emerged in conversations among local residents: urban-based professionals, who lived primarily in the densely populated corridor along the highway between Sacaba and the city of Cochabamba; and provincial elite families whose members had been known as vecinos (townspeople, literally “neighbors”) since colonial times. Their families had been medium-to large-scale landowners, professionals, or wealthy merchants before Bolivia’s 1953 Agrarian Reform. They identified themselves as emphatically not campesino and not Indian, though their physical appearance and wealth were not always distinguishable from that of rural residents. When the social environment widened to include the city of Cochabamba, as at David’s daughter’s baptism, people of greater wealth, lighter skin, and elite transnational connections entered: people who had obtained master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Spanish, U.S., Mexican, or Argentine universities or who identified themselves as belonging to the small European-descended population in Bolivia.
If many Sacabans used alternating binary opposites as terms of identity, some people seemed to wrestle actively with the question of whether or not rurality and urbanity represented sharply separated, unequal worlds and identities. The vision of rurality connoting poverty, cultural otherness, and backwardness is exceedingly common in postcolonial places like Bolivia (e.g., Pigg 1992; de la Cadena 2000; Kearney 1996; Subramanian 2009).
Certainly, there were differences in access to amenities between officially rural Choro and officially urban Sacaba Town. I ran out of Doña Saturnina’s house one afternoon in 2004 to try to find a head of garlic and a packet of mayonnaise—common items in corner stores in the provincial town of Sacaba—to cook dinner. Of the four tiny stores located in private homes in Doña Saturnina’s sector of Choro, all were either closed or sold out of both items. When I arrived home empty handed, Celia, the twenty-two-year-old architecture student and the baby of the family, greeted me with a scowl. “This is the furthest corner of the world [el último rincón del mundo],” she exclaimed in mock despair, as she lolled in front of the television on her mother’s bed, amid the blare of highway traffic. “I’m sure that where you live, there are lots of supermarkets—there are hypermarkets [hipermercados],” she said, surely thinking of IC Norte, a chain of enormous grocery stores in Cochabamba City. Such complaints presented Choro as a rural space walled off from and inferior to urban ones, despite its many amenities that distinguished it from more remote hamlets.
Yet this notion of rural and urban as separate vied with everyday evidence of movement and fluidity: the long history of relational identities and geographic mobility; the economic ties between farmers, merchants, and urban consumers through regional markets; more recent waves of migration since the 1970s coca boom; and the administrative linking of rural to urban areas within the same municipalities through the Law of Popular Participation in the 1990s. The actual state of infrastructure and services in much of Sacaba Municipality was better than in many officially designated rural areas of Bolivia. The construction of a major highway in the 1960s had permitted widespread electrification and running water for all but the poorest Choro households by the 1990s. Public transportation from Choro to Sacaba and Cochabamba was available during the day to anyone who could afford bus fare.
The most perplexing issue for Doña Saturnina’s family, however, was not the paucity of services in Choro. They spent most days in Sacaba or Cochabamba and, like other prosperous families in Choro, could purchase mayonnaise there and could, more significantly, afford to pay for urban doctors and schooling. Rather, their urgent questions centered on the extent to which they and others identified them with the countryside. Sacabans often divided the possession of middle-class distinction—described in Spanish by the adjective culto (cultured) and the nouns criterio (discernment) and civilización (civilization)—along rigidly separate rural and urban lines.
A variant of this local conceptual model posited the qualities of middle-class distinction as ebbing in concentric circles along a gradient from urban to rural areas. A bus driver and urban neighborhood leader whose parents had been Sacaba provincial elites, Don Álvaro, explained to me earnestly that Choro residents rarely left Choro and Sacaba Town residents rarely left the provincial town center. While giving me a ride one day between Sacaba Town and Choro in 2005, he affirmed that people in the town of Sacaba had more “criterio” than those in Choro. Pointing through the car window to mechanics’ garages, half-built restaurants, and cornfields that sprawled along the highway, he argued that the criterio of the inhabitants of each locality decreased gradually the closer one got to Choro. He struggled to define criterio, explaining that, whatever it was, criterio existed in a person as a function of the amount of time he or she had spent in the town of Sacaba or the city of Cochabamba. Criterio thus seemed to mean a classed and raced form of good taste, akin to Bourdieu’s use of the term “distinction” to depict middle-class notions of propriety, discrimination, morality, and intelligence (Bourdieu 1984). Don Álvaro’s depiction of people residing in officially designated rural areas as motionless, as stuck in place, was so striking because it was readily contradicted by the couples we passed at that very moment waiting by the side of the highway for rides to the tropics, bundles of clothing at their feet, and by the stream of minibuses that zoomed past us in both directions and which Don Alvaro himself had driven for many years. Sacaba, like the region of Egypt studied by Amitav Ghosh, “possessed all of the busy restlessness of an airport’s transit lounge” (Ghosh 1994:173). Don Álvaro’s notion of a clean rural-urban gradient of identity, however crude and ill matched to the reality, was still more nuanced than the binary divisions between rural and urban identities used by many other Sacabans.
Race and class intertwined with geography, furthermore, in the binary hierarchies of power. Racial insults persisted despite the revolutionary government’s declaration in 1952 that indios would be identified henceforth as campesinos and that all Bolivians would henceforth term themselves as socially equal, mixed-race mestizos rather than as subordinate indios or superior whites (blancos). Racial meanings that slipped into explicitly class-based terms like campesino were also woven into geographic terms like rural, countryside, urban, and city (Klein 2003; see also de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001).
Bolivian public and private talk also remained liberally peppered with explicitly racist epithets in 2006. Some regions of Bolivia experienced more severe racial polarization, for example, in eastern Bolivian regions such as Santa Cruz. Choreños who had traveled or settled there sometimes reported that easterners sometimes called them “Indians” or “shitty highland Indians [kollas de mierda]” (see Fabricant 2012; Postero 2007). According to reports I heard from several people from various regions of the country in 2009, such insults increased immediately following the election of Evo Morales in 2005, as eastern elites saw their social and economic supremacy challenged (see also Schultz 2008).7 Many Sacabans, in turn, referred to western highland residents as laris, a term that combined the racism of the Spanish epithet indio with the rural connotations of the English class term hick. Lari signified uncivilized backwardness and moral inferiority. “If you sit down with [laris] they won’t share even a morsel of food with you!” exclaimed Bald César, a sawmill owner residing in Choro. “They are not civilized people, they are savages!” similarly exclaimed Don Felipe, a man whom neighbors at times insulted behind his back as a lari himself, because he was poor and was widely criticized as having too many children. A desperately poor teenager, whose home lacked electricity and running water, explained why her father refused to live with her and her mother in Choro. A neighbor in Choro “called my dad a lari and that’s why he doesn’t come. As if he’s a lari! Her son-in-law, well, he’s a little lari [larisito] himself!” Amanda, in a moment of frustration with the elected leaders of Choro’s community council, exclaimed that they were “laris” because “they are very disorganized!” Disorganization, imprudence (“too many” children), poverty, lack of generosity, as well as highland origins could thus elicit racist epithets of Indianness.
In Sacaba, racist insults between intimates hurled in moments of anger were often couched in irony or joking, though they appeared to sting their targets deeply nevertheless. One day, for example, a married couple was
