Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
culto (cultured) and the nouns criterio (discernment) and civilización (civilization)—along rigidly separate rural and urban lines.
A variant of this local conceptual model posited the qualities of middle-class distinction as ebbing in concentric circles along a gradient from urban to rural areas. A bus driver and urban neighborhood leader whose parents had been Sacaba provincial elites, Don Álvaro, explained to me earnestly that Choro residents rarely left Choro and Sacaba Town residents rarely left the provincial town center. While giving me a ride one day between Sacaba Town and Choro in 2005, he affirmed that people in the town of Sacaba had more “criterio” than those in Choro. Pointing through the car window to mechanics’ garages, half-built restaurants, and cornfields that sprawled along the highway, he argued that the criterio of the inhabitants of each locality decreased gradually the closer one got to Choro. He struggled to define criterio, explaining that, whatever it was, criterio existed in a person as a function of the amount of time he or she had spent in the town of Sacaba or the city of Cochabamba. Criterio thus seemed to mean a classed and raced form of good taste, akin to Bourdieu’s use of the term “distinction” to depict middle-class notions of propriety, discrimination, morality, and intelligence (Bourdieu 1984). Don Álvaro’s depiction of people residing in officially designated rural areas as motionless, as stuck in place, was so striking because it was readily contradicted by the couples we passed at that very moment waiting by the side of the highway for rides to the tropics, bundles of clothing at their feet, and by the stream of minibuses that zoomed past us in both directions and which Don Alvaro himself had driven for many years. Sacaba, like the region of Egypt studied by Amitav Ghosh, “possessed all of the busy restlessness of an airport’s transit lounge” (Ghosh 1994:173). Don Álvaro’s notion of a clean rural-urban gradient of identity, however crude and ill matched to the reality, was still more nuanced than the binary divisions between rural and urban identities used by many other Sacabans.
Race and class intertwined with geography, furthermore, in the binary hierarchies of power. Racial insults persisted despite the revolutionary government’s declaration in 1952 that indios would be identified henceforth as campesinos and that all Bolivians would henceforth term themselves as socially equal, mixed-race mestizos rather than as subordinate indios or superior whites (blancos). Racial meanings that slipped into explicitly class-based terms like campesino were also woven into geographic terms like rural, countryside, urban, and city (Klein 2003; see also de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001).
Bolivian public and private talk also remained liberally peppered with explicitly racist epithets in 2006. Some regions of Bolivia experienced more severe racial polarization, for example, in eastern Bolivian regions such as Santa Cruz. Choreños who had traveled or settled there sometimes reported that easterners sometimes called them “Indians” or “shitty highland Indians [kollas de mierda]” (see Fabricant 2012; Postero 2007). According to reports I heard from several people from various regions of the country in 2009, such insults increased immediately following the election of Evo Morales in 2005, as eastern elites saw their social and economic supremacy challenged (see also Schultz 2008).7 Many Sacabans, in turn, referred to western highland residents as laris, a term that combined the racism of the Spanish epithet indio with the rural connotations of the English class term hick. Lari signified uncivilized backwardness and moral inferiority. “If you sit down with [laris] they won’t share even a morsel of food with you!” exclaimed Bald César, a sawmill owner residing in Choro. “They are not civilized people, they are savages!” similarly exclaimed Don Felipe, a man whom neighbors at times insulted behind his back as a lari himself, because he was poor and was widely criticized as having too many children. A desperately poor teenager, whose home lacked electricity and running water, explained why her father refused to live with her and her mother in Choro. A neighbor in Choro “called my dad a lari and that’s why he doesn’t come. As if he’s a lari! Her son-in-law, well, he’s a little lari [larisito] himself!” Amanda, in a moment of frustration with the elected leaders of Choro’s community council, exclaimed that they were “laris” because “they are very disorganized!” Disorganization, imprudence (“too many” children), poverty, lack of generosity, as well as highland origins could thus elicit racist epithets of Indianness.
In Sacaba, racist insults between intimates hurled in moments of anger were often couched in irony or joking, though they appeared to sting their targets deeply nevertheless. One day, for example, a married couple was having an argument while drinking with friends in a Choro chichería. The wife spat “Lari!” at her husband and explained to me with a tense smile that she only insulted him with that term when he went on a drinking binge. He emphasized to me, by contrast, his face also rigid and tight lipped, that she insulted him in this way because he hailed from a highland town. His grim expression attested that he felt this racial insult from his wife sharply. As with Edgar, who explained that he was justified in treating Doña Cinda with disregard because she was a chola, racist insults between intimates appeared to be deeply wounding.
Racialized teasing was also very common. For example, Deysi and Amanda were extremely fond of Edgar’s son, Teo, whom they had help raise, but did not spare him their sharp tongues or biting humor. Since he had come to live with them at age three, his aunts often mockingly shouted the same epithets at him that they used on their brothers when they did something that annoyed them: “Negro, indio, feo [Black, Indian, ugly]!” Although they always assured me that they were joking, Teo repeated these outbursts in other contexts, making the racism of these insults more explicit. For example, once when he was eight, while watching Sábado gigante, a Saturday-night TV variety show broadcast from Miami throughout Latin America, Teo gazed raptly at the bikini-clad, high-heeled hostesses who often performed dance routines. As one Afro-Latina hostess entered the screen, Teo screamed, “Negra, fea!” I was shocked at this harsh expression of prejudice, particularly since virulent racist epithets in Bolivia were usually targeted at Indians, rather than at Afro-Bolivians, who comprise about 1 percent of the population. Afro-Bolivians were usually the targets, instead, of an objectifying, paternalistic exoticism. The entire family, including Teo, adored Doña Saturnina’s Afro-Bolivian godson and often remarked with wonder, rather than scorn, at the contrast between his green eyes and skin darker than theirs. It seemed that Teo had picked up on the barbed quality of his aunts’ banter but not yet learned to direct it precisely nor to cloak it in the guise of humor.
Even the kindest people participated in such racialized banter and expressed the finely tuned color-consciousness of Bolivian society, couching their remarks in irony or joking. A few months before becoming ordained as a Catholic priest, a gentle friend of the family named Denis had Doña Saturnina’s children in stitches recounting his recent clever play on words. Their cousin Wilson was known to be very sensitive about the fact that his four-year-old son was dark skinned. “Your son is very choco,” Denis had told Wilson mischievously. Choco was the local colloquial Spanish term for light skinned and blond. When Wilson turned on Denis, furious, insisting that Denis was insulting his child by deliberately saying something that everyone knew was not true, Denis had retorted, “I wasn’t insulting him. He is very choco: he is choco … late!” (a pun on “chocolate” brown). Denis grinned roguishly at us while retelling the exchange and Doña Saturnina’s children roared with laughter. They repeated his joke many times during the subsequent weeks and marveled at his wit.
People also turned racialized disgust on themselves. Amanda, like many other women I knew in Sacaba, often lamented that she was ugly because her skin was “too dark.” Once Amanda, after a long, introspective discussion with her brothers and sisters after we had finished dinner, looked up seriously at me and told me that she had not yet had children (she was then thirty-eight years old and single) because she was afraid of passing on her dark skin to her child. “It was a joke, a joke!” she exclaimed when she saw my horrified expression. She insisted that she was teasing me precisely because she knew how earnestly I always tried to talk her out of such sentiments. Sometimes people extended this internalized racism to their children, like the many strangers on Sacaba buses who lamented to me that their children were “dark and ugly” when they saw my pale, redheaded baby. These were melancholy variants of more lighthearted but still racialized exclamations