The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (review)

Abstract

Daniel M. Goldstein. The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 296 pp. Violence and marginality in Latin American cities are intimately linked to each other by the discreet and explicit processes through which the upper echelons of society attempt to maintain order, exercise influence and reproduce their own social, cultural, political and economic power. The poor and marginalized populations in these urban settings not only feel the structural violence exerted on them from above, but also appropriate it as a way to defend their own interests and to obtain political, administrative and, overall, public visibility. Violence is in many cases a conduit through which to gain political voice and demand social inclusion and the rights of citizenship. In The Spectacular City (2004), Daniel M. Goldstein argues that public spectacles, both violent (illegal) and folkloric (cultural), in a barrio of Cochabamba, Bolivia, constitute a means by which marginalized populations force themselves into the public view. Goldstein's analysis draws attention to the similarities between the folkloric procession in honor of San Miguel and vigilante lynchings of petty thieves. He suggests they are both spectacular performances through which communities historically excluded from national life (in this case rural-to-urban migrants from the state of Oruro) strive to make claims to citizenship, inclusion and the formalization of their relationship to the administrative bureaucracy of the city. Goldstein presents ethnographic work undertaken in one of Cochabamba's most highly organized barrios, Villa Pagador. The book reviews urban planning policies since the Colonial period and underlines the exclusion of an ever-present rural-to-urban migrant population from the mainstream white metropolitan citizenry. As modernist planning set out to organize Cochabamba in the 1950s, rural-to-urban migration increased and has been out of the control of the city administration ever since. Goldstein reviews efforts to regulate illegal settlements that were furthermore hindered by Bolivia's adoption of neo-liberalism. Failure to effectively establish governmentality in the city produced two contradictory processes that have shaped the history of the political organization of Villa Pagador. The first were policies aimed at discouraging settlement and hindering the barrio's efforts to gain official recognition and basic services such as water and electricity. The second were various attempts to normalize and control the barrio's growth through the implementation of demographic mapping in order to establish a system of taxation in the newly settled areas. In the first three chapters of the book Goldstein reviews the historical processes through which barrios like Villa Pagador have appeared and developed, and the history of the community itself; a history of effective community associations undertaken by its leaders that has enabled them to gain political voice in the city and to demand official recognition. He then turns to the barrio's effort to construct identity through its links to the state of Oruro and its famous Carnaval de Oruro, a folkloric festival that has been co-opted by the Bolivian state as part of the national cultural heritage. The book scrutinizes the processions around the fiesta of San Miguel, which emphasize the origin, or imagined origin, of most of the migrant residents of Villa Pagador. Through these performances, community members strive to harness and appropriate a nationally recognized identity (based on the national imaginary that regards Oruro as the center of authentic folklore). The spectacular performances and dances of the fiesta have thus become a source of pride and community bonding that helps to give the barrio its identity. These efforts have been successful, as Villa Pagador has effectively managed to lobby for basic services and has received development aid from the city and international institutions like the World Bank. …