Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
while LPP reformers condemned clientelism as antidemocratic and archaic.10 At the same time, the LPP’s increased funding and expansion of salaried positions for over three hundred municipal governments created new arenas for graft and competition for public-sector jobs and for development resources. This political competition often erupted, as in Sacaba municipality, in repeated municipal conflicts between factions of people seeking upward mobility by vying for municipal bureaucracy jobs and elected posts as mayor or city council members. Third, a model of grassroots democracy coupled with the rhetoric of socialism and indigenous pride gained force with the rise of MAS during the late 1990s, and became the official platform of government with Morales’s election in 2005. Morales and MAS officials also vehemently denounced clientelism as a legacy of elite dominance and heralded a new nation free of clientelism. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, MAS political leaders and development workers called publicly for Sacabans to reject politicians’ stealing of public funds, nepotism, vote buying, and the seeking of jobs and other favors through clientelism.
Many ordinary Sacabans agreed in theory with this condemnation of clientelism and expressed the hope that MAS or the LPP—or both—would deliver an end to clientelism. Sacabans, like MAS leaders, often termed clientelism as “selfishness,” individualism, and “envy,” because they deemed the seeking of patronage favors as the cause of local political struggles that obstructed local governments. Furthermore, many Sacabans—though not all—agreed fervently that clientelism maintained the dominance of Bolivia’s superwealthy and had to be extinguished for racial and economic equality to be born.
Yet in practice many Sacabans sought jobs and resources from the municipal government and were accused by others of clientelism. Often, this was the only path to finding a job and therefore, a route to middle-class status. Sacabans’ political practices in fact often blurred the theoretical line between clientelism, the liberalism promoted by the LPP, and grassroots democracy promoted by the MAS party. The widespread condemnation of clientelism as “selfishness” signaled the theoretical clash between political frameworks that many Sacabans combined in practice: liberalism, grassroots democracy, clientelism, and the imperative to enter or remain in the middle class, often through securing a patronage job.
Self-interest, like collective interest, is a central human motivation. When MAS leaders and development workers perceived that their attempts at political transformation had failed, they often blamed citizens’ moral failure. MAS leaders expressed disappointment when citizens were unable, in their view, to properly assume an attitude of public-mindedness over private interest. Such language of blame ignores both the structural constraints on Bolivians’ realizing their own middle-class aspirations and the practical ways in which individuals drew on multiple frameworks in participating in public life. These observations lead me, like Ernesto Laclau (1992:9), to argue that self-interest and individual interest often blur in political practice, despite the widespread assumption in political theory that we can analytically distinguish between the two (see also Seligman 1992).
In practice, many Sacabans described their hopes for the future in ways that combined individual middle-class aspirations, collective prosperity for indigenous and poor Bolivians, and the uplift of Bolivia from its subordinate position in the global geopolitical community of nations. Many prosperous Sacabans who fervently supported MAS in the early years of Evo’s government described themselves as members of the historically excluded indigenous majority and therefore asserted that their individual interests were the interests of the nation.11
I suggest that these paradoxes are not confined to Sacaba but have broader reach. MAS leaders have claimed to have ushered in a new postneoliberal era in Bolivia,12 three decades after scholars began analyzing the impact of neoliberal free-trade policies around the world and the ideologies that accompany them—such as the Law of Popular Participation’s depiction of clientelism as a form of immorality that public-minded citizens can root out (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Carrier 1998; Ferguson 2006; Greenhouse 2010; Phillips 1997). Anthropologists have begun to pose the question of whether some societies, such as Bolivia, are indeed creating post-neoliberalism (e.g., Gustafson 2009; Fernandes 2010; Goodale and Postero 2013). What might post-neoliberalism look like? Chapters 4 and 5 follow middle-class Sacabans’ own debates over these questions about whether a deep societal transformation was possible and whether clientelism could be stamped out.
Definitions of Community Shaped by Middle Classes
Concerns about clientelism as the expression of individualism and selfishness also emerged repeatedly in Sacabans’ intense frustrations at what they saw as a lack of collective action at the local level—a failure of community. My third aim in this book is to show how ideals of community became a central focus of political debate in Sacaba in the context of rising middle classes. In Chapter 6, I trace the mismatch between idealized definitions of Sacaba’s rural communities as organized civil societies or as indigenous campesinos, promoted by LPP reformers and national MAS leaders, respectively, and the more heterogeneous ideals and practices of community enacted by Sacaba’s new middle class. Bolivia’s LPP reformers often depicted rural communities as rigidly bounded geographically, and governed by indigenous communal institutions of solidarity that had remained little changed since pre-Columbian times. National MAS leaders, meanwhile, defined communities as agrarian unions composed of campesinos and organized politically in networks with regional and national unions to defend the interests of Bolivia’s peasant-indigenous (campesino-originario) majority. Measuring actual local communities against these standards, many Sacaba municipal officials and development workers regularly deplored what they saw as a lack of strong collective action in Sacaba’s localities. I contrast these idealized, rigid ideals of harmonious peasant community with the other forms of collective action that emerged in response to middle-class aspirations in Choro. Finding funding and building vital infrastructure like a sewer and a new high school, fervent goals of development workers, required intensive collective effort that conflicted with many Choro residents’ other ambitions. For example, when coca leaf prices were high, many Choreños sought upward mobility by joining in the highly organized coca growers’ union in the Chapare region where coca was grown, seven hours away, withdrawing their time and attention from collective organizing within the boundaries of Choro. The desires of upwardly mobile professionals, coca growers, merchants, and truckers resident in Choro diverged from poorer people who could less easily afford to buy services such as health care and education in urban areas like Sacaba or Cochabamba City. Community, like clientelism, was an important genre of political debate.
My Position in Bolivia
Finally, as is always the case when conducting ethnographic research, local perceptions of me as a researcher mattered in shaping the stories that I was told and can tell. When I had a baby part way through my fieldwork, I became newly privileged to conversations with other parents in which they expressed concerns about their children’s health and safety, their upward mobility, or their quest for jobs. As a red-haired blancona (light-skinned woman), I heard plenty about race from Sacabans, who often expressed the wish that their hair and skin were lighter. When I became a mother toting a red-haired, blancón infant with me, I began hearing plenty from parents who expressed the wish, often in front of their children, that their children’s hair and skin were lighter. As a graduate student, I was received as a kindred spirit by many in Sacaba’s first-generation middle class who aspired to or had recently earned professional degrees. As a foreigner who spoke Quechua, I was greeted with great warmth and generosity. As a citizen of a wealthy country, I was often seen as a potential patron: a supplier of funds for home improvement, medical bills, and community centers. Finally, as a citizen of the United States, my presence elicited the longings of many Bolivians for the prosperity and power the United States symbolized, on the one hand, and intense resentment at the U.S. government’s heavy-handed interventions, on the other hand, particularly regarding free-market policies and the war on drugs that had squelched the coca and cocaine booms.
One story that Sacaba friends often asked me to retell conveys the mix of generous hospitality, fascination,