Chavo left, Deysi lay on her bed, looking up at the ceiling. She wondered aloud in a thoughtful tone why she seemed to have so much “fear of getting married.” I replied that it did not seem to be such a mystery, given the dire example of Chavo and Norah. I reminded her that she herself had often told me that, as a single woman in her late thirties with a steady, relatively well-paying job, she had quite a bit of freedom—to go to parties with friends and relax on weekends. So many husbands she knew drank heavily, beat their wives, tried to forbid them from leaving the house, or abandoned them to raise their children alone.
I had also noticed, though I refrained from mentioning, that during the years that I had then known them, both Deysi and Amanda had often seemed ambivalent about whom to date. They appeared to continually wonder whether their potential boyfriends were appropriate matches based on their status. It is possible that she, like Edgar, was perplexed about the way in which marriage would constrict her present ability to play with different identities. In 1995, when Deysi was a first-year college student in her early twenties living in Cochabamba, she had confided in me that she would only date men from Choro, never from Cochabamba. This provided a quite small pool of potential boyfriends: though Choro consisted of roughly four hundred families in 2006, few Choreños her age had college degrees.
On election night in 2006, Deysi emphasized the dilemmas created by perceived class differences. She continued, “Around here, it’s mostly this situation: one spouse comes from a family with more wealth and wants to put down [despreciar], to humiliate [humillar] the other one. You know, they say that it’s better for professionals to marry each other and for people from the countryside to marry each other [es mejor casarse entre profesionales o entre gente del campo].” Deysi was thus reaffirming the local hierarchy by which class and racial identity were defined in geographical terms: professionals, among who she counted herself at that moment, were inherently urban, while poor and uneducated people were by definition “people from the countryside.” She repeated that Chavo’s parents were indeed very poor. He shouldn’t have hit Norah, but, on the other hand, Deysi seemed to imply, Norah was engaging in emotional abuse when she touted her class origins as being above Chavo’s. Norah was a snob (altanera), Deysi said, for accusing Chavo of being only a mechanic and not even a high school graduate.
People are, of course, inconsistent. They are the targets of accusations that they also lob at others. On the one hand, Deysi argued that Norah was a snob for belittling her husband because she was a professional and he was not. Deysi had criticized David’s wife and his physician friends on similar grounds of snobbery. She resented Norah as snobbish in relation to herself as well, explaining that Norah was never willing to “share” (compartir): to sit with friends, drinking chicha and chatting. The common term Deysi used to describe such conviviality, compartir, conveys the widespread norm in Sacaba that socializing was an expression of generosity—the opposite of selfishness—as well as a pleasure. On the other hand, Deysi herself had argued that Doña Cinda, Edgar’s wife, was socially inferior to Edgar because of her immoral character in addition to her status as a cholita. Doña Cinda had similarly accused Deysi and her sister and mother of being snobs for not accepting Cinda’s relationship with Edgar.
David on one occasion attempted to insert more nuance into these binary oppositions of rural and urban, campesino and professional. When I asked him in 1998 whether he considered himself a campesino, he replied, “I’m a campesino because I live in the countryside, but I’m not poor like a campesino.” His was a rare assertion that a professional with close ties to both rural and urban areas could potentially assert a rural identity that was also prosperous and professional.
Deysi and Amanda sometimes called themselves campesinas, too, in moments when they pointedly criticized others’ snobbishness and promoted social equality. Their statements, like the examples of overt racism and classism described above, drew on fine local nuances of food, clothes, accent, or birthplace to connote race and class. One day in 2003, for example, Doña Saturnina and most of her children had gathered for a festive lunch while watching the Sacaba municipal anniversary parade from the rooftop of David and Eliana’s apartment building. Amanda handed a plate of fried chicken to David’s seven-year-old son, Alejandro, from a previous relationship. “Me and my mom don’t like to eat chicken skin,” Alejandro said mildly, as he began to peel the skin off his drumstick. “Well,” Amanda replied with mock severity to her nephew, “you and your mother are classy people [gente decente]. We [his aunts and uncles] eat chicken skin because we are campesinos.” Her comment echoed the complaints of Choro parents that their children refused to eat the skin and entrails that Choreños had eaten during leaner times before the coca boom. Similarly, in 2005, David admonished me for not eating the skin of a roasted guinea pig, an Andean delicacy to which I never became accustomed, which he had prepared at his mother’s house. “I am poor [soy pobre]; I eat the skin!” He declared pointedly to me. Both Amanda and David were teaching cultural beginners—a child and a foreigner—to be egalitarian.
If Doña Saturnina’s children expressed irritation when they perceived that I, Eliana their sister-in-law, or David’s city physician friends belittled them, they also complained angrily when nonprofessional and de pollera, but wealthier, neighbors asserted a higher status than them. Such complaints surfaced, for example, when I lamented that a well-to-do, cholita neighbor who owned a trucking business with her husband hadn’t come to my son’s baptism party, which we threw at Doña Saturnina’s house in December, 2005. Amanda remarked in a sharp, ironic tone, “She’s loaded [ricachona]! She only goes to rich peoples’ parties. Because we are poor [pobres], she didn’t come.” Amanda explained that this woman’s discriminatory thinking was “clear from where she goes and how she speaks. For the weddings of rich people [ricachones], she shows up with presents; for poor people, she doesn’t show. These people are creídos [snobs].” Years earlier, in 1998, Amanda, Deysi, and David similarly condemned another wealthy cholita neighbor who owned a successful chicha tavern. The neighbor had reputedly proclaimed that she would reserve expensive bottled beer and cocktails for “rich people [ricos]” at her daughter’s wedding, while serving poor guests only chicha and making them leave early. Amanda, Deysi, and David did not expect the neighbor to treat them as poor and refuse to serve them the expensive drinks; indeed, they partook freely. They nevertheless expressed these episodes as an affront to them personally—they had less visible wealth and cash on hand than their wealthy neighbors—as well as an altruistic concern for the many Choreños who were even poorer. Their protests also illustrate the intense social competition within this middle group in Sacaba, between professionals with little disposable wealth and wealthy merchants and truckers with little formal education. In a manner emblematic of middle classes throughout the Third World, they jockeyed intensely for the social supremacy to be recognized as a middle class, in this case through competing claims of distinctions based on wealth versus education (Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). Finally, these complaints by David and Amanda also demonstrate how in the social world of Sacaba Municipality, this rivalry for moral superiority could entail, paradoxically, making claims to egalitarianism.
In fact, the sisters termed themselves campesinas and rural and asserted an ethic of egalitarianism in some situations when they were called out as being snobs. In 2003, for example, Deysi recounted a painful episode in which she and Amanda had unexpectedly lost a valued friend. During a party at their home, they had teased their friend, a fellow university student who hailed from a rural town in the Bolivian highlands, that he had no right to criticize them: “Don’t forget that you’re an Apaza!” Apaza is a common indigenous Aymara last name that immediately signals a person’s origins in the rural, Aymara-speaking Bolivian highlands. Deysi and Amanda were subtly marking Bolivia’s racial hierarchy, in which highland Aymara speakers have been viewed as more Indian than, and inferior to, Cochabamba valley Quechua speakers.10 In effect, they had admonished him, in mock severity, not to be an “uppity Indian.” He became angry and told them that they had insulted him with a racial slur, left the party, and never returned to Choro to visit. Thinking back on this event several years later, Deysi said that she and Amanda
