The Emergence and Evolving Character of Contemporary Afro-Bolivian Mobilization

Abstract

Many are the scholarly and popular publications on Bolivia that open with the declaration, “Bolivia is the most indigenous nation in the Americas.” That the present chapter is concerned with Bolivia’s population of African descent makes that common opening statement no less necessary and relevant. It is precisely this demographic reality that has long held sway against social and political mobilization based on Afro-Bolivian identity and that has affected the character and trajectory of such mobilization when it has managed to emerge. Afro-descendants have been present in the territory that is now Bolivia for well over four hundred years, and yet they have been rendered virtually invisible by a numerically dominant Indian and mestizo population, by a politically and economically dominant mestizo and white minority elite, and by popular visions of Bolivian history, society, culture, and national identity that focus on negotiating degrees and kinds of “Indianness” and distances from Indianness (for example, in “mestizoness”) to the exclusion or marginalization of interrogations of other types of social identities. In the past one hundred years alone, the centrality of Indianness has been expressed in countless ways, not the least of which include the intellectual and political concern over “the Indian problem” at the turn of the twentieth century, the efforts at disappearing Indians into a homogenized campesino class after the 1952 Agrarian Reform, the reaffirmation of Indian heritage and diversity with inclusion of the words, “Bolivia, multiétnico y pluricultural” in the 1992 constitution, and, most recently, in the mounting dialogue around racism since the election of Bolivia’s first ever Indian president, Evo Morales, in 2005.KeywordsSocial MovementEvolve CharacterOral HistoryAfrican DescentRural DwellerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.