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C h a p t e r 3 Middling Sacabans Respond to Evo and MAS The distinctive language of identity appears again when people seek to calculate how tacit belonging to a group or community can be transformed into more active styles of solidarity, when they debate where the boundaries around a group should be constituted and how—if at all—they should be enforced. Identity becomes a question of power and authority when a group seeks to realize itself in political form. This may be a nation, a state, a movement, a class, or some unsteady combination of them all. —Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000:99) As she stepped through my front door in January 2006, a week after Evo Morales’s inauguration as president, Amanda fairly pounced on the newspaper on my kitchen table. She asked if it listed Evo’s newly announced cabinet ministers. I opened the newspaper and showed her the chart that listed the ministers’ names and pictures. This line of photos presented a startling departure from those of prior administrations in that it included several women. Amanda looked right at the photo of the new minister of justice, who gazed soberly out from the page; her skin was dark and she wore her hair in two braids. Amanda made a disgusted sound. I asked her if she knew the minister and did not like her.1 I had met her and liked her, I said. She was Casimira Rodrı́guez, president of the Bolivian domestic workers’ union, who had successfully pushed the Bolivian government to pass minimum wage and job protection legislation for maids and nannies (empleadas domésticas) several years before. This had been a landmark legal 74 Chapter 3 victory. Amanda laughed and said that she had not met Rodrı́guez, but, her voice rising with indignation, she did not like her for three reasons. ‘‘First, because she is Indian, second, because she is de pollera, and third, because she is not a lawyer, and so what does she know about the law? She doesn’t know anything!’’ Amanda laughed again. She seemed tickled by her own vehemence—and by the succinctness with which she had formulated this tripartite distinction; she repeated it several times over the course of that afternoon. Amanda’s profession of social superiority—her intertwining of racism with the sentiment that higher education was a sign of moral legitimacy and a marker of competence—emerged clearly that afternoon. Yet when denouncing Minister of Justice Rodrı́guez, Amanda’s laughter seemed to affirm, in my analysis, both that she disapproved of the presidential appointment and that she was making fun of herself for being a snob and racist. This double edge of racism and countervailing egalitarianism emerged more explicitly in a similar comment Amanda made in 2009 while criticizing a new MAS government minister of justice, Celima Torrico. Torrico was a cholita, like Rodrı́guez, and a longtime MAS party leader familiar to many people in Sacaba. This was three years after Evo’s first-term inauguration , and cholitas in high-level government leadership positions were now more common. Amanda was in the midst of reminiscing wistfully to me and Edgar that she herself had enjoyed putting on a pollera each afternoon as a child when she returned home from elementary school. She stopped when she became a teenager, though, because it was against the rules to wear a pollera to high school and furthermore, ‘‘lawyers can’t be cholitas.’’ A few moments later, Amanda exclaimed that she hated Celima Torrico. When I asked why, she retorted severely, ‘‘Because she’s a chola!’’ After a moment of thought, she laughed, as if trying to turn her comment into a joke, and added, ‘‘No, that’s not why. It’s because Celima Torrico promoted a law saying that law students can no longer work as legal assistants [tramitadores].’’2 Amanda had worked as a tramitadora before completing her law degree and sympathized with law students who might suffer economically without the option of this paraprofessional employment. That Amanda described her yearning to wear a pollera just before insulting Torrico as a chola, and then quickly denied hating the political leader for her chola race and class status, suggests that Amanda was ambivalent, repeatedly alternating between the assertion of superiority and egalitarianism . Amanda implied that on this occasion she was calling Torrico a chola [18.117.107.90] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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