THE SOVEREIGN STREET THE SOVEREIGN STREET Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia CARWIL BJORK-JAMES e University of Arizona Press www .uapress .arizona .edu © by Carwil Bjork-James All rights reserved. Published ISBN-: ---- (hardcover) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Cover photo: Achumani Blockade in La Paz by Carwil Bjork- James Interior design and typesetting by Sara axton Set in / Minion Pro (text) and ITC Avant Garde Gothic Book, Extra Light, and Bold Condensed (display) Publication of this book is made possible in part by funding from a Vanderbilt University Research Scholar Grant, and by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bjork-James, Carwil, author. Title: e sovereign street : making revolution in urban Bolivia / Carwil Bjork-James. Description: Tucson : University of Arizona Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiers: LCCN | ISBN (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Protest movements—Bolivia—History—st century. | Bolivia—History—– Classication: LCC F .B | DDC .—dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ Printed in the United States of America ♾ is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z.- (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1. Urban Space Claiming and Revolutionary Events 39 2. “This, This Is How We Have to All Fight Together”: The Water War as Precedent and Prototype 66 3. The Power of Interruption: From Blockades to Civic Strikes 86 4. The Sovereign Street: How Protests Become “the Voice of the People” 114 5. “We’re No Longer Just Tenants”: Indigenous Bodies Defiantly out of Place 147 6. Who Owns the City?: Race and Space During the Catastrophic Stalemate 167 7. A House Divided: Mobilization and Countermobilization Within the Plurinational State 189 Conclusion: A New Way of Doing Politics 213 Appendix Notes References Index ILLUSTRATIONS Figures . Alteños celebrate the Aymara New Year while overlooking La Paz in . Rural women attending the Nation Women’s Social Summit march in Sucre . Expressive and confrontational protests in Bolivia, – . Urban and rural blockades in Bolivia, – . Arte Willka mural celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Water War . Brick and cement homes extend up a hillside in Barrio Primero de Mayo, Cochabamba . Speakers address a cabildo from the balcony of the Fabriles building in the Plaza de Septiembre during the Water War . Dozens of water committees march to celebrate the tenth anniversary of victory in the Cochabamba Water War . Rural residents of Achumani blockade the street in front of the Ministry of Justice . A chalkboard at the Departmental Health Service in Cochabamba communicates the state of strike mobilization . Striking drivers march through a street market on the east side of the Cancha . Labor leaders address a crowd to pledge the formation of an interunion strike committee viii ILLUSTRATIONS . e main road entering La Paz from El Alto passes through the Plaza San Francisco . A coca grower from the Federación Chimore in the Chapare o¬ers a handful of coca leaves during the coca chew-in in the Plaza de Septiembre . Poster depicting the prefect, Constituent Assembly representatives, MAS members, and the leaders of worker and campesino confederations as “traitors to Chuquisaca” . Captive rural leaders, stripped to the waist, are forced by civic movement protesters to kneel in Sucre’s central square . A farmworker from Beni gives cash support to marchers in the Seventh Grand National March of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia . Editorial cartoon in the state-run daily newspaper Cambio . Speaker addresses the cabildo abierto crowd from the Fabriles building’s balcony . Marchers on the Eighth National Indigenous March walk uphill on a foggy road as they head toward La Paz . A campaign mural in the La Paz neighborhood of Sopocachi Maps . Bolivia . El Alto and La Paz . Central Cochabamba . Cochabamba’s limited road connections . Major points of origin and routes of marches in central Cochabamba . Central Sucre . Departments of Bolivia and their capitals Tables . Protest participation in Bolivia . Major recent successful civic strikes A. Regime transitions and their relation to social movement disruptions A. Forms of space claiming described in this book ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his book is about how, through acting together, people can unmake sys- tems of power that seem permanent, how collective action changes what Tinitially appears impossible into a collective accomplishment. So, rst and above all, I am grateful to those in Bolivia who used their voices, bodies, and relationships to refuse the social order—privatized, colonized, hierarchical, and impoverished—they could no longer accepting living within. Many of you did so in spite of fear for your lives and safety; thank you for your courage. Over a hundred people died in the course of events described in this book, and thou- sands more buried the dead; thank you for your sacrice. Every time an unjust order is shown to be temporary, whatever follows, the whole world becomes that much more free. It is also about how, once that sense of possibility opens up, people o¬er bigger dreams and attempt to create new political possibilities. I am there- fore indebted to everyone who risked believing that their present dreams could become future realities, everyone who dreamed out loud and struggled to create and defend the Bolivia they wanted to live in. ank you for your ongoing struggles, and your ongoing work to make your dreams concrete. is text came about through an encounter of experiences, those lived in Bolivia and in the global North. e analysis contained within it would have been impossible to perceive without the willingness of many, many people to share their experiences and perspectives freely and openly with a researcher whose appearance in their lives was quick and inquisitive. e conversations we x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS had were made possible by a±nities 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 experi- ence, 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 trav- elers (in the literal sense) in pursuit of such connections elsewhere also include Asha, Puck Lo, Andrea Gersh, Je¬ Juris, Jennifer Whitney, Kolya Abramsky, Michal Osterweil, Sarah Shourd, Sergio Oceransky, 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 of people pro- vided me with connections and advice, including Carmen Medeiros, Julieta Paredes, Leny Olivera, Maria Lagos, the late Ben Kohl, Linda Farthing, Bar- bara Giavarini Blanco, Marxa Chávez, Jorge Derpic, and Luis Gómez. Spe- cial thanks are due to Marcela Olivera, María Eugenia Flores Castro, Marcelo Rojas, María Rita Bautista, and to all the activists who talked to an inquisitive foreigner, especially during the polarized and risky months of mid-. I am grateful for the stories shared by all my interviewees, and I continue to learn from them. is work was gestated in the context of collective conversations about rad- ical social transformation and justice in the broadest sense. My longest stint of eldwork coincided with the remarkable revolution in Egypt, and my rst extended writing took place short subway rides away from Occupy Wall Street. As a distant but attentive observer of the former, and participant in the latter, often through its o¬shoot the Free University of New York City, I found myself constantly drawn back to the question of how revolutionary change happens, and what people in radically di¬erent circumstances can teach one another about how to make it happen. I thank Don Robotham, Michael Blim, Victoria Sanford, Leith Mullings, Barbara Weinstein, Ana Dopico, John Collins, Sinclair omson, and Marc Edelman for creating such spaces through their teaching. e Center for Place, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Culture, and Politics’ seminar on transformative politics (“How to Fight”) at the CUNY Graduate Center in –, led by Ruthie Gilmore and Peter Hitchcock; and the Robert Penn Warren Center’s seminar on “Working for Equality and Justice,” convened by Brooke Ackerly and Melissa Snarr, each provided invaluable contexts and brilliant interlocutors across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. I am grateful for all your thoughts, and for argu- ments, coinciding and divergent positions, wrestling with issues, and sugges- tions for things to explore, both past and future. Vanderbilt professors Lesley Gill, Norbert Ross, and the extended community that animates the Political Ecology and the Contemporary in eory seminars, as well as the faculty con- tingent involved in the Vanderbilt Resistance Teach-Ins, all provided further