discomfort among David’s siblings when they confronted people who were indisputably of higher racial and class status than themselves. Following the baptism of one-year-old Magaly in the Sacaba provincial church, her godmother, a fair-skinned rheumatologist friend of David from Cochabamba city, drove us in her SUV to a local restaurant. We enjoyed a series of provincial luxuries: we ate roast duck, talked, and danced around a long table in a private room that David had rented, gazing out at a slightly scruffy courtyard rose garden. Throughout the afternoon, friends of David from Cochabamba, mostly specialist physicians and their families, arrived and left the party in a never-ending stream. With their Spanish unaccented by Quechua, their light skin and hair, and their expensive-looking clothes, they displayed signs of class and racial distinction above that of even David and Eliana. The arrival of a family in which parents and their two children shared startlingly pale skin, green eyes, and red hair—all rarities in Bolivia—evoked curious whispers from David’s siblings. They asked themselves if they were foreigners or simply very elite Bolivians.
The party following the baptism abounded with signs of class and racial discomfort. Eliana’s friends from nursing school, children born to campesinos like her and professionals of a lower rank than physicians, sat at the middle of the table. They joked with each more quietly than did the specialist physicians from the city, who sat at the end of the table, and few conversations arose between the two groups. The nurses’ skin was, on the whole, darker; the women’s long hairstyles matched those of Eliana, Amanda, and Deysi and attested to a more working-class aesthetic. At the far end of the table, conversing exclusively with the nurses, sat David’s sisters, Edgar, his parents, myself, and Edgar’s eldest son, Teo.
Figure 3. Magaly’s best friend’s sixth birthday in Choro, 2009, with a cake from Dumbo’s, one of Cochabamba City’s most expensive bakeries. Photo by the author.
David’s sister Julia, who had dropped out of high school and wore a pollera, told me surreptitiously during the party that she felt uncomfortable with David’s “high society” (alta sociedad) friends. Even Deysi, the math teacher, though she had lived in Cochabamba for several years and had attended an elite, private college, also said she was uncomfortable. She complained while we took a break outside the restaurant that, unlike at a party in Choro where you could relax and have fun, here you had to act “refined” (refinada). David’s green-eyed friend with her green-eyed children, the one who looked like a gringa, had seemed a particular snob (altanera), Deysi told me, though she had not actually spoken to her. It seemed to me that part of Deysi’s discomfort arose from this challenge to her sense of being on top of her social world as a professional, a privilege she enjoyed more securely within the social space of Choro.
In sum, the relationships between Doña Saturnina’s children and their intimate friends and family illustrated many of the aspirations and anxieties of Sacaba Municipality’s new middle classes, many of whom built their dreams for a new life on the coca and cocaine booms. They professed fierce ambitions for upward mobility, as well as warring ethics of superiority and egalitarianism. They identified themselves along racial and class binaries—sometimes as campesinos and sometimes as profesionales—with few words available to describe being in the middle. And most keenly, they expressed anxiety about this ambiguous social position.
The Axes of Inequality in Sacaba
Alternation between different poles of identity warrants closer attention to both the language and scale of idioms of inequality. Class and race, in the Cochabamba region and other postcolonial societies, as described in Chapter 1, have historically been intertwined concepts. Furthermore, people experience social status through a series of binary oppositions of race and class terms (Weismantel 2001). Some of these terms emerged from Spanish colonialism while other terms are of newer origin. These terms raise distinctions based on wealth, as in pobre (poor) versus rico (rich); race, as in indio versus mestizo; and geography, such as rural or urban (Table 1).
Table 1. Common binary terms of unequal race/class in Sacaba.
| Subaltern | Elite | Formal Bases of Distinction |
| indio—Indian lari, salvaje—savage | blanco—white q’ara—White urbanite | Race |
| pobre—poor clase popular—popular class humilde—humble waqcha—poor and alone | rico, ricachón, de dinero—rich | Wealth |
| campesino, agricultor—peasant | rico, ricachón, de dinero—rich; profesional—professional, college educated | Occupation, peasant geography (rural/urban), and wealth |
| indígena—indigenous originario—native | blanco—white | Race-culture (positive evaluation of indigeneity) |
| analfabeto—illiterate no ha estudiado—didn’t study | bachiller, professional, college educated | Education |
| chola—wears a pollera and hair in braids | chota—not a chola | Race, class, and education |
| rural | urbano—urban citadino—city dweller | Geography |
| no chapareño—Someone who hasn’t earned wealth from the Chapare | chapareño—earned wealth from the Chapare | Wealth |
Source: Author’s fieldwork
The assigning of elite or subaltern categories depended on who was involved in a particular interaction. Deysi clearly considered herself a professional in relation to Doña Cinda but appeared to feel less of a professional when confronted with David’s pale, wealthy physician friends from the city of Cochabamba. Doña Cinda herself at times asserted social superiority when speaking of even poorer people.
These binary oppositions were shaped by the particular scale of a given place. Within the rural locality of Choro, Deysi vied for elite status with wealthier but less highly educated people but could assert middle-class distinction over poorer people. When she circulated in the provincial space of Sacaba, she was potentially subject to social demotion, as more highly educated or wealthier people who held stronger associations to urban institutions and social networks could outrank her and inspire her to declare herself a campesina. When she moved in social circles based in the city of Cochabamba, as at David and Eliana’s daughter’s baptism party, this potential demotion was more pronounced.
While these middling identities were relational—subject to the status of the person with whom an individual was interacting—some important patterns of identification and status were apparent in the social worlds of the community of Choro, the municipality of Sacaba, the city of Cochabamba, and the nation of Bolivia. Within the social space of Choro, I observed local residents define four general categories of people: very poor; professionals or university students like David and Amanda; prosperous merchants such as truckers, business owners, and farmers; and cocaine traffickers (small scale compared to internationally infamous traffickers
