 26.1 (1994): 79–115.
10. See, for example, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Mestizaje colonial an-
dino: Una hipótesis de trabajo,” in Violencias encubiertas en Bolivia,
vol. 1: Cultura y política, ed. Xavier Albó and Raúl Barrios (La Paz:
CIPCA, 1993) and Zulema Lehm and Silvia Rivera, Los artesanos lib-
ertarios y la ética del trabajo (La Paz: Ediciones del THOA, 1988).
11. Caciques and kuraqas refer to leaders of indigenous ayllus who held
local political power in the time of the Inka. Though this power was
severely eroded in the colonial period, it remained substantially strong
until the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century.
12. See, for example, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “La expansión del lati-
fundio en el Altiplano boliviano: Elementos para la caracterización
de una oligarquía regional,” Avances 2 (1978).
13. Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), El indio Santos Marka
T’ula, cacique principal de los ayllus de Qallapa y apoderado general
de las comunidades originarias de la República (La Paz, Ediciones
del THOA, 1988), hereafter cited as IS; Carlos Mamani, Taraqu
1866–1935: Masacre, guerra y ‘renovación’ en la biografía de Edu-
ardo L. Nina Qhispi (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1991), hereafter cited as
TM; Leandro Condori and Esteban Ticona, El escribano de los ca-
ciques apoderados, Karikinakan Purirarunakan Qillqiripa (La Paz:
HISBOL-THOA, 1992).
14. See Frank Salomon, “Ancestor Cults and Resistance to the State in
Arequipa, 1748–1754,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness
in the Andean Peasant World, 16th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve Stern
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); see also Juan Félix
 Rivera Cusicanqui: Postcolonial Modernity 53

Arias, Historia de una esperanza: Los apoderados espiritualistas de

Chuquisaca, 1936–1964 (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1994), hereafter cited
as HE.
15. Markas were rural towns or pueblos de reducción where the Indian
population was resettled in early colonial times. They loosely corre-
sponded to the precolonial federation of ayllus gathered around ritual
and political centers.
16. See HE and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Pedimos la revisión de límites:
Un episodio de incomunicación de castas en el movimiento de caci-
ques-apoderados, 1919–1921” (hereafter cited as PR), Reproducción
y transformación en las sociedades andinas, siglos XVI–XX, ed. Se-
gundo Moreno and Frank Salomon (Quito: Abya Yala, 1992).
17. See, for example, IS and PR.
18. Mestizaje is defined as the notion of racial and cultural mixing, which
consists of the complex ideas surrounding race, nation, and multicul-
turalism and their role in nation building.
19. The Katarista political movement, named after Tupac Katari, who
led the 1781 indigenous rebellions in and around La Paz, has been
a militant indigenous movement born in the late 1960s and largely
made up of Aymara nationalists who seek to revitalize Indian auton-
omy, culture, and religion. See Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but
Not Defeated”: Peasant Struggles among the Aymara and Qhichwa
in Bolivia, 1900–1980 (Geneva: UNRISD, 1986).
20. Mexico and Colombia, for instance, come closer to this model of in-
digenous marginality.
21. Xavier Albó, Bolivia plurilingüe: Guía para planificadores y educado-
res (La Paz: UNICEF and CIPCA, 1995), vol. 11:69.
22. Los grupos étnicos y sus fronteras: La organización social de las
diferencias culturales, ed. Fredrik Barth (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1976). Published in English as Ethnic Groups and Their
Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fre-
drik Barth (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).
23. Silvia Rivera and THOA, Ayllus y proyectos de desarrollo en el norte
de Potosí (La Paz: Aruwiyiri, 1992).
24. A counterpart to the Katarista movement, the Indianista movement
developed a more radical vision based on Indian autonomy and the
right to self-government.
25. The chola from La Paz, an emblematic icon of subaltern female eth-
nicity in Bolivia. See Rossana Barragán, “Entre polleras, llicllas y
ñañacas: Los mestizos y la emergencia de la tercera república,” in
54 qui parle spring/summer 2010 vol.18, no.2

Etnicidad, economía y simbolismo en los Andes: II Congreso Inter-

nacional de Etnohistoria, Coroico, ed. Silvia Arze, Rossana Barragán,
Laura Escobari, and Ximena Medinacelli (La Paz: HISBOL/IFEA/
SBH-ASUR, 1992).
26. See SM and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Diferencia complementarie-
dad y lucha anticolonial: Enseñanzas de la historia andina” (hereafter
cited as DC) in 500 años de patriarcado en el Nuevo Mundo, Clara
Leyla Alfonso (Santo Domingo: CIPAF/Red Entre Mujeres, 1992).
27. Elizabeth Peredo, Recoveras de los Andes: La identidad de la chola
del mercado: una aproximación psicosocial (La Paz: ILDI-TAHIPA-
MU, 1992).
28. These terms (desprecio escalonado and exclusiones escalonadas in
Spanish) come from Tierry Saignes, Los Andes Orientales: Historia
de un olvido (Cochabamba: CERES, 1985) and SM, respectively.
29. Xavier Albó, Tomás Greaves, and Godofredo Sandóval, Chukiyawu,
la cara ayamra de La Paz, vol. 1: El paso a la ciudad (La Paz: CIPCA,
1981).
30. Lucila Criales, Mujer y conflictos socio-culturales: El caso de las
migrantes de Caquiaviri en la ciudad de La Paz (La Paz: Aruwiyiri,
1994).
31. María Laura Lagos, Autonomía y poder: Dinámica de Clase y Cul-
tura en Cochabamba (La Paz: Plural, 1997), as well as Susan Paulson,
“Familias que no ‘conyugan’ e identidades que no conjugan: La vida
en Mizque desafía nuestras categorías,” in SM.
32. Chicha is an alcoholic drink made from fermented corn or other
grains, used for ritual purposes by the Incas, and consumed ritually
and socially throughout the Andean region today.
33. ILDIS-CEDLA, Informe Social Bolivia: Balance de indicadores so-
ciales (La Paz: ILDIS-CEDLA, 1994).
34. The notion of Indigenous Rights was first introduced in the 1994 Po-
litical Constitution of the Bolivian State and was further expanded in
the recent constitutional text approved in early 2009.
35. The zafra is the sugar cane harvest. In the last decades this migra-
tory process is increasingly oriented toward other countries, such as
Argentina, Brazil, and Spain.