Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
your [strawberry blond] husband so I can make a blond baby!” Skin and hair color were common sources of nicknames such as Negrita (Blackie) or Choca (Blondie, light skinned).8
These examples show racialized thinking alive and well in Bolivia, despite the government’s declaration in 1952 that racial consciousness would disappear by fiat. Racial signs, such as skin color and dress, could at times be synonymous with subordinate class signs, while at other times they diverged. Dark skin did not prevent Amanda from becoming a professional, but she appeared to fear that it constrained her options for finding love and forming a family. Meanwhile, Amanda also declared that light-skinned and fair-haired Doña Cinda was socially subordinate in terms in which race and class were indivisible: Cinda’s Quechua-accented Spanish, her pollera and braids, and her purported immoral gossiping and unwed motherhood, demonstrated her lower class and race. That some comments about race were couched in jokes—“black, Indian, ugly!” and “chocolate”—suggests that, like in the United States, Bolivians felt some restraint in making racist comments as a result of government and social movement condemnation of racism. That people often uttered harsh racist epithets in moments of anger at spouses and children also shows how racist speech could channel antagonism and tension; explicit racism marked the momentary lessening of self-control.
By the late 1990s, in response to the national government’s promotion of multiculturalism and the rise of the MAS, some Sacabans had begun to take on explicitly racial terms as badges of pride. “Around here, we are indios, laris,” said a taxi-bus driver in an affirming tone in 1998 as he sped along the road between Choro and Sacaba Town. Yet such self-identification with a term that had racist connotations—rather than the more positive indígena and originario—was rare in Sacaba.
Snobbery and Egalitarianism
The clash between the ethic of upward mobility, which Sacabans often feared was necessarily tied to snobbery, and the norm of equality created personal dilemmas. Deysi, Doña Saturnina’s math-teacher daughter, in her mid-thirties, was an astute analyst of local social relations and a vivid storyteller. On many occasions, she described the social quandaries created by this clash that she began to navigate as she became a professional and attempted to shrug off her status as a “person from the countryside.”
One moment in which Deysi asserted her own middle-class distinction while also condemning snobbery occurred on July 2, 2006, the night of the election for Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly delegates. Deysi came back to our shared bedroom at her parents’ house with her sometime-friend Norah’s husband. Norah was also a rural teacher, but unlike Deysi, who had a master’s degree from an elite urban university, Norah had earned a combination high school diploma and elementary school teaching certificate (bachiller pedagógico) from a rural boarding school run by Catholic nuns. Norah had been lucky to graduate and find a teaching job in the late 1990s before the Bolivian job market flooded with teachers. Though many people who had earned the less rigorous teaching degree a few years later were at that moment unemployed, Norah had a steady job.
Norah’s husband, Chavo, a successful auto mechanic, was telling Deysi about his long-running arguments with Norah and her mother. He was tearful and his voice was slurred from their recent round of postvote drinking. He, Norah, and their two small children had recently returned to live in Choro from the town of Sacaba in order to keep Norah’s mother company because she was a widow who lived alone. But his mother-in-law constantly claimed that he was taking advantage of her. She insulted Chavo as a bad provider, telling him: “I’m supporting you, here,” and asking pointedly, “And you, what do you have?” “It’s true,” Chavo said defiantly to Deysi. “My father is a poor farmer [pobre agricultor],” while Norah’s mother was a prosperous vegetable merchant who had inherited large plots of farmland from her grandparents. But Chavo’s mother-in-law’s taunts rankled mostly because Norah took her mother’s side, reproaching Chavo for his lack of earning power, saying scornfully, “I’m a teacher! I earn money.” Norah had told Chavo that her salary maintained the two of them and their two small children more than did his income as a mechanic. I was momentarily surprised at the fine distinction that Norah had drawn, since many Bolivians believed that rural teachers, particularly those with Norah’s high school degree, were not true professionals (see Luykx 1999). But Norah asserted her middle-class distinction in her fights with her husband. Chavo had hit Norah in anger, he told Deysi, and he regretted it.9
After Chavo left, Deysi lay on her bed, looking up at the ceiling. She wondered aloud in a thoughtful tone why she seemed to have so much “fear of getting married.” I replied that it did not seem to be such a mystery, given the dire example of Chavo and Norah. I reminded her that she herself had often told me that, as a single woman in her late thirties with a steady, relatively well-paying job, she had quite a bit of freedom—to go to parties with friends and relax on weekends. So many husbands she knew drank heavily, beat their wives, tried to forbid them from leaving the house, or abandoned them to raise their children alone.
I had also noticed, though I refrained from mentioning, that during the years that I had then known them, both Deysi and Amanda had often seemed ambivalent about whom to date. They appeared to continually wonder whether their potential boyfriends were appropriate matches based on their status. It is possible that she, like Edgar, was perplexed about the way in which marriage would constrict her present ability to play with different identities. In 1995, when Deysi was a first-year college student in her early twenties living in Cochabamba, she had confided in me that she would only date men from Choro, never from Cochabamba. This provided a quite small pool of potential boyfriends: though Choro consisted of roughly four hundred families in 2006, few Choreños her age had college degrees.
On election night in 2006, Deysi emphasized the dilemmas created by perceived class differences. She continued, “Around here, it’s mostly this situation: one spouse comes from a family with more wealth and wants to put down [despreciar], to humiliate [humillar] the other one. You know, they say that it’s better for professionals to marry each other and for people from the countryside to marry each other [es mejor casarse entre profesionales o entre gente del campo].” Deysi was thus reaffirming the local hierarchy by which class and racial identity were defined in geographical terms: professionals, among who she counted herself at that moment, were inherently urban, while poor and uneducated people were by definition “people from the countryside.” She repeated that Chavo’s parents were indeed very poor. He shouldn’t have hit Norah, but, on the other hand, Deysi seemed to imply, Norah was engaging in emotional abuse when she touted her class origins as being above Chavo’s. Norah was a snob (altanera), Deysi said, for accusing Chavo of being only a mechanic and not even a high school graduate.
People are, of course, inconsistent. They are the targets of accusations that they also lob at others. On the one hand, Deysi argued that Norah was a snob for belittling her husband because she was a professional and he was not. Deysi had criticized David’s wife and his physician friends on similar grounds of snobbery. She resented Norah as snobbish in relation to herself as well, explaining that Norah was never willing to “share” (compartir): to sit with friends, drinking chicha and chatting. The common term Deysi used to describe such conviviality, compartir, conveys the widespread norm in Sacaba that socializing was an expression of generosity—the opposite of selfishness—as well as a pleasure. On the other hand, Deysi herself had argued that Doña Cinda, Edgar’s wife, was socially inferior to Edgar because of her immoral character in addition to her status as a cholita. Doña Cinda had similarly accused Deysi and her sister and mother of being snobs for not accepting Cinda’s relationship with Edgar.
David on one occasion attempted to insert more nuance into these binary oppositions of rural and urban, campesino and professional. When I asked him in 1998 whether he considered himself a campesino, he replied, “I’m a campesino because I live in the countryside, but I’m not poor like a campesino.” His was a rare assertion that a professional with close ties to both rural and urban areas could potentially assert a rural identity that was also prosperous and professional.
Deysi and Amanda sometimes called themselves campesinas, too, in moments when they pointedly criticized others’ snobbishness and promoted social equality. Their