The Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Brief Reflections Regarding How We Have Come to Know Emancipatory Struggles and the Significance of the Term Social Emancipation

Abstract

This essay analyzes the events that occurred in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005. At that time, a powerful wave of mobilizations and uprisings opened up a space-time of Pachakuti. That is to say, it generated upheaval in a social system that, until then, had been accepted as normal and quotidian. It challenged the prerogative of a few men and women of a certain social status and ethnic background to rule and decide the fate and fortune of all others. Hundreds of collective actions of deliberation and decision making, community organizing, the construction of reciprocal trust, and the struggle and defense of the commons created situations that rendered visible, with the clarity that lightning offers in dark nights, the ethnic and social antagonisms that penetrate and fragment Bolivian society. This essay examines this visibility and how the growing collective rejection of the various mechanisms of political and social domination enabled the massive participation of thousands of men and women—organized in their communities, their unions, their local councils, their confederations and coalitions— to disrupt and change a whole set of oppressive and unjust social relations. In sum, Gutiérrez sets out to discern what this dawn of a season of Pachakuti might tell us about the possibilities of social emancipation today.