Cholos, mestizos and the (un) making of the Bolivian state: A literary journey, 1900--1952.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the literary representation of mestizaje and cholaje, two forms of conceptualizing the negotiations between ethnic identities and modern processes of state formation, during the period of national construction (1900--1952) preceding the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952. It is commonly held that the Bolivian Revolution produced a weak state because it imposed a modern rubric on a supposedly 'non modern' indigenous population. However, my discussion of eight pre-Revolutionary texts, starting with Alcides Arguedas and Franz Tamayo's essays in 1910 and ending with two novels written on the eve of the National Revolution, suggests that the revolutionary movement's real failure lay in its ambiguous engagement with subaltern readings of political and economic modernity. By subaltern I refer both to the urban lower classes and the rural indigenous populations of the country. One of the unintended consequences of the Liberal Party's installation at the helm of the state in 1900 was the increased (albeit often surreptitious) intervention of popular sectors in the country's political processes. The negative representation of this participation as cholaje in the essays of Arguedas and Tamayo betrays the elite anxiety about modernity's appropriation by subaltern groups. In 1910, Tamayo formulated mestizaje as a pedagogical strategy enabling the state to regulate their involvement in its political and economic functioning by transforming them into uniform and westernized citizens. During the 1920s, a period that marks the decline of the Liberal oligarchy's political domination, mestizaje hesitantly evolved into a state policy. Over the course of the next two decades, it metamorphosed from a strategy of survival adopted by a weakening oligarchy into the slogan of revolutionary nationalism promoted by the counter-elite, i.e. the leaders of the movements opposing the oligarchy, The shared pedigree of the oligarchy and these counter-elite is, however, revealed by the persistently ambivalent portrayal of cholaje. The conflictive representation of cholos as national subjects in the novels of Jesus Lara and Victor Hugo Villegas on the eve of the Revolution suggests the counter-elite's reluctance to embrace popular appropriations of modernity as the point of departure for an indigenous state model.