by Marisol were ambiguity, anxiety, alternation between elite and subaltern identities, and tension between an ethic of equality and an ethic of social superiority. The expression of these hopes, frustrations, and ambivalence in intimate relationships between family members, friends, and neighbors is the subject of the next chapter. Tracing these intimate politics is crucial to helping us understand the everyday experience of members of the new middle class and their roles in Bolivia’s rapidly transforming political culture.
Chapter 2
The Intimate Politics of New Middle Classes in Sacaba
Doña Saturnina Ramírez was in her late sixties in 2013, a plump, formidable woman.1 She had many godchildren, evidence that she was held in high esteem by many people in her hometown of Choro, even as some of Choro’s poorest residents were intimidated by her sometimes severe manner and by her children’s astounding professional achievements. Doña Saturnina’s family trajectory illustrated the sudden windfall that the coca boom had meant for many Sacabans. She wore a full pollera skirt and her hair, streaked with gray, in two long braids. As a chola in early twenty-first-century Bolivia, she identified herself as rural and campesina. Three of her four daughters, meanwhile, wore jeans and straight skirts and identified themselves as professionals. Seven of her thirteen children had died in infancy or early childhood of the gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases that afflict the very poor; five of her six living children, by contrast, had earned professional degrees or were attending university.
Like Marisol the pharmacist, Doña Saturnina’s children described themselves as an island of professionals amid a sea of campesinos in Choro. They often declared, “We are the only family in Choro in which all the children have studied.” While other local families had, in fact, produced several university students or graduates, many Choro residents echoed the family’s refrain about their uniqueness. They marveled at Doña Saturnina’s ability to raise a brood of “all professionals” (puro profesionales) or grumbled that Doña Saturnina’s children were snobbish (creídos) because they were professionals. Edgar, the eldest and in his forties in 2006, was a lawyer. Deysi, the next eldest, was a rural high school math teacher with a master’s degree from a prestigious private teachers’ college, while her younger sister Amanda was a lawyer. David was a pediatrician. The youngest, Celia, was nineteen and studying for an architecture degree. The refrain, “all of us have studied” excluded Julia, in her mid-thirties, a coca farmer and small-time cattle rancher before she set off for Spain (prior to the Spanish recession of 2008) to work as a home health aide. Doña Saturnina’s children spoke to each other at home in Quechua, Bolivia’s most common indigenous language. Yet like many speakers of indigenous languages in Bolivia and other Andean countries, they did not (usually) identify themselves as indigenous (see Canessa 2007; García 2005; de la Cadena 2000).
Doña Saturnina’s family, like Marisol and many other residents of Sacaba Municipality, struggled to establish and maintain a middle-class position in Bolivian society. They held fierce ambitions for their family’s prosperity and social mobility to “get ahead” (salir adelante). The coca boom sparked these ambitions among many in the Cochabamba region, inspiring them to shift their dreams to upward mobility through education or commerce rather than through agriculture, to imagine a future as a professional or affluent entrepreneur rather than a campesino. These middle-class dreams were coupled with intense anxiety, however, in part because they feared skepticism from wealthier or more highly educated people. They also faced equally vexing accusations of selfishness and snobbery from poorer and less highly educated friends, family members, and neighbors. My term “intimate politics” highlights both the prevalence and intensity of power struggles occurring at this most personal of levels between close family members, neighbors, and friends. Struggles for belonging and companionship, competition for social supremacy between husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, friends and neighbors grew from long-standing hierarchies of class, race, and gender in Bolivia as well as uncertain prospects in the free-market, post–coca boom economy.
In this chapter I look in detail at these intimate politics and the broader conflicting moralities that surrounded them, based on conversations with members of two dozen upwardly mobile extended families with whom I became close during my research. They included logging company owners, truckers, market sellers, cocaine producers, and, among younger generations, teachers, lawyers, agronomists, and doctors. I also draw upon years of conversations with people frustrated at their own poverty. I focus particularly on the experiences of Doña Saturnina and her grown children because the diversity of their perspectives and my long-term relationship with them provides a window onto the experiences of conflicting class and race identities that characterized new middle classes in Bolivia and, I suggest, in much of the Third World.
Doña Saturnina and other members of Sacaba’s provincial middle class attempted to assert their distinction as upwardly mobile through their moral virtue—hard work, sexual propriety, thrifty money management, and high academic achievement. They also sought to avoid accusations of snobbery or of having profited at other people’s expense “from the ribs of others” (a las costillas de otra gente). Envy was a common language for talking about conflict over inequality; discussions of envy marked the clash between ethics of individual upward mobility and ethics of equality. In practice, in their intimate lives, they espoused alternating ethics of social equality and superiority.
Upward mobility for people in Sacaba provoked anxiety, in part because the language of race and class was polarized between binary oppositions—of wealthy and poor, indigenous and nonindigenous—in ways that left little space to assert an intermediate wealth and social status. As in Marisol’s account in Chapter 1, the prevailing characterization of Bolivia was that of a society split between a dominant white elite and marginalized indigenous majority; there were few words in Sacaba through which people could identify themselves in any way as “in the middle” (compare to Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). More commonly, they alternated between elite and subaltern terms of identity, alternating, for example, between calling themselves profesionales and campesinos or rarely, indígena (indigenous).
Newly prosperous people in Sacaba often defined their identity in relational fashion, depending on the social context. This dynamic was similar to that of cholas for most of the twentieth century in Bolivia, who took on working-class and Indian identities when confronted by social superiors, and local upper-class and white identities when talking to social subordinates (see Weismantel 2001; de la Cadena 2000). Many newly prosperous Sacabans shared aspirations for upward mobility, fierce social competition, the practice of drawing moral distinctions, anxiety about their social position, and a sense of social fluidity with middle classes in many places in the world (Liechty 2002; O’Dougherty 2002). At the same time, they also shared the experience of relational identity and the alternation between binary opposites of elite and subaltern race and class with people who inhabited the Andean social category of the chola. That the language of class and race in Bolivia did not fit their actual middling economic and social experience added an additional layer of ambiguity about their status in social life.
Doña Saturnina’s family narrative of escaping campesino and Indian status was emblematic of many Sacabans’ aspirations for upward social mobility as individuals and families and contrasted with the MAS party’s formal rhetoric of collective uplift as indigenous campesinos. Doña Saturnina’s children told me that their parents had worked single-mindedly for many years with the sole aim of sending them to college to escape the everyday social stigma of Indian and campesino identity. They repeatedly recounted a pivotal moment in their family’s history when a policeman had yelled viciously (abusado, maltratado) at their father, Don Prudencio, who felt powerless as an uneducated man to shout or fight back. Don Prudencio reputedly vowed at that moment, “My children need to study and become lawyers to defend themselves.” He and Doña Saturnina thus described their quest as aimed at upward social mobility, an escape from the humiliation of social subordination, as much as material prosperity.
Don Prudencio had earned a decent income while working throughout the 1960s and early 1970s as a driver for a wealthy truck-owning relative. But after several trucking accidents