smile that she only insulted him with that term when he went on a drinking binge. He emphasized to me, by contrast, his face also rigid and tight lipped, that she insulted him in this way because he hailed from a highland town. His grim expression attested that he felt this racial insult from his wife sharply. As with Edgar, who explained that he was justified in treating Doña Cinda with disregard because she was a chola, racist insults between intimates appeared to be deeply wounding.
Racialized teasing was also very common. For example, Deysi and Amanda were extremely fond of Edgar’s son, Teo, whom they had help raise, but did not spare him their sharp tongues or biting humor. Since he had come to live with them at age three, his aunts often mockingly shouted the same epithets at him that they used on their brothers when they did something that annoyed them: “Negro, indio, feo [Black, Indian, ugly]!” Although they always assured me that they were joking, Teo repeated these outbursts in other contexts, making the racism of these insults more explicit. For example, once when he was eight, while watching Sábado gigante, a Saturday-night TV variety show broadcast from Miami throughout Latin America, Teo gazed raptly at the bikini-clad, high-heeled hostesses who often performed dance routines. As one Afro-Latina hostess entered the screen, Teo screamed, “Negra, fea!” I was shocked at this harsh expression of prejudice, particularly since virulent racist epithets in Bolivia were usually targeted at Indians, rather than at Afro-Bolivians, who comprise about 1 percent of the population. Afro-Bolivians were usually the targets, instead, of an objectifying, paternalistic exoticism. The entire family, including Teo, adored Doña Saturnina’s Afro-Bolivian godson and often remarked with wonder, rather than scorn, at the contrast between his green eyes and skin darker than theirs. It seemed that Teo had picked up on the barbed quality of his aunts’ banter but not yet learned to direct it precisely nor to cloak it in the guise of humor.
Even the kindest people participated in such racialized banter and expressed the finely tuned color-consciousness of Bolivian society, couching their remarks in irony or joking. A few months before becoming ordained as a Catholic priest, a gentle friend of the family named Denis had Doña Saturnina’s children in stitches recounting his recent clever play on words. Their cousin Wilson was known to be very sensitive about the fact that his four-year-old son was dark skinned. “Your son is very choco,” Denis had told Wilson mischievously. Choco was the local colloquial Spanish term for light skinned and blond. When Wilson turned on Denis, furious, insisting that Denis was insulting his child by deliberately saying something that everyone knew was not true, Denis had retorted, “I wasn’t insulting him. He is very choco: he is choco … late!” (a pun on “chocolate” brown). Denis grinned roguishly at us while retelling the exchange and Doña Saturnina’s children roared with laughter. They repeated his joke many times during the subsequent weeks and marveled at his wit.
People also turned racialized disgust on themselves. Amanda, like many other women I knew in Sacaba, often lamented that she was ugly because her skin was “too dark.” Once Amanda, after a long, introspective discussion with her brothers and sisters after we had finished dinner, looked up seriously at me and told me that she had not yet had children (she was then thirty-eight years old and single) because she was afraid of passing on her dark skin to her child. “It was a joke, a joke!” she exclaimed when she saw my horrified expression. She insisted that she was teasing me precisely because she knew how earnestly I always tried to talk her out of such sentiments. Sometimes people extended this internalized racism to their children, like the many strangers on Sacaba buses who lamented to me that their children were “dark and ugly” when they saw my pale, redheaded baby. These were melancholy variants of more lighthearted but still racialized exclamations to me and my blue-eyed son: “Lend me your eyes! [¡Prestáme tus ojos!]” or sometimes, with a flirtatious chuckle, “Lend me your [strawberry blond] husband so I can make a blond baby!” Skin and hair color were common sources of nicknames such as Negrita (Blackie) or Choca (Blondie, light skinned).8
These examples show racialized thinking alive and well in Bolivia, despite the government’s declaration in 1952 that racial consciousness would disappear by fiat. Racial signs, such as skin color and dress, could at times be synonymous with subordinate class signs, while at other times they diverged. Dark skin did not prevent Amanda from becoming a professional, but she appeared to fear that it constrained her options for finding love and forming a family. Meanwhile, Amanda also declared that light-skinned and fair-haired Doña Cinda was socially subordinate in terms in which race and class were indivisible: Cinda’s Quechua-accented Spanish, her pollera and braids, and her purported immoral gossiping and unwed motherhood, demonstrated her lower class and race. That some comments about race were couched in jokes—“black, Indian, ugly!” and “chocolate”—suggests that, like in the United States, Bolivians felt some restraint in making racist comments as a result of government and social movement condemnation of racism. That people often uttered harsh racist epithets in moments of anger at spouses and children also shows how racist speech could channel antagonism and tension; explicit racism marked the momentary lessening of self-control.
By the late 1990s, in response to the national government’s promotion of multiculturalism and the rise of the MAS, some Sacabans had begun to take on explicitly racial terms as badges of pride. “Around here, we are indios, laris,” said a taxi-bus driver in an affirming tone in 1998 as he sped along the road between Choro and Sacaba Town. Yet such self-identification with a term that had racist connotations—rather than the more positive indígena and originario—was rare in Sacaba.
Snobbery and Egalitarianism
The clash between the ethic of upward mobility, which Sacabans often feared was necessarily tied to snobbery, and the norm of equality created personal dilemmas. Deysi, Doña Saturnina’s math-teacher daughter, in her mid-thirties, was an astute analyst of local social relations and a vivid storyteller. On many occasions, she described the social quandaries created by this clash that she began to navigate as she became a professional and attempted to shrug off her status as a “person from the countryside.”
One moment in which Deysi asserted her own middle-class distinction while also condemning snobbery occurred on July 2, 2006, the night of the election for Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly delegates. Deysi came back to our shared bedroom at her parents’ house with her sometime-friend Norah’s husband. Norah was also a rural teacher, but unlike Deysi, who had a master’s degree from an elite urban university, Norah had earned a combination high school diploma and elementary school teaching certificate (bachiller pedagógico) from a rural boarding school run by Catholic nuns. Norah had been lucky to graduate and find a teaching job in the late 1990s before the Bolivian job market flooded with teachers. Though many people who had earned the less rigorous teaching degree a few years later were at that moment unemployed, Norah had a steady job.
Norah’s husband, Chavo, a successful auto mechanic, was telling Deysi about his long-running arguments with Norah and her mother. He was tearful and his voice was slurred from their recent round of postvote drinking. He, Norah, and their two small children had recently returned to live in Choro from the town of Sacaba in order to keep Norah’s mother company because she was a widow who lived alone. But his mother-in-law constantly claimed that he was taking advantage of her. She insulted Chavo as a bad provider, telling him: “I’m supporting you, here,” and asking pointedly, “And you, what do you have?” “It’s true,” Chavo said defiantly to Deysi. “My father is a poor farmer [pobre agricultor],” while Norah’s mother was a prosperous vegetable merchant who had inherited large plots of farmland from her grandparents. But Chavo’s mother-in-law’s taunts rankled mostly because Norah took her mother’s side, reproaching Chavo for his lack of earning power, saying scornfully, “I’m a teacher! I earn money.” Norah had told Chavo that her salary maintained the two of them and their two small children more than did his income as a mechanic. I was momentarily surprised at the fine distinction that Norah had drawn, since many Bolivians believed that rural teachers, particularly those with Norah’s high school degree, were not true professionals (see Luykx 1999). But Norah asserted her middle-class
