buy] a case of beer, then another case of beer. Meanwhile, a professional knows what he has sacrificed for his money; he isn’t going to waste it.” Her neighbor, a coca farmer who became a music teacher, echoed many upwardly mobile Sacabans in his criticism of poorer neighbors when he argued in 1998 that “if a person wants to work, he can prosper; if a person doesn’t want to work, he won’t …” Such sentiments mirror the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative prevalent in the United States that presents the middle class as more virtuous than the working classes and poor.
To be middle class was not an identity based solely on economic standing. Sacabans’ race and class identities were based as much on symbols with deeply charged meanings—a kitchen sink with running water, a trip to the orthodontist, a university diploma—as on a particular income or assets. As Mark Liechty reminds us, middle classness is a frame of mind, a set of behaviors, a “cultural project or practice … rather than a social category or empirical condition” (Liechty 2002:21).1 Middle classness is often defined by the practice of drawing distinctions between oneself and others who are poorer and using moral explanations for one’s success (O’Dougherty 2002:6). Marisol’s placing of herself in opposition to campesinos is emblematic of middle-class strategies for assuming social superiority.
Despite these similarities with middle classes throughout the world, many elements of Sacaba’s new middle classes’ identities are not shared by middle classes in places like the United States or Europe but are distinctive to the Third World. Given that impoverished people who struggle daily to earn enough to feed and house themselves make up a larger percentage of the Bolivian population than in the United States, new middle-class Bolivians experience more anxiety. The newly prosperous in Bolivia are faced continually with a grim reminder—in the 50 percent poverty rate—of what will happen to them if they fail in their quest for upper mobility (World Bank 2013; see Liechty 2002:10–11; Dickey 2000; O’Dougherty 2002; Cahn 2008). Like middle classes from Brazil to Nepal, newly middle-class Sacabans vigorously identified themselves with modernity and development and associated poor people with backwardness and underdevelopment. Bolivia’s superwealthy agribusiness landowners, the national class and racial elite, represented modernity and development, and Marisol, from her struggling pharmacy, placed herself with them.
Furthermore, the middle class does not define national identity in the Third World to the same degree as it does in the United States and Europe, where most people term themselves middle class. In the First World, middle classes became a large segment of the population in the mid-twentieth century as a result of industrial expansion that employed large numbers of unionized skilled laborers, middle managers, engineers, doctors, and teachers (Bledstein and Johnston 2001). By contrast, in Bolivia and much of the Third World, economies based on natural resource exports rather than industry supported a much smaller proportion of the overall population as a middle class. In early twentieth-century Bolivia, these were skilled craftspeople, medium-scale landowners, and doctors. Following the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, which expanded the functions of government, the middle class grew. As education became available in the countryside, new university graduates were hired as white-collar workers in rapidly expanding government offices and state-owned enterprises, for example in mining, telecommunications, and railroads. In large Bolivian cities like Cochabamba and La Paz, middle-class neighborhoods filled during the midcentury with boxy, modernist, cement houses, with perhaps a Brazilian-made Volkswagen Beetle parked in front. With Bolivia’s free-market reforms of 1985, government offices and state-owned companies saw mass layoffs, shrinking the ranks of the urban middle class. Internationally funded development organizations (NGOs) became a fallback, but less secure, middle-class employer. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the slice of the Bolivian population calling itself “middle class” has grown but never become a majority.
Another important aspect of middle-class identity in Bolivia, as in much of Latin America, is the overlap in the meanings of racial and class terms (de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001). In Bolivia in the early twenty-first century, explicit class terms like pobre (poor) and campesino carried the racial meaning of “indigenous,” just as racial and cultural terms that indicated indigeneity (indígena, indio) connoted poverty. This overlap stemmed in part from the Bolivian revolutionary government’s decree in 1953 that indios (Indians), a racist term to describe the majority of the country’s people, would be called campesinos and that all Bolivians shared the same mestizo (mixed indigenous and European) race. Pejorative racial meanings persisted in class terms: Sacabans often identified each other as belonging to the “campesino race” and defined campesinos as ignorant, uneducated, unintelligent, or ugly, drawing on racial ideologies of the colonial Spanish and Bolivian elites. These racist meanings have persisted alongside the assertions of racial and cultural pride promoted by social movements and the Morales government during the past three decades. Most terms of identity in Bolivia, whatever their dictionary definitions, connote race as well as class. Middle classness was therefore experienced as racially—as well as economically, morally, and culturally—intermediate.
Class and Race Among Middling Folk in Cochabamba
Some elements of the experiences of members of the new middle class in the Cochabamba region were distinct from other regions of the country, owing to Cochabamba’s particular history as a crossroads of migration and commerce. Tracing this distinctiveness can help us understand why many Sacabans alternated between identifying themselves with the wealthiest and with the poorest Bolivians and how they confronted simultaneous social pressure from their neighbors and family members to treat others as both equal and inferior. Cochabambans historically possessed unusually fluid identities relative to other regions of Bolivia; individual people identified themselves by different racial and class identities in different social contexts (Larson 1998:350). The roots of this fluidity can be traced to political and social patterns established as far back as the fifteenth century A.D. when Inca armies conquered the Cochabamba valleys and forced most native Cochabambans to move to other parts of the Inca Empire (Larson 1998). They resettled the Cochabamba valleys with subjects from other regions of the empire. When the Spanish conquered the Incas in the 1530s, many people returned to their home communities as far afield as modern-day Ecuador and Colombia. In the power vacuum that ensued after this exodus, some ambitious indigenous leaders cobbled together new communities from the Cochabamba residents who remained, collecting taxes and conscripting labor for Spanish colonial mines. Compared to highland communities, whose residents the Inca rulers had left in place and where community identity tended to be strong, Cochabamba community leaders’ authority was always more tenuous and community identity was historically weaker. Cochabambans readily left their natal communities to escape Spanish taxes, deadly forced labor in Spanish mines, and abusive indigenous leaders. Many became merchants and traveled between the valleys and highlands selling food and clothing to miners (Larson 1998:80, 323).
Cochabambans’ geographic mobility as a strategy for gaining freedom had enduring effects on their class and racial identities. The Spanish colonial government had created two legal classes of people throughout Latin America: urban residents were known as the Republic of Spaniards while rural residents were the Republic of Indians. In Spanish colonial times, the racial terms indio (Indian), mestizo (mixed race), and blanco (white) were primarily legal categories rather than based on physical appearance. Indians were taxpayers and laborers who resided in legally designated Indian rural communities. That is why geographic mobility and social mobility were intertwined: when individual Cochabambans moved from rural communities to towns or cities to avoid taxes and forced labor, they deliberately jumped from the Indian category to become mestizos (Larson 1998:375). Unlike in most other parts of the country, in Cochabamba self-defined mestizos became the majority of the population, and Cochabambans generally held less rigidly defined social and economic status than in other regions of the country.
On winning independence from Spain in 1825, Spanish-descended elites attempted to deny indigenous people a livelihood and a legitimate place in the new Bolivian nation. In the Bolivian highlands, indigenous people contested elites’ oppression with militant battles and identified themselves as the oppressed descendants of powerful indigenous
