had taken place since. Marisol also disagreed with the assertion by social movements and the Morales government that Bolivia’s extreme inequality represented a moral wrong that required a remedy by the government.
Marisol instead narrated Bolivia’s history through the framework of her own family’s experience of modest upward mobility. Her parents had taken advantage of a 1960s-era government program for small-scale farmers from western and central Bolivia to receive free land and tools if they moved to the tropical lowlands to grow soy, cotton, sugar, and peanuts. It was through their hard work, Marisol and her father had told me, that her parents had built up prosperity measured proudly by their ownership of a mechanized tractor and enough disposable income to send her to the university. She and her parents had worked hard so that she would not share their self-identification as a campesina who spoke the indigenous language, Quechua, but rather as a middle-class professional. And they had succeeded: she was a pharmacist married to an agronomist who was also among the first from his rural community to earn a college degree.
Marisol’s views coincided closely with the statements of Bolivia’s tiny, light-skinned, superwealthy class. Kiko Aguilera, one of Bolivia’s wealthiest men, owner of thousands of acres of tropical ranch land and leader of an elite right-wing political opposition movement, declared in 2006 soon after Evo’s election: “I’ve worked hard for everything that I own…. We haven’t stolen anything from anyone. We worked for our land with the sweat of our brow. We won’t return it to anyone. Death, first!” (quoted in Leidel 2006).
Yet as Marisol reaffirmed her middle-class status by distinguishing herself from campesinos she also complained about her own lack of resources: the dearth of clients in her pharmacy, the difficulty of living for several years with her husband and daughter in a small rented room while they saved money to build their own home, and the challenge of taking care of her six-year-old daughter with little help while running her own business.
Why did Marisol so vehemently set herself apart from campesinos if her parents were small farmers themselves, and why did she argue that government redistribution of wealth was itself a moral wrong, given that her family had benefitted from prior government largesse? Her prosperity, significant by Bolivian standards, was by no means equal to the lifestyle of Bolivia’s tiny upper class, marked by enormous wealth, country club membership, plastic surgery, live-in maids, and often, college education at Harvard or Texas A&M. Their social circles in no way overlapped with hers. In spite of limited purchasing power, dark hair and skin, and knowledge of Quechua learned from her parents—all of which would lead a foreigner or a Bolivian census taker to classify Marisol as indigenous—Marisol drew firm distinctions between herself, a middle-class professional, and Bolivia’s poor and indigenous campesinos.
Marisol was not alone in Sacaba Municipality in framing her relatively modest and sometimes uncertain means as acquired in comparable fashion to the fortunes of Bolivia’s tiny wealthy elite. Throughout Sacaba, many first-generation lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and newly prosperous merchants argued that their prosperity was available to all Bolivians willing to work hard, and, conversely, that poor people had probably been lazy or imprudent. They, like Marisol, asserted that campesinos and indios (Indians) had been tricked into supporting their socialist president and his promises that his government would redistribute wealth more equitably.
The very act of drawing such distinctions mirrors the practices of middle-class people throughout the world (see Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002; Bourdieu 1984). Yet, in other ways, Marisol’s response to inequality and her self-identification within hierarchies of race and class were particular to the Third World. In still other ways, she drew distinctions particular to Bolivia, and to the particular social world of a provincial municipality in central Bolivia. Marisol’s experience exemplified patterns shared by many in Sacaba whom I am terming the new middle class. At times Marisol, a first-generation pharmacist, allied herself rhetorically with Bolivia’s wealthiest elite. Yet in other moments she expressed discomfort when faced with wealthier, lighter-skinned, or generally more elite Bolivians. She conveyed a sense of anxiety over her social status and she alternated between professing values of egalitarianism and superiority and between subaltern and elite social identities.
This alternation between elite and subaltern identities was common in Sacaba, as a sample of incidents I witnessed reveals.
A doctor chastised me, as we ate roast guinea pig (a rural Andean delicacy) he had prepared, for not eating the skin. He declared with heat, “I’m poor; I eat the skin.” On another occasion, he told me proudly that his children insisted on his buying them cakes from Dumbo’s, Cochabamba’s most expensive bakery, for their birthday parties.
A lawyer remarked wistfully that he always felt out of place in law school because of his rural origins. He declined to marry his common-law wife, however, because her identity as a campesina and indigenous person from the countryside did not fit with the middle-class image he wished to project.
A rural family that had become wealthy through a trucking and logging business vied for superior status with their cash-poor but highly educated neighbors.
Marisol did not, in fact, call herself middle class; nor did most Sacabans. The term “middle class” (clase media) in Bolivia was most often reserved for well-established urbanite professionals and business owners. Like most other college-educated Sacabans, Marisol referred to herself as a professional (profesional) to convey her proud ascension of the Bolivian social ladder. Other prosperous but non-college-educated Sacabans similarly did not attribute to themselves any particular explicit term for being in the middle. Middling Sacabans instead, like Marisol, alternated between calling themselves subaltern—in terms like pobre (poor), campesina, and popular (working class)—and making statements of comradeship with Bolivian superelites. They also shared her anxiety over social status and alternation between ethics of social superiority and equality. Those I am calling Sacaba’s new middle classes also differed in their experiences and status from the prosperous urbanites termed “middle class” in the Bolivian press, political polling, and public debate because they were deeply shaped by the social connotations of living in or near a provincial town, a place viewed by many Bolivians as one step away from stigmatized rural spaces. I am calling them “middle class” because they had achieved some of their aspirations for upward mobility, because many elements of their experience were similar to experiences of self-identified middle classes elsewhere in Bolivia and the Third World, and because their self-presentations, preoccupations, and aspirations differed from the explicitly campesino-indigenous rhetoric of political leaders. These aspirations conditioned their political ideals and their relationships with their families and fellow townspeople.
Like members of middle classes elsewhere, Marisol made an effort to distinguish herself from poorer people through moral and intellectual, as well as economic, superiority (Bourdieu 1984; see also Ehrenreich 1989; Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). She rhetorically marked her intellectual superiority over Bolivia’s campesinos, who “blindly” believed in the Morales administration’s rhetoric of redistribution of wealth. She also aligned herself sympathetically with people much wealthier than herself when she suggested that Bolivia’s richest people, the large landowners, must have gotten that land through their own or their families’ hard work and “sacrifice” rather than through government handouts, as she suggested campesinos were attempting to do.
The notion that people who prospered did so due to their own hard work and sound money management, and that poor people remained poor because they lacked those values, were common sentiments among upwardly mobile Sacabans. Deysi, a schoolteacher from the rural community of Choro, similarly argued that her own and other first-generation professionals’ superior management of their lives came from the intellectual insight gained from a university education and from the moral worth gained by having “sacrificed themselves” to attain those professional degrees. “As a profesional, you know how to budget from your paycheck,” she declared in 2009. By contrast, her neighbors, “people from the countryside
