Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow

      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