We are Bolivians too: The experience and meaning of blackness in Bolivia.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the contemporary culture and identity of Bolivia's small and overlooked black population, descended from Africans enslaved by the Spaniards during the colonial period. More broadly, it deals with the experiences and meanings associated with blackness and race within Bolivia's overwhelmingly indigenous/<italic>mestizo</italic> socio-cultural landscape. The roles of three intervening forces in these meanings and experiences are considered: first, the dominant Indian/<italic>mestizo</italic>-centric paradigm for organizing difference and Bolivian national identity; second, expressive culture and its public performance and discursive life; and third, the nature and circulation of political, scholarly, and popular images and representations of blacks and race within Bolivia. This dissertation is based largely on two years of research and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Bolivia's capital city, La Paz, and in a small rural Afro-Bolivian community in the neighboring Yungas region. A central argument developed in this dissertation is that the realities and conversations around difference and diversity in Bolivia focus on degrees and kinds of Indian-ness to the exclusion of other kinds of difference; as a consequence, there is little or no vocabulary for talking or thinking about blackness. This research reveals that performance, in particular Afro-Bolivian <italic> saya</italic> music and dance, has provided a virtually exclusive vocabulary (both literal and symbolic) for articulating the salience of blackness as a category of identity and experience in Bolivia. In the process of presencing Afro-Bolivians on the national level where they have for so long been virtually invisible, <italic>saya</italic> has also contributed to a narrow understanding of blackness, relegating it to the performed---entertainment, the folkloric, the seemingly apolitical. Blackness is seen as a musical performance, thus making the non-black relationship to blacks and blackness one of audience to performers and performance.