JOINING “THE CORDILLERA WITH THE PAMPA, THE AYMARA WITH THE GUARAYO”: CONSTRUCTING THE BOLIVIAN TRANSPORTATION NETWORK AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES, 1880-1935 ________________________________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences Florida Gulf Coast University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts in History ______________________________________________________________________________ By Brent D. Spencer 2015 ABSTRACT The Creole nationalist literature of the late nineteenth century in Bolivia is replete with references to plans of consolidating and linking Bolivian national territory by rail, highway, and waterway in order to more effectively exploit and export the country’s mineral and agricultural resources. Caudillos and politicians ceded national territory by conflict and treaty as a consequence of failed efforts to gain access to important seaports and to build a modern export economy with fluid transportation and communication links. Yet as late as 1935, the influential writer, physician, university administrator, and politician, Jaime Mendoza, wrote of the unfulfilled need to build a modern transportation network to connect the “Cordillera with the Pampa, the Aymara with the Guarayo” in a project that was apparently still necessary to “consolidate true nationality.” How did these infrastructure projects simultaneously promote consolidation of the nation-state as a prerequisite for nationalist integration while excluding some populations from the national project? In what ways were people in the diverse regions of Bolivia either seen as assets to be exploited for labor for these projects, or as backward savages to be civilized or exterminated to make way for progress? In what ways did subaltern communities collaborate with these projects, and how did they relate to their position vis- à-vis the state and the national imagination of the Creole elites? This thesis explores the role that national transportation projects played as a catalyst for creating imagined national identities in Bolivia. ii CONTENTS Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................iv Introduction .................................................................................................................................1 Literature Review of Nationalism and Bolivian Historiography .................................................10 Chapter 1. Bolivian Physical, Social, and Economic Context ....................................................20 Geography .......................................................................................................................20 Economy, Transport, and Social Structure .....................................................................25 Chapter 2. River Exploration and Settlement ............................................................................35 Settling the Chaco Frontier along the Pilcomayo ...........................................................35 Forms and Methods of Indigenous Resistance in the Chaco ..........................................41 Amazon Basin Fluvial Routes ........................................................................................47 Chapter 3. Expansion of Land Communication Routes .............................................................50 Railroads .........................................................................................................................50 Highways and Roads .......................................................................................................56 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................69 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................77 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My interest in understanding the history of Bolivia’s transportation structure and its people’s varying imaginations of national identity stems from my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the village of Palamana located on the old highway on the border of Chuquisaca and Potosí. I would often go to a hillside there to look at Puente Sucre, an architecturally significant nineteenth-century bridge that spans the Pilcomayo River. A modern concrete highway now bypasses Palamana by several kilometers as it runs between the cities of Sucre and Potosí, but Puente Sucre stands as a monument to the hacienda economy that sustained Bolivia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The marginalized campesino population of the area represents one of the many Bolivian national identities that have developed over nearly two centuries. I would like to thank my friends in Palamana and elsewhere in Bolivia for helping me discover their fascinating histories. I am indebted to many great professors and mentors at several institutions of higher education where I have taken classes in subjects related to Latin America, and have had many experiential learning experiences that gave me the skills and background to be able to complete this project. Utah State University is where I began my exploration of the social sciences and solidified my Portuguese language abilities after my experience of living in Brazil. At the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Cuernavaca, Mexico, I finally learned to speak Spanish after struggling to speak this language with my Portuguese background. I earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Utah where I learned much about Latin American politics, economics, and geography, and solidified my Spanish reading and writing skills. I learned research skills at the University of Missouri where I took a course and participated in a research project related to the Latino community in Missouri. I was given employment as a Coordinator iv and Assistant Director for Study Abroad at Florida Gulf Coast University, which allowed me to take classes and earn another master’s degree in History which has resulted in this thesis. I would specifically like to thank the history faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University that serve on my thesis committee; Eric Strahorn, Michael Cole, and my advisor Nicola Foote. It was in one of Dr. Strahorn’s classes that I began a serious academic inquiry into the history of the Pilcomayo River region and its environment that led to the development of this thesis. Dr. Cole assigned a heavy reading load in his class that gave me a better understanding of the colonial Latin American context. He also edited a precursor to this thesis that will be published in the FCH Annals of the Florida Conference of Historians. Dr. Foote has given me tremendous support throughout this project. In preparation for being accepted into the M.A. program in History at Florida Gulf Coast University, I took her Modern Latin American History class where I was able to consolidate many of the disparate understandings I had of the region’s history. I took several graduate and directed readings courses from her and was always challenged to learn more about national identities, indigenous and subaltern history, and other social concepts and theories. She expressed a lot of confidence in my abilities and encouraged me to achieve more. Dr. Foote introduced me to several Latin American scholars outside of Florida Gulf Coast University that provided helpful advice and guidance. Erick Langer of Georgetown University, through email correspondence, gave me very helpful suggestions on primary sources and direction before my brief visit to the National Archives and Library of Bolivia. Dr. Langer also introduced me to Manuel Contreras and Esther Aillon who also gave me useful leads. Peter Henderson gave me insights from an Ecuadorian perspective during a reading of an early draft. Phone and Skype conversations with Marc Becker and René Harder Horst helped me place Bolivian indigenous populations in a wider Latin American indigenous history context. v The staff at both the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia and the Centro Bibliografico Documental de la Universidad de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca in Sucre, Bolivia were generous in helping me access and navigate their archives. I had only a very short time to do archival research while I was in Bolivia, but I learned a great deal about the efforts to preserve historical documents. I plan to someday return to Bolivia to spend more time doing research at these and other institutions. I would like to thank participants of several conferences where I received constructive feedback and questions that helped me clarify important points. The Florida Conference of Historians in Saint Augustine Florida gave me my first opportunity to present a history paper in public. I answered some difficult questions posed to me by faculty at Florida International University at the Department of History Graduate Student Association conference in Miami. I gained more presentation experience at the Florida Gulf Coast University Research Day event, and I met several contacts and heard relevant presentations at the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies conference in Charleston, South Carolina. I most especially want to thank and acknowledge my wife, Jhovana Spencer, for the many hours she spent listening to me talk about national identities, waterways, railroads, and highways in Bolivia. I have used her extensively as