thousands of hectares of coca plantings and arrested many low-level cocaine producers, transporters, and bystanders. The drug war contributed to the volatility of the price of coca leaves and cocaine and increased the risks for those involved in illicit cocaine production.2 This drew the final cushion out from under the Bolivian economy and led to another recession. In 2005, on the eve of Evo Morales’s election, the national poverty rate stood at 60 percent (Interamerican Development Bank 2008). The official unemployment rate was 10 percent, while real employment unemployment was widely recognized to be much higher.
A New Middle Class in Sacaba
Sacaba municipality’s proximity to the Chapare coca-growing district facilitated its status as a transit zone within the Cochabamba region. Sacaba residents flocked in large numbers to the Chapare, a mere seven-hour bus or truck ride from their homes. Many Sacabans fulfilled their aims to use their coca earnings to launch a business or pay for their children’s college educations and thus allow them to enter the middle class. But not all were able to partake in the coca boom’s bounty, given the need for start-up funds to invest in seedlings and land purchases, and the rapid erosion of soil fertility. This inequality fostered bitterness and invidious distinctions between newly prosperous and newly educated middling families, on the one hand, and still-poor laborers and farmers, on the other.
The coca boom also deeply shaped political culture in Sacaba. When a twelve-year-old girl in Choro told me confidently, upon meeting me in 1995, that there would be “a civil war and coup” unless the government ceased the militarized interdiction of coca growing, she was expressing the militancy of the coca growers’ (cocaleros) union to which her family—like nearly all coca growers—belonged. She was also echoing many Sacabans’ belief that their earnings from coca had saved them, or could in the future save them, from a life as destitute campesinos. Many in Sacaba saw coca as the means to achieving the dream of modernity and middle-class upward mobility that the Bolivian state had promised, but not delivered, since the 1953 Revolution. The frustration of these expectations following the drug war echoed the deep frustrations of people throughout the world confronting the bust of a boom economy, licit or illicit (e.g., Ferguson 1999; Shipton 1989). While some families managed to hold on to enough wealth to pursue their plans in higher education or commerce, the drug war made their project of upward mobility more precarious. The middle-class hopes and anxieties fed by the coca boom in turn sparked the rise of the MAS party in the late 1990s and helped propel Evo Morales to the presidency.
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the principal dimensions of middle classness in Sacaba, as shown by Marisol were ambiguity, anxiety, alternation between elite and subaltern identities, and tension between an ethic of equality and an ethic of social superiority. The expression of these hopes, frustrations, and ambivalence in intimate relationships between family members, friends, and neighbors is the subject of the next chapter. Tracing these intimate politics is crucial to helping us understand the everyday experience of members of the new middle class and their roles in Bolivia’s rapidly transforming political culture.
Chapter 2
The Intimate Politics of New Middle Classes in Sacaba
Doña Saturnina Ramírez was in her late sixties in 2013, a plump, formidable woman.1 She had many godchildren, evidence that she was held in high esteem by many people in her hometown of Choro, even as some of Choro’s poorest residents were intimidated by her sometimes severe manner and by her children’s astounding professional achievements. Doña Saturnina’s family trajectory illustrated the sudden windfall that the coca boom had meant for many Sacabans. She wore a full pollera skirt and her hair, streaked with gray, in two long braids. As a chola in early twenty-first-century Bolivia, she identified herself as rural and campesina. Three of her four daughters, meanwhile, wore jeans and straight skirts and identified themselves as professionals. Seven of her thirteen children had died in infancy or early childhood of the gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases that afflict the very poor; five of her six living children, by contrast, had earned professional degrees or were attending university.
Like Marisol the pharmacist, Doña Saturnina’s children described themselves as an island of professionals amid a sea of campesinos in Choro. They often declared, “We are the only family in Choro in which all the children have studied.” While other local families had, in fact, produced several university students or graduates, many Choro residents echoed the family’s refrain about their uniqueness. They marveled at Doña Saturnina’s ability to raise a brood of “all professionals” (puro profesionales) or grumbled that Doña Saturnina’s children were snobbish (creídos) because they were professionals. Edgar, the eldest and in his forties in 2006, was a lawyer. Deysi, the next eldest, was a rural high school math teacher with a master’s degree from a prestigious private teachers’ college, while her younger sister Amanda was a lawyer. David was a pediatrician. The youngest, Celia, was nineteen and studying for an architecture degree. The refrain, “all of us have studied” excluded Julia, in her mid-thirties, a coca farmer and small-time cattle rancher before she set off for Spain (prior to the Spanish recession of 2008) to work as a home health aide. Doña Saturnina’s children spoke to each other at home in Quechua, Bolivia’s most common indigenous language. Yet like many speakers of indigenous languages in Bolivia and other Andean countries, they did not (usually) identify themselves as indigenous (see Canessa 2007; García 2005; de la Cadena 2000).
Doña Saturnina’s family, like Marisol and many other residents of Sacaba Municipality, struggled to establish and maintain a middle-class position in Bolivian society. They held fierce ambitions for their family’s prosperity and social mobility to “get ahead” (salir adelante). The coca boom sparked these ambitions among many in the Cochabamba region, inspiring them to shift their dreams to upward mobility through education or commerce rather than through agriculture, to imagine a future as a professional or affluent entrepreneur rather than a campesino. These middle-class dreams were coupled with intense anxiety, however, in part because they feared skepticism from wealthier or more highly educated people. They also faced equally vexing accusations of selfishness and snobbery from poorer and less highly educated friends, family members, and neighbors. My term “intimate politics” highlights both the prevalence and intensity of power struggles occurring at this most personal of levels between close family members, neighbors, and friends. Struggles for belonging and companionship, competition for social supremacy between husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, friends and neighbors grew from long-standing hierarchies of class, race, and gender in Bolivia as well as uncertain prospects in the free-market, post–coca boom economy.
In this chapter I look in detail at these intimate politics and the broader conflicting moralities that surrounded them, based on conversations with members of two dozen upwardly mobile extended families with whom I became close during my research. They included logging company owners, truckers, market sellers, cocaine producers, and, among younger generations, teachers, lawyers, agronomists, and doctors. I also draw upon years of conversations with people frustrated at their own poverty. I focus particularly on the experiences of Doña Saturnina and her grown children because the diversity of their perspectives and my long-term relationship with them provides a window onto the experiences of conflicting class and race identities that characterized new middle classes in Bolivia and, I suggest, in much of the Third World.
Doña Saturnina and other members of Sacaba’s provincial middle class attempted to assert their distinction as upwardly mobile through their moral virtue—hard work, sexual propriety, thrifty money management, and high academic achievement. They also sought to avoid accusations of snobbery or of having profited at other people’s expense “from the ribs of others” (a las costillas de otra gente). Envy was a common language for talking about conflict over inequality; discussions of envy marked the clash between ethics of individual upward mobility and ethics of equality. In practice, in their intimate lives, they espoused alternating ethics of social equality and superiority.
Upward
