Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
position.
The Axes of Inequality in Sacaba
Alternation between different poles of identity warrants closer attention to both the language and scale of idioms of inequality. Class and race, in the Cochabamba region and other postcolonial societies, as described in Chapter 1, have historically been intertwined concepts. Furthermore, people experience social status through a series of binary oppositions of race and class terms (Weismantel 2001). Some of these terms emerged from Spanish colonialism while other terms are of newer origin. These terms raise distinctions based on wealth, as in pobre (poor) versus rico (rich); race, as in indio versus mestizo; and geography, such as rural or urban (Table 1).
Table 1. Common binary terms of unequal race/class in Sacaba.
| Subaltern | Elite | Formal Bases of Distinction |
| indio—Indian lari, salvaje—savage | blanco—white q’ara—White urbanite | Race |
| pobre—poor clase popular—popular class humilde—humble waqcha—poor and alone | rico, ricachón, de dinero—rich | Wealth |
| campesino, agricultor—peasant | rico, ricachón, de dinero—rich; profesional—professional, college educated | Occupation, peasant geography (rural/urban), and wealth |
| indígena—indigenous originario—native | blanco—white | Race-culture (positive evaluation of indigeneity) |
| analfabeto—illiterate no ha estudiado—didn’t study | bachiller, professional, college educated | Education |
| chola—wears a pollera and hair in braids | chota—not a chola | Race, class, and education |
| rural | urbano—urban citadino—city dweller | Geography |
| no chapareño—Someone who hasn’t earned wealth from the Chapare | chapareño—earned wealth from the Chapare | Wealth |
Source: Author’s fieldwork
The assigning of elite or subaltern categories depended on who was involved in a particular interaction. Deysi clearly considered herself a professional in relation to Doña Cinda but appeared to feel less of a professional when confronted with David’s pale, wealthy physician friends from the city of Cochabamba. Doña Cinda herself at times asserted social superiority when speaking of even poorer people.
These binary oppositions were shaped by the particular scale of a given place. Within the rural locality of Choro, Deysi vied for elite status with wealthier but less highly educated people but could assert middle-class distinction over poorer people. When she circulated in the provincial space of Sacaba, she was potentially subject to social demotion, as more highly educated or wealthier people who held stronger associations to urban institutions and social networks could outrank her and inspire her to declare herself a campesina. When she moved in social circles based in the city of Cochabamba, as at David and Eliana’s daughter’s baptism party, this potential demotion was more pronounced.
While these middling identities were relational—subject to the status of the person with whom an individual was interacting—some important patterns of identification and status were apparent in the social worlds of the community of Choro, the municipality of Sacaba, the city of Cochabamba, and the nation of Bolivia. Within the social space of Choro, I observed local residents define four general categories of people: very poor; professionals or university students like David and Amanda; prosperous merchants such as truckers, business owners, and farmers; and cocaine traffickers (small scale compared to internationally infamous traffickers but wealthier than all others in Choro). On the scale of Sacaba Municipality, two additional class and racial categories emerged in conversations among local residents: urban-based professionals, who lived primarily in the densely populated corridor along the highway between Sacaba and the city of Cochabamba; and provincial elite families whose members had been known as vecinos (townspeople, literally “neighbors”) since colonial times. Their families had been medium-to large-scale landowners, professionals, or wealthy merchants before Bolivia’s 1953 Agrarian Reform. They identified themselves as emphatically not campesino and not Indian, though their physical appearance and wealth were not always distinguishable from that of rural residents. When the social environment widened to include the city of Cochabamba, as at David’s daughter’s baptism, people of greater wealth, lighter skin, and elite transnational connections entered: people who had obtained master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Spanish, U.S., Mexican, or Argentine universities or who identified themselves as belonging to the small European-descended population in Bolivia.
If many Sacabans used alternating binary opposites as terms of identity, some people seemed to wrestle actively with the question of whether or not rurality and urbanity represented sharply separated, unequal worlds and identities. The vision of rurality connoting poverty, cultural otherness, and backwardness is exceedingly common in postcolonial places like Bolivia (e.g., Pigg 1992; de la Cadena 2000; Kearney 1996; Subramanian 2009).
Certainly, there were differences in access to amenities between officially rural Choro and officially urban Sacaba Town. I ran out of Doña Saturnina’s house one afternoon in 2004 to try to find a head of garlic and a packet of mayonnaise—common items in corner stores in the provincial town of Sacaba—to cook dinner. Of the four tiny stores located in private homes in Doña Saturnina’s sector of Choro, all were either closed or sold out of both items. When I arrived home empty handed, Celia, the twenty-two-year-old architecture student and the baby of the family, greeted me with a scowl. “This is the furthest corner of the world [el último rincón del mundo],” she exclaimed in mock despair, as she lolled in front of the television on her mother’s bed, amid the blare of highway traffic. “I’m sure that where you live, there are lots of supermarkets—there are hypermarkets [hipermercados],” she said, surely thinking of IC Norte, a chain of enormous grocery stores in Cochabamba City. Such complaints presented Choro as a rural space walled off from and inferior to urban ones, despite its many amenities that distinguished it from more remote hamlets.
Yet this notion of rural and urban as separate vied with everyday evidence of movement and fluidity: the long history of relational identities and geographic mobility; the economic ties between farmers, merchants, and urban consumers through regional markets; more recent waves of migration since the 1970s coca boom; and the administrative linking of rural to urban areas within the same municipalities through the Law of Popular Participation in the 1990s. The actual state of infrastructure and services in much of Sacaba Municipality was better than in many officially designated rural areas of Bolivia. The construction of a major highway in the 1960s had permitted widespread electrification and running water for all but the poorest Choro households by the 1990s. Public transportation from Choro to Sacaba and Cochabamba was available during the day to anyone who could afford bus fare.
The most perplexing issue for Doña Saturnina’s family, however, was not the paucity of services in Choro. They spent most days in Sacaba or Cochabamba and, like other prosperous families in Choro, could purchase mayonnaise there and could, more significantly, afford to pay for urban doctors and schooling. Rather, their urgent questions centered on the extent to which they and others identified