Blessings of the Virgin in Capitalist Society: The Transformation of a Rural Bolivian Fiesta

Abstract

A 40‐year scrutiny of the Virgin's fiesta in a highland Bolivian town reveals it to have come under recent control of individuals who have migrated to the national capital, La Paz, and to have flourished and expanded during economic crisis. Viewing the fiesta as a mechanism contributing to rural social stratification, this analysis reveals a new, fiesta‐limited compadrazgo; it emerged from the fragmentation of social class, permitting urban migrants to funnel resources, not from the town to the city, but from the city to the city through the town, cushioning the urban residents against a chronically collapsing economy. Viewed from the town, this transformation is best understood as a product of the failure of a formal capitalism to develop in the postrevolutionary landscape in the periphery of the national economy. From the city, however, the same transformation may be considered a successful capitalist metamorphosis of the compadrazgo institution that once served to cross the barriers of social class. What defines the Virgin's fiesta today is its setting in a community that relies less on subsistence agriculture than on an opportunistic occupational multiplicity. Expanding the analysis over a century reveals this fiesta transformation to be one of two, both linked to major social upheavals on the Bolivian altiplano. The first led to the rise of the town as a major regional center, the second to its collapse.