Symbols in Motion: Katari as Traveling Image in Landless Movement Politics in Bolivia

Abstract

This case study of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) looks at the contemporary use and value of the image of Tupac Katari, an anti-colonial hero who led a regional insurgency in 1780. The symbol of Katari as resurrected spirit in political tale-telling and on flags and posters mixes with more contemporary icons of landless peasant politics to serve political and economic purposes: redistributing land and resources to displaced peoples. This essay argues that as this symbol travels through time – from a popular sign of Andean politics to a critical emblem of multiculturalism in the 1990s – it takes on new meanings as indigenous peoples make critical links between ethnic/racial identity, uneven resource distribution, and structural inequality. As people move across geographic space – from MST communities to urban centers, from Santa Cruz to La Paz – their symbols stand against new forms of violence and discrimination and infuse regional spaces with hybrid political identities. However, when an image or symbol, once tethered to concrete demands and embodied performances at a local level, moves across scales and turns into a mere symbol of the state, abstracted from material shifts, it loses its capacity to mobilize.