he had missed his true calling—to become an accordionist specializing in regional Cochabamba music. Edgar began traveling long hours on his days off to take lessons from elderly accordion masters living in provincial towns throughout the Cochabamba valleys, whose scratchy recordings he and his brothers and sisters played during parties and when they sold their mother’s chicha. Most evenings, the strains of Edgar’s accordion practice could be heard wafting from his bedroom on the second floor of his mother’s house. While the earnings and social status of a successful accordionist’s life could be a step up from those of his parents, only the most successful musician could hope to rival a lawyer’s prestige and earnings and Edgar never, in fact, left his law practice.
Edgar’s longing for an urban life and higher status showed marked similarities to members of other striving Third World middle classes, to their ethic of rising socially and their longing to take part in transnational modernity (e.g., Liechty 2002; Dickey 2000). Yet Edgar’s pleasure in the “calm” (tranquilidad) of rural life, in going out drinking in Choro chicha taverns with less-well-educated friends, in wearing old clothes and cheap sandals, in listening to provincial music, and in living in his hometown rather than renting an apartment in Sacaba or Cochabamba, also marked him as ambivalent about which lifestyle to pursue and which class and race to identify with.
Edgar’s anxiety about upward mobility, his apparent conflict between wanting to join the professional middle class and simultaneous comfort in lifeways defined locally as those of campesinos and Indians also emerged in his relationship with his common-law wife, Doña Cinda.2 Doña Cinda was a cholita like Doña Saturnina: she wore her hair in two braids and wore a pollera.3 Doña Cinda worked as a part-time housekeeper for a wealthy local family and also washed clothing for prosperous families in the town of Sacaba. She and Edgar began their relationship in 1995 and had two children together. Most Sundays, if he was not drinking chicha with friends, Edgar spent his time with Doña Cinda, who lived about a mile down the highway from Edgar’s mother’s house.
By 2006, Edgar’s sisters and mother had been nagging Edgar for years to baptize his daughter, Claudia, who was then six years old. Most parents with rural origins baptized and named their children on their first birthdays; urban middle-class parents usually baptized their children as tiny infants.4 Like the rest of his family, I took Edgar’s failure to baptize Claudia as a symptom of cruel disregard for his children and their mother. In 1998, he had taken his eldest son, Teo, away from Doña Cinda’s care to Doña Saturnina’s home, claiming that Cinda was irresponsible. His mother and sisters took primary responsibility for raising Teo. Edgar had often explained to me that Cinda was “not my real wife” and that his children with her—including Teo, with whom he lived—were “not my real children.” He often said, half defiantly and half longingly, that he expected to find another woman who was not de pollera at some unspecified future date, one who would be more suitable to his station as a profesional. Edgar was echoing the notion that professional-class men should have liaisons with cholas but not marry them, a widespread maxim among elite Bolivians for several centuries (see Albro 2000).
Such cruel statements about Doña Cinda and his children seemed to express Edgar’s sense of uncertainty about his social standing; they also sometimes angered his sisters and mother. On Christmas Eve in 1998, as we sat in a state of semi-stupor after our enormous holiday meal, Edgar expressed misgivings about having recently brought his son to Doña Saturnina’s house. He exclaimed in a tone of mild irritation that he did not want Teo to hang around him because Teo would likely speak to him in Quechua in front of Edgar’s friends (presumably lawyers). His sister Deysi harrumphed and burst out to me in private a short while later, “It looks like he doesn’t care about his son! If I had a child, I would be working only for him.” His sisters Amanda and Deysi often rolled their eyes and grumbled angrily at what they saw as Edgar’s neglect of his family. He sent only Teo to Sacaba schools in the urban provincial school district. His other child, Claudia, attended the Choro elementary school in the rural, and inferior, school district. In exasperation, the sisters urged Edgar to either marry Doña Cinda or leave her definitively.
But they did not like her either. Amanda and Deysi often lampooned Cinda’s heavily Quechua-accented Spanish in falsetto voices, echoing racist television comedy shows from the 1990s in which middle-class male actors cross-dressed as cholas. The sisters laughed gleefully when Teo insulted his mother. Once, for example, when Teo was nine years old and had not lived with Doña Cinda for six years, they laughed encouragingly when Teo exclaimed scathingly, allying himself with them and against her, that he would never return to live with “that washerwoman” (esa lavandera). Sometimes they protested to me that, while they sympathized with Teo’s mother when Edgar insulted her as a cholita, Doña Cinda showed poor moral character and was not worthy of their respect. “She’s nuts [loquita]! She says bad things about us to other people,” Edgar’s sisters told me, seemingly in an attempt to justify their mockery.5
Deysi, Amanda, and Doña Saturnina explained that Doña Cinda had begun a campaign of malicious gossip about them after Doña Saturnina had visited Cinda one day to warn her that Edgar might never marry her. Doña Saturnina, in their telling, hoped Cinda would leave Edgar because he neglected her and their children. Cinda was young—nearly ten years younger than Edgar—and fair-skinned and pretty; she could find a better husband. But Cinda, instead of being grateful, blew up at her, raging that Doña Saturnina’s true concern was that Cinda was not a profesional like Edgar. She threw Doña Saturnina out of her rented house.
When telling me this story several years later, Doña Saturnina sighed and said in a resigned tone about Doña Cinda, “She is dying to marry him [Pay wañurisan casarinanta].” Cinda held on to Edgar because he was a lawyer, even as she was furious that he contributed only minimally toward her and her children’s expenses and spent very little time with them. Deysi chimed in with irritation that Doña Cinda often bragged to others in Choro, “My husband is a lawyer,” implying that this bragging was uncouth and demonstrated Cinda’s lower status. When I asked why Edgar did not finally marry her, given that so many years had passed during which he had never carried through with his threat to marry a professional, Deysi replied with a weak smile, as if discomfited at expressing snobbishness explicitly: “It’s that it’s not so acceptable [no es tan aceptable] for a profesional to be married to a cholita.” She continued that if the cholita were someone decente (morally upright) perhaps it could be done. But Doña Cinda was not decente: she was a gossip and had a child from a previous relationship. With this comment Deysi demonstrated how middle classes often assert distinction using a rigid morality, in addition to dress, wealth, language (a Quechua accent), and education (see Liechty 2002; de la Cadena 2000; Gotkowitz 2003). Deysi implied that Cinda’s moral failings as a gossip and promiscuous woman confirmed her rightful place in a lower class and racial category. By implication, in the relational logic of class and race in Bolivia, all of Edgar’s family raised themselves socially by criticizing Doña Cinda for being immoral and a cholita. And yet it seemed, if Doña Cinda was bound to Edgar, despite her anger, through her longing to associate with a professional and through her economic dependence on him, Edgar was also bound to her in ways that he could not bring himself to admit directly: his discomfort with fully adopting an urban lifestyle and professional status.
The occasion of Edgar’s daughter’s baptism brought to the surface Edgar’s conflicting hopes and anxieties about his middle-class status and brought to a head Doña Cinda’s unfulfilled aspirations for upward mobility through her relationship with Edgar. Both Edgar and Doña Cinda appeared to want earnestly to baptize Claudia but also appeared unsure about whether or not they wanted anyone to attend the event and the party afterward—usually an opportunity for joyful drinking and dancing with the parents’ friends and relatives. For example, while Edgar and I planned the logistics together, Edgar shied away from my suggestion that he have his daughter baptized in the large, ornate provincial church in Sacaba. All the other Choro families I knew, wealthy and poor alike, had baptized their children there. Instead, Edgar insisted on the rural church in the nearby
