Claiming Space, Redefining Politics: Urban Protest and Grassroots Power in Bolivia
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CLAIMING SPACE, REDEFINING POLITICS: URBAN PROTEST AND GRASSROOTS POWER IN BOLIVIA by CARWIL BJORK-JAMES A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2013 © 2013 CARWIL ROBERT BJORK-JAMES All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Marc Edelman ______________________________ ________________________ __________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Gerald Creed _______________________________ ________________________ __________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Michael Blim Ruth Wilson Gilmore Sinclair Thomson Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract CLAIMING SPACE, REDEFINING POLITICS: URBAN PROTEST AND GRASSROOTS POWER IN BOLIVIA by Carwil Bjork-James Advisor: Professor Marc Edelman This dissertation analyzes the role of space-claiming protests by primarily left grassroots social movements in Bolivia’s current political transformation. Space claiming includes mass protests that physically control or symbolically claim urban space through occupations of plazas and roads, sit-ins, blockades, and other measures. As a theoretical construct, space claiming brings together tactics of collective action and meanings of public spaces, and looks at the consequences of their interaction. This dissertation is based on ethnographic engagement and oral interviews with protest participants and their state interlocutors during twelve months of fieldwork and archival research. By using detailed ethnographic evidence—of social life as experienced through the human body, the meanings attached to places, and social movement practices—it explains how grassroots movements exerted leverage upon the state through pivotal protest events. This study shows that the political import of these protests arises from their interruption of commercially important flows and appropriation of meaning-laden spaces in cities like Cochabamba and Sucre. Social movements used spatial meanings, protest symbols and rhetoric to build an imagined community of interest and sovereignty, which claims the right to direct the political course of the state. The presence of indigenous bodies, symbols, and politics in these spaces challenged and inverted their longstanding exclusion from power. iv The largest mobilizations exercised control over aspects of daily life that would otherwise be organized by the state. These interruptions of commerce and circulation, and the collective gatherings that directed them posed an alternate possibility of sovereignty. This put the existing order into question, forcing shifts in political life to resolve the temporary crises. At the same time, the practices of disruption were added to the routines of political practice, making future officeholders even less able to maneuver independently of the grassroots base. This dissertation explains why and how space-claiming protests work as political tools, and the ways that practices of cooperation, coordination, and decisionmaking within protest have become models for Bolivia’s political culture. In doing so, it contributes to the study of social protest in Latin America, the theory of social movement practice, and the geographic study of political protest. v Acknowledgments This text came about through an encounter of experiences, those lived in Bolivia and in the global North. The analysis contained within it would have been impossible to perceive without the willingness of many, many people to share their experiences freely and openly with a researcher whose appearance in their lives was quick and inquisitive. The conversations we had were made possible by affinities in our experiences, aspirations, and ways of approaching social change. In turn, innumerable teachers, thinkers, comrades, and exemplars shaped my approaches to political life, far more than I could acknowledge here. I am grateful to all those who made the Bolivian experience part of a global conversation in the years when I was drawn to study and describe that experience, among them Indymedia Bolivia, the Notes from Nowhere collective, the Andean Information Network, and the Democracy Center. Equally, the work of those who expressed their solidarity with Bolivian movements through their on-the-ground presence and direct support, made my conversations possible. Among them, I include my friends Sasha Wright and David Solnit. Fellow travelers (in the literal sense) in pursuit of such connections elsewhere, also include Asha, Puck Lo, Andrea Gersh, Sarah Shourd, Tristan Anderson, and the never-forgotten Marla Ruzicka; I’ve learned from your travels how to tell the story of my own, and the value of doing so. Once I arrived into this transnational conversation, a variety people provided me with connections and advice, including Carmen Medeiros, Julieta Paredes, Leny Olivera, Maria Lagos, Ben Kohl, Lydia Farthing, Bobby Arduini, Luis Gomez, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Special thanks are due to Marcela Olivera, María Eugenia Flores Castro, Marcelo Rojas, and to all the activists who talked to an inquisitive foreigner, especially during the polarized months of vi mid-2008. I am grateful for the stories shared by all my informants, and promise the uses made of them in this text will not be the last. Invaluable archiving was done by Cecilia Illanes and the rest of the staff at CEDIB, and the archivists of the National Archive and Library of Bolivia and the Library of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly. Thanks to Jay Barksdale and the New York Public Library for hosting me at the Wertheim Study in your beautiful building. The research for this dissertation was supported by the City University of New York (through an exploratory summer grant, MAGNET fellowships, and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and National Science Foundation Award BCS-0962403. I had the pleasure of overlapping my fieldwork with a number of very talented social scientists and advocates, whose knowledge and perspectives contributed to my understanding of Bolivia, and whose good natures enriched my time in Cochabamba, La Paz, and Sucre, notably Anna Walnycki, Sarah Hines, Carmen Soliz, Kathryn Ledebur, Mareike Winchell, Erin Hatheway, Emma Banks (whom I also thank for feedback on a complex chapter), Kylie Benton-Connell, Becky Hollender, Jason Farbman, and Jeffrey Wayne. A series of courses and seminars helped to shape my work. In each case, this was due to phenomenal collective conversations among students and (in the last case) faculty, and the structuring and informing work of the faculty members who organized them. In particular, these were Barbara Weinstein’s course on gender, race, and nation; Marc Edelman’s course on documentary research on Latin America; Don Robotham’s anthropological methods course; Sinclair Thomson’s course on popular politics; Ana Dopico’s introduction to anticolonial and postcolonial theory; and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics’ incredible seminar on transformative politics vii (“How to Fight”) in 2011–12, led by Ruthie Gilmore and Peter Hitchcock. These spaces have provided me a sizeable cohort of long-term colleagues, inside and outside of the academy. I am grateful for all your thoughts, and for arguments, coinciding and divergent positions, wrestling with issues, and suggestions for things to explore, both past and future. I shared early drafts of chapters of this dissertation with the How to Fight seminar, two sessions of Works in Progress in Latin American Society and History, the annual Conference on Critical Geography, and the American Anthropological Association. I would like to extend particular thanks to Jeff Juris, Nick Copeland, and Brooke Larson for thoughtful and wide-ranging feedback; to Jen Ridgley, Jesse Goldstein, David Spataro, Harmony Goldberg, Samantha Majic, Ujju Aggarwal, Marisa Lehrer, Costas Panayotakis, and Alvaro Reyes for incisive comments and intellectual engagement; and to Kaja Tretjak, Risa Cromer, Charity Scribner, and Jonathan Gray for particularly warm encouragement. Late in my drafting, Martha Lincoln offered invaluable editing assistance and structuring advice. All along she has been an exemplar and a guide for making it through the doctoral process. Likewise, Nicole Fabricant has been a source of guidance, connections, and good conversations about Bolivia, as well as an impressive example to follow as an ethnographer in the country. Pamela Calla took on a number of these roles, from provider of contacts to institutional sponsor to a vital interlocutor as I formulated the structure of my research. My exam committee directed me towards this project, accepted my unorthodox reading list but ensured that it was fully studied, and propelled me towards this project. Neither Leith Mullings nor Victoria Sanford ever let me doubt that this path was for me. Michael Blim, most of all, welcomed me into friendly and thoughtful debates that refined my understandings and my viii arguments. The entire committee ensured that I left for my dissertation feeling like a future colleague, something I will always appreciate. Sinclair Thomson has been an incredibly open, supportive, and committed source of advice, context, connections, and reflection. He opened my many doors to me, but most