Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935–1964

Abstract

Fields of Revolution represents a significant advance in the literature on agrarian reform, revolutionary Bolivia, and the political power of peasants. Scholars have long agreed that control of land has played a central role in wealth and power; however, the use of historical methods to analyze Cold War–era land reform is still nascent. Along with universal suffrage and the nationalization of the principal tin mines, the transformation of the countryside developed into one of the three pillars of Bolivia's 1952 revolution, which was led by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR). Carmen Soliz's extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of land tenure in three provinces at the core of Bolivia's hacienda system explains not only the mechanics and shape of land reform but also its profound effects on society and politics. Outlining the MNR's pivot from its vision of wage labor and modernization through mechanized farming, Soliz persuasively argues that wide-scale expropriations were determined from below and thus varied widely based on local practice, power brokers, and geography.Soliz draws on agrarian court cases, prefecture records, newspapers, politicians' papers, and social science research to paint a vivid picture of land tenure and rural power relations before and after 1952. This detailed research undermines many oft-cited facts and statistics about land tenure and rural labor in Bolivia. Complicating the landlord/peasant dichotomy, she reveals details of specific cases and disputes to explain the hierarchies among peasants and often-surprising alliances with particular landlords. In addition to the 1953 decree governing redistribution, this monograph highlights the less-understood restitution decree of 1954 that generated conflicts between Indigenous community members and hacienda workers (colonos).This book contributes to a larger rethinking of Bolivia's revolutionary period. Initial appraisals heralded the MNR for profoundly changing Bolivian society, but by the 1970s Indianist scholars in Bolivia and social scientists in the global North judged it a failure or at least incomplete. Both groups described land reform as a top-down clientelist process that created a passive peasantry. Carmen Soliz forcefully argues against this view. Her analysis depicts an MNR that came to depend on rural support and thus worked to accommodate local demands, even if they ran counter to the letter of the land reform law. Far from manipulated clients, the peasant unions in this book remade the countryside in their own image and won for themselves a powerful role in society.This research resonates with recent scholarship that has emphasized how a weak state apparatus and dependency on a diverse coalition made the MNR quite responsive to pressure from below. Future appraisals of the 1952 revolution should reflect Soliz's argument that the ultimate shape of land reform was not what the MNR envisioned and that it fundamentally changed landholding in the countryside, facilitating the rise of the peasantry as a powerful force in Bolivian politics. Analysis showing 1960–64 to be the most radical era for expropriations challenges the prevailing periodization of the MNR as becoming more conservative after 1955 and should prompt scholars to question how they are defining conservative.Soliz's portrayal of the MNR acquiescing to a relatively independent countryside does not erase the prevailing racism of the revolutionary period. On the contrary, the text astutely demonstrates how shared prejudice against Indigenous cultural practices bridged divides of race, class, ideology, and political party. Yet Soliz argues that despite the MNR's explicitly assimilationist discourse, the implementation of its policies unintentionally strengthened Andean practices by giving unprecedented control to relatively independent peasant unions. Soliz makes a strong case that peasant unions mapped onto existing communal structures and became a vehicle for collective negotiation with the state.Fields of Revolution is an important contribution to the literature on revolutionary Bolivia. It is a clearly written and accessible text that assumes an audience unfamiliar with Bolivian society and history. Soliz draws astute comparisons to land reforms and revolutionary regimes in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, and Peru that help readers understand Bolivia as part of larger Latin American trends. The book includes a wealth of concrete data that is both analyzed in the text and presented in informative tables and appendixes. Yet Soliz also discusses the skepticism with which scholars must treat statistics and certain sources, such as press accounts of rural violence and MNR reports on land reform. This methodological clarity, comparative framework, and engagement with a complex historiography make this text teachable at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.