A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880 – 1952

Abstract

Laura Gotkowitz’s book is a timely intervention in ongoing discussions among historians, ethnohistorians, political scientists, and anthropologists over the meaning and uses of the law for the consolidation of the modern nation-state, and for what we might now refer to as the evolution of multicultural or plurinational states in Latin America and in the Andes. She also fills in what has been a neglected chapter in recent Bolivian history, that is, the period between the turn of the nineteenth century up to the events of the 1952 Revolution.Gotkowitz adds significant depth to conventional understandings of the 1952 Revolution as a rubicon of Bolivian history by connecting it to myriad ongoing campaigns undertaken by rural indigenous advocates throughout the 1910s – 1940s. In so doing she brings into focus the relationship between grassroots indigenous efforts and the military populism of this period, while linking the often mythologized events of 1952, typically discussed as a largely urban movement among workers and the middle class, to a less well known but persistent silent revolution in the countryside over rights to land.Gotkowitz generates her rich narrative of indigenous advocacy, representation, and organizing during the period by tracing out the construction of relationships between indigenous and other political actors: rural-urban networks, workers’ unions, municipal officials, and national political leaders and parties. Her attention to these highly coordinated networks animates her accounts of the 1938 constitutional referendum, 1945’s first national indigenous congress, and the 1947 uprisings in rural Cochabamba, all precedents to what has arguably been Latin America’s most neglected revolution. Gotkowitz uses archival records to build the case for the consistency of indigenous claims about collective rights, autonomy, and land throughout the twentieth century right up to the present, and for the extent to which these claims played a significant role in Bolivia’s national political history during this period. Setting the narrative against the background of national politics, Gotkowitz shows indigenous leaders as engaged in an ongoing argument among themselves and with state authorities about what it meant to be “indigenous.” This was an argument conducted by contesting the significance of presidential decrees, petitions, land surveys and titles, boundary disputes, competing definitions of private property and of fallow lands, efforts to extract protections and guarantees, written labor agreements, arguments over taxation, the juridical status of communities, political circulars, and a host of other legal, political, and bureaucratic interventions.Gotkowitz explores the vernacularization, in the hands of grassroots indigenous leaders, of relationships between liberalism, rights discourses, and concerns for justice in early twentieth-century Bolivia. Indigenous voices appropriated legal precedents and idioms as tools to claim alternative visions of Bolivia’s liberal state, citizenship, collective rights, property, self-government, and ownership. We see the extent to which indigenous political practice was shaped by, and actively shaped, the process of the law. This book shows how indigenous leaders, as sometimes subversive and self-appointed agents of the law, appropriated and challenged Bolivia’s liberal project, as part of an ongoing contest in Bolivia about who can legitimately speak for Indians.The most important contribution of Gotkowitz’s book is her convincing and well-researched demonstration of the importance of the regular politically creative uses of national law made by indigenous leaders during this period in repeated interventions with multiple levels of state officialdom. Despite often prevailing assumptions to the contrary, representatives of indigenous interests both demonstrated legal literacy and challenged an elite monopoly over legal interpretation. Promoting their own account of the law, these leaders actively built relationships with nonindigenous local and national political leaders and regularly intervened to promote their own concerns, primarily in order to articulate collective indigenous claims to land.Gotkowitz’s work is in fruitful conversation with scholars dedicated to identifying indigenous voices and political projects or concerned with the forms taken by indigenous engagements with the state, and with a rich corpus of research on the politics of land and land reform. More narrowly, even as it helps to fill in a relatively neglected chapter in the history of indigenous struggle in Bolivia, the book adds to our appreciation of the limits of national identity projects and opens a timely historical window upon the grievances that continue to be sources of Bolivia’s current transformational moment of Evo Morales and the MAS.