Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity, and the State in the Andes

2. Capturing Indian Bodies, Hearths, and Minds: The Gendered Politics of Rural School Reform in Bolivia, 1920s–1940s

32 / Brooke Larson 2 Capturing Indian Bodies, Hearths, and Minds The Gendered Politics of Rural School Reform in Bolivia, 1920s–1940s Brooke Larson F or a good while now, feminist scholars have illuminated the complicated gendered processes that accompanied modern state-building and development policies in twentieth-century Latin America. Just as modernizing a European nation’s devised social policies to cope with an emerging mass society pressing new political claims and bringing social ills into close proximity of urban educated elites, so too did Latin America’s liberal and populist states develop educational, immigration, and eugenic plans to manage their explosive demographic, social, and political problems associated with all the opportunities and ills of modernity. In the era of World War I, government reformers drew from biomedical and social ideas articulated in a transnational professional milieu and adapted them to suit their definition of national need or racial heritage. Latin America’s varied postcolonial contexts therefore shaped and mediated the political and social significance, and outcome, of those reform efforts in the interwar era. According to Nancy Stepan, Brazil’s reformism proved to be the vanguard of tropical medicine policies and sanitation sciences, whereas Argentina cast its fate with the eugenic process of whitening through aggressive immigration policies and military violence against its interior indian population (1991). The Mexican Revolution, by contrast, made its development policies progressive compared with those of Argentina and Brazil. The revolutionary rupture of its oligarchic liberal state permanently altered the ideological landscape and transformed the national state, making it more beholden to the country’s laboring classes and anxious to bring them into the ambit of the populist state. This it largely accomplished through federal agencies of education, agrarian reform, and health under Cárdenas during the 1930s (Stepan 1991; Vaughan 1997). In the Andes, modernizing and reformist elites confronted a more dif- ficult task. On the one hand, they lacked the institutional or ideological Capturing Indian Bodies, Hearths, and Minds / 33 resources that neighboring nations enjoyed—Chile’s relatively stable political system, Brazil’s biomedical establishment, Argentina’s immigration option, or Mexico’s unifying revolutionary state apparatus—in order to mobilize their own societies for purposes of social control and economic development in an increasingly competitive global economy. On the other, Bolivia’s creole reformers (that is, Spanish-speaking Bolivians of European descent who considered themselves to be progressive nationalists ) were deeply preoccupied with the “dead weight” that their own racially heterogeneous, poor, and illiterate populations had placed on their modernizing and culturally homogenizing projects. As they gazed upon their interior landscapes of mountains, provincial potentates, and indians mired in feudal servitude or else erupting in episodic upheaval, creole elites often turned pessimistic about their nation’s racial unfitness or diseased body politic (Arguedas 1909). Anxiety about the future progress of Andean society might then provoke deeper unease about modernity itself. Was Mexico’s postrevolutionary paradigm of mestizaje (that is, racial -cultural fusion) to serve as the Andean template of integration, or did race mixture hasten nineteenth-century “degenerative processes” of racial and republican decline? How might the Andean nation-state uplift and integrate its indigenous populations while preempting a Mexican-styled social revolution? Might Andean scientists and health workers manage to engineer sanitary cities and healthy bodies, purged of disease, alcoholism, and other vices, without the kind of public health campaigns that Brazil boasted? No less urgent, if attempts to attract white European immigration to the Andes were proving to be a colossal failure, how might public education be made to civilize, moralize, and uplift the Andean nations? These questions vexed and divided creole elites (see de la Cadena 2000). Furthermore, as Nancy Stepan notes, tropes of economic and cultural progress could easily be reversed as “degeneration [became] the major metaphor of the day, with vice, crime, immigration, women’s work, and the urban environment variously blamed as its cause” (1991:24). At any historical moment or place, social policy making might be motivated by a fragile calculus of optimism and pessimism, hope and fear—and never more so than in the Andes, where weak states and fractured elites competed with each other over regional/racial projects (as in the polarizing Lima/ Cuzco struggle in Peru), or where international conflicts or internal rural uprisings suddenly altered internal political balances (as in Bolivia after the 1899 indigenous uprisings or the Chaco War in the early 1930s). But sooner or later, modernizing states began to expand the notion [18...