because the language of race and class was polarized between binary oppositions—of wealthy and poor, indigenous and nonindigenous—in ways that left little space to assert an intermediate wealth and social status. As in Marisol’s account in Chapter 1, the prevailing characterization of Bolivia was that of a society split between a dominant white elite and marginalized indigenous majority; there were few words in Sacaba through which people could identify themselves in any way as “in the middle” (compare to Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). More commonly, they alternated between elite and subaltern terms of identity, alternating, for example, between calling themselves profesionales and campesinos or rarely, indígena (indigenous).
Newly prosperous people in Sacaba often defined their identity in relational fashion, depending on the social context. This dynamic was similar to that of cholas for most of the twentieth century in Bolivia, who took on working-class and Indian identities when confronted by social superiors, and local upper-class and white identities when talking to social subordinates (see Weismantel 2001; de la Cadena 2000). Many newly prosperous Sacabans shared aspirations for upward mobility, fierce social competition, the practice of drawing moral distinctions, anxiety about their social position, and a sense of social fluidity with middle classes in many places in the world (Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). At the same time, they also shared the experience of relational identity and the alternation between binary opposites of elite and subaltern race and class with people who inhabited the Andean social category of the chola. That the language of class and race in Bolivia did not fit their actual middling economic and social experience added an additional layer of ambiguity about their status in social life.
Doña Saturnina’s family narrative of escaping campesino and Indian status was emblematic of many Sacabans’ aspirations for upward social mobility as individuals and families and contrasted with the MAS party’s formal rhetoric of collective uplift as indigenous campesinos. Doña Saturnina’s children told me that their parents had worked single-mindedly for many years with the sole aim of sending them to college to escape the everyday social stigma of Indian and campesino identity. They repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in their family’s history when a policeman had yelled viciously (abusado, maltratado) at their father, Don Prudencio, who felt powerless as an uneducated man to shout or fight back. Don Prudencio reputedly vowed at that moment, “My children need to study and become lawyers to defend themselves.” He and Doña Saturnina thus described their quest as aimed at upward social mobility, an escape from the humiliation of social subordination, as much as material prosperity.
Don Prudencio had earned a decent income while working throughout the 1960s and early 1970s as a driver for a wealthy truck-owning relative. But after several trucking accidents left the family in debt, Doña Saturnina and their children forbade him to drive. The price of coca and cocaine was just then booming, in 1975, and so Don Prudencio and Doña Saturnina decided to turn their efforts toward growing coca in the tropical Chapare region, seven hours away. Over the next twenty years, Doña Saturnina and Don Prudencio put four children through university largely on the proceeds of their coca farming. They were helped by the veteran’s pension of Don Prudencio’s mother, whose late husband had fought in the 1932 Chaco War with Paraguay, and by Doña Saturnina’s earnings from selling chicha and dry goods from their home.
Owing to the cost of the children’s education, Doña Saturnina’s family lived in a home whose symbols of status and comfort were only at the median for houses in Choro. In 2009, it had cement floors, excepting a dirt-floored kitchen that housed a small fridge. They had only recently replaced a small color television bought in 1995, whose channel dial had fallen off and could only be changed with a wrench. On the rough floorboards of the upstairs bedroom, shared by Doña Saturnina, her grandson, and Amanda, stood several varnished wooden wardrobes and a glass case that held a few decorative dishes and mementos from travels to the Bolivian capital, La Paz. They often lamented that their house lacked the flush toilet and shower owned by several more prosperous families in Choro. They had paved their interior courtyard with cement and built several new rooms during the previous few years. Rebar poked out of the roof of their new second story, some of their cement floors were crumbling, and the privy behind their house remained half-dug. In the context of their locality of Choro, their perpetually under-construction house gave off an air of modest prosperity.
The relationships between Doña Saturnina’s immediate family and her two daughters-in-law, the wives of Edgar and David, illustrated the family’s shifting articulation of their social position between social dominance and social inferiority. These relationships were characterized by both the hopefulness and social anxiety that afflicts middle classes in many places in the world. Of all Doña Saturnina’s children, Edgar, the eldest, expressed most explicitly a sense of uncertainty about his social standing. Most people in Choro, including Edgar himself, considered him to have been the first person from Choro to get a university degree. He had lived at home since finishing his law school degree at the public university in Cochabamba in 1995, except for one lucrative year practicing law in Ivigarzama, a boomtown in the Chapare. When the massive Drug Enforcement Administration–sponsored crackdown on coca growing and cocaine production in 1998 ended the boom in the Chapare and sparked a national recession, Edgar moved his operations to the provincial town of Sacaba, a short bus ride from Choro. He rented a tiny one-room office and opened his law practice. Since then, he earned a living but felt his income to be precarious.
Edgar often alternated between asserting an urban, professional identity and a rural, campesino identity. In keeping with his professional aspirations, he told me several times over the years that he was seriously considering moving to the city of Cochabamba. Edgar often bitterly denounced “backward” Bolivia and Choro and extolled the “advanced” nations such as the United States; he said that he could not wait to escape Bolivia. This was why his sisters called him by the nickname “Yanqui” (Yankee), an affectionate reappropriation of the term that among coca growers’ union or indigenous movement activists typically served as a harsh denunciation of U.S. intervention in Bolivia.
Despite these vocal longings to be a prosperous professional, Edgar signaled in other ways that he also remained drawn to a campesino identity. When he came home to Choro from his Sacaba office every evening, he immediately changed from the oxfords worn by urban professionals into red vinyl sandals in the rural style of many of his local friends who had not finished high school. On the weekends, he often went drinking with these friends; he socialized often with rural folk. He continued to live at his mothers’ house rent-free and ate his sisters’ and mother’s cooking. While this was certainly a way to save effort and expense, Edgar sometimes said that he relished the relative quiet and the clean air of Choro as compared to the bustle and pollution of the town of Sacaba or the city of Cochabamba. Edgar also told me wonderingly how he still remembered feeling like a “freak” (un bicho raro), out of his element, when he had begun attending the public university in Cochabamba during the late 1970s. At that time, he had been one of the only students from a rural background. Edgar appeared often bemused, as if he felt that his life embodied an unshakeable paradox. In 2009, he suggested for the first time in my hearing that he might remain living in the countryside for the rest of his life after all, because it was calmer (mas tranquilo) than urban living.
By day, Edgar sat at his desk in his small rented office several blocks from the Sacaba central plaza. He shared the office with his sister Amanda, who had obtained her law degree several years after him. Their clients, many of whom discussed their cases with Edgar in Quechua, appeared to feel more comfortable in this environment—with its cracked and stained walls, shabby chairs, manual typewriter, and piles of worn manila files—than in nearby law offices whose proprietors attempted to lure clients with computers and shelves of shiny legal tomes. During slack periods between clients, the lawyers played cards with Sacaba neighbors at Amanda’s desk. Both Amanda and Edgar complained that they earned much less than they had during the coca boom, despite having many clients, because few people could pay high legal fees without their boom-time earnings.
In part because of his reduced income, Edgar
