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Dancing on the Borderlands / 107 5 Dancing on the Borderlands Girls (Re)Fashioning National Belonging in the Andes Krista Van Vleet Notions of modern citizens and national identities are typically built on unmarked categories of masculinity, “whiteness,” urban residence, and adulthood, yet those others—women, nonwhites, children—are also citizens, both in the formal sense of having the “right to carry a specific passport” (Yuval-Davis 1997) and in the practical sense of actively negotiating their belonging to national collectivities. As Andrew Canessa points out in the introduction to this volume, the ways in which women and ethnic minorities are materially and symbolically crucial to the construction and maintenance of borders between places and categorical distinctions between “kinds of” people have, in recent years, been explored by scholars from a variety of disciplinary and regional perspectives.1 Much of this work, drawing on Foucault’s theoretical framework (1972, 1978), demonstrates the ways in which colonial and national states engage in and depend on establishing not only new political and economic organizations but also social actors able to function within them. Although often relegated to the margins of political publics, “women,” “natives,” and other subalterns participate in the nation and are crucial to the production of national identities. It is also from a Foucauldian perspective that anthropologist Sharon Stephens (1995:6) asks further, “In what respects are children—as foci of gender-specific roles in the family, as objects of regulation and development in the school, and as symbols of the future and of what is at stake in contests over cultural identity—pivotal in the structuring of modernity ?” In the highland region of Sullk’ata (Province of Chayanta, Department of Potosí), Bolivia, where I have conducted fieldwork since January 1995, as in other areas of the Andes, children and young adults come into contact with urban hegemonic notions of national identity and become integrated into national arenas through education in rural public schools (Larson, this volume; Luykx 1999; Stephenson 1999); migration 108 / Krista Van Vleet to urban areas for work (Gill 1994); consumption and production of commodities (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999; Parker et al. 1992) and popular culture (Bigenho, this volume); and mandatory military service (Canessa, this volume; Gill 1997). But if people’s subjectivities are partially shaped through state and civil institutions, they are also inextricably intertwined with personal experiences and local conceptions of childhood and youth, gender and family (Stephens 1995:16; Stoler 1995).2 Moreover, children and youth are not simply objects of regulation or symbols of future identities. Children imagine themselves and enact themselves as gendered, ethnic, national, and transnational subjects. They are themselves social actors, agents, who in their ordinary lives do not simply take on the nation’s politics as their everyday psychology (Coles 1986; Stephens 1995:3). I draw on Laura Ahearn’s (2001:112) definition of agency as the “socioculturally mediated capacity to act” in order to bring attention to performances and interactions that cannot be understood simply as either resistance or free will. Agents are produced within certain sorts of social and historical regimes, according to specific cultural frames of meaning and style, and through particular languages. Yet as Desjarlais (1997:201) has suggested, the question of “how” is often neglected in the discussion of agency: “How do people act? What are the means of action specific to a person, a group, an institution, or a social setting?” Gendered, racial, cultural, and linguistic relationships of power shape any individual’s capacity to act; how youth navigate social, economic , and political constraints even as they enact themselves as citizens remains a question. At the same time, youth have their own material necessities and personal desires. In this chapter, I explore how the consumption of clothing may be a site for understanding how Sullk’ata youths experience the possibilities and constraints of their own “belongingness” in Bolivia at the turn of the twenty-first century. I use the term youth throughout this paper to refer to unmarried Sullk’atas who are generally between the ages of eleven and twenty-two, and often in school. The age corresponds to Quechua categories of sipas and jovencita, which along with cholita, are used most often by Sullk’atas to refer to girls transitioning between child and adult status. Although Sullk’atas perceive youth as incompletely socialized, as I describe further below, they also recognize that children and young adults are socially, politically, and economically capable of acting for themselves.3 My emphasis...

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