Beyond Indigeneity: Coca Growing and the Emergence of a New Middle Class in Bolivia 9780816533107, 2016008675

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names
Introduction
1. Histories of Migration and Struggle
2. People and Coca Fields
3. Supplying Coca for a Nation
4. What Has a Long History Is the Land
5. Indigenous Morality and the Immoral Economy
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Glossary
References
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Beyond Ind i gene i t y

aLeS S andra PeLLegrInI CaLd er Ón

BeYOND iNDigeNeiTY Coca Growing and the Emergence of a New Middle Class in Bolivia

TUCSON

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu

© 2016 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2016

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16  6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3310-7 (cloth) Cover design by Leigh McDonald

Cover photo by Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón This work was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Zurich in the autumn term 2013 on the recommendation of the Doctoral Committee: Prof. Peter Finke (main supervisor), Prof. Willemijn de Jong, and Prof. Andrew Canessa.

Publication of this book is made possible in part 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: Calderón, Alessandra Pellegrini, author.

Title: Beyond indigeneity : coca growing and the emergence of a new middle class in Bolivia / Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón.

Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008675 | ISBN 9780816533107 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Coca industry—Social aspects—Bolivia—Yungas. | Social mobility—Bolivia—Yungas. | Middle class—Bolivia—Yungas. | Indigenous peoples—Economic conditions. | Indigenous peoples—Bolivia—Yungas.

Classification: LCC HD9019.C632 B64173 2016 | DDC 308.898/085—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008675

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my parents, Antonio and Maja Pellegrini, who enabled me to follow my interests and my fascinations To my husband, Yussif Calderón, whose dream was always to write a book x

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi A Note on Names xv Introduction

3

1 Histories of Migration and Struggle

30

2 People and Coca Fields

53

3 Supplying Coca for a Nation

85

4 What Has a Long History Is the Land

107

5 Indigenous Morality and the Immoral Economy

130

Conclusion

149

Abbreviations 165 Notes 167 Glossary 173 References 177 Index 197

Illustrations

Figures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Old and new houses 18 Landscape in the Yungas 22 View of Piñapata 33 Road passing through Piñapata 34 Tent with iron sheeting in the coca field 56 Harvesting wachu 59 Coca fields growing in age and extent 64 A newly terraced coca field 76 Preparing a taki for taking to La Paz 92

Map 1. The three coca-growing regions in Bolivia

11

Acknowledgments

T

this book resembled harvesting a coca field. In the Yungas, harvesting coca leaves is labor-intensive, seemingly never ending because as soon as it is finished it sprouts again, and while at times it is a very satisfying activity and joyful, at other times it is also monotonous, tolerable only because of the company of colleagues, friends, and family. As Yungueños say, it is impossible to manage a coca field alone. Writing a book alone is also impossible. First, I would like to thank my friends in the community in the Yungas, which I call Piñapata, who received me, helped me, and supported me. My warmest thanks goes to doña Rosa, who always received me in her home and created a warm and homely atmosphere. I am extremely grateful for her taking me along with her, for her continuous sup­ port and warm affection, and I admire her for her patience and her compassion. I equally would like to thank her entire family—Felix, Yovana, Grover, and Bismark—for receiving me in their home and for sharing their everyday life with me and with my husband. A special thanks in Piñapata goes also to Roxana and Honorato, who gave me friendship more than I could have imagined. I am enormously grateful for their sympathy and for always receiving me in their cozy home. I would also like to thank Felipa for taking me along and always welcoming me with a great deal of humor. I am grateful to her whole family, as well, who received me wherever they were: Jacinto, Daysi, Edwin, and the other Edwin. Likewise in Piñapata, I would like to thank Juana, Froilan, Olivia, he process of writing

xii Acknowledgments

Ricardo, Dionisia, Vicente, Justina, Susi, Mario, Matilde, Nolbert, Lauriano, Aurora, Juan, Dario, Isabel, Marina, Eywer, Ramiro, Celina, Faustino, Teresa, Zacarías, Eleodoro, Epica, Marleny, Rolo, Roberto, Armando, Edgar, Emmica, Faustino, Nancy, Mario, Susana, Apina, Betty, Lola, Hortensia, Luis, Victor­ iano, Vicenta, Sofia, Santiago, Gregoria, and all other inhabitants who are not listed by name, for the many hours that we spent together. Further, I would like to thank the politicians, leaders, and intellectuals who allowed me to conduct interviews on the subject of coca and the Yungas and gave me access to their institutions: in La Paz, Ernesto Cordero, Germán Loza, Felix Patzi, Pedro Portugal, Carlos Makusaya, Fernando Untoja, Felipe Quispe, Walter Reynaga, Aureliano Turpo, Fidel Estrada, Javier Medina, Sdenka Silva Ballón, Maruja Machaca, Juan Carlos Pinto Quintanilla, Felix Cárdenas, Juan Torres, Lucila Criales, Felipe Santos, Victor Hugo Cárdenas, Juan Carlos Huanca, and Simon Yampara; in Chulumani, Jorge Villanueva, Ernesto Ticona, Beatris Pariguana, Manuel Tapia, Padre Walter, Sabino Gomes, and Hernán Justo. In La Paz, I would also like to thank the entire staff of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore (MUSEF), who were supportive during my lit­­ erature research. For help with the transcriptions of the interviews, I would like to thank Ruth Soliz for her very reliable and precise work. I also would like to thank Juan Carlos Montesino for providing me access to the Archivo de la Pre­­ fectura and to Delia Aguilar for providing me access to the Archivo de la Sala Murillo. The research was funded by various institutions who allowed me to conduct this study: the Swiss National Science Foundation, which provided very generous funds for part of my stay in Bolivia and for my stay at the University of Essex, and as such enabled me to take up a PhD in the first place; the Stiftung zur Förderung der Archäologie und Ethnologie, which contributed to the fieldwork budget; the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences for making it possible to present my work at a congress in San Francisco; and the University of Zurich, which made it possible to present my work at a conference in Manchester. A first version of my research results was presented as a PhD thesis at the University of Zurich in 2013. I would like to thank my teachers who have con­­tributed toward the development of the argument: Peter Finke for his con­ ti­nuous interest in the coca growers, for his careful reading and insightful comments, and for giving me a highly enjoyable workplace; Willemijn de Jong— who shaped my understanding of anthropology more than any other person

Acknowledgments xiii

since my very first year as an undergraduate student—for her inspiring comments, for her continuous curiosity and openness, for the stimulating and encouraging discussions, and for being a continuous inspiration for anthropological projects of any kind; and Andrew Canessa for his innumerable insightful comments on many drafts, for helping me get to the point and develop the overarching thread, for his animating support and encouraging enthusiasm for this project throughout the process from preparing the research design years ago up to the publication of this book, and for having been a crucial impulse to take up this project. In addition, I would like to thank Alison Spedding for always opening her door and very generously helping me with advice on the Yungas, for always making me aware of analytical traps, for many insightful discussions, and for giving me important comments on drafts of papers that became part of this book. In addition, I would like to thank two host institutions where I passed a well-remembered time: the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, which provided a very stimulating academic environment, and the Departamento de Sociología de la Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, which facilitated the organization and funding of my study. I had various opportunities to present my work, and I would like to thank the many persons who made valuable comments on such occasions or commented otherwise on drafts of papers: Heinz Käufeler, Cori Hayden, Akhil Gupta, John and Jean Comaroff, Angela Hobart, Thomas Grisaffi, and Carol Conzelman. Furthermore, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, whose valuable comments helped me significantly improve this book, and the staff at the University of Arizona Press, especially Allyson Carter, Scott De Herrera, and Amanda Krause, as well as Sally Boyington for her thorough copyediting. In addition, I thank Oliver Slappnig for drawing the map that appears in this book. Friendships not only made this work less monotonous and more enjoyable but also made it a collective effort and had a lasting impact on its content. First, I would like to express my immense thanks to Nieves Zúñiga, who was simply the perfect companion after we met by pure chance in La Paz. I do not know how I would have finished this book without our uncountable discussions, Skype sessions, and cross-reading. I thank her for her many concise, supportive, and structured comments and for being constantly disposed to read and help, although we were in different parts of the world, and for the friendship that developed through this project. Furthermore, I would like to thank Anne Ebert for her very helpful and inspiring comments, which made me find the thread

xiv Acknowledgments

again. In addition, I would like to thank Stefan Leins, Sarah Brack, Danae Pérez, Paula Sarávia, Jorge Montesinos, and Nancy Egan, who were all in one way or another involved with the project. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their manifold support. I would like to thank my parents, Antonio and Maja Pellegrini, for their comprehension and support, for their continuous belief in my abilities and perspectives, and for always giving me space to share my experiences, doubts, joys, and reflections. I would also like to thank my sister, Daniela, and my brother, Claudio, as well as my grandparents Fritz and Benita Hofmann, for their continuous interest in what I was doing. Additionally, I would like to thank my family-inlaw—Erasmo, Martha, Rosa, Luis, and Mauricio—who gave me affection and care in La Paz. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Yussif Calderón, for his love, support, and patience.

A Note on Names

T

where fieldwork was conducted, as well as all the names of its inhabitants, has been anonymized through­ out the text. For public persons, such as politicians, leaders, and intel­ lectuals, their original names have been maintained. he name of the communit y

Beyond Ind i gene i t y

Introduction

M

usic of Andean panpipes, flutes, and drums sounded, dust whirled up, colorful skirts and costumes swirled around, and the smell of roasted pork filled the air. It was a sunny day in April 2011 in the subtropical Yungas on the eastern Andean slope, one of the main cocagrowing regions in Bolivia. On that day, I went with Nora, Rita, and others from a small village, which I will call Piñapata, to the so-called community en­­ counter—an event organized by the regional Catholic church each year during which the different communities compete with their music and dances. Nora, Rita, some ten other persons from Piñapata, and I arrived all dusty in Francisco’s minibus, as the weather was hot and dry and the many cars that went to the encounter raised dust that landed on the ones behind as they drove up the winding unpaved road to the community where the event took place that year. The night before, in Piñapata, a group of men practiced their zam­ poñada (music with differently sized panpipes), and they should have come to play today. After the musical practice, however, they celebrated with beer until late at night. As a consequence, this morning, Florencio—who had the key to the room where the instruments were stored—was fast asleep, and not even the fierce horn of   Francisco’s minibus could wake him up. There was nothing to do, and disappointed with the band, Francisco drove up. When we finally arrived in the community, Rita, Nora, and I went up an elevation, sat in the grass, and looked down on the earthy football field, without a single blade of grass, now

4 Introduc tion

transformed into a dancing space. Nora and Rita, both around fifty-five years old and bilingual in Aymara and Spanish, each wore a glittering Andean skirt (  pollera) and had her hair bound into two plaits arranged around her head in a circle. They both own big coca fields and regularly employ migrants from the Andean, Aymara-speaking highland as day-wage laborers, who are often poor and come to the Yungas in search of cash. Although there was much work to be done on the coca fields, today people in Piñapata took a day off. We were enjoying the broad variety of dance and music presentations, and after the presentation of each group, some regionally well-known persons—such as the radio host of the regional radio station, the priest, or the secretary general of the peasant union federation—handed them a certificate. Around midday, the host community distributed the meal, which the different communities that participated had cooked; it consisted of sweet potatoes, cooked bananas, and pork. A little later, a young man from the host community passed by with a six-pack of plastic bottles of the Bolivian brand “Soda,” which is a national imitation of Coca-Cola and cheaper than the original, offering it to everyone sitting and enjoying the event. Seeing the “Soda” bottles from afar, Nora was disappointed and remarked contemptuously and without hesitation, “This is a   jaqi drink” (refresco de jaqi). In addition, she indicated that to offer “Soda” demonstrated bad hospitality. This is surprising. Jaqi is the Aymara word for “person” and is mostly used in a respectful sense to describe the achievement of full personhood in Andean communities. As such, it implies that persons reach their full evolvement through participating in networks of reciprocity with the community and the spirits. It has a very positive connotation among Aymara speakers, who often use the term to proudly distinguish between themselves and nonindigenous Others. In the Yungas, people are descendants of Aymara highland migrants from several generations ago, who settled in the Yungas and became coca growers. Today, Aymara highland migrants still regularly arrive in the Yungas in search for work in the lucrative coca economy—for example, on Nora’s and Rita’s fields. Thus, as we sat there on the grassy hill, receiving our bottle of the cheap soft drink “Soda,” Nora went on explaining that this “Soda” is what highlanders drink because it is very cheap, and in contrast to the original Coca-Cola, it has an awful taste. To offer such a cheap Coca-Cola imitation for a Yungueño community encounter was deemed inadequate. She proudly recounted that when the community encounter was held in Piñapata, they offered all their guests the more expensive Coca-Cola and Fanta: Coca-Cola is a Yungueño drink.

Introduc tion 5

But if   jaqi in the Andes is a very respectful term and denominates Andean people in rural communities, why do Yungueños not consider themselves to be jaqi—particularly when they all are highland migrants from several generations ago and most of them are bilingual in Aymara and Spanish? In this spontaneous rejection of a local Aymara word for their self-definition, several issues on a global scale come together, which this book addresses. Talking about jaqi means talking about what has been called the “indigenous peoples’ slot” (Li 2000): a discursive frame used to describe people who are imagined to look and speak like Nora and Rita. As coca growers and as rural peasants, people from the Yungas seem from the outset to perfectly fit in the discourse on “indigenous peoples”: they are of Aymara descent, a majority of them still speak or understand the Aymara language, they live in rural areas within what is called the “traditional coca-growing region” where coca has been cultivated since times immemorial, and they continue to cultivate the millennial, “sacred” coca leaf. Not only on the basis of international definitions on “indigenous peoples” and the academic literature on the topic (see Barnard 2006; Hodgson 2002; Kuper 2003) but also in the context of the government’s identity discourses, Yungue­ ños seem to be unambiguously indigenous, and any external observer would read­­ ily classify them as such. In Bolivia, the discourse on indigenous peoples intensified during the past few decades and culminated in the election of Evo Morales as president in 2005. Indigenous people are generally presented by the Morales government as modest, communitarian, humble, poor, anticapitalist, and economically marginalized. In his inaugural speech in 2006, for example, Morales famously described indigenous people as intrinsically moral when he said that “indigenous peoples are the moral reserve of humanity” (Morales 2006). This rhetoric also transformed into politics, most prominently the new political constitution of 2009. This constitution initiated a new “citizenship regime” (Yashar 2005), which acquired a considerable ethnic character through the definition of thirty-six indigenous nations and languages. In addition, the concept of “living well” (vivir bien) is enshrined in the new political constitution as it was elaborated under the Morales government in 2009, and this is thought to describe an indigenous way of   life: one based on a communitarian logic of harmony and reciprocity, standing in contrast to the capitalist logic of   “living better,” a logic that is based on accumulation and ex­­ pansion. This idea of “living well” is generally assigned to indigenous cultures in Bolivia, prominently to Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní people, as in Article 8 of

6 Introduc tion

the constitution the “ethic-moral” principles are stated in the Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní languages. An inherent component of these indigenous cultures is coca, which is also an ideological pillar of the newly refounded “plurinational state” of Bolivia and, as such, is intimately linked to the government’s rhetoric of “living well.” During Morales’s presidency, his administration has been characterized not only by a prominent discourse on indigeneity but also by the invoking of coca as a strong emblem for national identity. Most prominently, Morales requested during meetings of the United Nations the international decriminalization of the coca leaf (the Single Convention on Narcotics of   1961 banned its cultivation and consumption) and demanded the recognition of its legal use in the form of chewing, infusions, and foodstuffs (see La Razón 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). In public speeches, he extensively invokes the slogan “Coca is not cocaine”—a slogan that Jaime Paz Zamora disseminated in 1992 while president of Bolivia to express national pride on the basis of coca. Through these political initiatives, coca became a kind of   “brand” for Bolivia and for Andean indigeneity in the international scene. As declared in the political constitution, coca is a natural resource and part of the “cultural patrimony” of   Bolivia (Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia 2009: Article 384). While the government invokes the idea of anticapitalist indigenous people and the coca leaf as an emblem of such an image, however, the question is, how do those who actually cultivate these coca leaves relate to these identity politics? Yungueños might seem at first glance to be unambiguously indigenous, but their identification and political positioning within current identity politics is much more complex. Yungueños such as Nora are in many ways reluctant to em­­ brace the politics of indigeneity despite being among the most vocal supporters of  Morales. Although being themselves icons of coca leaf  “tradition,” people of the Yungas do not perceive coca as indexing their own indigeneity. Instead, they are an emergent, new middle class and create political positionings beyond the “indigenous peoples’ slot.” However, it would be wrong to assume that their emergence as a new middle class and their increasing economic prosperity would automatically mean that they identify as mestizos and thus move toward ethnic “whitening.”1 Yet Yungueños such as Nora, as they attend a regional dancing competition, work in their coca fields, or drink Coca-Cola during their midmorning break, reject not only being   jaqi but also being mestizo. So what does it mean for people like Nora to be neither jaqi nor mestizo? In this book I look at the unexpected development of a new social space that stands beyond “indigenous” or “mestizo” in the plurinational state of Bolivia, as well as the way

Introduc tion 7

this challenges indigeneity discourses. I unpack why Yungueños are reluctant to accept the label of indigeneity and ask about the new political positionings that emerge as a consequence of increasing rural wealth. What is the politi­ cal position of  Yungueños as affluent peasants toward the government’s identity politics? Identity politics of the Bolivian state changed profoundly during the previous century (see Healy and Paulson 2000; Postero 2007a). For most of the twentieth century, the state pursued assimilationist politics, which are generally associated with the national revolution of 1952. The main aims of the revolution were universal citizenship and education, nationalization of the tin mines, and land reform that abolished the large landholdings and distributed the land into peasant smallholding estates, mainly in the Andean region. The revolution was spearheaded by miners and peasants under the leadership of the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), or National Revolutionary Movement. By ex­­ tending citizenship to indigenous and rural populations, the MNR imagined the nation as a general melting pot. Assimilation and homogenization of indigenous populations by integrating them into the nation were thus principal aims of the state and were expressed in the dominant political discourse of indige­ nismo (see Sanjinés 2004). As part of national politics, indigenismo consolidated the building of a homogeneous mestizo nation with one national culture. Nationalism in Latin America is often still built on this notion of mestizaje, which, however, has generally been used as a means for the exclusion of indigenous populations.2 Although marginalized, indians represented the preconquest basis of the newly built nation-states and were therefore instrumental for twentiethcentury nationalism in Latin America (Crain 1990; Friedlander 2006). However, as the nation became imagined as an ethnically and racially uniform entity, ethnic-racial categories (indio, “indian”) were officially replaced by references to class (campesino, “peasant”) after the revolution of 1952 (e.g., Albó 1979). In the 1980s, Bolivia adapted neoliberal restructuring programs and initiated the so-called era of the “New Economic Policy.” While initiating these neoliberal reforms, the government did not break with the mestizaje ideology (Healy and Paulson 2000). Only in the 1990s, during the administration of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada—who was the minister of planning when the neoliberal politics were initiated in the 1980s—did the government embrace multicultural politics, which were expressed in the elaboration of new laws of decentralization and of an educational reform that included bilingualism (Gros 2002; Healy and Paulson 2000). Although these multiculturalist reforms aimed at an increased

8 Introduc tion

integration of indian communities in society, the communities often lacked the necessary autonomy and remained excluded from political decision processes (Calla 2000; Orellana 2000). But however critically these reforms should be assessed, many of the Morales government’s aims—such as, for example, to create indigenous municipalities—have roots in these multicultural reforms (see Postero 2007a). The political self-expression of indigenous identities and indigenous organizing along ethnic lines became visible in Bolivia and most Latin American countries only in the 1990s (see Bengoa 2007; Jackson and Warren 2005:551; Stavenhagen 2002:30; Stephenson 2002:100). Crucial for the development of this new discourse on indigeneity were the political contexts of the 1980s and 1990s. International conventions on indigenous peoples (such as the International Labour Organization [ILO] convention 169), for example, legitimized indigenous claims on territory and autonomy. Contrary to the meanings of indigenismo, which were based on liberal notions of citizenship, indigeneity as a contemporary political rhetoric acquired a very different meaning, as it builds on notions of differentiated citizenship (see Blackburn 2009). Although identity politics in Bolivia specifically, and in Latin America more generally, changed during the twentieth century, there still seem to be limited ways in which to think about people who position themselves as neither “indigenous,”   “nonindigenous,” nor “mestizo,” which are categories that a common discourse on ethnic and racial identifications proposes. As Andrew Canessa (2012b:10) notes, while the general issue on a global scale is about embracing indigenous peoples’ rights, we might also ask about the (local) right not to be “indigenous” (see also Castañeda 2004). While the notion that people reject a stereotype—be it indigenous or not—is nothing new, this book opens a space to think about what else we can learn by examining how this rejection is experienced. By looking at Yungueños’ social and economic ascendancy, I go beyond culturalist analyses on indigeneity and focus instead on economic relations and ethics. As such, this book explores how Yungueños disrupt the way we think about who indigenous peoples are and what they do.

A Sacred Commodity: Coca Politics and National Economy Coca leaves are picked from the waist-high bushes, dried, and then sold. They have traditionally been used as an indispensable part of any ritual, as an ingredient

Introduc tion 9

of an offering to the spirits, as part of Andean medicine and healing, and for chewing: during breaks at work, funerals, get-togethers, political negotiations, and more. People in the Yungas—though not everyone—also often chew coca during their midmorning breaks in the coca fields or after lunch. Sitting on the floor or on a stool, they choose some nice coca leaves by rifling with their hands through the dry leaves, then put each leaf individually into the mouth by biting off the leaf ’s small stalk with the front teeth, smoothly chewing each of them a few times, and molding them into the cheek. Sometime in-between, they take one leaf, fold it once, then take the folded leaf with thumb and index finger, pinching with the nails and the folded leaf the lejía (a substance made of ashes and containing sodium bicarbonate) to take a very small piece of it; they then fold the leaf again and put it into the mouth. While chewing, people sit together and chat, and often they smoke a cigarette, which they sometimes pass around or smoke individually. Coca in the Andes is generally perceived to be sacred because of deep social and religious roots in indigenous cultures. Catherine Allen, for example, describes how coca in Andean communities is the very basis through which the identity and status of a person come to be articulated, as it provides the means of communication between people and between people and spirits (1986, 2002). In the Yungas, where people do not merely consume coca leaves but first of all produce them, coca’s sacredness is not only related to religious aspects. Rather, it also has an economic dimension, because as Yungueños often state, it “gives life” in a plain, explicit economic sense: as people sell coca, they buy everything they need. In addition, people in the Yungas also insist on the sacredness of coca as a discursive means to oppose it to cocaine, expressing by this their disagreement with U.S.-guided drug politics. Thus, as they say, “coca is sacred because it is not a drug.” Indeed, the twofold characteristics of coca—indigenous sacredness and global drug—are what Bolivian coca politics have always struggled with. The history of coca politics in the twentieth century found its expression in a sequence of different international and national regulations, which accompanied discourses on coca, indigeneity, and national identity: In the 1960s, the Bolivian government signed the Single Convention on Narcotics, under the pressure of the United States, which stated that coca chewing should be abolished within twenty-five years and that if illicit traffic is not controlled, cultivation would be forbidden. In addition, illegal cultivations should be destroyed. In 1988 followed the signing of the so-called Vienna Convention, which stated that coca eradication programs should be supported by rural development programs. This laid

10 Introduc tion

the basis for the implementation of the famous Bolivian Law 1008—the law on the coca regime and controlled substances—which was decreed in 1988 under the pressure of the U.S. government (República de Bolivia 1988). This national law, which is still in force today, defines three different coca-growing regions. The three zones (“traditional,” “transitional” [or “exceeding”], and “illicit”) are distinguished according to how long coca cultivation in the respec­­ tive region has existed, and different measures of eradication apply in the differ­ ent zones. These differential classifications of the three zones have an impact on how different coca growers position themselves politically. The “illicit” zone is the whole national territory, except where the “traditional” and “transitional” zones lie; coca cultivation is not permitted in the “illicit” zone and must be eradicated. In the “transitional or exceeding” areas—such as, for ex­­ ample, parts of the Chapare region in the tropical lowlands but also some recent colonization zones in the Yungas—eradication (either voluntary or forced) is permitted, and coca cultivation there is not allowed to be extended, since it should be steadily reduced. Eradication can take the form of manual destruction, with soldiers uprooting and burning the plants of a field, or chemical destruction, with airplanes spraying herbicide over the fields. The “traditional” zones are defined as those where coca has historically been grown and which should cover the national demand for traditional consumption (chewing, healing, rituals). They have somehow received a privileged position, because there cannot be any forced eradication by law, although in practice some eradication is often a formal condition to receive development projects. Most parts of the Yungas are defined as “traditional” zones because coca cultivation dates back, according to some authors, to 3000 BC (Carranza Polo 2010; Mamani 2006). Moreover, Yungueño coca is chewed all over the country and used for Andean rituals, ceremonies, infusions, and medicines; coca from the tropical, “transitional or exceeding” and “illicit” areas is in the main not suitable for chewing. In addition to the two main coca-growing regions, Yungas and Chapare, there is also a third, very small region—the so-called Norte de La Paz—which includes parts of the provinces Muñecas, Franz Tamayo, and Bautista Saavedra (see map 1). This zone contains mainly areas of  “traditional” and of  “transitional” cultivation. The government party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), or Movement Toward Socialism, and Evo Morales as the political leader and president of Bolivia emerged alongside these national coca politics. Born in the highlands, Evo Morales migrated with his family first to the Yungas and then to the Chapare—defined as an “exceeding” coca-growing area—when he was twenty years

The coca-growing regions in Bolivia, with Yungas and Chapare as the main regions: Norte de La Paz (which includes parts of the provinces Muñecas, Franz Tamayo, and Bautista Saavedra) is a very small region, with some parts defined as “traditional” and some parts as “transitional”; Yungas is mainly defined as “traditional”; and Chapare is mainly defined as “transitional.” Map by Oliver Slappnig. Map 1. 

1 2 Introduc tion

old and became a syndicalist leader. He participated in the conferences of the National Confederation of   Bolivian Peasants (CSUTCB), who in 1994 decided to create a “political instrument” that would complement the struggles of the peasant union (Zuazo 2009:37). One year later, during the congress for “land, territory and political instrument,” a broad range of indigenous and peasant organizations created the precursor of the MAS party, called Assembly for the Sovereignty of the People (ASP). In 1996, Morales became the president of the peasant federations in the Chapare, an office he still carries on as president of Bolivia. His presidency of the cocalero federations in the Chapare became an important basis for his later becoming the leader of the MAS. In fact, Chapare cocaleros always constituted a very strong faction in the “political instrument,” ensuring that ASP candidates won municipal elections in the Chapare region (Zuazo 2009:40). As the president of the cocalero federation, in 1996, Morales ran for national president in alliance with the party United Left. Although the ex-dictator Hugo Banzer was elected, Evo Morales became a parliamentary dep­ uty, which consolidated his leadership within ASP. He strongly opposed Banzer’s “Coca Cero” (Zero Coca) policy, which envisaged completely erasing ille­ gal coca growing and was highly repressive in the Chapare region (Ledebur 2005:200). The early 2000s was a period of much social and political unrest: af­­ ter broad protests over the privatization of water in Cochabamba and the sale of natural gas through Chile to the United States in El Alto (Albro 2005:436), President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada escaped, and during the next two years Bolivia changed president twice. Although many different social movements were involved in the protests, the MAS constituted the political opposition in these years (Sivak 2010:154–55), and Morales was subsequently elected as president. In his new office, Morales initiated different coca policies and pushed these is­­ sues successfully into the agendas of his nonindigenous allies (Albro 2006:408). On the one hand, he has put much effort into advocating the legalization of coca products on the international level. He has presented plans, for example, for industrializing coca for infusions, energy drinks, cereals, and anti-inflammatory analgesics to export them (La Razón 2012b, 2013d). On the other hand, one of the declared objectives of his government is to revise existing laws, regulations, and practices on the national level. For some years now, for example, a new law for coca cultivation and commerce is being elaborated to replace Law 1008— which creates some ambivalence among the different coca growers (as analyzed in chapter 4). In contrast to former policies, the Morales government supports

Introduc tion 1 3

coca cultivation for legal purposes while it tries to reduce, with varying efforts and varying success, illegal drug production. While coca is extensively invoked as being sacred, part of indigenous cultures, and representing an anti-imperialist stance in the context of national and international regulations, it is also an important part of the national economy. Its price is considerable compared to other products, and for the state, coca has always been an important fiscal source. Thus, taxes on coca, in contrast to other agricultural products such as potatoes, have been imposed since the early times of the conquest (Carter and Mamani 1986; Soux 1993). According to historians, coca created a market that expanded much more than subsistence products did, as it has been traded from Ecuador to Buenos Aires (Soux 1993), and it was one of the first products of mercantile circulation (Glave 1985). Although in precolonial times coca was an important product that was traded and redistributed between the different archipelagos of the Aymara kingdoms and the Inca Empire (Murra 1972, 1980), the coca economy as a market economy seems to have been initiated in early colonial times (see Rivera 2011), and toward the beginning of the twentieth century it was traded in overseas export markets (Soux 1993). Coca was a vital product for the internal economy, and unlike silver or tin from the mines it did not need foreign investment (Lema 1997). Thus, coca commerce has long been a vital economic activity for Andean societies. This created a specific economy as consumers and producers traveled to regional markets, even as coca also moved across regional boundaries (Carter and Mamani 1986). Indeed, commerce itself has been organized at different levels of society, involving small, medium, and big traders (see chapter 3), including mestizo and white as well as indian classes (Alurralde Anaya 2002; Carter and Mamani 1986; Soux 1993). Thus, almost all parts of society were—and still are—somehow involved in the coca economy, whether as producers, traders, or consumers. In the 1990s, Carlos Toranzo Roca, for example, estimated in his qualitative analysis of the coca economy that “the coca/cocaine economy permeates the totality of social and economic spheres in Bolivia and thereby affects virtually the entire population” (1997:195) and that “the total value of the coca-cocaine paste-cocaine circuit is equal to the total of the rest of the country’s economic sectors combined” (1997:207). Madeline Léons and Harry Sanabria similarly stated that “the economy is stabilized by coca and cocaine, which contribute more to the GNP and employ a larger proportion of the population than in any other country” (1997a:3). Although these figures refer to a time when the economy was

14 Introduc tion

much smaller than it is now—the natural gas and mining boom started only in the 2000s—there is no doubt that coca has been highly important for the economic structures of the country. Official statistics generally do not catch this overall importance, because they are in part guided by political interests and do not include illegal activities (Léons and Sanabria 1997a). Thus, the latest United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report (UNODC 2015) states that the value of coca of the total GDP in 2014 was only 0.9 percent and that it was only 8.8 percent of the GDP of the agricultural sector (UNODC 2015:1). As Toranzo Roca showed in the 1990s, it is difficult to imagine that the coca economy would have such a limited impact. With its economic force, the coca economy provides a means of becoming included within the national, capitalist, market economy, because it entails the possibility for economic accumulation and creates a sense of   being a supporting pillar of the economy. Coca is both an important cultural issue in Andean everyday political and ritual life and an important economic element as it provides not only an income for those communities that cultivate it but also revenues for the state. Coca may be sacred, but it is also a commodity and as such creates economic circuits. Because of its vital economic importance through time, Yungueños have historically been immersed in capitalist relations, probably more than other rural Andean people. This book continues narrating the contemporary history of coca as a means for achieving full personhood and as an Andean commodity, which impacts more than any ethnic value Yungueños’ positioning toward the discourses on indigeneity.

A Joke about American Indians: Global Indigeneity and Local Gaps Do you know the joke about the indians in North America? . . .  Well, they say that colonizers arrived in the far West, and when winter approached, they camped and said, “Gosh, they say that here winters are very hard, we need to find wood. But is it going to be really very hard?” and the other said, “The indians know it, the indians know nature,” and therefore he went up the hill and looks at what the indians are doing; “They will guide us.” Thus, he looks around and sees that the indians were cropping wood; “ Yes, it seems that it will be cold, they are collecting wood,” and the

Introduc tion 1 5

white colonizers start collecting wood. “I think now it’s enough,” he says, “but go and see what the indians are doing.” The man climbs up the hill and sees that the indians are cropping more; “Oh, no, this will be very cold, the indians really [are cropping more], gosh,” and the white colonizers go on cropping. “Ah, look, now however cold it might be, I think we will be fine; go and see just in case what the indians are doing,” and he sees that the indians are cropping wood like crazy. “No! This winter will be the worst, the indians are accumulating wood like crazy, go on, we have to find more wood.” “Listen, but we need to know how the in­­ dians can know that this winter will be very hard, go and talk to the chief, the shaman, go and talk to the priest of the indians,” and the white man goes. “Chief, we want to know how can you know that this winter will be so hard, so extremely hard?” “Easy,” says the chief. “We climb up the hill and look what the white men are doing.” —J o k e to l d b y P e d r o P o r t u g a l , i n t e r v i e w w i t h t h e a u t h o r , M ay 9 , 2 0 1 1

As I describe above, Yungueños could quite unproblematically be classified as “indigenous.” In addition, through the promotion of the term by international organizations as well as by the Bolivian government, Yungueños could be expected to declare themselves “indigenous people,” since this would open new spaces for agency and diverse possibilities for increased political participation. However, Yungueños continuously explicitly refuse to be classified as “indigenous people,” and within Yungueño communities, people seldom use the Spanish term indígenas spontaneously on their own. When the term is used, ideas about its meaning range from essentialist ideas of   backwardness and rural poverty, which a substantial portion of the people hold, to an understanding of indigeneity as part of modern Bolivian politics. In some instances, this is similar to Evo Morales’s invocation of a romanticized view of indigenous peoples in his discourses. The idea of linking indigenous peoples to rural areas, ancestral territories, and a way of   life marked by communitarianism, however, is not exclusive to the political discourses in Bolivia. As Pedro Portugal—an Aymara intellectual and the director of the indigenous newspaper Pukara in La Paz—expresses in the above joke, such ideas about “indigenous” values and knowledge always emerge

16 Introduc tion

through the mutual projections of preconceived ideas about the Other, which arise out of   the imagination of   each actor in encounters between so-called indig­ enous and nonindigenous people. Pedro Portugal’s joke nicely illustrates indigeneity as a “dense dialogic formation” (de la Cadena and Starn 2007a:7) in which both indigenous and nonindigenous people participate. Within the (mainly West­­ern) academic literature—the so-called “indigenous peoples’ ” debate3— which has turned around questions of how to define “indigenous peoples” in a useful way, there have been arguments that resemble essentialist criteria like those invoked by Evo Morales. Although creating a useful definition of indig­ eneity is generally recognized as next to impossible, there is, often implicitly, something that Mary Louise Pratt (2007:400–401) calls a “template or schema of indigeneity, a set of narrative elements that are seen as having widespread applicability.”   The main elements of this template are descent from precolonial inhabitants, cultural distinctiveness, marginality, and self-identification (e.g., Assies 2000; Canessa 2007; Hodgson 2002; Kenrick and Lewis 2004; Saugestad 2004). These elements are also reflected in the working definitions and declarations of international organizations such as the United Nations and the ILO. As Ronald Niezen (2003) has pointed out, indigeneity is an explicitly global phenomenon. With regard to the Yungas, where people actively distance themselves from the idea of  “indigenous peoples,” this global template seems inapt. These local inconsistencies of a global discourse, however, feed into the meaning of the concept of   indigeneity. As Anna Tsing (2005) has shown in her study about In­­ donesian indigenous and environmental activists, the universal notion of   indig­ eneity is locally engaged and produces conceptual gaps. In her work, Tsing follows “voices that travel” (2007:42) alongside transnational links as they produce “friction” (2005, 2007:41) and thus common understandings and frames, as well as dissent. Along these traveling voices, gaps emerge where “powerful demarcations do not travel well” (Tsing 2005:175), which happens whenever we try to categorize, dichotomize, and standardize universal knowledge, because not everything fits into these categories. Thus, there are gaps which lay between established categories. Under the influence of these culturally charged discourses on indigeneity, many distinctions follow the line of “indigenous” and “nonindigenous.” In this book, I explore new forms of identification that transcend this line of  “indigenous” and “nonindigenous.” The “indigenous peoples’ debate” leaves unanswered the question about how to depict people in-between these categories, as it is more concerned with ques­­ tions of indigenous rights (mostly land rights) and why people take on the label

Introduc tion 17

of  “indigenous peoples,” rather than why they reject it. In fact, it is often understood as self-evident that indigenous movements are claiming a cultural identity that they want to retain vis-à-vis neoliberal state politics (Martínez 2009; see also Jackson and Warren 2005). To look at the questions I pose here, we must think about indigeneity as being an issue of political conjuncture (Postero 2013) and link it with questions of economic accumulation and mobility. Tania Li equally conceptualizes indigeneity as a kind of   “positioning” that “draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle” (2000:151). Whether people identify as indigenous people or not is part of a political conjuncture that has the power of providing places of recognition to some people, while it denies such places of recognition to others. At the same time, there is an active moment of articulation (Hall 1992, 1996a, 1996b) between people and the discourse, as well as a cobbling together of different elements of that discourse, which accounts for the final political position as “indigenous people.” This notion of positioning and articulation recognizes a creative moment of the relationship between people and identity politics. It allows for a new way of seeing how people reinterpret and negotiate these politics to carve out their own space of identification and political agency within the globalized discourse of indigeneity. And this is exactly what Yungueños do. Thus instead of looking at the categories—which, as Pedro Portugal expressed in the joke he told me, are always mutual projections—this book looks at the gaps that emerge in-between.

Beyond the Urban Middle Class In 2015, when I returned to Piñapata after a period of two and a half years, I was surprised at the number of cars in the community and at the new houses that have emerged everywhere, each more sophisticated than the other. Most old houses consisted of a simple architecture: They had an inclined flat roof, a ground floor consisting of one big room, and an upper floor with one equally big room or in some cases two rooms that were often accommodated on each side of a central aisle. Long wooden boards were used as the floor on the upper level and constituted at the same time the ceiling of the ground floor. In contrast, the new houses have mainly the pitched roofs of urban models and contain striking details in such a rural context; many of them have flowerpots, for example, in front of the terrace. Increasingly, they are built of   bricks instead

18 Introduc tion

Figure 1. 

Old (in foreground) and new (in background) houses in Piñapata, 2015.

of adobe. In addition, they are not just painted from bottom to top but also clad with ceramic tiles on the lower part, which is a relatively high extra investment. The floors are now made of ceramic tiles, which people bring from La Paz, instead of the former wooden floors. The kitchen, which consisted before of an open hearth located outside the houses in a kind of tent, is now constituted as a room inside the house and is connected to a gas container. The houses of­­ ten have more than just two rooms, and these are accommodated in any possible way, not necessarily around a central aisle. The whole architecture of the house, the distribution of the rooms, and the furniture increasingly remind one of a middle-class home in La Paz (see figure 1). However, while the houses resemble urban middle-class homes, coca growers still live a peasant’s life, which essentially means tilling the earth and getting physically tired.4 And while rural households may accumulate wealth, this is often perceived not to be equally legitimate for all ethnic groups—even less so in the case of coca growers, for whom wealth is often viewed as being suspicious because it could potentially stem from illegal activities.

Introduc tion 19

In Latin America, ethnic or racial categories are generally thought to be bound to occupational positions and economic standing. As Olivia Harris (1995) pointed out, the categories of  “indian” and “mestizo” are historical constructions and were always grounded in economic relations and activities, as well as state politics. Ac­cording to her, it was precisely through market participation that inequalities emerged, which have then been represented as ethnic categorizations. Har­­ ris argues that during the colonial period, indian and mestizo identities were based on “racial” and later fiscal categorization regarding tribute to the state and later transformed into an economic and political category during the republican per­­iod. According to Harris, with differences in market participation there emerged an unequal legitimacy of accumulating wealth. The fiscal category of  “indian” dissolved, and to be indian became more associated with ethnic differentiations and with class positions. Through the state-supported creation of a market for land, land was appropriated by large landholders (hacendados), and indians became ex­­ cluded from commercial activities but remained a cheap labor force. Ethnic cate­­ gories were still very much linked to economic activities, as the transition to a mestizo identity included the involvement in commercial activities and the em­­ ploy­­ment of    labor. In the context of Latin America, it is generally perceived that upward mobility and shifting ethnic or racial identifications go hand in hand (e.g., Fried 1961; Guss 2006). As Harris argues, “Indians are a class to whom accumulation of resources has been progressively denied” (1995:375); indians are associated with poverty because on the one hand their labor force has been extracted by upper classes, which also has impeded their market participation. But on the other hand, this association came into being “because of the process by which those who did accumulate altered their status and ‘passed’ to mestizos” (Harris 1995:375). Thus, historically, as soon as indians accumulate wealth, national society classifies them as mestizos and they would then rise to the urban middle class. However, Yungueños accumulate wealth but work as peasants. This in­ evitably raises the question, what happens with indian or peasant identities when wealth is accumulated and an entrepreneurial position is achieved? The emergence of new middle classes has been noted both in Latin America and elsewhere (see Heiman et al. 2012; Robison and Goodman 1996). In Nepal and India, for example, this phenomenon has received major attention. In this context, Mark Liechty (2003) analyzes the emergent middle class in Kathmandu in terms of cultural practice and performance, through mass media and the consumption of goods. For him, middle classes in Kathmandu create a new

20 Introduc tion

cultural space between “tradition” and “modernity.” Sara Dickey (2012) analyzes uncertainties and potentials of newly ascended middle classes in Madurai and how caste values are projected on these urban middle classes. In Latin America, Maureen O’Dougherty (2002), for example, looks at middle classes in Brazil (São Paulo) and takes consumption as the most important aspect of middleclass definition and as central to middle-class life. For her, middle-class experience takes place in the “realm of desire and dream,” as “what one would be” and “what one would not be” (O’Dougherty 2002:9). In Bolivia, the literature regarding newly emergent middle classes focuses mostly on the so-called cholos/cholas—urban indigenous Aymara or Quechua entrepreneurs who are famous for being savvy businesspeople (see Himpele 2003; Scarborough 2010; Tassi 2010; Tassi et al. 2013). Jeff Himpele (2003), for example, calls these urban Aymara entrepreneurs a “parallel middle class,” as they have created a new form of urban wealth based on the performance of indianness against the backdrop of a westernized mestizo middle class. The urban space of La Paz thus contains two competing, parallel middle classes, which both accumulate wealth but have differing relationships to abundance, well-being, and national identity (Himpele 2003:211). There is thus an increasing shift in the literature derived from analyzing the phenomenon of middle class not only in Western countries but also in the global South. This literature, however, still takes for granted that middleclassness is an urban phenomenon. Consequently, the possibility for rural residents to become middle class without migrating to the city goes unnoticed, as all of the mentioned works focus on the urban space. An important exception to this urban focus is Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld’s Native Leisure Class (1999): in this volume he describes how successful handicraft merchants from Otavalo (Ecuador) experience social mobility without becoming detached from the land and the community. This requires a remarkable effort, as there is a constant tension between peoples’ aims of accumulating wealth through a rational entrepreneurial ethic and the subsistence economy in the rural community where they live. To maintain this “subsistence ethic” despite successful entrepreneurship bears special importance for Otavaleños. While the subsistence economy provides some stability in a context of economic unsteadiness, it is not simply an economic but a cultural issue and is strongly related to native identity, as it allows even successful merchants to present themselves as peasants. These emergent “native middle classes” become affluent while at the same time they uphold and perpetuate an indigenous identity (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999:209)—an

Introduc tion 21

indigenous identity that itself becomes transformed by the expanding economic possibilities and new cultural expressions. Despite their participation in global trade and their loosening links to subsistence production, these Otavaleños are still proudly indigenous. At the same time, Colloredo-Mansfeld shows that the concept of a subsistence ethic is tightly connected with the local idea of a fruitless peasant life: the labor and goods of peasants do not have an economic value in the wider economic circuits, and rural people in Ecuador thus often perceive peasant work as labor spent in vain (1999:114–19). The coca economy of the Yungas in contemporary Bolivia, however, produces virtually no “fruitless” work. Coca-growing labor, in fact, often pays better than urban jobs. In addition, in the Yungas there is no subsistence economy: the rural labor of the Yungueños, rather than becoming “fruitless,” is an important means to generate economic value that circulates within the national economy (as described in detail in chapters 2 and 3). In this book, I discuss how becoming a new middle class that lies beyond the urban space, the performance of indigeneity, or becoming mestizos challenges the politics of indigeneity and the discourse on an indigenous condition of “living well.” Thus, the book tries to uncover how—by rejecting indigeneity—Yungueños experience social mobility without becoming part of the mestizo middle class, and thus what it means to be neither proudly indigenous nor part of an urban middle class. I break from the common paradigm that social mobility goes hand in hand ei­ ther with a reinforcement of ethnic garb—such as is the case with cholas—or with becoming mestizo. In the Yungas, people understand themselves as being peasants (campesinos), and within national imaginaries, Yungueños would clearly be “indians.”

Coca in the Yungas Located on the eastern Andean slope, the Yungas is a region that is covered with subtropical mountain forests, between a four- and ten-hour drive (by bus) from Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. While La Paz lies at an altitude of about 3,600 me­­ ters in the middle of the Andean highland landscape, the Bolivian Yungas cover an area more or less between 500 and 3,300 meters above sea level and consist of steep V-shaped valleys (see figure 2). Coca is a very labor-intensive cash crop that can be harvested four to six times a year, and it yields high prices per weight compared to other agricultural products such as potatoes and vegetables. The

22 Introduc tion

Landscape in the Yungas: steep hills with coca bushes in the foreground and coca fields on the opposite hillside, 2007.

Figure 2. 

coca economy, which already existed in precolonial times, always depended on the flow of migrants from the highlands to the Yungas. Under Spanish colonization and the expansion of mines, the coca economy intensified to supply the increasing number of miners with coca leaves, since they were its primary consumers. Today as well, the coca economy heavily depends on an influx of migrants, often from the Andean, Aymara-speaking highland, who come to the Yungas to work as day-wage laborers—they are the jaqis that Nora mentioned when sitting in the grass at the “community encounter.” To provide sufficient labor force in coca production, the Spanish additionally brought African slaves to the Yungas. Even today, there exists a handful communities of almost exclusively Afro-Bolivian people in one concentrated area of the Yungas (the famous communities Chicaloma, Toquaña, Chijchipa, and Mururata). Most other communities consist of a mix of Afro-Bolivians and other Yungueños, with Afro-Bolivians in a small minority. Interestingly, the presence of Afro-Bolivians is often perceived as being one defining “ethnic”

Introduc tion 23

characteristic of the Yungas. Although Afro-Bolivians are not included as part of the thirty-six indigenous nations, they succeeded in being included as a separate category in the census in 2012 for the first time (La Razón 2013e). However, the Afro-Bolivian Movement has had much more resonance on the national and international level than in the Yungas. In contrast to other Yungueño peasant organizations, which focus on economic and political issues immediately relevant to coca production, the Afro-Bolivian Movement puts cultural issues and the aim of enforcing a differentiated ethnic identity at its center. It has mainly been initiated by Afro-Bolivian migrants in the city of La Paz, where it very much promotes the saya, a dance of supposedly African origin (Spedding 2009:452–57). Thus, the grassroots who live and work in the Yungas, especially in communities like Piñapata where they are a small minority, show little interest for the movement’s agenda; like all the other inhabitants, they engage in the peasant union and identify themselves as coca growers and Yungueños. Coca growing was generally combined with the cultivation of other products, such as corn, peanuts, walusa (a regional variety similar to potatoes), sugarcane, coffee, cacao, and fruits (such as mangos, oranges, tangerines, limes, papayas, and bananas). At the core of the “traditional coca-growing zone,” this pattern continued only to a limited degree, as many families now concentrate all their labor efforts on coca growing; if they cultivate some other products, they do it in small quantities that do not cover their subsistence and are not sold, which means that they generally buy almost all their foodstuffs. There is thus no question of their being self-sufficient—in fact, they are deeply involved in the market. This generated a considerable debate on whether coca replaced the once-vital agricultural role that the Yungas played and whether coca destroys the fertility of the subtropical soils (Conzelman 2007a; Laserna 1996). Generally only in the peripheral regions of the Yungas (such as Caranavi and Asunta), which consist of more recent colonies and where coca cultivation is more restricted, do people take their fruits to La Paz and sell them on the market. Historically, as a coca-growing region, the Yungas played a vital economic role in pre-Hispanic empires, as well as after the conquest and up to today. As noted above, its importance lies in Andean culture and the fact that coca—specifically Yungueño coca because of its high quality—was and still is a vital element in Andean social and religious life, thus providing a product that was demanded by the entire Andean population (Carter and Mamani 1986; Mamani 2006). Because coca in rural areas is always needed and often is acquired for cash (Harris 1989), coca growers of the Yungas produce and initiate a cash economy

24 Introduc tion

that spreads over almost all rural places in Bolivia. This demarcated economic dimension of coca creates a strong economic ethos among Yungueños that spills over into social life. People most clearly articulate such an economic ethos in re­­ lation to jaqis, the highland migrants, as they generally trace cultural, noneconomic features back to economic issues: They hold, for example, that jaqis are more united because they are poor. To be united allows them to demand and get public works and projects for the community, and, as the reasoning goes, because they are poor, they have no options other than being united and demanding public works. In addition, because they cultivate only subsistence crops and have long periods of inactivity, according to Yungueños, they have plenty of time to organize politically and to get projects for their community. While my focus on Yungueños’ economic ethos in the realm of identity politics could seem economically deterministic, in the context of coca production and everyday life in the Yungas it would be misleading to ignore the economic basis of people’s arguments (as discussed in the chapters that follow). In fact, I did my first fieldwork on questions of kinship and started my following research with issues of cultural identity and indigeneity. However, I inevitably arrived at issues of peasant economy as a centerpiece of my ethnography. This book looks at indigeneity from the angle of a deeply held economic perspective on social and cultural life, and thus it goes beyond the dominant culturalist framework about peasants in Bolivia.

A Note on Ethics The fact that Yungueño coca growers are deeply immersed in mercantile relations and produce and sell a product that is internationally banned affects the anthropological enterprise. In 2006, equipped with a list of potential fieldwork communities, I took a bus from La Paz to Sud Yungas, then waited at the marketplace and hoped to recognize the red pickup truck, which I was told would take me to Piñapata. After that I conducted two periods of fieldwork of one year each and visited the community almost every year. Because Yungueños do retailing, fieldwork clearly expanded the physical realm of the community, as I traveled with people to Santa Cruz (a city in the lowlands), where among other places they have sold their coca since 2006 and to which several members of the field location have migrated to get work. Moreover, I went with them to an urbanized highland town close to La Paz, where some members of the

Introduc tion 25

community live, and a majority of them participated in their patronal fiesta that year. My fieldwork expanded also to the city of La Paz—where they regularly travel to sell their coca on the market and where I went to meet them—to the cantonal and provincial capital of Sud Yungas, and to Coripata, the provincial capital of   Nor Yungas, another part of the region. People from Piñapata or their relatives lived in all these places or had a double residence, something that is often the case. To follow the mobility of people from Piñapata was especially important with regard to the issue of their increasing prosperity. Fieldwork in the Yungas was facilitated by the coca production cycle: harvesting is a year-round activity and in particular an activity that easily allows for participation. In the Yungas, anyone who is ready to help harvest coca is generally very quickly welcomed, and to do so facilitates the building of rapport considerably. Thus, I went almost every day harvesting coca with different groups of people, though I often moved in Rita’s and Nora’s extended webs of reciprocity. However, to work without requesting a day wage, or at least half a day wage, was something that people first had to get used to, and some wanted to pay me during the working day. I was also present at community events such as baptisms, first communions, weddings, funerals, rutucha (the first haircut of a child), Todos Santos (All Saint’s Day), and the patronal fiesta. Further, I attended numerous political events, such as regional elections and communal meetings; regional visits of President Morales, Vice-President García Linera, different vice-ministers for coca, and the mayor of the provincial capital; and marches, seminars, and assemblies of the Yungueño coca growers’ association (ADEPCOCA).5 Though I also conducted almost eighty interviews, I used them mainly to complement the much richer data from daily participation in agricultural labor and from my attendance at various events, meetings, and assemblies.6 When I conducted interviews with a recorder, I often could not avoid the feeling that first of all politically active men fell into a quite specific mood of self-representation, similar to the one when political leaders are interviewed and talk on the local radio. The political dimension of my research frequently overtook me: When I wanted to conduct a census of the community in 2006, after having lived almost a year in Piñapata, I presented my plans at the community meeting and was surprised at the fierce discussion this created. Although my census focused on fictive kinship relations and household compositions, I included some questions on the extent and production of the coca fields, which helped me in evaluating the socioeconomic stratification in Piñapata, the average household size,

26 Introduc tion

the extent of land and fields, and production. However, these are very sensitive issues that created mistrust, and as a gringa outsider, I aroused suspicions about the possibility that I would hand this information over to the government or possibly even the United States. In the end, I was allowed to go ahead, and only two people rejected participating in the census at all. Similarly, I had to make specific arrangements with the peasant union in 2011, when I was interested in seeing historic information about the community’s peasant union from its foundation in 1954 until the present through the review of their communal minutes and protocols (libros de acta). The community allowed me insight into their documents under the condition that I would conduct research in the national archives in La Paz and Sucre to determine the exact date of Piñapata’s foundation. Thus, I studied the available documents in the national archives and summarized this historical information, as well as oral history, in a small booklet and distributed it to every household in the community. To focus on such a small hamlet over an extended period of time facilitated the way I could gather and interpret my data. Returning to the same community over a period of nine years allowed for the building of trustful relationships, which opened many insights into sensitive issues—and coca cultivation and commerce are sensitive issues, as the description about the arrangements with the peasant union shows. Talking and writing about coca is always difficult, be­­ cause any information about its cultivation and commerce can be politically manipulated, and any critique on it is generally quickly interpreted as delegitimizing coca cultivation as such. This has forced me during various moments in fieldwork and writing to reflect on the ethics of the anthropological enterprise, and there are some aspects that deserve mention and clarification at this point. Although in their communities Yungueños put an emphasis on displaying their increasing prosperity, and in some ways do the same thing in national society to acquire and legitimate increasing political power, to be affluent coca peasants is something they fear could redound on them in a negative way. After all, people could say that affluent coca peasants are the proof of coca’s linkage to drug trafficking and to the illegal commercialization of coca by coca growers. Thus, as Eulogio—a man around thirty years old who was politically active in the community—told me once, “Although it is true that we have cars and various houses, if someone asks me about it, I could never say the truth; I must not say that I am saving money with coca, that I am buying a car or a house with coca. I have to say, as we say here, ‘I live off my sweat’ and that ‘I work to live for the day.’ Because we know very well that now we have to make a new law on coca.” In this new law (discussed in chapter 4), Yungueños hope to maintain their special

Introduc tion 27

position as “traditional coca growers” and an unlimited right to coca cultivation and commerce. Being portrayed as wealthy could lead to a stricter government policy on coca cultivation, further leading to eradication, delimitation of cocagrowing areas in the Yungas, and stricter control regarding commercialization. Thus, Eulogio insists on being represented to the outside world as a poor peasant, although he is proud of his new pickup and his newly built house. However, in this book I portray coca growers as an economically and socially emerging affluent sector of Bolivian society. Thus, I need to make some ethical points clear: I believe that coca cultivation is an activity that involves an immense amount of   human knowledge, which is part of my fascination about the Yungas. Self-evidently, I have a critical view of the U.S. War on Drugs and any other programs that have tried to destroy and reduce coca cultivation by violence, based on extremely unequal power relations, and without the agreement of   local populations. I also believe that the problems of drug addiction, mainly in Western countries, cannot be resolved by punishing peasants in countries such as Bolivia for producing a product that allows them to live above the subsistence level and which, after all, has usages other than being converted into drugs. Thus, I want to make clear that in my view coca cultivation in the Yungas is a legitimate means to make an income. I also wish to make clear that this study is not about the circuits of coca from the seed to the white powder, nor is it about making a normative statement about coca cultivation, coca politics, eradication, and drug trafficking. Within coca cultivation and commerce, legal and illegal aspects and processes and trajectories are inextricably interlinked with each other. This is hardly something new, but it complicates the effort to separate these issues, even in an academic study on the topic of identity, such as the present case. Instead of glossing over the dark side of coca commerce, however, I believe it to be more useful to take part in these discussions, as they allow us to interpret them in a different, alternative light. Any issues that are directly or indirectly linked to illegal activities on behalf of coca growers, retailers, or traders that appear in this book can also be found in newspapers or in government and UN reports, and I thus find no reason to conceal them. However, when information appears through such public channels, the details are contextualized and interpreted in a very specific way, and I am convinced that as anthropologists we are able to propose an alternative interpretation of these incidents. In the back of the mind, perhaps of any anthropologist, there might always be this nagging question: “What would people say if they read what I write?” (see Brettell 1993). This question does not always receive an answer. In the end,

28 Introduc tion

I believe, it is a personal decision we have to make about what we publish and for what reasons. There is always an ambiguity in making this decision, since it relies on an unresolved tension between the desired self-representation of our research partners and our own vision of what “science” or “art” in general, and the anthropological enterprise in particular, means to us.

Outline of the Book This book is structured around a geographical orientation, which yields insight into how and why Yungueños reject being jaqis. This rejection, as I suggest, goes along with the increasing involvement in commercial activities that reach beyond the local community; thus, the book moves from the locally circumscribed setting of Piñapata to other geographical spaces where retailing takes place, such as Santa Cruz (chapter 3), and where negotiations with the government about what “being traditional” and “having history” means are conducted, such as in La Paz (chapter 4), and finally, where the links to the international drug economy are conceptualized and the moralizing discourse on indigenous peoples finds its expression (chapter 5). I start by outlining the historical foundations of the community and the region, because history is a crucial element in the discourse on indigeneity. Chapter 1 looks at how Yungueños as “traditional coca peasants” have become so, as well as how different actors who are all connected through their activities with coca and the Yungas—such as indig­ enous highland intellectuals, local teachers, lawyers, and writers—evaluate this history and have embedded it in other narratives. In chapter 2, I look at the coca economy and Yungueño entrepreneurism as it emerges at the local level of production. This sets the stage for the anchoring of   Yungueños’ peasant identity and their strong positioning as coca growers, as I consider how coca fields contribute to the personhood of   Yungueño community members. Once the coca leaves are harvested, dried, and packed, however, they need to be sold. Chapter 3 describes coca commerce and retailing experiences through which Yungueños gain the possibility to reposition themselves in the socialethnic categorizations of Bolivian society. While this repositioning is strongly colored by a perceived move toward the middle class, it also contains a reinforcement of their standpoint as—rather than any kind of coca growers—specifically “traditional coca growers” and poses a challenge to the local syndicalist discourse. The debates about the “traditional coca growing region,” which

Introduc tion 29

are analyzed in chapter 4, are strongly linked to the Morales government’s efforts of making a new law on coca production and commerce. This has created new discussions on what “tradition” and “history” mean. Finally, the idea of the “indigenous people’s slot” to which the moralizing discourse of the Morales government is related, and the drug economy to which coca production in the Yungas is loosely connected, makes the link to the international scene. The analysis of the story about human fat stealers in chapter 5—in different versions known throughout the Andes—is not simply a curious story about a fearful person; through it, Yungueños’ understanding about the mechanisms of economic accumulation and social ascendancy becomes apparent. Having their own understanding of what kind of person these human fat stealers might be, Yungueños affirm their position as affluent peasants in the Andes. It is to the jaqis that they assign such immoral practices as stealing fat; Yungueños create an idea of not indigenous morality but rather of immoral economic practices. In the conclusion, I query what the consequences of the increasing prosperity of coca growers are for current political transformations and how they affect our understanding of indigeneity and middle class.

1 Histories of Migration and Struggle

A

round the turn of the t wentieth century, more or less in 1910, a sixteen-year-old boy went with his uncle and a bunch of pigs to the Yungas. They came from Ambaná, a town in the inner Andean valleys with a mild climate, which contrasts with the subtropical hot climate of the Yungas. The valleys of Ambaná are close to the highlands, but grapes, peaches, wheat, and corn grow on the fields there, unlike those of the highlands. Uncle and nephew had both blond hair and blue eyes. As Héctor recounted his family history, we were sitting in the kitchen on a small bench of wood. The floor of   his kitchen was hard stamped earth, and we each held a cup of coffee, while just outside the door his chickens were clucking. His two grandsons were running around in the kitchen, and one of his sons stood at the gas stove, preparing soup for dinner. Héctor’s wife had died a few years earlier; she had an accident on the steep slope of the coca field and never recovered from it. His only daughter was living in town; thus, a purely male household remained, as Héctor was living with only his two sons. The young boy from Ambaná was Héctor’s father, who helped his uncle commercialize pigs in the Yungas. In Ambaná, the young boy’s grandfather was a landlord, and for some reasons that Héctor could not remember, the boy wanted to escape his father’s and grandfather’s home, so he went with his uncle to the Yungas. In the Yungas, people from Ambaná have the reputation of

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  31

being light-skinned, and even today, they are known for raising and selling pigs. People call them khuchitisi, khuchi being the Aymara word for pig. The boy and his uncle arrived in the cantonal town after a march of several days, and from there, they continued with their pigs to Piñapata—at that time a very isolated hacienda (large landholding), located behind a dense cloudy forest. Piñapata’s landlord at the time was originally also from Ambaná; upon seeing the young boy, he immediately trusted him. He asked him to stay at the hacienda and to become his mit’ani, a kind of peón (servant, tenant) for personal services. The boy led, for example, the mule on which the landlord sat when he had to go to town, and Héctor proudly recounted that the boy also managed the landlord’s money. Until he was thirty, he lived with the landlord in his house. Then, he married a tall dark-colored woman who—as was true of all women at the time—wore an Andean skirt, but instead of the two long plaits that Andean women had, she had two short plaits of black, curly hair; she was a so-called zambita, a woman of mixed African and indian descent. Apparently, she was a widow and already had four sons, and she had come with her husband from Ambaná to the Yungas. After staying in different haciendas and losing her husband in an accident, she finally married Héctor’s father. When I worked through the historical records of the Yungas in the archives of La Paz and Sucre, I was surprised by the frequency of movement of people, not only newcomers from the inner Andean valleys and the highlands who came to the Yungas but also people moving between the different haciendas. The story of Héctor’s father exemplifies many of the dynamics that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century: this was the time when most families of people who now live in the Yungas established themselves in the region. People from the highlands arrived as merchants, as barterers, or in search of work, like Héctor’s father and his uncle, and peones changed haciendas and landlords frequently, like the dark-skinned woman his father married, who had stayed in different haciendas, probably also in the northern province of the Yungas, before arriving in the area of Piñapata. Héctor’s family history thus illustrates the discontinuity of people in the region over time. As a result of the frequent movement of people, there is no continuity between the nine families that are mentioned in the first official record of   Piñapata in 1817 and those of today. Even when shorter time periods, such as the first fifty years, are considered, families change. However, archaeological evidence indicates that in the region around Piñapata, coca has been cultivated since at least AD 1100, but all families that

32  chap ter 1

inhabit Piñapata now have done so only since about one hundred years ago. While there is an important continuity of coca cultivation in the region, there is a high discontinuity of people who actually do so and, consequently, who transmit the knowledge of cultivation. To have a historical consciousness seems to be one defining characteristic of indigenous peoples (Canessa 2012b:70), who are often thought to embody the social and cultural memory of the nation. As Thomas Abercrombie (1991, 1998) has shown, however, distinctions among different social and ethnic groups on historical grounds are highly problematic, as there have always been various in­­ terfaces between these groups and plural memberships of each individual. Never­­ theless, history is often used to redefine cultural identities. As Judith Friedlander (2006) argues, however, in some instances, to place importance on diverging his­­ torical trajectories, which facilitates the claim of cultural difference, is only to euphemize the deep social and economic differences that persist despite dynamic historical processes of cultural development. As such, history is always a political construction that emerges out of the unequal power relations in a so­­ ciety, as those in power “universalize” their version of history (Silverblatt 1987: xxi). Such a universal version of   linear history also underlies claims of indigeneity, which eschew local versions of interrelation and migration. In this chapter I narrate the history of Yungueños as an immigrant society and as a community of political struggle. I consider how people who produce the high-quality coca leaves in the “traditional coca-growing region” have become so—how they actually became coca growers, and how they became “traditional”—and the discourses that emerge around this historical narrative. The written and oral history of   Piñapata constitutes the context of the discourses that emerge as political projects: first, the idea of being traditional, because in the Yungas there are haciendas and people who cultivated coca before the land reform; second, the idea of   being originally from the Yungas, because the people of the region have ancestors from areas other than the Aymara highlands; and finally, the idea of being politically part of the community of traditional coca growers, because of participation in the struggles for coca in the twentieth century. Yungueños legitimize their increasing affluence with this history of how they have become coca growers from the “traditional zone.” The histories and ancestries of   Yungueños bring to light an ambiguous relationship to the highlands and to jaqis—with whom they share many cultural attributes—but also to other “nontraditional” coca growers, as Yungueños have created a peculiar historical consciousness.

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  33

Introducing Piñapata To reach Piñapata (see figures 3 and 4), people take any of the pickups or minibuses owned by community members, who irregularly drive to the cantonal and provincial towns to buy foodstuffs or to pick up harvesters whom they bring to their coca fields. Sometimes they take a taxi instead, which costs five times as much as the bus ride to La Paz, which takes four times as long. The road to Piñapata creeps up the hills through a dense and dark subtropical cloud forest, with high ferns and trees covered with lichen—beards (barbitas), as people say— before leaving the forest behind and descending to Piñapata. Road construction began in 1960 and was finished in 1979, and it was a major achievement for the community. Everyone helped work on the road in shifts, with picks and shovels, and apparently a former son of the landlord (   patrón) of the region had a good relationship with President Hugo Banzer, who sent in tractors. Before this road was built, people went to town through the dense forest by foot or with mules.

Figure 3. 

View of Piñapata, 2011.

34  chap ter 1

Figure 4. 

Road passing through Piñapata, 2006.

Piñapata, like all the other hamlets in the Yungas, lies on the steep hillside, with coca fields reaching from the hamlet to the river, covering a range of several hundred meters of altitude (from 1,700 meters above sea level where the hamlet is located down to 1,100 meters above sea level at the river). Above the hamlet lie the communally owned pastures where people leave their mules. In the area of these communal pastures, there are also some patches for agricultural plantations of seasonal subsistence products, such as peanuts and corn. Piñapata was established as a hacienda at the end of the eighteenth century, just before the founding of the Bolivian Republic in 1825. In 1817, the first time Piñapata was mentioned, there were only nine families registered in this community, which had a population of about twenty registered inhabitants.1 This represents a common number for workers on the haciendas of the region at this time. During the next fifty years, the inhabitants continued to consist of between six and nine families, but besides the family of the landlord, most families changed and new names appear on the documents. Toward the 1860s, however,

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  35

the population diminished until only three families were left in the hacienda of Piñapata, and the community is no longer mentioned in state documents from 1863 to 1882. Many Yungueño communities seem to have become depopulated at this time: only the very big haciendas still counted on a significant workforce, while many other haciendas often shrank to only two or four families. The 1877 register of a neighboring community reads, “Everyone dead. No people.” This depopulation was most probably due to endemic diseases such as malaria and leishmaniasis. During this time, I could identify one person who was previously registered in the hacienda Piñapata being listed in the register of other, bigger haciendas. However, people moved not only between the different haciendas, as Héctor’s mother did, but also between haciendas and so-called originary communities that were free and did not have a landlord. Ancestors of those who live today in Piñapata generally migrated from the highlands and the region of the inner Andean valleys around Ambaná and Moco Moco to the Yungas. They arrived around the turn of the twentieth century, between 1900 and 1910, in very much the same manner that Héctor’s father came to Piñapata. This migration took place at a time when there was a high demand of   labor in the Yungas because coca became an export product for overseas markets, with the volume of exported coca even higher than that of coffee (Soux 1993:37), and both coca production and coca prices steadily increased. People’s ancestors thus have lived in Piñapata for around two to four generations. Héctor’s family, for example, is one of the seven families to which almost all eightyeight families of today’s population in Piñapata can be traced back. After the nineteenth-century depopulation, haciendas thus became populated again by im­­ migration from the highlands. Interestingly, one of  Piñapata’s neighboring com­ munities became depopulated again in the mid-1990s, remaining with only a few families. Also in its case, highlanders repopulated the community. The oldest persons in Piñapata remember that during the “time of the hacienda” (tiempo de hacienda) the community had a very different aspect: there were fewer coca fields, and in the lower parts of the community there were large areas planted in banana trees, sugarcane, pineapples, and coffee. The landlords had a sugarcane press (trapiche), which they used to produce different derivatives of sugarcane, including alcohol. Whereas toward the end of the nineteenth century there was only one landlord in Piñapata, when the land reform in 1953 took place there were seven; some of them became so through marriage or descent, others through the buying of   land. Because there were so many, the landlords of Piñapata had modest

36  chap ter 1

properties compared to those of other landlords in the region, who sometimes owned more than one hacienda at a time. Each landlord in Piñapata had only around eight to ten peones. The land reform itself passed smoothly there, compared to other regions and even other communities in the Yungas, where peones attacked the landlords or burned their houses. In Piñapata, people have different memories about the day of the land reform: the son of one landlord remembers that his father was in town when the land reform took place and that peasants hoisted a flag saying, “Down with the landlord, his baby bottle [mamadera] fi­ nally finished!” When he went back to Piñapata, people simply did not go to work for him, and to maintain his coca fields he was obliged to pay laborers. Héctor, who was around ten years old when the land reform happened, recounts that his father went early to work but soon returned, because the landlord had furiously sent them home, saying, “These lazy people will now always be lazy.” After the land reform in 1953, the colonos (servants, tenants) who had formerly worked for the landlord received land and became smallholding peasants, and they took over the whole primary market of coca leaf production (see Spedding 2004:58–60).2 In Piñapata, after the land reform, people first formed the comando. Such comandos were local organizations politically installed in many parts of Bolivia by the party that led the revolution, the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement; MNR). The peasant union in Piñapata was founded in 1954, and the union and the comando seem to have existed simultaneously for at least one or two years. One year later, in 1955, almost half of the population of Piñapata left the community and started building coca fields and huts made of branches and leaves at the hillside opposite Piñapata, where there was virgin soil, no other people lived, and thus immense extents of land existed. In the beginning, people moved back and forth between the two settlements until the 1960s, when around half of the population at the time settled down permanently in the new community. In 1954, only a few months after the union had been founded, the first land survey took place, and engineers from the government arrived and stayed for several months. The land was divided up between the forty-eight families who inhabited Piñapata at this time, each one formally receiving ten hectares of land (in practice it ranged more or less between eight and twelve hectares), and leaving out communal land for pasturing animals as well as one part of  “reserve,” which would belong to the peasant union. Around the year 2000 there was again a second land survey, intended to provide an updated title for owners. In 1971, the

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  37

state school was built to house classes up to the fourth year of education; in 1981 the community installed the first potable water system on their own initiative; and in 2002 they installed a small hydroelectric platform, which was replaced in 2011 by state-provided electricity. Today, in Piñapata there are eighty-eight registered families in the peasant union. According to the census I undertook in 2007 and updated in 2011, there are 172 permanent residents, 116 people with double residence (in Piñapata and generally La Paz), and 143 people who are generally considered as being part of the community because of descent or marriage but do not reside in Piñapata. There are around twenty-four families who have a car and around eleven who have a motorbike, which is a relatively high number compared to other communities, and twenty-three who have a retailing license (see chapter 3). People have between one and eight children per family, with an average between four and five. The only families that lack access to or do not own land are those of highland migrants who have settled in the community but are not yet members of the peasant union. The extent of the land people own ranges between 0.3 hectares and 12 hectares, and the extent of coca fields ranges between 0.3 hectares and 3 hectares, with an average extent of coca fields of about 0.5 hectares, or two catos in local parlance (a cato is a unit of measurement the govern­ment also uses for its coca politics). People are relatively well-off, although socio­­economic stratification is considerable: in the census I undertook in 2007, the person with the largest harvest harvested 104 times more coca leaves than the person with the smallest one. The richest people in this prosperous community earned around the same amount of money as does a medical doctor after university, a secretary in a ministry, or a teacher in a technical institution. Because of Piñapata’s location near a mountain forest, people are able to irrigate their fields throughout the year, which is not the case in all parts of the Yungas. In addition, probably in relation to the early splitting of the community, Piñapata has a vast amount of cultivable land; coca fields have a greater extent, and the potential for production is higher than is common in the region (see Spedding et al. 2013:127). This partly accounts for Piñapata’s current reputation in the region of being a prosperous community. People from Piñapata are also proud of   having bigger, nicer coca fields than in nearby towns and of   being consequently better-off than others. Vidal, a man around sixty-five years old, thus told me, “Our coca fields are nice—in the town they are all small—and we all have luxurious cars.”

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An Immigrant Society The region where Piñapata is located, as with most of the Yungas, was part of the Aymara kingdoms in a system of vertical archipelagos (Murra 1972) reaching from more than 4,000 meters above sea level to less than 2,000, and the first Aymara settlement in the region can be dated back to circa AD 1200 (Spedding 1994:12), which means they were pre-Incaic. Not until the fifteenth century did the Yungas became part of the Inca state (Spedding 1994:12), in which coca was an important product and was used to strengthen the political and economic power of the empire (Sanabria 1993:39), since coca was vital for the articulation of different ecological levels through processes of exchange and redistribution (Murra 1972). Because of the growing coca market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with Spanish colonization (e.g., Carter and Mamani 1986; Mamani 2006; Soux 1993), haciendas expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and supplied coca leaves for the mines, which were generally owned by the criollo elites—people with Spanish origins who were born in Bolivia. People from Aymara highland communities migrated to the Yungas to work as colonos on the haciendas of the time, which were constantly in need of a labor force for their extensive coca fields. In addition, in the eighteenth century a marchioness bought African slaves in Potosí—where they worked in the mint, in agriculture, in domestic service for criollos, or as artisans—and took them to the Yungas, where they worked as a cheap labor force on the coca fields (Pérez Inofuentes 2010). The woman that Héctor’s father married was a descendant of one of these African slaves. While recognizing the history of immigration in the Yungas, some Yungueño intellectuals—teachers, radio hosts, notaries, and writers, who no longer live exclusively on the basis of coca production and commerce—claim that Yungueños exemplify a kind of diaspora very different from that of other highland people. Such is the case of Fidel Estrada, a Yungueño sociologist who writes poems about the Yungas for different municipalities, as well as small books about Yungas history. He describes himself as an “underground writer” (escritor subterráneo), because he also self-publishes school books on the subject of politics, which he distributes to local schools throughout the Yungas. He was born in the province Sud Yungas, is easy recognized by a big beard, and studied social communication in La Paz and later sociology in Ecuador. People in Piñapata suggested that I meet him, as he had come to Piñapata and conversed

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  39

with the eldest people of the community about the hamlet’s history, which was to be included in a book he was preparing for the municipality. In addition, Fidel Estrada wrote many poems and one book about the role of the Yungas in Bolivia’s struggle for independence in the nineteenth century (Estrada 2010a; see chapter 4). I met him in La Paz soon after he returned from the Yungas. Fidel Estrada believes that Yungueños constitute a very specific social and political group. He starts by criticizing the new constitution of 2009 and explaining that Yungueños do not easily fit any of the official categories of “indigenous people.” In his account, he refers to the work of anthropologist Xavier Albó (CIPCA 1976) and claims that Yungueños are “the other indigenous people.” Estrada makes reference to the new political subject created in the constitution—the “indigenous originary peasant” (indígena originario campesino)— and with relation to this tripartite name, Estrada defines Yungueños as the “originary Yungueño peasant”: We cannot talk about a Yungueño chemically pure like indigenous. However, he

maintains his roots. There are indigenous people who are in a similar status as are

other peoples; there is no, let’s say, definition or sharp differentiation between the

indigenous Yungueño and an Andean indigenous, for example—it does not exist.

But they are societies who have different cultures, different customs, we can say. I would talk more about Yungueño peasants [campesinos yungueños]. Or Yungueños like a culturally different enclave. . . . Therefore, it seems that the economic

activity we had, the presence of the mestizaje, in many cases with Spanish roots, let’s say, there has been created a very, a bit different, culture, which would be the

originary Yungueño peasant [campesino originario yungueño], I would say. (Interview, March 10, 2011 [my translation])

Yungueño intellectuals such as Estrada claim a fully recognized space within the official ethnic categories of the plurinational state, which would mean that they would be acknowledged as a category of their own. In the perspective of people like Estrada, the state constantly tries to put Yungueños together with others such as Aymara highlanders, which they try to prevent. In a similar way, the mayor of Chulumani, the provincial capital of   Sud Yungas, argues that Yungueños are a specific part of the population beyond the government’s identity politics: he laments that they lack recognition from the central government, be­­ cause they are either put together with Aymaras in general, in which case highlanders dominate, or with coca growers in general, in which case those from

40  chap ter 1

the Chapare dominate. As he says, “Well, they [the government] wanted us to generalize and incorporate into the Aymara, but more than that, as Yungueños, we have our own customs, which are not necessarily copied from the Aymara comrades” (interview with Hernan Justo, April 23, 2011). Rather than pointing to concretely implemented state politics, this “putting together,” which the mayor and Fidel Estrada criticize, refers to the discursive formation that has been created through the debates about the new political constitution. These debates especially turned upon the issue of which social groups would be part of the thirty-six nations and questioned the idea of defining these nations primarily through language. Tracing this discursive “putting together” back to concrete statements or actions of the Morales government directed specifically toward Yungueños is difficult. However, I could appreciate Yungueños’ concerns when I interviewed representatives of the central government, some of whom do seem to perceive Yungueños simply as part of the Aymara nation. Felix Patzi—who is a former minister of education and culture under the Morales administration, now governor of the department of   La Paz, and a sociologist and lecturer at the state university in La Paz  —  expressed, for example, the view that Yungueños are unambiguously Aymaras.3 In his description, he focuses uniquely on the Yungueño population as a result of the Aymara migration from the highlands to the subtropical valleys. At the core of his argument lies the distinction between a geo­­ graphic identity and a cultural or political one, and he recognizes a distinct Yun­­ gueño identity related only to the geographical space: In order to distinguish themselves from the highlands in this transitory situation

between the lowlands and the highlands, in this location, thus they [Yungueños]

have tried to politically construct a Yungueño identity, but one that is somehow more linked to the geographical space than to a cultural identity. . . . But I don’t

think that they can construct an idiomatic identity; it’s very difficult, because

they would still be Aymara-or Spanish-speaking. . . . Secondly, we can say that

their belief system is rooted and it will equally have a shading in the geography, but the trunk is still Aymara or Quechua; that’s why it is very difficult that they want to construct [a Yungueño cultural identity]. (Interview, March 22, 2011 [my translation])

In other cases, rather than being clearly subsumed under the Aymaras, Yungueños have been “put together” with coca growers in general by government

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  41

representatives, who perceive them as part of newly formed, mixed communities, which still does not recognize them as a category of their own. Juan Carlos Pinto Quintanilla, for example, expresses this view. Working in the vicepresidency and being a close associate of Evo Morales, Pinto Quintanilla is a middle-class, urban intellectual who was part of a guerrilla-like organization (Comando Nestor Paz Zamora) together with the current vice-president, Ál­­ varo García Linera. According to Pinto Quintanilla, Yungueños—and coca grow­­ ers in general—are defined in the new political constitution not as part of any indigenous nation but as “intercultural communities.” Such communities are characterized by consisting of migrants from different parts of the country as well as people who were born and have grown up there. Generally, the term in­­ tercultural communities is used for more recently colonized coca-growing regions, such as the Chapare or marginal, new areas in the Yungas like Caranavi, but not for the core of the “traditional zone” of the Yungas. However, Pinto Quin­ tanilla expands this notion to the whole of the Yungas. In addition, according to him, this intercultural characteristic makes coca growers an extremely dynamic part of society, which has a huge political potential: They are intercultural communities in the sense that there are processes of colo-

nization, but the word colonizers would sound ugly; now they are intercultural

peoples, in order not to confuse the process. So, in what sense is it interculturality [interculturalidad ]? Because Quechuas, Aymaras, and natives [lugareños] inclusively became mixed and have generated an identity. President Evo is the product of this process of interculturality: Aymara in origin, he migrated to the city and then to the Chapare, where there are basically Quechuas. . . . He is the product of

interculturality, people who migrate and lose their relation first with the family, with the language; they detach themselves and generate another identity. (Interview, November 15, 2010)

While Yungueño coca growers and intellectuals like Estrada all agree that Yungueños are characterized by being a mixed society regarding people and culture and are recognized as such by government representatives and Bolivian society more generally, for most Yungueño intellectuals and politicians the Yungas is more than simply an undefinable mix of everything as the characterization of “intercultural communities” suggests: as Chulumani’s mayor expressed, they distinguish themselves from the dominant Aymara-centered discourse, which perceives Yungueño identity at best as a variation of the Aymara identity, and

42  chap ter 1

they do not agree with being put together with other coca growers of recently colonized, often only partly legal, zones. Yungueño intellectuals and politicians claim to be not simply descendants of Aymara migrants or of a new intercultural mix but to have their own Yungueño history. Part of this specific history is that some think they have their own ancestors other than Aymaras.

In Search of Ethnic Ancestors In many of the minibuses that transport people between towns and villages of the Yungas, as well as on some windows of shops in Chulumani, one can read stickers saying “neither camba nor kolla, but wholeheartedly yungueño.” This saying refers as much to the geographical space of the Yungas, which lies between the highlands and the lowlands, as to their cultural space, which lies “inbetween.” Cambas and kollas—terms used to refer to people living in the lowlands of Santa Cruz and in the highlands, respectively—are implicitly understood as rivals and political oppositions, and there have been violent confrontations between kolla migrants and camba urbanites during the past few years in Bolivia’s big cities (see Fabricant 2009). Stating that Yungueños are more than just descendants of Aymara highland migrants is important for most Yungueños. Thus, some Yungueño intellectuals have created a discourse that Yungueños have their own set of ancestors that goes beyond Aymara highlanders. They believe that the mixture characterizing the current Yungueño population came about historically because the region of the Yungas was originally inhabited by Lecos, a lowland ethnic group. One such local intellectual who espouses this view very clearly is Ernesto Ticona. He is a schoolteacher in Chulumani, the province capital, and former president of the municipal council. I met him in his home in Chulumani, in an untidy room downstairs where he arranged a kind of small shop with replacement parts and tires for cars, which he occasionally sells. Because the door to this room opened directly to the street, everything was covered with dust, and we sat on plastic chairs in the middle of a hastily cleared space. I contacted him because during his administration he had initiated the project about the recording of    Yungueño communities’ histories, of which Fidel Estrada’s book was a part. As many Yungueño men do, he always wears a peaked cap, even inside. Although nominally used to protect one from the burning sun, peaked caps become in some cases a kind of permanent accessory, and it is difficult to even imagine some persons without such caps on their head.

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  43

Ticona believes that Yungueños are biologically and culturally a mix between Aymaras, Quechuas, and Lecos, because the Lecos were the original inhabitants of the Yungas and were displaced first by the Incas, who were Quechua, and then by the Aymaras. He thinks that first the Tiwanacus (an ancient culture that predated the Incas) and then the Incas had sent the Aymaras to the Yungas to colonize, and the mixture of Lecos and Aymaras became the Yungueños. The Lecos, he thinks, sustained themselves by hunting and gathering, and they were descendants from the monte jaqis. These are imagined as small creatures that are neither human nor animal and are more confined to the realm of myth and legends. Although monte jaqis have a face like humans, they are active at night and have habits that are not considered human. They eat raw worms and fish, hunt without tools, do not talk as people do, have their feet the other way round, are pretty small, are covered with braids and lianas of the mountain forest, and do not chew coca. In addition, monte jaqis are said to always carry a bag (chuspa) with them, which is full of gold. When people shout, “Leave your bag,” they leave it and run away. Alison Spedding heard a version in which people have to shout, “Pay your taxes,” and the monte jaqi leaves his bag, full of gold in her story as well, and dashes away (personal communication). In his account, Ticona refers to his parents, who came as Aymara migrants from the highlands and recounted that not everyone in the Yungas was from the highlands; rather, there have been a kind of “proper Yungueño” people. He underlines his theory with the fact that there are specific linguistic expressions that are common in the Yungas but, according to him, are neither Aymara nor Spanish. For   Ticona, this is proof that Yungueños are descendants of the Lecos, and he assured me that “the Yungueño has always lived here. His roots are the Lecos; the Lecos are those persons who inclusively in some moments have had a form of monte jaqi, as they say, the monte jaqi” (interview, February 5, 2011). I have heard such arguments about the Lecos being ancestors of   Yungueños among the coca growers in Piñapata also. They sometimes draw an evolutionary scale from the monkey to the monte jaqi to the chunchu, which is a contemptuous term for lowland indigenous groups, and then to the Lecos. Nora, for example, thinks the monte jaqi is the ancestor of   Yungueños because monte jaqis originated from the monkeys. For some, however, there is no evolutionary scale, and monte jaqis are simply “people of the jungle” (  gente del monte). As such, monte jaqi is just another term for chunchu and Leco. Yungueños describe chunchus as walking around without clothes (    pelados) and without shoes (q’ara khayu), hunting with a bow and arrow, having very strange customs— “they dance around a buried head” and “they don’t have coffins,” as Rita once

4 4  chap ter 1

told me—not being in contact with the rest of the world, and being essentially not civilized. Interestingly, there is a plant with big red candle-like flowers that produces a kind of nonedible pea called chunchu alverja. This plant grows on coca fields or other spaces cleared for cultivation, as well as in pastures, and it is conceived to belong neither to the wild mountain forest nor the realm of wholly domesticated plants. This may exemplify the status of people called chunchus. They are people (  gente)—in contrast to the monte jaqi—but are not wholly civilized. Yungueños consider Lecos to be a kind of chunchu, and as such one could ask the question why some Yungueños would insist on these contemptuously conceived chunchus being their ancestors. This seems to be a way to frame a particular identity in ethnic terms in order for others to be recognized; as such, it reproduces to a certain degree the ethnic discourse of the government and the political constitution. In other words, drawing their ancestry from Lecos roots Yungueños, who are migrants, in the local space and gives them legitimacy in this space by indigenizing them. Among the Bolivian public, Lecos are often considered to be an indigenous group standing at the verge of extinction (e.g., Noticias Bolivianas 2013). They are not lowland indians, but they inhabit a space located between Andean highland ethnic groups and lowland indigenous peoples (Dudley 2005). In addition, the Lecos have started to recover their ethnic identity only recently (mid-1990s) to make claims on their territory. They do, however, mainly identify as campesinos (peasants) and speak Quechua (Dudley 2005). Thus, by trying to recover an eth­­ nic identity, they follow a general trend since the emergence of indigenous movements in the late 1980s and 1990s, which is fostered through the new constitution of the Morales administration. Being an indigenous group that is only vaguely present in the Bolivian public consciousness, and whose contemporary existence is not even wholly acknowledged, interestingly, the Lecos have been adopted by some Yungueños to claim an ethnic identity of their own. This, however, is only one way through which they claim to be more than simply an immigrant society without a history of their own; quite another and more widespread way is their focus away from ethnic value to political struggles.

Struggling for Coca Vis-à-vis the government, Yungueños tirelessly invoke the argument that they are traditional coca growers because in the Yungas there are haciendas—in contrast

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  45

to other coca-growing regions, such as the Chapare—although Law 1008 does not define “historical” and “traditional,” and within Law 1008 only whole prov­ inces are defined as “traditional” or “transitional,” without specification of which part of these provinces would correspond to either of these categories. How­ ever, peasant organizations have implicitly established a criterion of   what “his­torically” concretely means: for them, it implies all areas where coca cultivation existed before the land reform of 1953, thus in the time of the large land­holdings, the so-called tiempo de hacienda (Spedding 2004:72–  74; Spedding et al. 2013:69). This allows them to maintain the traditional zones as a relatively small area: the massive colonization of the lowlands for coca cultivation, such as the Chapare, started only in the 1960s. In addition, political struggles very much inform Yungueños’ contemporary self-understanding as a kind of “avantgarde” of social movements: Juan Carlos Huanca, for example, who is head of the federation of peasant unions of Sud Yungas, explained that coca growers have been among the first to have a deputy in the parliament, and as such, they have fulfilled a “protagonist role” for other social movements. This “protagonist role” is rooted in a long history of political struggles around the coca leaf. Before the land reform in 1953, the rural elites or landlords, who were generally part of urban upper society, were important defenders of coca (Lema 1997). The Society of Landowners of the Yungas (Sociedad de Propietarios de los Yungas), founded in 1830, consisted of landlords who owned the haciendas in the Yungas where the Aymara colonos (servants, tenants), who constantly migrated from the highlands, settled. Thus, the members of the Society of Landowners were elites who commanded the labor of Aymara indians and had good connections with the government. This society defended the coca leaf until the land reform was enacted, and they insisted on the government defending their interests in international relations. The society’s strategy for defending coca was to show the cultural and social importance of coca, as well as the beneficial chemical attributes, such as a high vitamin content. The Society of Landowners was convinced that international political resistance to coca stemmed from a lack of information about the real characteristics of the coca leaf. Moreover, they proposed to the government that rather than a prohibition on the cultivation of coca leaves, the export and consumption of coca internationally should be promoted. The government did take these concerns into account and “refused to seriously consider carrying out the recommendations that emerged from the United Nations study [in 1949] for it did not wish to upset the local economic system, which, during the 1940s, generated from coca more than

46  chap ter 1

eighty per cent of all taxes obtained from national products” (Lema 1997:112). With the land reform, however, their interests broke apart, because their landholdings were divided among the peasants and hence their power became limited (Lema 1997). In 1961, the Bolivian government could no longer resist international pressure. After signing the Single Convention on Narcotics, in 1962 the govern­ ment decreed that planting new coca fields was forbidden and initiated a census of coca fields, which people in the Yungas resisted, as they did any other attempts at registration and licensing that took place (Léons and Sanabria 1997a:21). In the 1970s, the first big project for substituting other crops for coca was initiated in cooperation between the United States and Bolivia (PRODES, Proyecto de Desarrollo Chapare Yungas, the Chapare-Yungas Development  proj­­ect; Léons and Sanabria 1997a:21). The idea of  “coca for development”—pushed under Jaime Paz Zamora’s administration from 1989 to 1993—underlay many programs with regard to coca cultivation. In 1986, when the coca price collapsed shortly after having reached its peak, eradication campaigns started under the banner of “alternative development.”   They included the implementation of other crops and the building of schools and roads, often accompanied by considerable repression. In the Yungas, under the UN-initiated Agroyungas project from 1985 to 1991, whole communities had to sign an agreement that stated that in return for infrastructural projects and credits for new crops they would not plant any new coca fields (Léons 1997:151). In the Chapare, from 1987 to 1998, people who voluntarily eradicated their coca field received individual payment of two thousand U.S. dollars and seedlings of alternative crops (Llanos and Spedding 2006:6–8). Madeline Léons and Harry Sanabria (1997a) argue that the problem with all these programs was that they did not take marketing into account, because no alternative product ever reached as high a price as coca did. In 1988, the Convention Against Illegal Trade in Narcotics and Controlled Substances, known as the Vienna Convention, determined that coca eradication was to be supported by rural development projects (Léons and Sanabria 1997a:22). Bolivia signed this convention but indicated that the coca leaf as such was not a narcotic when used traditionally in the form of chewing (Léons and Sanabria 1997a). Shortly after, in the same year, the famous Law 1008 was enacted, and this defined three different zones (see introduction). Coca growers in general opposed the law, because they felt it to be a mistake that they were

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  47

being included in a law that mainly deals with illicit activities and criminalized peasants (Léons and Sanabria 1997a). In the 1990s, political mobilizations of coca growers increased. In 1991, for example, the famous “march for dignity and sovereignty,” organized by the Chapare coca growers against an increased militarization of the War on Drugs and the involvement of the Bolivian military, appealed to wider parts of the population. In 1993, again, the pressure on Bolivia increased because it did not achieve the target of coca eradication and the government declared that new efforts against drug trafficking would be taken. This again pushed coca growers to the streets (Léons and Sanabria 1997a:31). Toward the end of the 1990s, under President Banzer—who ruled as a military dictator in the 1970s and was elected as president in the 1990s—eradication programs required that the community bundle a certain amount of hectares to receive a community project. From 2002 on, there was no longer voluntary eradication in the Chapare, only forced eradication. In the Yungas, President Banzer tried to implement eradication programs in 2001, but this met with fierce resistance, and the government finally had to drop it (Conzelman 2007b). Resistance of coca growers in general took the form of road blockades or ransacking of offices and control posts. Alison Spedding (1997b) even recounts the lynching of policemen in 1982 in Chulumani, the capital of the province Sud Yungas, after having committed many (including sexual) abuses, and the looting of the office. Consequently, the drug police did not return for the following five years. Eradication programs in the Yungas never had much success: When voluntary eradication took place, only old fields were eradicated, and eradicators were often expelled from their communities (Spedding 1997b). In Piñapata only one person eradicated his coca field. Interestingly, this person claims to be one of the descendants of the landlord and as such was never integrated into the community as a common community member. Rumors tell that he even bought coca from community members to make cocaine paste in the 1980s,4 and after many incidents of betrayal between him and community members, he eradicated his coca field toward the end of the 1980s. Ironically, with the two thousand U.S. dollars he received for doing so, he bought another, bigger coca field. Also in the 1980s, the Departmental Association of Coca Producers (ADEPCOCA), the “economic branch” of peasant unions in the Yungas, was founded as a reaction to the restricted trading opportunities for coca growers.

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Its aim was to reform the coca trade and to industrialize coca for exportation (Cusi and Flores 2007). This organization emerged after coca growers of the Yungas and the Chapare together founded a national association. Yungueños, however, saw the need to distinguish themselves and to found their own organization, since at the national level between coca growers of different regions, there seemed to be no clear objectives of the organization (Cusi and Flores 2007:36). ADEPCOCA started a registration of coca peasants and created iden­­ tification cards for coca producers, which allowed them to take their coca to the legal market in La Paz. In addition, ADEPCOCA mobilized peasants for demonstrations, often through an obligation put on cardholders and sanctions in the form of a fine, as is common in peasant unions in general in Bolivia. ADEPCOCA also became involved in political parties, such as the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), and was active in forming the party Eje Pachacuti, which had one parliamentary deputy in 1993 (Spedding 1997b:130). In the Chapare, however, peasants aligned themselves much more successfully with political parties, a process which peaked in the election of Evo Morales for president (Van Cott 2005). In 2004, issues about coca eradication reached an important turning point. Then congressman Evo Morales attained an agreement with President Carlos Mesa Gisbert stating that each coca-growing family should be allowed to cultivate one cato of coca, which would apply to the Yungas and the Chapare. The cato policy was a demand that Chapare peasants made during years of eradication, and it was an important achievement for them. One cato was a measure the government used with regard to a stable amount of production but with varying extent according to the specific region. While in the Chapare one cato was 1,600 square meters, in the Yungas it was 2,500 square meters, because the same extension generally yields less in the Yungas than in the tropical Chapare region. One cato would be sufficient to generate a family income and would allow coca growers to start planting alternative crops. As several authors assert (Farthing and Kohl 2012; Ledebur and Youngers 2012), this so-called rationalization policy had considerable success in the Chapare region because the coca growers there found the tripartite zonal approach of Law 1008 to be unfair; Yungueños, however, strongly rejected it. In Piñapata, people unanimously state that cato politics were always meant for the exceeding areas only, not for the “traditional zone.” They even argue that it would be against the law (referring to Law 1008, which is still in effect) to implement it in the Yungas, since accord­ ing to them, in the “traditional zone” there cannot be any kind of   limitation per family. However, the MAS’s slogan for its rationalization policy that “there will

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  49

not be zero coca, but neither free cultivation” might in fact be the coca policy most desired by people in the Yungas, for they absolutely agree that illegal zones should be eradicated, which elevates their status as “traditional coca growers” and ensures that the price of coca will be maintained. From the 2000s on, people in the Yungas participated in the most popular mobilizations, such as the “gas war” and the expulsion of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.5 People in Piñapata are proud of having been part of these mobilizations, which were important in bringing Evo Morales to power. With Morales’s presidency, coca growers shifted from being the enemies of the state to being its allies (Conzelman 2007b). People in Piñapata generally say that the time of road blockades has passed—this was something they did before, but now they are in a time of dialogue because “this is our government.” Going to the streets would be “a betrayal,” as Nora once said. As an older man told me, “Those who didn’t go to the street before are doing demonstrations now.” Piñapata identifies itself explicitly with the government party—which means that many of their leaders subscribed to the party and publicly state that Piñapata supports the MAS—and I did not hear of any march they had participated in since 2006. Although there was a road blockade in November 2010 in the Yungas, with people from the regional oppositional party to the MAS (Agrupación) leading the protest, only a few Yungueños participated, and nobody from Piñapata. Indeed, there was only one march in which people from Piñapata, from the whole Yungas, and from the Chapare participated: it was in January 2011 for the national day of coca chewing (acullicu), as they had been called upon by the government to attend. Although Yungueños and the government thus very much agree on certain issues regarding coca politics, especially the promotion of coca chewing, Yungueños disagree on the expansion of generalized benefits from the coca economy beyond the Yungas. This disagreement is closely linked to the disputed legitimacy of Yungueño regional identities and to their position between the state’s identity categories—neither simply Aymaras nor simply coca growers. By focusing on political struggles to defend the coca leaf, Yungueños are only rarely creating unity with other coca growers, and it is a means of claiming an exclusive position in history.

The Impossibility of Recovering History As this history of struggles for coca indicates, coca growers are far from being a unified social movement. Rather than jointly defending coca cultivation,

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coca growers of different regions disagree vehemently. There is an increasing distance and even rivalry between the Yungas and the Chapare region, as they struggle for the legal amount of hectares under coca cultivation and the market share each is assigned. In this struggle, the coca growers of the Yungas try to retain their status as the single “traditional,” and thus legitimate, zone. As Linda Farthing and Benjamin Kohl state, “Cleavages . . . proliferate between producers from the Yungas ‘traditional’ coca-growing zone, who seek to protect their productive niche under Law 1008, and the much larger group who have steadily migrated to more productive lowland frontier areas [mainly the Chapare] subject to eradication” (2012:490). However, even within the Yungas, there are factions between the regions considered to be the core of the “traditional zone” and others considered to be peripheral to it, although legally they are all defined as “traditional” (or “transitional,” in some cases). Thus, on the one hand, the coca growers in the core of the “traditional zone” want to defend the regional economy and thus try to retain and protect a specific privilege by promoting regional politics (Caroline Conzelman [2007b] calls them “protectionists”). On the other hand, there are those from the more peripheral regions of the Yungas and thus from the more recently colonized zones who try to expand the coca economy and thus promote national coca-supporting politics (Conzelman [2007b] calls them “nationalists”; see also Spedding 1997b). Paradoxically, as Spedding and her colleagues (2013:272–77) indicate, Yungueños tirelessly repeat that Chapare peasants are favored by the current government of Evo Morales, while in fact Yungueños have created a monopoly over the coca market—Spedding and colleagues (2013:277) thus call Yungueños the “elite of the cocalero sector.” As a leader in an ADEPCOCA assembly that I attended agitatedly shouted, Yungueños will struggle to maintain this monopoly, and they are ready to reach out at the international level: The topic of coca, it is a national and international problem, but at the international level, brothers, we are always bound to win as Yungas, but not as the Tropic

[Chapare], because the United Nations knows what is the Tropic and what is the

Yungas. But if we are handled [manejado] by the Tropic, we will always lose. . . . There is more to talk about, brothers, at the international level. I think now we are like two teams; we are even giving a referee [arbitro] to the Tropic. But at the

international level, brothers, what the United Nations tells us, one proposal as

traditional coca growers from the three provinces [Sud Yungas, Nord Yungas, and Inquisivi; all three are part of the geographical area of the Yungas] for the

His tories of Migr ation and S truggle  51

international level, yes or no, brothers? [Everyone: Yes!] This is another level we have to aim at, because the United Nations at the international level, there they

will tell us, Chapare here, and Yungas here. We are legal ones, and we know that it is our coca that is consumed, brothers.

Interestingly, Yungueños do not aim at the international level to create alliances, such as is the case when indigenous people claim their indigeneity at indigenous forums (Niezen 2003); rather, they aim at reinforcing at the international level their distinction as “traditional” and thus as the only legitimate coca growers. As some politically active men from Piñapata explained, it makes no sense for them to unite with the Chapare coca peasants, because Chapare coca goes to the drug industry, while Yungueño coca does not. The link to drug issues is one aspect that potentially destabilizes coca growers’ positioning. In addition, coca laws operate on a zero-sum logic: They establish a specific amount of legal hectares on which coca can be grown (in Law 1008, 12,000 hectares), which is then distributed among the different regions. Thus, if one region receives more hectares, the others will receive less. Within this zero-sum game, the definition of   “tradition” is crucial, since this determines the extent to which coca growers stand within or outside the law. In their definition of who can become part of the “traditional coca growing region,” however, Yungueños focus very much on contemporary political struggles to defend coca from eradication and banning over a relatively short period of time. Their historical consciousness very much differs from how indigenous peoples are supposed to look at history, as in Yungueños’ historical narratives they ascribe little importance to the moment of colonization or of   “having been there before.” Nevertheless, the effect is similar: in both cases, history cannot be recovered (see Spedding et al. 2013:276). This creates fissures and affects both their relation to the “nontraditional” coca growers, such as the Chapare peasants, and their relation with highlanders: Although Yungueños could be said to have a close historical relationship with highlanders because many of their ancestors were highland migrants who settled in the Yungas (as in the case of Héctor’s family), highlanders who settle in Yungueño communities today can never recover the history of struggle for the coca leaf that Yungueños so much invoke. Although they pay a kind of entrance fee when they decide to settle in the community (see chapter 2), which is calculated on the number of days that community members had worked to construct the road, the water pipes, and the electricity system, and although they learn how to construct and maintain

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a coca field, they cannot pay for struggling for the coca leaf and suffering under state repression. The emergence of coca growers’ discourse on history must be placed in the context of emerging antidrug policies in the twentieth century and (as discussed in chapter 4) the Morales government’s new coca policy. Yungueños’ historical consciousness very much focuses on “the time of haciendas,” the events related to the agrarian reform of 1953, and their political struggles during the twentieth century. Although some Yungueño intellectuals have created a counterdiscourse by claiming their own ethnic ancestors, such as the Lecos, focusing on political struggles is much more common. That coca growers’ historical consciousness focuses more on political struggles than on a line of ancestry might be linked to the fact that Yungueño communities have always benefited from and have been maintained by migration, although both migration and struggle create their own forms of   historical exclusion. As a result of their specific activity of coca growing, Yungueños reposition themselves in national society and put much emphasis on their self-declared differentiation from jaqis—although Yungueños were all jaqis before.

2 People and Coca Fields

D

around fifty-five years old, and lives with her husband, her daughter, and her son-in-law in Piña­­ pata. She wears a pollera (Andean skirt), and her long black hair is bound into two plaits, united toward the end and twisted around her head in a circle, looking like a nice crest. She is known to be a very good-natured, fair, and calm person who works hard—some say she works harder than her husband—and very much cares for her children and her family. Rita was born in Piñapata and went to school for only two years because her parents separated and she and her elder sister had to take care of the two younger brothers. She often recounted that her father was “evil” (malo) because he beat his wife and children. Her mother was a zambita: she was tall, with long skirts and short plaits made of her curled hair. Rita and Gregorio started living together when she was about twenty years old, and as is usually the case in Piñapata, they never married but had only the sart’a (asking for the woman’s hand). Gregorio was a widower and already had two children, only a few years old. Rita raised the older son as if he were her own, as is always commented on with admiration in the village. As her contemporary friend Nora once said, “Out of ten stepmothers you will find only one like Rita.” Rita also has two children of   her own: a daughter and a son. Throughout her life, Rita never earned money other than with coca, and in Piñapata, she is known to be one of the most skilled harvesters. oña Rita is a middle-aged woman,

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Rita built her current house only six years ago, and it is one of the more spacious ones. The ground floor contains two rooms, which are used for storing coca leaves and Gregorio’s motorcycle. Sometimes, when highland day-wage laborers work for Rita, she accommodates them in this room, where they sleep on folded woolen blankets. On the upper floor, Rita had built a spacious terrace, which she expanded two years ago, when she built a bathroom and a toilet beside it. At the time, it was only the third toilet in the hamlet. Within the house, there is a big kitchen with a cement floor, a gas stove, and a sink with a tap. Behind the kitchen, there is a spare bed, where Rita sometimes accommodates day-wage laborers. One door—with a lock—leads to Rita’s sleeping room, which has a wooden floor and a curtain on the window. On both sides of the terrace, there are two other rooms: the daughter’s room and, on the other side of the terrace, the son’s room—although because her son does not live in the community, this became Gregorio’s room. Rita generally gets up at five o’clock in the morning, six at the latest. The first thing to do in the morning is put phuti on the stove: these are green bananas that people in the Yungas peel and then boil in water, like potatoes. While the phuti cooks, Rita prepares rice or noodles and finally fries some eggs or charque (dried meat) or, if there is fresh meat around, prepares chopped meat with some vegetables (onion, peas, tomatoes). In the meantime, Rita takes her breakfast, often bread and coffee, and this is generally when other household members get up. Gregorio—whose nickname is Ch’ikhi (“intelligent,” in Aymara), because he likes to repair everything—generally has already left the house between four and five in the morning and cooks his breakfast on an earth stove in the coca field. It is also in the morning, before heading off to the coca field, when people pass by, have a chat, sit down briefly on a bench opposite Rita’s house, and discuss the weather or where to go to work that day. Before leaving for work, Rita distributes household members’ food in plastic buckets and then packs her stuff in a blanket she fastens around her shoulders. Being on time is always important if people work on someone else’s field or others come to help on one’s own field, because making them wait is inconsiderate. There are different formalized itineraries: the “normal” itinerary is from nine o’clock until three thirty in the afternoon. A relatively new itinerary that came into vogue six years ago is from seven until one o’clock in the afternoon (the so-called siete a una). If coca fields are far away, people have to walk up to one hour to reach the field. In Piñapata,

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coca fields are usually below the village, and there are small paths connecting the fields to one another and to the village. Some of these paths pass through sections of mountain forest, but they almost always cross different coca fields and are thus mainly in the sun. In the morning people can walk downhill, but in the afternoon, going up the steep hills in the sun after being bent over the whole day and already tired, is the most exhausting part of the day and takes up to one and a half   hours. Rita’s coca field is close to the hamlet, and she needs only about half an hour to reach it. Upon arriving at her coca field, Rita sits down for a moment, eats some bananas or peanuts, and rests from the walk. She contemplates her coca field and considers which sections are ripe, where parasites have damaged the plants, and where weeding is necessary. She then hangs her bag, which contains the midday meal she cooked in the morning, on some branches and puts on some trousers and socks beneath her skirt, as well as a long blouse, to prevent mosquito and ant bites. Then she fastens a fabric around her hips, into which she will stow the coca leaves, and another one around her shoulders to protect her from the sun. In the meantime, other villagers who come to help her slowly arrive. Rita then goes to the section of the field that she wants to harvest that day and just starts. Her helpers still rest briefly: some chew some coca, and others eat a part of their meal that they brought. Then they come and accommodate themselves on the terraces that follow Rita’s and start to bend down and pick the leaves. Harvesting is a very tiring activity. Coca plants have different heights: they vary from half a meter high to almost two meters. People must be bent over throughout the day, and if plants are small, people begin to complain about pain in their back well before midday. In addition, coca fields generally have only a few trees, because people believe that coca does not grow well in the shade (only with some few species of trees is it considered that coca should be combined), and the sun thus burns during the whole day on the back and the head. As people harvest close by each other, there is a lot of talking, joking, and laughing, and everyone is generally eager to converse. There is, however, also a constant feeling of having to hurry up in order to not fall behind. Leaves have to be picked carefully, without damaging the buds and branches, and from time to time, the owner of the field passes by to collect the picked leaves and, while receiving them in a huge plastic bag, assess their quality. People like Rita, who have harvested almost every day since their childhood—and this generation generally started harvesting between six and eight years old—are unbeatable both

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Tent with iron sheeting in the coca field, 2015. Under these tents, people store their dry and fresh coca leaves in big plastic bags, nets (  yuti) for drying coca, and working clothes. During breaks and lunch, people take a rest in the shadow of such tents.

Figure 5. 

in speed and in quality, and people say that “they harvest like machines.” Rita’s hands move smoothly and quickly through the branches; she often says, “That’s just my way of   harvesting.” Rita is known to respect itineraries. When people come to harvest on her field, at exactly 11:30 a.m. she calls for a lunch break. Relieved to have reached las doce (“twelve o’clock,” as the lunch break is called, although people have it before twelve), they all stagger with pain in their back toward the shadow of the small house made of stones or to a kind of tent made with iron or plastic sheeting (figure 5). From the qeri (stove made of earth), a slight gray smoke creeps into the air and the blue sky, from Gregorio having cooked his breakfast and lunch in the morning. After finishing the snack, people accommodate themselves comfortably on the huge plastic bags used for stowing coca leaves or the huge nets (  yuti) used for drying coca, and there they smoke a cigarette, chew

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coca leaves, and comment on the latest gossip. The break lasts for one hour, during which Rita sometimes even takes a short nap, and then they all go back to where they were harvesting. The afternoon is generally more tiring than the morning; the sun seems even stronger and the meal sits heavy in the stomach. Sometimes, in the afternoon, when Rita sees that she wanted to advance farther that day, she slightly pushes harvesters by increasing her speed and thus going ahead even more. When Rita is the owner of the field on which to harvest, she is also always slightly nervous. These are her plants, her leaves, of which to take care; it is she who needs to direct harvesters, handle the breaks, and collect the full mit’is (blankets where picked leaves are stowed). It is also she and her family who have to carry the heavy bags full of fresh coca leaves back to the hamlet to be spread carefully in the room downstairs until the next day, when she will lay them out in the sun to dry. At precisely 3:30 in the afternoon, Rita passes by every person, collects the picked leaves, and quietly says to everyone, “Let’s go home; it’s time to have coffee.”

*** Coca in the Yungas constitutes the ethic of people’s life, and people often say that coca is their culture and their history. Catherine Allen (1986) has made the argument that in Peruvian highland communities, functioning as a social person without coca chewing is impossible; similarly, in the Yungas, for people to achieve personhood without a coca field is impossible. People who do not have a coca field in the community either become invisible when they engage in other work, such as cattle raising, or fall into the lowest category of the local sociopolitical hierarchy, called yanapero (helpers), as they do only day-wage laboring. As Carlos Toranzo Roca argues, the coca economy is unlike other peasant economies, because it exceeds the labor capacity of the household; neither is it simply a mercantile production in which people only sell what they produce. Rather, it is a “composite form . . . that cannot be easily classed as simple mercantile production, or peasant economy” (1997:201). This chapter describes the coca production economy and outlines the practices that account for Yungueños’ relation to their coca fields and lead to their entrepreneurism in the realm of peasant production. It is meant as a detailed ethnographic description through which I bring to light the way their political positioning as coca growers is intimately linked to the relation that people

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have with their coca fields, as well as how the mercantile logic in everyday life contributes to their success and social recognition. Their success as coca growers raises questions about how to assess local economic fragmentation as well as how to evaluate their prosperity and their social status in national society.

Working in the Coca Field As people repeatedly underline, maintaining a coca field is not for one person alone; it needs at least two. Although there are a few people who work alone on their own fields, people generally prefer to work together. This is especially true for harvesting, which is perceived to be a boring task—although extremely important, harvesting is labor intensive and never ending, because once the field is harvested on one side, it is again ready for harvest on the other side. The process of coca cultivation consists of clearing the land through slashand-burn techniques (llamear and quemar); terracing the steep hills by first digging a kind of canal, placing the stones, covering them again with earth, and then beating the earth with a wooden blade to compact it ( plantar or zanjear); sowing the coca seedlings and transplanting them onto the terraces (telar); harvesting the coca leaves (k’ichir), the work that requires the most time; and then drying them (secar), packing them (mat’achar and takear), and finally taking them to La Paz and selling them. In addition, irrigation must be installed, the terraces must be weeded after each harvest (masi or chonteo), every four years the plants must be pruned (traskilar), and before packing the dried leaves must be divided and selected according to different qualities and sizes (sernir or elegir). The whole production process involves a high degree of specialized knowledge, which is necessary to maintain the productivity of a coca field throughout a person’s life (for a detailed description of the whole production process, see Spedding 1994, 2004). In the coca field, there is a strict organization of work, and I base my outline mainly on harvesting, because this activity is performed throughout the whole year. When people harvest in groups, they progress together through the coca field as each person harvests one wachu (terrace; see figure 6). These groups often consist of different people from Piñapata who help each other on different days or are sometimes paid a day wage. When harvesting and going ahead, people have to count the wachus forward according to the number of persons to reach their wachu. Everyone in the group should harvest the same number

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Figure 6. 

Harvesting wachu, 2011.

of wachus. When people start changing their wachu, which is the case when someone fails to count them or tries to cheat and evade very full ones, people get upset. Interestingly, the idea of working on wachus is also transposed to communal working days: when clearing a road, for example, one person is in charge to “mark wachus” (stripes of five to ten meters), and people proceed on the road in the same way they proceed through a coca field. To have “worked” means to be assigned to a wachu, rather than helping others on their wachus. Only by harvesting a proper wachu does one contribute to the total advancement of a working day. Thus, to be a full person in the coca field means to “have wachu” and to count as a full labor power who is able to gain a full day’s wage through ayni (reciprocal labor exchange) or money. However, not everyone has the same harvesting abilities. People who harvest quickly do millkear, a word used when they are getting ahead fast and leave the others behind. People who fall behind because they were chatting (called liwisiri) are perceived as not deserving help from their mates, because their staying behind is self-imposed.

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Millka is a concept linked to the idea of competition, which during harvest is not appreciated, since the entire group of harvesters is supposed to progress together. There are, however, different reasons why people sometimes equally do millka: some, like Rita, claim that this speed is their way to harvest; others may want to harvest quickly when it becomes obvious that the remaining harvest will be finished this day, so that they can go home earlier. Some people also tell that in the past landlords gave the ones who went millka an extra remuneration. Moreover, people sometimes also do millka because they like to talk among themselves apart from the rest of the group and want to separate themselves with the few people with whom they most like to chat and gossip. And finally, millka is not always perceived as a derogatory act; when people harvest with big groups, especially those coming from town to whom they pay day wages in money, they often ask quick and good harvesters to come in order to “pull” or “drag” ( jalar) the big group. Such skilled harvesters, like Rita, are called jaladores, and they are supposed to go millka: they make the others get ahead more quickly because as people ideally progress together through the field, they try to catch up with the millka, as lagging behind is perceived to be inadequate ( feo, ugly). Moreover, if the owner is a very skilled harvester and does the field harvest with a group together with her husband, she tries to go millka to make her mink’a (laborers) hurry up, to achieve the maximum benefit from them. Working and progressing all together is also important because the coca field is first and foremost imagined as a space of chatting and gossip. Migrants from the highlands who come to harvest in the Yungas are exceptions to this expectation: they are not involved in the chatting, gossiping, or joking. When the owner harvests alone with them, without other people from the community, the day often passes mostly in silence. When the owner of the field works with other people from the community, the highland migrants are of­ ten given a separate bag (sacilla) in which to put their leaves, and they harvest apart, not integrated within the row of wachus that other people work on. This is a strong contrast to the way people harvest in groups when everyone is from the Yungas. The reason for this separation is their deficient harvesting skills; highland migrants harvest much more slowly. In addition, they are supposed to work more hours than do others who might come to earn or pay back their aynis (reciprocal work exchange [see below]). And finally, this spatial separation also marks a social distance and an ambivalent relationship that Yungueños have with highlanders (see section below on Yungueños and  jaqis). In general, people have a very intimate relationship with their coca field. The peculiar space of the coca field, where there is a strict organization of work and

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status, creates notions of what a fully recognized person is and what it means to be a “real” coca grower. The coca field is a place of work, of social relations, and where a sense of collectivity and uniqueness of  Yungueño cocalero identification is built. This constitution of the coca field as a peculiar social space relies on the idea of  “growing.”

Growing Through Coca Nora and her husband, Francisco, have one of the largest coca fields. Nora is around fifty-five years old, wears a pollera (Andean skirt), and has curly, plaited hair that reaches the middle of her back, along with a round face and a pointed nose. She is one of the most active community members and is always ready to organize and take part in any event, and she is almost always the only woman who speaks during communal meetings in the meeting room, where generally only men talk. Francisco is a tall man who speaks very fast and is likewise very active in communal politics. Nora and Francisco have two children. The elder, a son, has lived in the United States for ten years, where he has bought a house and works as a mason, and he regularly sends remittances to his parents. The younger, a daughter, lived for some years with her husband and her two children in Piñapata and cultivated part of her parent’s coca fields, but she moved recently to Santa Cruz, the big city in the tropics, where they opened a shop. Ten years ago, Nora and Francisco lived for five years in Santa Cruz and had a snack bar; Francisco owned a big ice cream machine, which he bought for 3,500 USD, as he often likes to recount. They returned to Piñapata when their son left for the United States. Nora and Francisco did not receive land or coca fields from either of their parents; they bought their land from the person who was the first head of the peasant union in the 1950s and left Piñapata in the 1960s, as almost half the population of the time did. Nora and Francisco’s land is very close to their house and as such is very advantageous. They have the biggest house in Piñapata, built partly with adobe and partly with bricks, with three floors and a big terrace; for many years, they were the only ones who had a toilet and a proper shower. Until recently, before state-provided electricity was installed, they had one of the four refrigerators that existed in the community and, like almost everyone else, a television and a DVD player. Also, their kitchen was until recently one of the very few with a sink. Francisco dyed his hair black as it became ever more gray and white—something that some men in Piñapata do, as well as some older women.

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Nora and Francisco harvest at least forty times more than the poorest people in the community and, additionally, buy coca from other community members. They resell in La Paz each month as much as ten takis (bags of fifty pounds), which requires much liquid capital or means that many people who borrowed money from them now owe them coca leaves to repay the credit. In 2007, Nora got a carpeta al detalle (permission to do retailing), and she travels each month to Santa Cruz to do retailing (see chapter 3). Since 2009, they have also significantly extended their chicken stock, and they now have a small farm with around a hundred chickens whose eggs they sell in Piñapata and neighboring communities. For many years they have owned one house in the cantonal capital and one house in La Paz. They were also among the first to own a pickup and later a minibus. Because of the extent of the coca fields, Nora and Francisco are not able to do all the harvesting on their own, which takes an immense amount of time. Through the years they have had many utawawas in their house: these are young people who stay in the house and help with the work in return for food and shelter. They thus “adopted,” for example, children of a large family in Piñapata whose father was left alone to bring them up and could not afford it. In addition, they regularly receive migrants from the highlands. More recently, the most important form of  harvesting became the contracting of  large harvesting groups of fifteen to thirty people from the nearby town, who are paid a day wage. Often, they also give patches of land for harvesting a medias to others, often to young community members, which means that these young people harvest everything and hand in half of the harvest. In fact, their coca fields are so big that they need to invest almost half of their income into the paying of day wages, as Nora once calculated. Nora and Francisco are some of the richest people in the community, and they play a vital role in community politics. They exemplify the underlying idea of  “growing.”  They have gradually extended their coca fields and invested part of their income in day-wage laborers. This allowed them to enlarge their house in Piñapata and to buy other houses in the town and city, as well as a car. They have an important voice in communal meetings and have gathered a cluster of loyal people around them. In addition, as affluent people, they are often asked to be godparents. This emphasis on economic growing through coca cultivation is tightly linked to the availability of labor power. As Alison Spedding has noted, coca is “integrated into the life cycle of the peasant household” (1997a:51), because

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increases and declines in coca production follow the extension and reduction of the household in terms of  its available workforce. People in the Yungas generally start to have their own coca field as soon as they form their own family, be this by having a partner or by having children. Most often, their parents give them a plot of land where they can start making a coca field or transfer a small part of an existing coca field to them that is already in full production. In the latter case, this allows the young couple to gain the necessary money to build the terraces on which coca is cultivated, to plant the coca seedlings, and to subsist until their own first harvest is rendered after one year, called wawa coca (baby coca). These plants are still small and do not yield much return. This is also a time when the couple needs only a few resources, given that they have no children yet or only small ones who are, for example, not in need of school supplies. In the course of four years, the harvest increases; during this time their children will grow and the family needs an increasing amount of resources. With a part of their earnings, they will build more coca fields. After four years, the first coca plants are getting old, and they need to be pruned (traskilar) and will then sprout again. The coca fields are at their highest point of production at the time the family needs its most resources—for example, because the children are going to school—and provides its most substantial workforce to maintain the field. Until this time, people have gradually extended their fields. But once their adult children look for their own partners and have their own families, the parents will not extend their own fields any more and will give them a part of their fields. At this point, their coca plants are in decline just like their owners are. Their yields decline, and the plants grow old like the people who have planted them, becoming beardy. This coca is called coca vieja (old coca). This is the point at which people do not need many resources anymore, because their children have become independent. As people grow older, and their coca fields with them, they help in physically less-demanding work such as drying small amounts of coca leaves and looking after children. Therefore, the coca field lasts a lifetime: having been cut every four years and cared for properly, coca plants can be harvested for at least thirty to forty years, often longer (on this cycle, see figure 7).1 This growth in age and extent also entails growth in economic terms, as people are expected to extend their fields and increase their income. This requires that people maintain their social relationships in terms of a reciprocal la­ bor exchange (ayni) and invest in hiring day-wage laborers, as they are crucial for the high amount of work that is needed. People invest part of their earnings in

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Figure 7.  Coca fields growing in age and extent, 2007. On the bottom, the field gets extended by the building of new terraces, and the whole field, which is divided among several families, shows the different stages of the coca bushes: from harvested with bare brown branches to not yet harvested and bright green with ripe coca leaves.

the building of new coca fields or in buying and reselling coca, which fosters their further economic growth. In addition, people are supposed to gradually acquire electronic devices, houses in different parts of the country, and cars. People who do not enlarge their coca fields or who, despite enlarging them, do not grow materially are perceived to be lazy and not achieving anything in their lives as people generally should. A contrasting example to the successful growing of  Nora and Francisco is the case of Ariel and Ediberto. In general, the poorest people in the community are mainly the young, the old, those from large families whose land is small because it was divided among many siblings, and those who were abandoned by their partner and thus need to care for their children alone. Ariel and Ediberto are both negros (blacks), as they are of Afro-Bolivian origin. Ariel has short, curly hair, as does Ediberto, who is extremely tall and is by far the tallest person in

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the whole community. They are both in their thirties and have four children between the age of one and nine years old, and both are from impoverished families. Ediberto’s mother—whom people said was “such a nice black woman” (una negra tan linda)—was an utawawa for the son of the landlord and came to the community with nothing. After working many years on the landlord’s fields, she married her husband, who is from a large family from Piñapata. Most of the time Ediberto’s mother lived in a kind of house-tent made of leaves and branches far down in the coca field, although she had a small house in the hamlet. Ariel’s family lives in another Yungueño town in very poor living conditions, renting only some small rooms with an earth floor and lacking a proper house and big coca fields; all their children except Ariel, however, are studying. Ariel and Ediberto see themselves as very modest people and are both engaged in the church; Ediberto is the catechist of the community. Their house is small, consisting of only a ground floor, and is built entirely with adobe; it has a cozy feel, as souvenirs and pictures are pasted all over the walls. They both studied in La Paz (social work and social communication), and both had to leave their studies because they were expecting a baby. However, both of them want to go back to the university and very much challenge the idea of economic growing; they often say that they do not like the work as a coca grower, and they disapprove of people’s economically ambitious behavior, which they perceive as being egoistic. Ariel’s dream is to finish her studies and to become a social worker. During their now almost ten years that they have lived in the community, they have managed to build their own house but are still most of the time indebted to several people because of a shortage of money to buy food. They received a patch of  land from Ediberto’s father and built their coca field. However, they have extended their field only minimally. This is very much deplored by others, as it exposes their lack of economic ambitions. Some cite their parents and grandparents, saying that “blacks are tall for nothing, they are lazy” (and Ediberto is very tall). Thus, Rita’s sister, for example, says about Ariel and Ediberto that they do not think well, because they want to have only a small coca field and after so many years still have not extended their field, nor did they put any effort into getting some land from the peasant union. She compares Ariel and Ediberto with other young people who returned to the community only a few years ago after they had finished their studies and already own huge coca fields. Contemptuously, Rita, for example, remarked that it seems that Ariel and Ediberto do not like working.

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Eulogio, a contemporary of Ariel’s and Ediberto’s, made a similar remark; he is a thirty-year-old ambitious man who married into the community and now owns a relatively big coca field. He is originally from the highlands and speaks Quechua as his mother tongue; after he had worked for years in a kitchen oil factory and met his wife in La Paz, they moved back to Piñapata when their first daughter was born, because the coca economy produces a much better income than any urban job for young and unskilled workers. He declared that he cooks the best rice, better than his mother-in-law and his wife, and that he actually likes cooking. He integrated well into the community, likes teasing everyone during harvesting days, and is also increasingly active in the peasant union. In talking about Ariel and Ediberto, he contemptuously commented, “They don’t want to grow with their patch of   land [con su cato], work more, ex­ tend their coca field.” To grow economically, however, is not simply an end in itself, and this is the reason why the perceived lack of economic ambitions of Ariel and Ediberto is so contemptuously noted. For people to participate as fully recognized people in the community, they are supposed to accumulate economic rewards. People participate in the community through the redistribution of their resources and the sponsoring of community events, which are mechanisms that oblige rich people to share their economic growth to a certain extent with the community. One way is through their active participation in the annual fiesta, for which they might sponsor invitation cards, fireworks, new clothes for the local saint, a band, clothes for the dancers, and most important, a reasonable number of crates of beer, the minimum being two and the most generous often being ten. In addition, people like Nora and Francisco are often named as godparents for children, objects (such as T-shirts and football goals), football teams, or events. This redistribution of resources does not contradict the idea of economic and material growth—otherwise, there would be nothing to redistribute. However, generosity alone is not a virtue, nor is being modest appreciated; being modest is instead viewed as a way of avoiding hard, daily work—which is highly important in the context of a cash crop economy that demands year-round agricultural work without resting periods. People are supposed to be economically ambitious, which does not stand in opposition to community interests but is rather a precondition for the overall progress and development of the community. This redistribution fosters among the most prosperous community members a sense of social ascendency, and even while redistributing there is an

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entrepreneurial aim: anyone named as a sponsor (  preste) would try to arrange their contribution in such a way that they would not really lose any of their wealth. The sponsoring of the annual fiesta generally means a huge financial expense: by arranging it cleverly, organizing and administrating it in the right way, however, the sponsor of the fiesta may even end up earning some money, because sponsors are also responsible for selling the beer that others will sponsor during the course of the fiesta, which they do at a slightly higher price than what they buy it for. In addition, when the sponsors of the fiesta receive a certain amount of   beer, they often give one or more crates back to the donor and may, if there is enough beer around, resell the received crates. People generally criticize this kind of business during redistribution. Poorer people like Ariel and Ediberto, who could never afford to become sponsors, very much despise it and comment on this behavior by saying that “people make fiesta only for doing business.” Sponsors themselves, however, perceive it to be highly legitimate and even their exclusive right. This became obvious in people’s accounts of the fiesta of 2012 and when the new sponsors started to plan the fiesta for the next year. In 2012, a young man who was originally from the community but had moved to town, bought a truck, and worked by transporting meat from La Paz to the Yungas came to Piñapata with his truck full of  beer and sold it cheaper than the beer the sponsors sold. In this way, as an upset Eulogio, who was a sponsor that year, told me, he ruined their business. And when Rita’s sister Carmen—a woman about sixty years old, generally very serious, and known to be very hardworking—started preparing the fiesta for the next year, she fiercely told me that she would not permit being ruined during the next fiesta. She assured me that she would talk with the young man; according to her, he had sold his house and coca field and no longer lived in the community, so he could not just come back during the fiesta and make money. Economic accumulation is important for both women and men: indeed, harvesting is a predominantly female activity, and women generally pack and sell the coca, while men terrace the fields and weed them. Moreover, there are additional aspects of growing for each gender. Men, for example, gradually become involved in communal politics. At the height of their life, when their coca fields also yield the most, they are generally most involved in politics, reaching higher cargos (offices such as secretary general). Politics are generally male domains that contribute to the personhood of men. Women also have their specific ways of growing: apart from being a mother, which is essential for their personhood, they are highly appreciated for their harvesting abilities. Even more,

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they are the ones who manage the coca fields: they assign the daily work to each household member and decide when to harvest, when to dry, and when to sell the coca. By organizing the agricultural work, they are the ones who maintain ayni relations (mutual work exchange). Women grow as the net of ayni relations is knitted ever more tightly. The important point about economic accumulation is that it is primarily achieved through coca cultivation and commerce and is thus anchored in the coca field and the rural community. Economic accumulation is thus tightly linked to the ownership of land and the so-called fulfilling of a social function; to grow economically is legitimate only if people fulfill their social function within the community. On the whole, to fulfill a “social function” means to fulfill all communal duties, including communal work on roads and maintaining the water and electric supply, attending meetings, holding political offices (cargos), participating in protest marches, and paying the annual subscription (which is equivalent to one harvest day wage per year). However, fulfilling a social function also involves more-subtle forms of obligations, such as engaging in ayni relations not only in agricultural work but also in beer or money, which presupposes the participation of people in communal events and festivities. In addition, to fulfill a social function means not just owning a piece of  land and fulfilling communal duties but also working that piece of land; people who come and go a few times a year are considered to be “tourists,” as one man said in a communal meeting, who do not fulfill their social function, although their for­mal records might be clean as fines are paid and for communal works they hired paid labor and sponsored beer during festivities. The idea of social function becomes an issue when people do not formally own land or when they decide to become a permanent, recognized member of the community, such as highland migrants who decide to stay in the community. There is a hierarchical order of membership categories, which is linked to the specific land tenure regime. It ranges from so-called afiliados, who own a piece of land of ten hectares (  parcela) and have a land title dating from the land reform of 1953, to children of these formally affiliated persons, who generally receive land from their parents or parents-in-law and construct their own coca field on these pieces of   land, to so-called chiquiñeros, who received land as a donation from the peasant union to build their coca field, while the land still formally belongs to the union. At the far end of this scale are the yanaperos (helpers), who are migrants, generally from the highland region, who settle down in the community; they

People and Coc a Fields  69

generally do not own land. Commonly, they become formal members only after many years, and to become such a formal member, they must affiliate themselves to the peasant union. They have to pay a total of 5,000 bolivianos (roughly equal to at least 100 harvest day wages, around 900 USD), which is considered a payment for the right to stay on the community land (derecho de pisada). The logic of this entrance fee is that people need to give back something to the community as soon as they benefit from community land (by owning either coca plants or land), and the 5,000 bolivianos are calculated as the sum of all the working days that community members have done to construct the road, the drinking water system, and the electricity installation. Thus, paying the fee is about the moment when the community land contributes to their individual, personal economic growth, rather than helping others as day-wage laborers and thus contributing only to others’ economic growth. Upgrading in membership goes hand in hand with access to land and thus the ability to expand production and to accumulate resources—and thus the possibility to “grow.” In the Yungas, there is the possibility to acquire coca fields without acquiring the land on which the field is planted. This is, for example, the case when people “receive” land from the peasant union, which is only permission to plant one’s coca field, for the land still belongs to the union. However, because a coca field lasts a lifetime, this situation only constrains the option to pass land on to the next generation. There are also discussions about whether highland people should be allowed to buy land or only coca fields. To fulfill a social function is one way to give people access to these different membership categories and thus to expand their economic endeavors: only by being a recognized part of a peasant community can they expand their entrepreneurial activities. To fulfill a social function is also a precondition for obtaining a re­ tailing license, and retailing in turn involves ascending economic possibilities (as discussed in chapter 3). Although not everyone in the community becomes affluent and is successful, and socioeconomic stratification is very high, personhood implies economic growth. The general state of the coca field, the number of people harvesting on it, and also the end product of the packed coca reflect a person’s social network and therefore his or her position as a social person within the community; all these aspects display the successful growing of a person. As Alison Spedding states, “A perfectly packed, bright green coca, which demonstrates that the harvest, the drying, and the packing have all been of the highest standard, reflects a household in which everyone works hard and all their social relations are

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exactly as they should be” (Spedding 1997a:65). The ideal person in the community grows in the same pace as his or her coca field, achieves economic growth, and distributes a part of his or her resources within the community. This economic growing, however, requires that people increasingly acquire external labor, since they are not able to cover the whole amount of work with their own household.

Getting Labor “No hay mink’a”—there is no labor—is something people say almost every day of the year. It is the normal state in the Yungas, as there is always a lack of   laborers. To acquire such external labor is consequently one of the most important and prominent topics of everyday life. Depending on whether a household is able to acquire such external labor, the possibilities for growing, extending, and accumulating are enhanced or diminished. The labor arrangements are an important reference point in everyday life when people pragmatically make economic calculations, and socioeconomic stratification plays a vital role in who par­ ticipates in which of these arrangements. Without doubt, ayni is the most important way of pooling labor. Ayni is a nonmonetary form of mutual work exchange, widely described in the literature on the Andes (see Allen 2002; Gose 1994; Mayer 2002; Sallnow 1987). It is the Andean principle of reciprocity per se, a “symmetric and egalitarian relationship that does not allow a permanent separation between workers and propri­ etors” (Gose 1994:8). Ayni is generally opposed to mink’a, which involves an asymmetrical relationship and has an exploitative character. According to Peter Gose (1994:8), mink’a is generally recruited during the production process by only the small, wealthier mestizo class and is remunerated only with food and drink for the day rather than with repayment in an equivalent number of working days, as is the case with ayni. Thus, for Gose (1994:xi), to do ayni or mink’a is a distinguishing element between indians and mestizos: to participate in webs of ayni is a defining characteristic of being an “indian” and not belonging to the mestizo population, because mestizos do not repay the work with their own work. There are important differences between the Yungas and the common Andean literature on ayni and mink’a. First, while the term ayni is used to denominate a relation of exact reciprocity—reciprocating the same task and the same

People and Coc a Fields  71

amount of hours, even the same itinerary—mink’a (pronounced “minga” in the Yungas) has a slightly different meaning. It is predominantly used for laborers paid with a day wage, but often also used to designate any kind of worker who helps on that day. If someone goes harvesting alone without any kind of help, this person would, for example, say, “I am going without mink’a.” When Rita hurries in the morning to be at her coca field on time because aynis and day-wage laborers ( jornal ) from Piñapata are coming to work, she says, “I have mink’a.” The reason for the lack of a clear distinction might lie in the fact that it is considered rude to openly ask the owner of the field who works for ayni and who works for a day wage (see also Spedding 1994:75). The matter becomes even more complicated when we consider the term yanapa (help), which according to Gose (1994:9) means to work only for food and drink but implies that in the long term one’s help will be converted into ayni. In the Yungas, yanapa or the Spanish ayuda is used for ayni and even for laborers whom people pay in money; they all “help” with the harvest—which is the main activity where external labor is needed—although they do not do it for free. In addition, the yanaperos constitute a political category in the community (see above), and the term describes mainly those who do not own a coca field but only “help” others, which means that there are only limited ways of entering into ayni relations with these persons, because they would rather work for a monetary day wage. A second difference is that in Piñapata, people do not offer food or drink to their laborers, be these ayni or wage laborers. There are only two exceptions: If the laborers are migrants from the highlands, the host offers them shelter and food, but this reduces their day wage because the expenditures for food are subtracted. The other exception is when there are huge work parties, called  faena (see below), where people recruit many workers. But even in this situation, nowadays in Piñapata, hosts do not offer a meal but provide only a big loaf of bread and alcohol—sometimes not even alcohol and beer but only soda. There is also a third difference: in contrast to the idea that ayni and mink’a generate class differences, in Piñapata, this is not necessarily the case, and any class differences that are created are much less absolute. Although people like Ariel and Ediberto not only do ayni but also work for others for a day wage— which people like Rita or Nora never do—the opposition between ayni as a form of reciprocity and other monetized work arrangements gradually dissolve. Almost all people in Piñapata pay day-wage laborers and engage in asymmetrical labor relations, while at the same time they also practice reciprocal ayni

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relations, and they do this for the same productive activities; sometimes on the very same day, some of their workers come to work for ayni, while others come to work for a wage. Which labor arrangement one chooses rather depends on the extent of the fields, the monetary resources, the productive state of the coca field, and the size of the household. Because all people practice different labor arrangements, ayni as a pure form of reciprocity is no longer necessarily the distinctive element of   being an “indian,” as opposed to being a mestizo. To participate in these monetized, asymmetrical relations does not mark people as mestizos: rather, it is a distinctive element of being a successful coca grower. This means that Yungueños depart from one of the central diagnostics of   being “indian,” which is the assumption of practicing pure reciprocity as opposed to paying for labor in money. This leads to the fourth difference, which is probably the most surprising. In the Yungas, ayni is conceptualized in monetized terms. On the one hand, aynis can be earned, saved, and owed in the form of debts. These should be paid back as soon as possible, but people generally earn aynis when they have no harvest and save these until their coca leaves are ready to pick. On the other hand, some would, for example, pay a monetary day wage to others, who would then help them to earn ayni on their account. People like Nora often use this possibility: because Nora and Francisco’s coca fields are close, people come and gain ayni, but Nora does not like to go to their fields, which are farther away, and she thus pays a young day-wage laborer to pay back the aynis on her account. And finally, I even witnessed once a discussion about selling aynis in Piñapata. This means that aynis would be transformed into a day wage and sold by the person who accumulated it. Concretely, as the discussion went, someone who earned a lot of aynis could sell them to someone else at a slightly higher price than the current day wage (if the day wage is 50 bolivianos, the sold ayni would have a price of 60 bolivianos). The person who owes aynis to the seller would then go to the buyer to pay them back. It needs to be said that Piñapata has in general an exceptionally high labor shortage, both because of its geographic isolation and because it has landholdings that are larger than is common in other communities. In addition, a precondition for this trading of aynis is that the seller has a surplus of aynis and is in need of money rather than external labor; he or she thus prefers to convert reciprocity into a day wage. The catalyst for this discussion was the case of Nora and Francisco: Jenaro wanted to sell them his aynis. He is a single man at least in his forties who lives with his mother and owns some small coca fields. Some think he has a very

People and Coc a Fields  73

light mental impairment—in any case, he is someone who almost does not talk and chat but is nevertheless well integrated into the harvesting groups and goes harvesting day after day, sometimes for ayni, sometimes for a day wage. He is, however, also known to harvest very slowly. One day, Jenaro had a surplus of twenty aynis and wanted to sell them. Francisco told him, “Sell them to me!” Jenaro wanted 65 bolivianos for his aynis, while the common day wage for harvesting was 50 bolivianos, which Nora thought was just too much, because, as she said, “Jenaro’s aynis do not have any value,” as he harvests very slowly. But Francisco wanted to buy Jenaro’s aynis because they would have been guaranteed labor and Francisco and Nora are among those with the largest coca fields. In the end, the trading of ayni did not take place, and whether this complicated arrangement is really applied on a more general basis—and then only in times of great scarcity of labor—is unclear. In fact, this specific discussion seems to be best understood as a local way of how people talk through the monetized logic of ayni. The possibility of selling aynis seems to be the ultimate consequence of this logic, though it does not seem to be put into practice. Finally, working days can be sold. This is, for example, done in relation to public works, for which every person needs to fulfill a certain number of working days on a rotating basis. While some may work more days (for example, be­ cause they are leaders), others often ask them after the fact to sell them their working day (and they use the term vender, “selling”), for which the purchaser pays them a day wage without a premium charge in return for registering the working day on their account. The nature of these labor arrangements is tightly linked to the specificity of the coca production cycle and its economy: in contrast to seasonal subsistence products, coca fields in the community are ready to harvest at almost any time of the year, generally every three months, and they are not all ripe at the same time. The fields of the different households and even the various fields of a sin­ gle household are ripe in an intercalated, interlaced way. Thus, to save aynis, for example, makes perfect sense. In addition, because they can be saved over a relatively long period of time until the next harvest, people generally count aynis very strictly, including the itinerary, even between family members (siblings, parents-children, in-law relatives), and literate people keep accounts of their aynis in small notebooks. Apart from ayni, there are also purely monetary forms of labor recruitment, especially day wage ( jornal  ), harvesting per pound (libreada), and by contract (contrato). Day wage is paid for harvesting as well as for weeding (chonteo, masi)

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and cutting the plants (traskilar). A period of approximately six hours is considered a normal day wage, while eight hours are considered a double day wage (dobleada); the double day wage is 70 to 100 bolivianos when people are Yungueños or contracted in groups from the nearby town and 40 bolivianos for highland migrants who come to the community and receive food and shelter. Libreada refers to payment according to the amount of  leaves harvested (between 2 and 3.5 bolivianos per pound of fresh leaves), and the contrato is almost exclusively used when people—often migrants from the highlands—are contracted to build the terraces of the coca field or to weed the whole coca field. They are paid for the work as a whole, not for each working day, an amount of money that the owner sets before the beginning of the work and is sometimes negotiated. Poor people mainly engage in ayni relations or work for others for day wages, while they seldom pay others in money. Interestingly, since at least 2009, it has become commonplace that people with large coca fields, such as Nora and Francisco, hire entire groups of ten to thirty people in the nearby cantonal town, and they come by minibus to the community, harvest dobleada (the “double day wage”), and go back in the evening. By using this method, people can finish their harvest more quickly in­ stead of harvesting on their own or only with their accumulated aynis during the whole month, which is especially useful for people who have a second residence in La Paz or elsewhere. In addition, because people use more and more chemical fertilizers, coca leaves need to be picked as soon as they are ripe, and people have much less time to defer the harvest. These harvesting groups are constituted by long-term migrants who do not have a coca field of their own and live in the cantonal capital. They have a representative, who bargains the day wage with the owner of the field and then recruits as many people as possible for the appointed day. This kind of harvesting is extremely expensive; people have to pay for not only the high day wages these groups ask for but also transportation (300 to 400 bolivianos for fifteen to twenty people). Because Piñapata is a very prosperous hamlet, people in fact do pay such high day wages. There are different reasons why there are more of these harvesting groups now than in the past. First, those young people who in the past worked for day wages have their own coca fields now, and the new generation of young people spend more time in the city going to school and university. Second, as a consequence of the increased urban education of their children, more people reside in the city to take care of their children. They nevertheless live from the income of

People and Coc a Fields  75

their coca fields, and they want to finish their harvest within a few days in order to go back to the city. Third, the highland migrants who come to the Yungas in­ creasingly stop in the towns and integrate into one of these harvesting groups. Fourth, coca leaves fall on the ground and rot when not picked in time, and peo­ ple are willing to make high expenditures to prevent this. While people such as Nora and Francisco with extensive coca fields prefer to work with these harvesting groups, they also complain about the high investment of funds; Nora, for example, once said that “we are only harvesting for the k’ichiris [harvesters]” and that more and more, “the k’ichiris will leave us poor.”   The problem inevitably is that to work with these huge harvesting groups, people need some capital, something not everyone has—as is the case with Ariel and Ediberto. Often, when people contract big harvesting groups, they invest around half of their gains. However, there comes a point at which marginal profits decrease: Marco, for example, a middle-aged man who terraced all his fields on his own and only rarely pays harvesting groups, stated that the ideal extent of a coca field is two catos (half a hectare). For this size of coca field, paying an external workforce is not necessary, yet the field is big enough to render a good income. If it is bigger than that, according to Marco, the net earnings are the same because people need to pay day wages. Such explanations suggest that people calculate based on marginal revenue the point at which a larger field no longer makes sense. Unsurprisingly, the average extent of coca fields in Piñapata is in fact two catos. In addition to considerations of marginal revenue, people in the Yungas always calculate with opportunity costs in mind. In contrast to the Peruvian peasants studied by Enrique Mayer (1999), who apparently do not calculate their own labor and household resources as investments and loss, people in the Yungas calculate everything on the basis of day wages (  jornal   ). In the Yungas, time therefore has a very concrete value. All decisions related to the work on the coca field are calculated based on the monetary jornal. Every day that people do not work is implicitly calculated as a loss. A man who started buying and reselling coca from others, for example, left a community meeting early in the afternoon to select and pack his coca while saying, “Only the fool loses a day wage [  jornal], the clever [one] makes money anyway.” Apart from harvesting with big groups on common working days, one occasion when most people try to gather as many laborers as they can is when the coca plants are harvested for the first time ( faena). People say that this is when “the bank opens.” Until this moment, people made a lot of investment in

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Figure 8. 

A newly terraced coca field, 2007.

their fields in terms of work and money. Many people who can afford it do not build the terraces on their own anymore but pay a highland migrant to do it on a contract basis. As Spedding says, however, the construction of a perfectly built coca field might be accomplished only by an experienced Yungueño man: “It takes years to learn how to construct wachu [terraces] to perfection, and a well-made cocal, where the coca branches interlock over the lines of the cortes [vertical files of wachus], is a true work of art. Only men who were born in the Yungas, or have lived there for many years—and not all of them—are able to achieve this” (1997a:54; see figure 8). Acquiring external labor in the Yungas is highly monetized, even commoditized, which is bound to Yungueños’ ethic of accumulation. In this process, nonmonetary labor arrangements such as ayni do not disappear; rather, they become integrated into a mercantile logic. Being able to acquire such external labor is to display and perform prosperity and, by this, be recognized as a successful coca grower in the local community.

People and Coc a Fields  7 7

Yungueños and Jaqis The ethic of accumulation is the basis for local processes of differentiation and Yungueños’ social ascendancy. People in the Yungas, however, know that not everyone ascends economically as they as coca growers do. They are very conscious of the fact that a high price of coca—stemming in part from the high demand of coca for traditional usages such as chewing, rituals, and medicine and in part from some connections to the drug industry—is the primary vehicle for their overall economic accumulations. Those who in Yungueños’ eyes exemplify this lack of economic growth most are highland people, whom they call jaqis (see the introduction). Jaqi is the Aymara word for people, and it is generally described as the Andean concept of full personhood (Estermann 2006; Fernández Juárez 2004; Medina 2008). Andrew Canessa (1999), for example, describes a highland Aymara community where jaqi is a person pertaining to an Aymara community and is fundamentally different from a q’ara (urban mestizo, upper classes). Jaqichasiña, meaning “becoming a person,” is the local term for marriage and indicates that people become persons through different rituals; it is the starting point of participating fully in communal obligations and taking on communal offices, owning land and participating in ayni relationships, and making offerings to the spirits. A person is a jaqi when the relationship between the individual and the community, as well as with the spirits, is achieved in a full sense, which is the case when people are integrated into reciprocal relationships with other community members, the spirits, and the land. The difference between jaqi and q’ara is that jaqi is defined by his or her participation in relations of reciprocity rather than economic well-being per se, which is a feature that, among others, marks the q’ara. The word jaqi in the Yungas, however, expresses inferiority and is used for someone who did not achieve personhood according to Yungueño standards. In the Yungas, jaqi is in a way the antithesis of  Yungueños’ emerging prosperity and social mobility. It is the derogatory denomination for someone who has no money, is poor, does not really know Yungueño rules, and speaks Spanish badly, mixing it with Aymara. Nora, for example, used this term to indicate poor hospitality at the “community encounter” when being offered the cheap brand “Soda” instead of the more expensive Coca-Cola, calling the drink “refresco de jaqi” (a jaqi drink) because it is what highlanders drink. When litter is spread

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over the ground near the church, after day-wage laborers have passed, people say that they must have been jaqis. Moreover, when a Yungueño uses an uncommon Aymara word in the middle of a sentence, people say that this person “seems to be a jaqi.” Interestingly, people always use Aymara words that relate to coca production, and in such cases, there is no suspicion that they “seem to be jaqi”; it is, rather, the correct way to talk about coca and coca fields. The word jaqi is used only for highland men. In contrast, for youngsters, people often use waynu, which derives from the Aymara word to describe young men (wayna), while women are generally called cholita, which refers to women with skirts, or tawaqo, the Aymara word for girl, or warmi, mainly used for elder women. None of these terms are offensive in general, certainly not as the word jaqi is. The word jaqi is also associated with “being Aymara.” Some people in Piñapata say that jaqis are “legitimate Aymaras” (Aymara legítimos), in the sense of being “true” Aymaras. This is linked to the fact that although people from the Yungas speak or understand Aymara and perceive themselves to pertain roughly to the Aymara Andean culture, they all agree that highlanders speak a much better and “sweeter” (más dulce) Aymara than they do. It is interesting that Yungueños make reference to jaqis speaking sweeter Aymara than they do. Canessa (2005), for example, describes that in the highland community of Pocobaya, men say that women speak sweeter Aymara than they do. However, speaking a sweet Aymara, although a positive remark, is less valued in a context in which speaking Spanish is an ability that opens access to the modern, metropolitan, urban world. Canessa argues that speaking sweet Aymara is one attribute that makes women more indian than men. Through the description of highland jaqis speaking a sweet Aymara, Yungueños might end up insinuating that highlanders are more indian than Yungueños are.2 Their attitude toward highlanders parallels, in a way, the attitude that members of the urban upper classes have toward indians in general. Although far from being q’aras, through their relative economic well-being people from the Yungas move with much more ease in the metropolitan space than jaqis do. Just like many q’aras, Yungueños might own houses in the city and drive a car. The most prominent aspect of the term jaqi, however, is its indication of economic inferiority, and Yungueños explain many of the jaqis’ characteristics through their poverty. This is the case regarding the idea of “unitedness,” for example (as discussed in the introduction). It is interesting that especially in this case, Yungueños simultaneously express disdain for jaqis’ economic conditions while positively evaluating their communitarian ethos that is part of the

People and Coc a Fields  79

notion of “unitedness.” Thus, on the one hand, unitedness is seen as a kind of cultural and political progress: it is perceived as a necessary aspect of any good community politics and of doing politics successfully in general—for example, when negotiating with mayors or ministries. This is very similar to what Daniel Goldstein (2012:147) states with regard to poor neighborhoods in Cochabamba, where the notion of “unitedness” is equally linked to the notion of  “progress.” Yungueños think that highlanders are more united than they are and that highlanders follow much more a communitarian ethos. Interestingly, however, this perception about highlanders following a strong communitarian ethos, and the appreciation that Yungueños express for it, is disrupted when evaluating the contributions highlanders make to community events in the Yungas. Regarding these events, people in Piñapata talk about highland migrants in the community as being avaricious (mich’a): they observe, for example, that some of the highlanders disappear some days before the patronal fiesta and do not come back until after, to circumvent ayni relations and the sponsoring of beer and, most important, to impede the possibility of being chosen as sponsors for next year’s fiesta or becoming godparents of expensive items. Thus, as soon as highland migrants seem to accumulate resources through their involvement in the coca economy, they are perceived as keeping communal contributions at bay and thus breaking with the communitarian ethos. For Yungueños, the ultimate reason for highlanders’ unitedness and their communitarian ethos lies in their economic failure and thus expresses economic inferiority. As such, it receives a negative connotation: according to Yungueños’ common reasoning, highlanders are united because they are poor and thus have no other options of getting external support for their communities. Around the ideas of unitedness, a communitarian ethos, and communal contributions arise thus various tensions when people evaluate jaqis’ behavior. In the end, these tensions all flow into causal ex­ planations that are based on jaqis’ lack of economic power. People from the highlands are aware of the idea of inferiority attached to the term jaqi as used in the Yungas. They oppose this idea by saying that people in the Yungas are not informed about the meaning of the term, which is simply “person,” because they do not speak Aymara properly, and the highlanders claim that all (Yungueños and highlanders alike) are jaqis. In addition, highlanders often depict Yungueños as economically reckless and ambitious to excess. As a young highlander who was married to a woman from the community remarked about Yungueños, “People live ground down by their drudgery.” He attributes to them an economic attitude that goes beyond the moral standards of  jaqi.

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Interestingly, although highlanders and other immigrants in the Yungas recognize Yungueños’ economic ambition and a considerable increase in their economic accumulation, they do not necessarily evaluate this as real social mobility. Flavio, for example, now in his fifties, is originally from the highlands and has lived for more than twenty years in Piñapata. His mother tongue is Quechua, but he also speaks Aymara and Spanish. Before coming to Piñapata, he lived in Cochabamba in the tropics, where he worked in agriculture and in mining. He originally came to Piñapata as a day-wage laborer, and after he had settled down in the community for many years, the peasant union gave him a patch of land. I met him in front of his house, which stands a bit farther away from the other houses, after he had come back from work and just before the soup in the kitchen was ready for dinner. As we were talking on a bench close to his house under a small tree with purple flowers, he said, “The labor of coca is one of mining, nothing more and nothing less, because the miner does not produce potatoes, nothing, and each week he needs to go to town and buy [foodstuffs], and here it is the same.” As a consequence, “in the Yungas, there is money, but money also goes away, but Yungueños do not notice that.” As the conversation went on, Flavio commented, “Yungueños are part of the middle class. They are chhalla misti—neither really indigenous nor really mestizos.” As he said, they are “inclined toward being mistis [mestizos]” (“son medio tirados al misti”), while in fact they are “fake mistis” (“chhalla mistis”). It is interesting that he used the term chhalla to describe Yungueños: chhalla is Aymara and refers to something or someone who is not really as he or she wants to make others believe; a chhalla Yungueño is one who was not born in the Yungas but claims to be Yungueño, a chhalla doctor is one who says he is a doctor although he failed his exams to receive his final title. For Flavio, thus, the Yungueño coca grower’s identity rests simply on the production of capital, which makes Yungueños believe that they experience social mobility. Because Flavio still binds social mobility to a change in ethnic identification—from indian to mestizo—he interprets the ascending economic position as fake: according to him, Yungueños do not really experience social mobility, because they are still indians, and in this reasoning, without people becoming mestizos there is no real social mobility. Flavio recognizes, however, that Yungueños position themselves as an emerging, economically powerful social group vis-à-vis others and reproduce to a certain extent a mestizo middle-class attitude toward indigenous populations without, however, perceiving themselves as belonging to such a mestizo middle class and without being perceived by others as having become so.

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One Jumper for Three Days of Work: Entrepreneurism and Coca Production Yungueños’ definition of who coca growers are is based on the idea that coca helps to create highly lucrative economies. As such, coca growers understand themselves as constituting a highly dynamic part of society. Through the need to acquire external labor to keep growing beyond the capacities of the household, Yungueños become entrepreneurs as they engage in market-based labor systems—as, for example, with regard to the monetization of ayni relations. As Francisco proudly said, the continuous paying of day-wage laborers makes them “micro-entrepreneurs”: “We are micro-entrepreneurs [mini-empresarios]. . . . Peo­ ple from the highlands come in order to earn [money], and I pay them, you see. In one month, we [pay them] 4,000, 5,000 [bolivianos], and with this they go off, so you see, we pay, we are micro-entrepreneurs, we pay like this” (interview, April 12, 2011). The emerging micro-entrepreneurs, however, take on a very ambivalent position regarding poorer people in the community. The case of  Yola and her comadre Josefina nicely illustrates this sensible point. Yola is a small young woman in her thirties, with a relatively big coca field; she has two children, and because of a problem with her hips, she constantly limps. She now lives most of the time in La Paz, while her husband, Eulogio, lives with her mother in Piñapata. During the school holidays, she goes to the Yungas to work and earn aynis; sometimes, however, she pays harvesting groups because she cannot leave La Paz for very long. Yola also started buying and reselling coca of other community members, and she started retailing to places far away around the country some three years ago. Around the same time, some four years ago, Yola became the comadre (godmother of the child) of   Josefina, who asked Yola to baptize her daughter at the annual fiesta, and Yola accepted this invitation. Josefina is probably part of the poorest family in the hamlet. She lives with her husband, who is from the valleys close to the highlands, in the former house of  her parents. The house is of pure adobe and has marked fissures in many parts. She has four children, all of whom are commented on in the community as unattended, dirty, poorly nourished, and poorly dressed. Josefina does not understand money; she cannot read the coins, does not know the value of each of them, and does not handle money at all. She is probably the only person in the whole community who is unable to do so. It is her husband who administers all finance. She did not go to school or attended for only a very short period of time, and while some say that she seems to have a mental impairment,

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others would deny that this is the case. Josefina is one of two others in the village who have green eyes, and she has curly hair. Because of  Josefina’s lack of a school education and knowledge about money, she is often treated by others and talked about as though she were a child. Being ritual kin, Yola bought a jumper for Josefina in La Paz, but without her comadre having asked for it. One evening when Yola arrived from La Paz and we were sitting on a bench opposite Yola’s mother’s house on the street, Josefina passed by to visit her comadre and to chat. Yola went to fetch the jumper and handed it over to Josefina in the spirit of a gift. However, it immediately became clear that Josefina would need to come to work on Yola’s coca field until she paid back the value of the jumper, which is precisely calculated on the basis of the price of the jumper that Yola paid, and the current day wage. Thus, they started talking about how many days would be necessary and when Josefina would come to work on Yola’s field. This occasion was at a time when Yola had a lot of coca that was ripe and needed to be picked, and so she made Josefina commit to come on specific days to work. Apparently, for Yola, the working days of   her comadre had ultimately more value than the jumper. To hand over a jumper to her comadre was a means to bind Josefina to come work on Yola’s field instead of choosing to go to someone else. These emerging microentrepreneurs thus create their own strategies on how to bind poorer people within the community as a secure labor force to them. In these strategies, reciprocity is economized almost to excess: Yola exchanged the (unrequested) jumper for the day wages of   her comadre. Yungueños expose a highly entrepreneurial model in everyday life, which raises questions about the historical roots of their entrepreneurism and how this relates to economic development. At first glance, it reminds one of a kind of Protestant work ethic. Max Weber (2004 [1920]) proposed a close relation between the “Protestant ethic” and “the spirit of capitalism” that lies in the economic rationalism of both (Weber 2004 [1920]:69). According to him, capitalism is characterized by the aim of accumulation as an end in itself. At the same time, Weber argues, Protestantism has at its center a specific work ethic that demands that people follow their “vocation” (Berufung) and be devoted to their craft (Weber 2004 [1920]:78). Protestantism asked its adherents to work hard and invest the money they earned rather than simply spending it—and in this sense, wasting it—on consumer goods. This was based on the claim that only those who will conduct their life in such a way have a chance to be one of those whom God will choose to save. Rather than economic determinism, for Weber,

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the Protestant ethic played a crucial role in economic development: as Protestantism and capitalism met at specific and unique historical circumstances, they paved the way for the emergence of modern capitalism. Yungueños somehow follow the work ethic that Weber described as Protestant: They work year-round, invest their resources into more productive enterprises, and accumulate money and goods. They pursue their work with much devotion, as coca fields become an inherent part of peoples’ personhood. In contrast to peasants who are less involved in cash crop economies, Yungueños calculate with opportunity costs in mind and thus expose a “spirit of capitalism.” This economic rationalism, however, is not grounded in Protestantism as a religious current. Rather, it is tightly linked to the historical presence of market economies in the region, which is related to the important role that coca played in Andean societies. While this role is specifically related to religious ideas, the work ethic of   Yungueños is not guided by their religious perspectives. Not all community members embrace a “capitalist spirit” to the same extent, and Yungueños’ economic rationalism also creates fragmentation within communities. Yola clearly does—she acquires the labor power of others, such as her comadre Josefina, and precisely calculates the time and money that she invests. Thus, as Maria Lagos (1994:5) convincingly argues, it is not necessarily the case that peasants are exploited by others outside the community in the market by selling their product cheaply and by the need to buy expensive supplies, but rather that the extraction of surplus begins in the realm of production at the level of the community, where they exploit each other. Lagos analyzes these relationships of exploitation with regard to sharecropping agreements and credit relations. In the Yungas such relations are equally apparent, because people like Nora and Francisco buy the coca of those like Ariel and Ediberto, who often depend on credit from them. They generally receive an advance but are then obliged to give the coca of the next harvest to this person or else be obliged to go work for them until they pay back their debts. Those who travel and consume outside the community go with money—they are the emergent microentrepreneurs, like Yola, Nora, and Francisco—and are not exploited when they enter the national market with their products because coca reaches a high price; rather, within the community, the exploitation of poorer community members and migrants takes place on a daily basis. As such, the focus on “growing” not only produces successful peasants but also creates pronounced social stratification as those who cannot or do not want to follow such an ethic are left behind.

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The mercantile logic that is part of  Yungueño everyday life is vital for their economically ascending social position. In the Yungas, even the Andean principle of reciprocity (ayni) has been adapted to an increasingly mercantile logic. Because ayni has been adapted and not erased, however, Yungueños do not become mestizos, because mestizos would not do ayni at all, whether monetized or not. To engage in an increased wage labor system is a sign of being a successful coca grower and, as such, of  having achieved full personhood. Only by following a mercantile logic and the ethic of accumulation are people able to engage in such a labor system. While they engage in a monetized wage labor system, however, people also need to fulfill a “social function”: this is a way to open economic possibilities to the full members of the community, and it guarantees that these members remain rooted in the community, because only as long as they fulfill a social function are they given land or the permission to obtain a retailing license, which in turn opens more entrepreneurial possibilities. Mestizos, in contrast, would not fulfill any social function within the community at all. But neither are Yungueños jaqis. Their specific positioning as “chhalla mistis,” as Flavio called them, rests on labor arrangements other than those that are generally encountered in the Andes; this positioning is bound to the specificities of the coca economy and enforced by expanding entrepreneurial possibilities.

3 Supplying Coca for a Nation

O

Nora called me and told me that we would go to Santa Cruz and that we should meet in one hour at the bus terminal. Nora has had the license for retailing since the year 2009, and she travels each month to Santa Cruz to sell her coca. On that day, their son, Pedro, who lives in the United States, was in Bolivia visiting his parents. At the bus terminal, everyone arrived with his or her luggage. Pedro carried two trolley suitcases, but Nora refused to carry such a suitcase, preferring to take her awayo, which is a colored piece of fabric that people in the Andes carry over their shoulders, tied with a knot. Nora wears a pollera (Andean skirt), and for this trip she put on a green glittering one that she wears only when traveling to towns, cities, or fiestas. Francisco wore new jeans and a new shirt, both of which Pedro brought him from the United States. Before I arrived, they decided to buy the ticket with the Trans Copacabana “bus cama,” meaning that seats are inclinable, which is executive class—in short, the most expensive ticket that exists to travel to Santa Cruz. These buses are very high and have televisions, the seats are wider than normal, and all seats have security belts, something that is rare for buses in Bolivia. Pedro seems to have convinced them to travel on this luxurious bus; Nora said that usually she does not travel in “bus cama” but in a bus that is a bit cheaper. ne af ternoon in January 2011,

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When she travels to Santa Cruz with coca, Nora told me, she always goes in a truck, which is less comfortable but cheaper; this is common among Yungueño retailers, who often travel together in small groups. As the bus drove out of La Paz, made a stop in El Alto—the city that lies high above on the outskirts of   La Paz—and then continued at high speed on the highland plateau and we admired the colorful sunset, Nora explained that retailing coca follows strict routes and controls. When retailing, Nora can remove the coca from the market of La Paz only with special permission from ADEPCOCA, the Yungueños’ economic association, and DIGCOIN,1 the national agency for coca commerce, and she is required to take it out through a separate door of the coca market that opens toward the main street. There, authorized taxis and pickups load the takis (fifty-pound bags of coca leaves) and, together with their owner, drive to El Alto. Retailers have to get their permit stamped by DIGCOIN again there, and then the takis are loaded onto big trucks. Nora says everyone in these trucks has a sleeping bag and accommodates herself on the coca bags. These trucks exclusively transport coca and retailers and depart in the evening (the trip to Santa Cruz takes between sixteen and twenty hours). At every police checkpoint, people have to get down and get their permit stamped. Between La Paz and Santa Cruz, there are six such checkpoints (Achica, Sutikollo, Bulo Bulo, Yapacaní, Montero, and Warnes). Once retailers reach their destination, they receive their final stamp in the DIGCOIN office. Retailers like Nora have permission to travel once a month, and when traveling the next time, they need to present the completely stamped document from the previous time; otherwise, they are not allowed to travel anymore. However, this time the trip to Santa Cruz was only a family visit combined with some bureaucratic issues regarding the retailing license that Nora needed to settle. Thus, at 6:00 p.m. everyone was sitting in the comfortable seats of the Trans Copacabana “bus cama.” The bus passed by different checkpoints on its route to Santa Cruz, and when we passed by the Chapare around three or four in the morning, Nora mentioned to me that people there earn a lot of money because they all make drugs (  pichikata, cocaine paste). When we arrived in Santa Cruz, we first arrived at Nora’s nephew’s house, where they had prepared a barbecue. Then we walked to the market in the center of Santa Cruz. Seeing porters waiting for a contract, Nora spontaneously said that those people are from the Chapare, they speak Quechua, and they are lazy, which is why they come to the city to work as porters.

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The next day, Nora had to arrange some things regarding her permission from the previous trip. Together with Francisco and their son-in-law, we took a taxi and after some twenty minutes arrived at the checkpoint outside Santa Cruz. A bit farther away, next to the road there were some stalls, consisting of four shabby wooden huts faintly painted in blue, and all were closed. According to Nora, coca growers from the Yungas had bought these stalls for 700 USD. Nora explained that this was a new road and that her stall is still located along the old road, which is not being used anymore. Thus, it makes no sense for her to sell her coca at her stall, because there are no people passing by, and she has requested of the alcaldía (mayor) that their stalls be moved. Nora, Francisco, and their son-in-law were talking fervently about the problems they encountered in this little “town” (   pueblo), as they call it. People here seemed to resent that others came to sell coca and feared they would be cut out of the market, since they also sell coca. Thus, in the end, the mayor allotted people like Nora and other coca growers a place farther away on the pretext that the municipality wanted to build a market hall there, which never happened. Thus, according to Nora, nobody started to build their stall, because “there are no people, there is no movement.” We then went to one of the houses that people from this town live in, located some fifty meters away from the road. These were common houses that one finds in the lowlands, called chozas, made out of wooden boards and thatched with palm leaves. They all have a small fenced patio (courtyard) where people keep chickens, dogs, and some trees in the center that give shade in the humid, hot climate. In front of the house, they have often a veranda where people install rocking chairs and hammocks. Nora had to visit the corregidor of the sector— who is the highest authority of a cantón (territorial-administrative unity) but often also functions as a kind of village governor—to arrange some of her papers. The corregidor, wearing shorts and a dark blue T-shirt covering a big belly, came out of the door; after a mistrusting look toward me, he greeted everyone and asked us to take a seat. He is the one who gives the final stamp to retailers who have their stalls in this small town. They were talking about the municipality and speculated from which party the next mayor might come, since the current one is, quite inconveniently, not from the MAS. Then they talked about the fiesta of the town, which was in a few months’ time. The previous year, people from Piñapata were nominated sponsors for the sound amplification, and those from Piñapata who come to this area to retail their coca gave a subscription and

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sent two of their representatives to attend the fiesta. The corregidor said that this year they should really be present, because people from other parts of the Yungas who retail in this town were also coming. Nora enthusiastically started making plans about how they could organize their attendance. Then the topic of the conversation shifted and they started asking the corregidor whether there was some vacant land to buy. Apparently, there were some patches for about 500 USD, and Nora and Francisco explained that they wanted to buy land and build a house where they would have a place to rest, hang out, and walk around (descansar y pasear). With this, the conversation slowly ended; again taking a taxi, we all went back to Santa Cruz. When I called Nora four years later by telephone and chatted with her, she was in Santa Cruz—indeed, in the house she had bought. Although Nora did not go with the purpose of selling coca that afternoon but only to put in order some issues that would allow her to sell the subsequent month, the trip demonstrated the many new possibilities that unfold as people start to engage in retailing activities and sell their coca leaves directly to consumers all over the country. Nora conceptualizes the national space in a specific way through the trip to Santa Cruz, creates a specific relation to this new place by strengthening personal relations with authorities and by discussing and participating in their local fiesta, and positions herself as an affluent coca grower as she contemptuously assesses the poor porters on the street or aspires to buy a house where she could come and relax. In this chapter I explore the connection between citizenship, postpeasant identities, and commercial activities, such as the coca trade, which opens new experiences for people like those in Piñapata through retailing. By citizenship, I mean a set of practices that fosters participation in state politics at different levels and spheres of society while people create a relation to the state, as well as a set of ideas that conceptualizes the political, economic, and cultural relation between citizens and the state (see Lazar 2008). Thus, citizenship is more than rights and obligations (see Heater 2004; Oliver and Heater 1994) or a status (Marshall 1998); in many ways, it is a sense of belonging that is actively created through the multitiered articulations between citizens and the state (YuvalDavis 1997). In the case of Yungueños, this articulation between them and the state is determined in important ways by the economic movements that coca creates: retailing activities allow people to explore the nation in a movement through space that—although with different political purposes—fosters a nation-building project similar to what rural indians experience when they are sent for military

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service to different places of the country. Military service far away from home, as others have noted, “give[s] people a better sense of what it means to be Bolivian” (Kohl and Farthing with Muruchi 2011:44) and to “understand what Bolivia is” (Canessa 2005:137). Retailing has a similar effect: Eulogio once told me that thanks to retailing, people get to know the nation, because “before, many Yungueños only knew the Yungas of the department of   La Paz, but thanks to retailing, at least they know the nation, they got to know all places, they went out from here to other departments.” By moving through the nation, Yungueños palpably experience the economic movement they create; many Yungueños like to repeat that “coca creates movement” because they produce a product with a high return, which allows them to increase their consumption. They reject the “indigenous people’s slot” through their enthusiasm of participating in and manipulating small niches in the retailing market, but by this, they move into a conceptual space that is scrutinized by the local political discourse.

Building Up the Coca Trade The coca trade significantly expanded when, after the Spanish conquest, miners multiplied, who were primary consumers of coca leaves. In the nineteenth century, the coca trade was divided into so-called coca de hacienda and coca de rescate (Spedding 1997b:124). Coca de hacienda was traded out of the haciendas at the time in large quantities by mestizo traders, while coca de rescate was traded in small quantities by peasants who bought the coca in the communities without haciendas and sold it in the highland region. In the 1980s, under the dictatorship of Luis García Mesa Tejada, the government created a national agency for the coca trade (Acopio), which bought the coca from the peasants at a very low price and then sold it at a very high price to the consumers or, indeed, to drug traffickers. Peasants in the Yungas gained almost nothing for their coca and started to covertly take it out in small quantities to La Paz to supply the market of traditional consumption (Spedding et al. 2013:66). This state monopoly was not successful, however, and when ADEPCOCA, the Departmental Association of Coca Producers of La Paz, was founded in 1983, one of the major aims of this organization was to control the coca trade. ADEPCOCA thus started issuing a coca producer’s card beginning in 1987, and having the card was required for coca growers to take their coca out of the Yungas and sell it in La Paz (Spedding 1997b:125). Some Yungueño peasants with sufficient capital used

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possession of the card as an opportunity to buy coca from other community members and to sell it in La Paz. Nora and Rita, for example, buy coca from Ariel and Ediberto (and Yola from Josefina, as discussed in chapter 2) and sell it in La Paz, where they hope to make some additional profit.2 Until the early 1990s, however, people sold their coca in the so-called agencias: wholesale depots where merchants served as intermediaries between the coca growers and the traders who bought the coca (Spedding et al. 2013:71). Since then, Yungueños have generally taken their coca to the legal market that ADEPCOCA had built in La Paz, and there they sell it to intermediaries, who in turn sell it to consumers throughout the country. The coca market in La Paz is located in the neighborhood of Villa Fátima, which lies at the outskirts of the city in the direction of the road that heads toward the Yungas. It is a neighborhood from which buses to the Yungas depart, and it is populated by many Yungueño migrants. The market lies on the main road and consists of a huge building stretching over one block, painted in green and showing a sign with “ADEPCOCA” written over the background of the wiphala flag and a coca leaf. The wiphala, commonly believed to be the symbol of the Inca Empire and its four regions, consists of many rows and lines of colored squares in white, yellow, orange, red, blue, green, and purple. The wiphala flag has had indigenous connotations since the 1990s, when indigenous movements gained strength and carried it during their protests, such as those in Ecuador or Bolivia. The Morales administration adopted this flag and integrated it as a national symbol in the constitution of 2009. Thus, the parliament now displays two flags: the Bolivian Republic one and the wiphala. The market has two doors: One is on the side of the steep road that goes up near the building, and this is where people bring their coca bags in and where intermediaries and other people pass through. The other door is at the bottom of the building, and it opens toward the relatively flat main street, where intermediaries and coca grower retailers take out the coca for long-distance travel. The coca that exits this bottom door is packed into official white bags with the ADEPCOCA logo and is then loaded into specifically licensed taxis, pickups, and trucks. Inside, the market is divided into different halls (  galpones) according to the thirteen sections that constitute ADEPCOCA. These sections sometimes cut through municipal and cantonal divisions but often follow these divisions. Each of these sections has its own representatives on the ADEPCOCA board. When I was in La Paz, it was always a distinctive experience to enter the coca market. People busily move about, carrying the heavy coca bags and loudly

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asking others to make way for them or walking around with empty plastic bags (mostly carried by the intermediaries) or empty sacillas, which are similar to jute bags (mostly carried by coca growers who just sold their coca leaves). In the halls, people sit around on their full, red-colored coca bags, which in some seasons are piled up to the ceiling along the walls. Some of these bags are open to show potential buyers the quality of the coca leaves. In some corners there are some straw mattresses where Yungueños sleep when they do not have a place to stay. Yungueños generally try to arrive at the market between four and six in the morning, since this is the time when selling mostly, but not exclusively, takes place. The halls are filled with the noises of walking, filling and packing coca leaves in new bags, the laughter and chatter of sellers, and the rustling of stiff plastic bags, along with the unmistakable sweet scent of the dried coca leaves. Intermediaries pass by the open bags, take a handful of coca leaves (sometimes from deep in the bag), let them fall again into the bags, look at them, and taste a few leaves by putting them in their mouth. They then ask for the price. Coca prices are regulated wholly on demand and supply, and coca growers try to sell their coca at the highest possible price. There are many different qualities, depending on the color of the leaves (bright green, yellow, or black), the size, how much they have been eaten by parasites, and how nicely they have been picked; they should not contain small branches and buds. The big, green leaves that are picked one by one (elegida, selected) are of the highest quality, and these are generally used for trading in northern Argentina, where, as people say, middle-class Argentinians chew them in small portions.3 While coca is generally sold by whole bags weighing fifty pounds, these high-quality leaves are sold per kilogram and reach a price almost double that of the common “standard”quality leaves. The black leaves are the lowest quality; they get this color when rain falls on the half-dried leaves. In every hall, there is a small blackboard where coca prices by quality are announced. Precisely what these prices represent is unclear, however. The galponero—the person responsible for each hall, who also weighs the leaves and puts them into the buyers’ bag—writes the prices on the board according to what he hears. The prices on the board are broadcast by local radio in the Yungas each afternoon, and people attentively listen to these broadcasts and decide when to take their coca to La Paz. They do not necessarily sell the coca at the price written on the blackboard but try to sell it at the highest possible price. A very good price for something like standard quality coca in 2010/2011 was 1,600 bolivianos (in 2011, around 230 USD) per taki; however, people generally sold it for around 1,200 bolivianos. Black coca leaves (choq’eta)

Figure 9. 

Preparing a taki for taking to La Paz, 2007.

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were often sold at only 800 bolivianos and elegida (the highest quality) sold for about 130 bolivianos per kilogram, approximately 3,000 bolivianos per taki. When Yungueños take their coca to La Paz (figure 9), they have to pay taxes at different points. In the community, they have to pay 1 boliviano per coca bag to the communal representative of ADEPCOCA, who gives them a small ticket on which the number of   bags (takis) that this person is taking to La Paz is recorded. When they arrive at La Rinconada, the checkpoint before La Paz, they have to show this ticket, and the official at the checkpoint gives them another ticket (  guía), which they later present at the market in La Paz. They also have to hand in their ADEPCOCA license, which they can pick up from the market the next day. When they arrive at the market and unload their coca, they have to show the ticket from the checkpoint and the ticket from their community to be allowed to take their coca inside the market. Later on, they can pick up their ADEPCOCA license by showing their checkpoint ticket and paying 2.50 bolivianos per taki. This money stays with ADEPCOCA in La Paz and is used for expenses of the institution, including paying taxes to the government. In addition, coca growers who work as retailers, as well as the common intermediaries who buy coca in the market, have to pay 10 bolivianos per taki, which goes to the government agency for coca commerce (DIGCOIN). When people sell their coca, they also have to pay 1 boliviano to the pesador, who weighs the coca leaves that are sold. In addition to this regular selling of coca leaves, the market contains also more subtle and less easy-to-grasp activities, which, however, are all part of the contemporary routes that coca leaves follow after leaving the plants in the Yungas. There seems to be, for example, a kind of underground commerce between the different halls. The price of coca between these halls varies considerably, sometimes as much as a 200-boliviano difference for the same formal quality of coca leaves between the different halls.4 As a result, there are rumors that some people “have a coca field in the hall,” as a head of the peasant unions once called it. These people apparently buy coca leaves cheaply in one hall and sell them at a higher price in another hall, claiming that this coca was harvested in the coca fields of the section corresponding to that hall. In addition, some coca grower retailers seem to sell their coca from the Yungas in the corresponding hall and use the resulting profit to buy coca for the retailing site at a lower price from another hall. Another set of actors who are part of the La Paz coca market are the so-called ch’aqas—an Aymara term referring to a type of ants (see, for example, Eju.tv 2009, 2010; La Razón 2010; Página Siete 2012). Yungueños

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describe them as people who “make one taki very tiny,” because they buy the coca by the pound from different sellers—without any license, they are allowed to buy fifteen pounds at a time—and then beat and push coca from the different fifteen-pound bags into only one plastic bag until it is much smaller than the common taki but weighs the same. They buy coca by the pound because they have no retailing license; they are reputed to supply the drug industry with these coca leaves. Although everyone knows that ch’aqas are involved in illegal activities, they are tolerated, because many perceive them as necessary to maintain a relatively high coca price. Some people in Piñapata, for example, think that without ch’aqas the market would fill up with coca because there would not be enough outflows through official, formal selling, and as a consequence, the coca price would inevitably fall. Selling coca implies a thorough knowledge of prices and qualities and a good instinct about how much one can ask for her or his coca. It is mostly women who are involved in this part of the process. They have a lot of experience and are the ones who sell their coca in La Paz. Often, women are also the ones who prepare the coca for packing in Piñapata, which is equally delicate work: the coca needs to be humidified so that the dried leaves are not broken during packing and when being transported to and sold in La Paz. Thus, a precise amount of water has to be sprayed over the coca for the correct humidity, so the leaves do not get too moist and take on a bad smell, while at the same time making sure that it is not too dry, which makes the leaves break. The government started to allow coca growers to engage in retailing activities and to sell their coca leaves directly to the consumers by the pound in 2006. This is, in a historical view, a further continuation of differentiation in the coca trade, for it shifted coca growers’ location in the trade chain, moving them closer to the consumers, or to potential drug traffickers, by eliminating intermediaries. Only a limited number of   licenses were available for coca growers who wanted to start retailing, and people had to fill out paperwork that included certificates from the community and ADEPCOCA showing that the person in question really is a coca grower, actually produces coca leaves in his or her community, and fulfills all communal duties—and thus fulfills a “social function” (as discussed in chapter 2). In addition, people had to present a clean criminal record report from the special police section for drug issues in Bolivia, Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico (FELCN). A person thereby gained permission to sell coca in the place he or she sought out. These areas are dispersed all over the country and are sometimes far away, such as Santa Cruz

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or Tarija, which is at least a twenty-hour trip away from La Paz. People then generally had to buy a stall where they would retail, as Nora recounted during the trip to Santa Cruz. They are required to take six takis (fifty-pound bags) per month to their retailing site, and if they do not comply with this amount and regularity, they risk losing their license. In Piñapata, which has eighty-eight registered families in the peasant union, twenty-three people acquired such a license and regularly retail their coca. Around half of these twenty-three people are among the community members who have the most extensive coca fields, and they live in the community and fulfill their communal obligations. Seven people who have a retailing license possess only small coca fields, however, and not all of them fulfill a social function: some of them are unmarried young women or men who live with their parents and received a patch of land from their parents to cultivate as their own coca fields. They are not affiliated as a separate social unit to the peasant union and only help their parents in fulfilling the communal obligations. Four people in Piñapata have a retailing license even though they no longer reside in the community and do not have their own coca fields. They try to comply with community norms, for example, by participating in political demonstrations in La Paz and having it registered on their account or by paying the 1 boliviano to the community to other people from Piñapata in La Paz, who then give them the communal receipt. They retail by buying coca in the legal market in La Paz and then take it to their retailing site. As a man angrily shouted during a communal meeting in Piñapata during which they discussed the issue, these people are detallistas chutos (false retailers): chuto is a term applied to falsified items or cars without documents or, as in this case, people (on the word chuto see also Goldstein 2012:80). In general, it is mostly young people who do retailing. Half of those who have a retailing license, mainly those with big coca fields, employ groups of day-wage laborers that they bring from town in minibuses. Within Yungueño communities, however, there are different ideas about who should get a retailing license and what the initial purpose of the government’s retailing law was. As I was picking coca with Ariel and Ediberto in their coca field (with only the three of us), Ariel firmly stated that the idea of retailing was designed for coca growers with small fields, as they were the ones who needed an additional income and would have time for retailing. Ediberto jumped in and recounted that people often had to pay unofficially up to a thousand dollars for their stalls as part of a corrupt system, which meant that only those with big coca fields, such as Nora and Francisco, would have the capital to buy them. Also

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for the license itself they had to pay corrupt government officers, which the poor could not afford. In contrast, the government’s “from producer to consumer” rhetoric implies that those who engage in retailing have big coca fields so that they can produce each month the required amount of six takis (Spedding et al. 2013:217). This is also how retailing mainly has been put in practice in Piñapata. This contradiction of having to retail coca each month and thus produce a high amount of   leaves, on the one hand, while being absent from the coca fields for a significant period of time each month (often between one and two weeks), on the other hand, not only determines who is able to acquire and maintain a retailing license—and why Ariel and Ediberto would not be able to obtain one—but has also an impact on both the reengagement of some people as peasants and the gradual reduction of plain peasant activity and increased entrepreneurism in production. As Alison Spedding and colleagues (2013:213–18) note, retailing activities from the producer to the consumer all over the country also attracted people who were no longer active coca producers. Thus, they were interested in getting a producer’s card, which meant that they nominally fulfilled a social function in the communities and maintained at least a small coca field. In addition, the possibilities of retailing fostered the previously existing practice of   working with paid harvesting groups (as described in chapter 2): because retailing activities do not leave enough time to manage the coca field, people who have a retailing license often engage day-wage laborers, and in addition to their own coca, they also buy coca leaves from others in the community to complete their six takis per month. The discourse of people such as Ariel and Ediberto, who understand the idea of retailing mainly in providing poor peasants with an additional income, thus clashes with the discourses of the emerging successful entrepreneurs, who stick to the government’s “from the producer to the consumer” rhetoric and increase their engagement in a mercantile labor system through retailing activities rather than through reciprocity.

Exploring the Frontiers in the Lowland Starting to retail was no easy issue. Many people in Piñapata remember how hard it was to find everything out and to find their place in the new localization. Rudy is one person from Piñapata who regularly retails his coca by the pound. I got to know him when he and his wife still lived in the house of his parents, which had a dark covered aisle where two rooms were arranged on each

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side. While living with his parents, he bought a minibus, with which he went to town, sometimes even to La Paz. It was one of the smaller but modern models that appeared in the Yungas, with a large cargo capacity. This allowed him to drive to town, either contracted by someone else to take the big coca bags to the bus stop or to transport his own coca. As a consequence, soon after, he started buying coca from other community members and selling it in La Paz, thus starting to retail on a regional level. When I returned to Piñapata after more than a year away, his new house was finished, right on the main road. I was surprised, as it was so clean and tidy that it could have well been a house in a middle-class neighborhood in La Paz. It has many special decorations that other houses do not have, such as figures on the ceiling and small flowerboxes outside the windows. The house is also elaborately painted in red and pink with details on the windows. The outside wall is covered with tiles instead of being painted up to the height of the ground floor, something that at the time no other house in Piñapata had. Rudy—whose nickname is El Flaco (the skinny one)—has a coca field on a patch of land (one cato) from the peasant union. It is covered with huge coca plants, which brought him the reputation of using synthetic fertilizers, a practice that is noted with contempt, so that people try to do it in secrecy.5 Rudy was also among the first who became involved in retailing. He retails in Villa Montes, a town in the tropics in the southeastern part of the country. For him and the others who went there for the first time, it was an adventure, as they had to figure out everything by themselves, such as where and when to sell, at which price, and what else their clients would ask for. Rudy recalls, When we arrived, it was quite funny, that was; we arrived at Villa Montes, we didn’t know Villa Montes, and we arrived at a hostel, we took a room, we ar-

rived, we stored our coca, and we didn’t know how much the coca costs, we didn’t know. We arrived and we went out in order to sneak around. We left the coca in

the hostel, we took a shower, we went out, we arrived at a market, at the central market, we went and we saw that coca was being retailed, and we had to go and

buy coca ourselves in order to know the price. Okay. We went close and we said, “How much is the kilo?” and they told us, “Eighty.” “One ounce?” “Five.” “The quart?” covertly [disimuladamente], strategically, we had to ask. Okay.

And there were others who noticed that we were Paceños [from the depart-

ment of La Paz], because you see it in the face, right? The Paceños are different, the Cambas [from the department of Santa Cruz] are different, the language, right, we talk differently, the Cambas differently, thus, “Ah, you are kolla” [from

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La Paz], “Ah, you are kolla, surely you brought coca,” and then they don’t tell you the price because of that.

Thus, because of this, for example, we formed our own board, we commis-

sioned ourselves, let’s say one group, . . . let’s say we are five. So what did we do? We arrived all five, and we said, “In pairs go and ask” in the market, because we

were also afraid. We were afraid of asking the price. So what did we do? “You

together with him go and ask how much the price is”; thus they went and asked, to the other side we go asking, “How much did he tell you?” “He said that the

kilo is eighty,” and we went, and they also said eighty. So now how do we do it?

Seventy-five. One whole day we did this—we had to figure out how they sold it, what things they had. We went like this, like spies.

In [one man’s] stall, what did he have? He had alcohol, cigarettes, and out

of curiosity we had to stay there, although close to his door, covertly [disimuladamente], in the street, [and] ask ourselves what things this man is taking with

him, what is he going to buy. Thus, he bought coca, cigarettes, bico [sodium bicarbonate, also called lejía, the substance made of ash that people chew together

with coca], stevia in a small bag, and we said curiously, “But we didn’t bring bico

with us!” But, well, from there on, we realized that we need cigarettes Casino, cigarettes Astoria, cigarettes LM, alcohol, stevia, bicarbonate, all these things we knew from there on, and so this day, what did we do? We bought a scale. (Interview, February 4, 2011)

Rudy and the other four or five people who went for the first time to Villa Montes slowly started to understand how coca was retailed, what a retailer needed to know and do, and what kind of people these clients in Villa Montes were and what they expected from the sellers. Upon arriving after the long journey, Rudy leaves his fully stamped document at the government office to announce that he has arrived. Then he goes straight to the market and takes out his coca. Rudy recounts that among the clients in Villa Montes are people from Paraguay and even Mennonites. Villa Montes is close to Paraguay, where there are extensive landholdings and people keep cattle, and the Mennonites are famous for their colonies in the lowland of Santa Cruz. According to Rudy, Paraguayans need coca for their laborers, and he thinks that also the Mennonites have laborers for whom they buy coca. For Rudy, the real advantage of retailing coca is that people are able to have a break from work while at the same time they are earning more money than if they would be working. “The advantage, for example, is that at least you are

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going to have a rest, but at the same time it is absolutely sure that you bring money back home,” he once told me when we were sitting on the sofa in his cozy living room. “You relax, you relax during the days that you are retailing coca there, you are sitting, well fed, you go to the restaurant to eat; the advantage is that you are well fed, that you are relaxing, you are selling simply by sitting there, and from there you also bring money back home, you bring it back.” His wife later explained that he brought her back home 11,000 bolivianos (around 1,500 USD at the time); in fact, she said, he earned even more, because he gave money to his children in La Paz and he paid the ticket for the bus ride and for his food. The coca grower retailers in Villa Montes coordinate their selling schedules to improve their market possibilities. Rudy tells that they have a list of three hundred coca growers who sell their coca in Villa Montes, but some do not travel each month because they have no coca, and others rotate among the few stalls they have at their disposition. In this way, not all the coca grower retailers are at the market at the same time. According to Rudy, the fewer people there are, the more money that can be earned by those who are there to sell. If there are only few retailers, people sell their bags quickly and can therefore go back to the Yungas and work on their fields—consequently, they lose fewer day wages. Also, as Rudy explains, if there are few retailers and a lot of people who want to buy coca, you give each client a bit less coca since you will finish the bag quickly anyway and thus, in the end, sell more. There were also conflicts with intermediaries, since, as illustrated in Rudy’s account, they have to buy the coca first and then resell it, and therefore they need to sell it at a higher price than coca grower retailers do. Intermediaries thus fear that coca growers will cut them out of the market. While there are many coca growers like Rudy who sell their coca as retailers legally, there are also some who do not (see FM Bolivia 2010; Noticias.com.bo 2011). As Carlos Toranzo Roca (1997:200) states, legal and illegal activities “are linked by basic concepts of the market and of survival” and not because peasants are evil-minded or intentionally criminal. Generally, people cannot influence, and are not interested in, what happens with their coca leaves after these are sold at the legal market in La Paz. They try, however, to produce the best coca leaves possible, for these obtain a high price in the market and are, in principle, the most likely to be chewed. In fact, the only incentive for coca grower retailers to divert coca to potential traffickers is time: the transaction of selling by the bag to potential drug traffickers takes only a few minutes and often happens at night. Thus people lose much less time and can quickly return to their fields to work. In contrast, selling coca by the pound to traditional consumers

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takes at least one or two weeks to empty the six takis they are required to bring. During this time, their coca fields are abandoned or their spouses need to work the fields alone. When they return to their fields, there is not enough time to do all the work before it is time to travel again. Thus, in November 2010, the viceminister of coca made the accusation over local radio (Radio Yungas) that coca growers divert (desviar) their coca by selling it by the bag to drug traffickers just before arriving at their final destination. By selling the coca leaves without intermediaries, Yungueños now hold a more vulnerable position in the trade chain because they arouse suspicions of fueling drug production. For Rudy, going from the small coca field and the small room where he lived with his wife and his two daughters to getting a retailing license and buying a minibus and a house was, of course, a big effort. Now, however, he feels that he has a high degree of security in his physical work on the coca field and his business, and he enjoys the regular trips to Santa Cruz. Once I went back with him from La Paz to Piñapata in his minibus, and as we talked about Bolivians who migrate to other countries, he cheerfully said, “I am happy here; I don’t want to leave Bolivia: I have everything I want, I can buy everything I want, I work whenever I want, and I can make my breaks whenever I please.”

Selling Expensive Coca to Poor People Not everyone retails in Santa Cruz, however, where Paraguayan landowners buy big quantities of coca leaves. Yola, for example, one of the first to get a retailing license, regularly travels with her husband to the southern highland region of Norte Potosí, which is generally known in Bolivia to be one of the most impoverished regions of the country because of the harsh climate, few job opportunities, and slowly disappearing mineral reserves. The people in the Norte Potosí region mainly speak Quechua, and those who speak Aymara would inevitably be classified as jaqis by Yungueños. Yola goes to a weekly provincial market once a month, and there she sells her coca leaves in a stall. She said that this market is generally crowded and she barely has time to weigh the leaves. One afternoon, I went to visit her in her rented house in La Paz, just a few squares from the coca market, located on a steep street that leads from the central avenue of the neighborhood of Villa Fátima to more distant neighborhoods. I met Yola just a few meters from her door, as she was walking up the street coming from the coca market and carrying a fancy pink textile handbag. Wearing sneakers, gray sport trousers, and a red, acrylic thin sweater, she looked exhausted, as

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though she had not slept the previous night. As we entered her house and sat on the cement patio—the inner courtyard of the house, around which the living room, the dormitory, the toilet, and the kitchen are arranged—to warm up in the sun, she started telling me how well her retailing trips went: she could sell all her coca at a good price. Astonished, she told me, “You wouldn’t believe it, the market is so huge and everything is so cheap—only coca is expensive.” She bought about ten frasadas (thick synthetic wooly blankets, often imported from Peru) at a low price, which she will sell for double the price to people from Piñapata. But that was not the point. What impressed her most was, as she said incredulously, that the people in Norte Potosí who come to the market are poor but nevertheless buy her expensive coca. Yola now mainly lives in La Paz; only during school vacations does she go with her two children to Piñapata and work every day on her coca fields. She proudly recounted several times how many aynis she earned in just a few weeks. During these short working periods, she also employs harvesting groups from town. Her husband, who is not Yungueño, stays with her parents in Piñapata and does the bulk of work. However, it is Yola’s mother who actually organizes the agricultural work and the aynis on Yola’s fields in her absence. Sometimes, when her mother has finished all her own harvest and Yola’s fields are full with ripe coca leaves, her mother comes to La Paz and looks after her children so that Yola can go and help her husband. Yola received the land where she built her coca fields from her father, and her father helps them install irrigation pipes for the field. Because she and her husband live in the house of her parents, she and her mother alternately buy every few months a canister of oil, twelve kilograms of rice, and the same amount of sugar. When Yola retails and is absent in La Paz, it is sometimes her mother and sometimes her husband’s sisters or cousins who help them look after their children. Although she has become a retailer, Yola’s activities to gain and save money are firmly rooted in the coca-producing economy of the local community. Retailing demands steady production of coca leaves, which she could not manage without the help and knowledge of her parents and an increasing proportion of external labor. While her husband is occupied with maintaining the agricultural base in the community, Yola takes over business issues. However, she would be unable to retail and expand her businesses without her social relations to the community. Yola is repositioning herself in the socio-ethnic hierarchies of Bolivian society, as she recognizes that she sells a much more expensive product than others do, which allows her to increase her consumption and increase her investment

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in other business ventures. One year later, when I visited her again in La Paz, she had just bought a dozen new Nike sneakers. Buying them in quantity made them much cheaper, and again, she will sell them in Piñapata at double the price: sixty dollars each. Almost four years after having started retailing, Yola and her husband had bought a pickup and a patch of land in one of La Paz’s distant southern neighborhoods, built a house in Piñapata, and significantly extended their coca fields. Both her children go to private schools in La Paz. Selling coca to jaqis thus allowed Yola to become less jaqi.

The “Three-Strata Model” This sense of engaging in business and being able to sell an expensive product to others is, by some people in Piñapata, explicitly expressed with the term middle class. Those who apply the term to themselves are mostly nonpolitically active men. Federico, for example, who was once Rita’s neighbor and originally from another Yungueño community, started buying coca in Piñapata and reselling it in La Paz and proudly exclaimed to me spontaneously late one night, when he finished packing ten takis with coca that he bought from others and would take to La Paz, “We are middle class!” Similarly, Nora’s son-in-law, who lives now in Santa Cruz and opened a shop, stated that he belongs to the “middle class”: he thinks that he never really changes this position in society no matter whether he is in La Paz, the Yungas, or Santa Cruz and no matter whether he works on the coca field or in his shop. Some people in the Yungas, however, critically assess the emergence of Yungueño retailers such as Nora, Rudy, and Yola. While for many, economic movement and social mobility are crucial aspects of   being a coca grower, some politically active men in Piñapata fiercely reject the idea that by increasing their living standard, they really change their class position. They argue that it is not the case that by traveling to Santa Cruz and “earning as much as a doctor” (as Rudy said about his sister), people are becoming middle class; for them, becoming middle class is a matter of not only economic power but also structural position. It is interesting, however, that many of those who reject the idea that Yungueños become middle class are former highland migrants—jaqis—who have lived for many years in Piñapata by becoming in-laws, while Yungueños like Rudy, Nora, and Yola assert themselves much more as being middle class and sometimes use the term about themselves.

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I was already familiar with the strong Marxist-colored discourse of the peasant union and its leaders when I began to ask how people think about Yungueño retailers and how others in Piñapata interpret their ascending social position. On a sunny day, I took a break from going to harvest with Rita and Nora, and as I was lingering along the bare earthen football field, Lucio was sitting on the edge of the field where he had spread his coca leaves for drying on a huge fish net (called yuti), which facilitates gathering together the leaves. He had his cheek full of dried coca leaves and was waiting for the spread-out leaves to dry a bit more. Lucio is originally from the highlands, had lived for many years in La Paz, and married a woman from Piñapata, where he has now lived for more than five years. He is a small man in his thirties, and he is described by many as intelligent and well educated, active in the peasant union, and someone who likes to read about unionism. The first time I met him was when I conducted the census, when he, his wife, and their two daughters still lived all together in a small room in the house of his father-in-law. As I asked him about Yungueño retailers, Lucio started by describing the division of social classes into three strata that he differentiates according to how people make money: the bourgeoisie, who earn money through big enterprises and by employing others; the middle class, which consists of intellectuals and professionals who earn money through their intelligence; and the labor class, who earn money through physical labor. He went on by characterizing each of them: L:

I think that there are three social strata; they are divided into three. Let’s start with the highest, the bourgeoisie. What is the bourgeoisie? The bourgeoisie are owners of huge enterprises, owners of monstrous machines, right? Owners of big tools, they only see their economic position where they have to give work to the laborer, owner of   big productions. Then follows the second social stratum, which is the middle class. Now, who is in the middle class, who feels they are part of the middle class? It isn’t the person who lives in the countryside [campo] and who has more money—no. We rather need to locate the middle class according to what they think; thus, the second social stratum, the middle class, are the intellectuals. Now we can differentiate: There is the teacher, he earns money with his mind [cabeza, “head”]. Any person who earns money by what he or she knows pertains to the second social stratum. This is the middle class. Then follows the working class. This is the last social stratum, and there we are located, the peasants.

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All persons who contribute with their labor force, they are the ones in the third social stratum. AP: But now, for example, retailers who are Yungueños, live in La Paz, do business with coca, to which social class would they belong? L: They would be a kind of micro, micro—almost classless [desclasados], right, but in their generality, there are three social strata. But they are apart. . . . They have another system of life; there have been businessmen [negociantes] since a long time ago, since the feudalists. (Interview, October 21, 2010) For him, coca growers pertain by definition to the labor class, no matter how much business they do. However, in the end, he is unsure on how to locate prosperous Yungueños who engage in retailing in the rigid “three-strata model,” as they seem not to fit any of these categories and in a way break with Lucio’s classic syndicalist discourse. Social mobility—be this in explicit terms of   being middle class or as a general increase in living standard—among coca grower retailers is experienced in diverse ways: the increasing economic purchasing power of the labor force of others and of consumer goods; their occupation, such as increasingly engaging in “doing business,” which is a classic aspiration of rural people in Bolivia in general; movement and mobility, by being able to know the national territory and thus increase their participation in national society and their sense of citizenship; and the relational position to other peasants, such as Yola expressed by noting that poor highlanders buy her expensive coca. The fact that coca grower retailers experience this social mobility, which moves them closer to the middle class, but remain rooted in their communities and thus in the peasantry makes it difficult for Lucio to locate them in his “three-strata” society. Yungueños are not the only peasants who have become entrepreneurs in La­­tin America. The artisans in the Otavalo valley in Ecuador that Rudi ColloredoMansfeld (1999) describes and the Otavalo merchants that Lynn Meisch (2002) has analyzed constitute one example, and the so-called cholas—indigenous busi­­ nesswomen in La Paz, often having a rural origin—are another. Cholas equally challenge ethnic notions of class, although in a different way than Yungueños do. They embody indigeneity as well as entrepreneurism (Scarborough 2010) and have been successful in bringing together these two realms that are often thought to be separate. As Isabel Scarborough (2010) argues, cholas claim their indigeneity not only through their origin and their ethnic garb but also through

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market practices, and by this they remove indigeneity from being an antimarket concept. Yungueños, in contrast, use the argument of entrepreneurism to distance themselves from being indigenous. Although they differ in their positioning regarding indigeneity discourses, cholas in La Paz, artisans in Ecuador, and coca growers in Bolivia have all created postpeasant identities (Kearney 1996), whereby people mobilize beyond mere agrarian issues and get global with their business and their political demands. These postpeasant identities, however, no longer fit into the “three-strata model.” Retailing activities are one of the keys to understanding how Yungueños position themselves between the categories of   “indigenous,” “nonindigenous,” and “mestizo”: they provide the possibility of becoming affluent while at the same time remaining rooted in the communities as coca growers, and only those who remain rooted in these communities are actually allowed to work as retailers, since (as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter) they have to provide evidence that they fulfill a “social function.” To retail coca, they need to maintain interactions and social relations with the community: The coca they retail needs to be produced in these communities, and maintaining coca production is almost impossible without social relations and labor beyond the household. This holds not only for those who have done retailing directly to the consumers since 2006 but also for people who buy coca from other community members and re­­ sell it in La Paz to intermediaries. They need to manage good relations with the producers to guarantee supplies, and they compete with any other person in the community who also has a producer’s card and some capital and wants to be­­ come established in this business. They cannot disconnect themselves from coca production and peasant labor if they want to do business—and thus, they cannot become mestizos, if engaged in retailing and trade. The interweaving of discourses on class, social mobility, and indigeneity, as is the case in Piñapata, is contested beyond the Yungas as well and raises questions about Yungueños’ relation to the current government. People in Piñapata have not only become successful entrepreneurs; they are also loyal followers of the government party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). As Miriam Shakow (2011, 2014) describes for emerging middle classes in Bolivia’s city of Cochabamba, the experience of social mobility often poses a dilemma for those who identify themselves as followers of the MAS: On the one hand, their individ­­ ual aspirations for prosperity and social mobility often stand in contrast to the MAS rhetoric of equality and equal distribution of wealth. On the other hand, although their own social mobility has often taken place thanks to political

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advancements of the MAS—in the case of the Yungas, partly because of the government’s law on retailing—they are also part of the population that is critical of the MAS’s political projects. Yungueños, for example, criticize the government’s proposition of legalizing extensive coca cultivation of illegal cocagrowing regions. As a consequence, they reconstitute themselves as a special kind of coca growers—as exclusively “traditional coca growers”—and take up the government’s terminology of   “history” and “tradition.” Surprisingly, this fits very well into the discourse on “indigenous peoples.”

4 What Has a Long History Is the Land

I

n April 2011 , there was an ADEPCOCA assembly during which the new board informed the grassroots about ongoing projects and the financial balance of the organization after being four months in office. The event took place in the football stadium of Coripata, a town in Nor Yungas, which is the first (and only) town in the Yungas to receive a football field with artificial grass from the government—something widely appreciated, which people proudly comment on. That Coripata received the grass field was probably not by coincidence, because it is famous for being the hometown of the best national players of the Bolivian select team who went to play in the World Cup in the 1990s. The stadium was full of people who had arrived from all corners of the Yungas and were sitting according to the different regional sections of ADEPCOCA. They also paid great attention to seating those together who identified themselves as supporters of the government party (MAS), separate from those of the regional opposition party, locally called Agrupación. We were all sitting on the cement steps in the sun, and those who were commissioned from their communities as representatives had a little notebook in their hand where they jotted down notes as the assembly went on. In particular, the presentation of the financial balance received special attention from these persons, and they were eager to write down the six- and seven-figure sums that the president of ADEPCOCA announced—which was no easy task. At the

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beginning of the assembly, Ernesto Cordero, the president of ADEPCOCA and a follower of the MAS, talked in Aymara and explained that according to the new constitution they had to speak in Aymara because this was their language. However, around me, there were many people who did not understand any of what he was saying in Aymara. Gloria, next to me, for example, looked at me, shaking her head and saying, “I wonder what he is saying.” He made his subsequent speeches in Spanish. Toward the end of the session, the president informed them that the government wanted to define a new national holiday devoted to the coca leaf (día nacional de la coca). The government proposed that this holiday fall on the date of the massacre in Villa Tunari in June 1988. On that day, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a U.S. law enforcement entity, as well as the Mobile Police Unit for Rural Areas (UMOPAR), a Bolivian antinarcotic force, had invaded the Chapare and killed twelve coca growers, leaving twenty injured and many more disabled. The massacre happened in a place defined partly as an illegal area and at a time when Law 1008 was being debated in the national congress. The peasants opposed the eradication of their coca fields using herbicides and requested that their demands be integrated in Law 1008, which was not yet enacted. Thus, Chapare coca growers generally frame the massacre in terms of their struggle to defend the coca leaf. In 2009, Evo Morales, as the president of Bolivia, framed this massacre using an anti-imperialist rhetoric be­ cause the DEA, and thus the United States, was heavily involved in the incident (Kawsachuncoca.com 2014; Tercera Información 2009). However, the president of ADEPCOCA did not agree with the government’s proposal to select that day. He yelled, accompanied by the applause of the people, that Yungueños had nothing to do with that day and that massacre and that once more they were being ignored by the government, as it chose a day related to coca growing in the Chapare rather than the Yungas. “We are history!” he went on, implying that those from the Chapare did not have history. Instead, for the national holiday ADEPCOCA proposed June 21, the summer solstice and the Aymara New Year, which had been revived in recent years (see Ari Murillo 2004; Ebert 2015). Thus, they were arguing that the date must have a relation with their history as traditional coca growers. They seem to have felt that rather than commemorating a militarized invasion into partly illegal coca-growing regions, the religious and spiritual dimension of  coca should stay at the center, which in turn is closely linked to their conceptualization of

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   109

themselves as “coca growers from the traditional zone.” Instead of an antiimperialist rhetoric, Yungueños wanted to put coca as a sacred plant and as part of Andean life at the center. In addition, for Yungueños, issues about defending the coca leaf in the Chapare based on arguments of coca being a sacred plant carries an ironic connotation, since it is well known that most Yungueño coca is used for traditional usages while a significant percentage of Chapare coca goes to the drug industry. The discussions over the national holiday were only one point in a more extended debate about the definition of the “traditional coca-growing zone.” These discussions can be conceptualized in relation to Kay Warren and Jean Jackson’s framework of  “authenticators” (2002:10): they have argued that some people define the criteria of authenticity at a particular moment in time, and through the power and authority with which these actors are endowed, these criteria are then recognized as such. This means that the focus lies “on the production and consumption of authenticity rather than on the elaboration of cri­ t­eria for an objective standard” (Warren and Jackson 2002:10). It is not that ac­ tors are authentic but rather that they create ideas and notions of authenticity that become politically meaningful through processes of differentiation. The focus thus lies on the processes of how such notions are created, how they are filled with meanings, and how they become politically important by claiming representativity. As José Antonio Lucero states, looking at these questions of representativity is about “focusing on the practices and discourses that situate some subjects as more culturally authentic and more politically consequential than others” (2006:33). By redefining history and tradition, which gives them the legitimacy of cul­ tivating coca, Yungueños become a kind of “authenticators.” More precisely, they are authenticated by the quality of their product and by the land. What follows in this chapter is the beginning of a territoriality-centered discourse that Yungueños create by reinterpreting the legal terminology offered by the government for their own region. Whereas chapter 3 is focused on Yungueños as marketers and on how they reject the “indigenous people’s slot,” this chapter looks at the paradox that emerges around this rejection: even as Yungueños re­ ject the “indigenous people’s slot” and with it the idea of being people who follow antimarket activities and have static traditions, they make reference to history and tradition, which are prominent in indigeneity discourses, to secure exclusive economic possibilities for themselves.

1 10  chap ter 4

Debating the New Law for Coca Production and Commerce Toward the end of May 2011, ADEPCOCA invited all community authorities (dirigentes) to attend a seminar at which they would debate a proposition for the new law on coca production and commerce. Because Law 1008 is detested by coca growers, as it was elaborated under U.S. pressure in 1988, the government of Evo Morales decided to create a new law on coca issues, based on the new political constitution, in which coca is defined as “cultural patrimony.” Different social groups—such as coca growers from the Yungas, the Chapare, Caranavi, Apolo, and Muñecas (so far only partially recognized zones), the Kallawayas (the famous shamans from north of La Paz), and intermediaries (detallistas)— have thus elaborated propositions and presented them to the government. From these different propositions, the government would try to reach a consensus. The event I describe in the following section was a discussion about a draft, but this was not the final proposition that was later presented to the government. The seminar took place in a former cinema in the center of La Paz. It is an old building, painted in ochre on the outside. The cinema is huge, with a very high ceiling, opaque, energy-saving lamps, and blue curtains at the front. It was very cold inside because of a lack of windows and the general cold climate of  La Paz. In front, there was a wooden stage where the board members of ADEPCOCA were sitting, as well as the members of the ADEPCOCA commission who had prepared the proposition. There was an overhead projector, a screen, and a small speaker’s desk. The cinema had at least thirty rows and as many seats on each row. It was full, every seat being occupied; thus, there were almost a thousand persons. People—mainly men, because only community authorities were invited—arrived in warm jackets, with hats or caps, carrying some papers, folders, or small, worn-out suitcases. These community authorities generally occupied a position in the ADEPCOCA committee in their communities, or else they occupied a post in the peasant union. From Piñapata, those who were members of the ADEPCOCA committee did not attend, because at the time they were three women and at a previous communal meeting, the union board had decided that only experienced leaders should attend this very important event. Instead, the Piñapata representatives included Eulogio (Yola’s husband), who is a young man and eager to get involved in politics, taking the place of his mother-in-law, who was on the communal ADEPCOCA committee at the time. There was

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 1 1

also the secretary of public relations from the peasant union, as well as some others who at that time did not occupy a post in the communal peasant union but were known to “understand” political issues. I accompanied the delegation from Piñapata, and because one of the ADEPCOCA board members was also from Piñapata, I got permission to enter and attend the seminar. Although the formal invitation was exclusively for community authorities, as with the Piñapata delegation there were also some other people who were not clearly definable as such. For example, there was a young woman who seemed to be from a Yungueño community and had studied in La Paz and wrote her master’s thesis on coca law in Bolivia, but she did not seem to occupy any political post in her community. Because her thesis was linked to what was being debated in the seminar, she tried to contribute her knowledge about judicial procedures to the debate. Other people seemed to be former, but not cur­ rent, community leaders. The president, Ernesto Cordero, opened the seminar with a short speech in which he set forth the intention of debating each and every article of the proposition. Then the program started with a speech from Mauricio Mamani, a Bolivian intellectual of Aymara origin, who together with the American William Carter had made groundbreaking studies about the social and cultural importance of coca in the 1980s as a mandate for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He pointed out that coca was not to be confounded with cocaine and that coca is not only a national but also an international topic. Quintin Quispe, the Yungueños’ parliamentary deputy of the MAS, then made a speech in which he emphasized that they should elaborate the new law in an act of unity among Yungueños, “we, as Yungas of La Paz.” Similar phrases such as “We have to work in favor of our region” and “We have to make our own pro­posal as Yungueños, as Yungas of La Paz” were invoked over and over again during the meeting. Sometimes people also made reference to the international level, by saying, for example, that “Two hundred thirty-six countries recognize us as traditional coca producers.” Then the commission from ADEPCOCA, which had elaborated the draft proposition, guided the rest of the seminar. The commission was made up mainly of young men, some of them university students who were eager to contribute to their home region through their educational background. They read through every article and paragraph, which were projected as a Power­ Point display, with copies distributed to the community authorities at the entrance door. The law was divided up in five main sections: production, commercialization, industrialization, biodiversity, and social control.

1 1 2  chap ter 4

While these community authorities were debating the law, they realized that they had to walk a fine line between inserting as many sectorial privileges as possible to themselves as Yungueño coca growers while at the same time proposing a sufficiently “national law” to be accepted in the legislature. Cordero explicitly asked his grassroots to keep in mind that this proposition draft would “lead to a national law”: “We are not going to present a sectorial law because this would be rejected in the parliament.” Claiming their sectorial privileges, people invoked a linear historical model. Thus, a participant from Chulumani claimed, “We are identifying as traditional producers. Now it is ancestral and originary, because since the pre-Columbian times coca existed in the Yungas. It is a production proper to our cultures. Coca is a cultural patrimony, the Boliv­ ian State appropriated it, coca belongs to Bolivia [la coca es propia de Bolivia].” The elaboration of this proposition was about how to best guarantee Yungueños’ particular interests within a national law. The most heated debate created the definition of which regions would be considered legal zones and what they would be called. In the end, these zones more or less followed those of Law 1008, although participants in the seminar formulated only two zones rather than three: one of “originary production” and the other of “nonoriginary production,” which would include both the “transitional zone” and the “illicit zone” of Law 1008. Some argued that the “nonoriginary zone” would in effect be an illicit zone and that there should be nothing like zones of transition (as in Law 1008) but only zones that either allowed coca cultivation or not. One question on this issue was whether to include that the “originary zone” is defined as where ex-haciendas exist, which is how Yungueños generally interpret the way the “traditional zone” is defined in Law 1008. Interestingly, some were eager to include that interpretation, because it related to their very specific history of “coca growers from the traditional zone.” One participant thus said, “We have to say that there are ex-haciendas, otherwise we have neither history nor culture.” However, others argued that there are ex-haciendas outside the Yungas as well and that in the Yungas there are communities that are not ex-haciendas, and thus they rejected the inclusion of this criterion. Most participants were also eager to include an expression that coca would be “for life” (de por vida) and “perpetual” (perpetuo), because otherwise, politicians could argue that as soon as the plants die, new ones cannot be planted. Many participants also claimed that the cultivation of coca in the Yungas should not be made conditional on development projects and the so-called rationalization from the government, which should be the case only for other coca-growing regions.

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 1 3

Following the zonification debate, another polemic discussion took place about how many hectares would be allowed for each region. The representative of the ADEPCOCA commission, a young man around thirty years old, from the region of Chulumani and studying law at that time in La Paz, used figures from the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) to show that the Chapare, with around half of the hectares of the Yungas, produced almost the same amount of metric tons of coca leaves. Thus, if the government increased the amount of  legal hectares for the Chapare, there would be more coca from the Chapare than from the Yungas. In fact, all participants were fiercely against President Morales’s push to increase the total number of legal hectares at the national level (see also La Razón 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d, 2011e, 2011f, 2012a). Some argued that rather than increasing the number of legal hectares for the Chapare, the number of legal hectares for the Yungas should be doubled, with the rationale that the soils in the Yungas are worn-out and hence the production decreases every year. This whole discussion led to an agitated critique against the Chapare and was complemented by other issues that these Yungueño authorities found unfair. They concluded by saying that if they wanted to defend their interests “as Yungueños from the traditional zone,” as they said, they could not make any compromise or alliance with the Chapare. One member of the ADEPCOCA commission shouted, “That’s enough with a pro-Chapare system! Rather than the unity, we have to rescue the Yungueño dignity!” When people talked about the Yungas versus the Chapare, feelings ran high: they interrupted each other and spoke louder, more aggressively, and more insistently. Interestingly, they thought about inserting a clause that the production of the “nonoriginary zones,” which would mainly be the Chapare but also some regions of the Yungas (such as Caranavi and Palos Blancos), should in no case be more than 20 per­cent of the total production of coca leaves, thus leaving the “originary zone” with 80 percent of the total production. Regarding commercialization, almost all present leaders who contributed to the debate agreed. They tried to define that coca producers should be the only ones allowed to commercialize coca and that the intermediaries should be allowed to trade only the amount that coca growers were not able to cover themselves. In addition, they were very much at pains to emphasize that ADEPCOCA should be the only entity that could give licenses and regulate commerce in coordination with the state. They really wanted to underline that the state would not be allowed to issue retailing licenses for those regions that were not within

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ADEPCOCA. Rather, the state should help to create a market for Yungueño coca leaves. The tension between ADEPCOCA and the government was noticeable throughout the whole seminar. The head of the ADEPCOCA commission— the same young, highly articulate man who used the UNODC figures about cultivated hectares—pointed out that with this new constitution, coca cultivation would be protected and defended by the state, because it was defined as a cultural patrimony and a natural resource. He argued that such a definition put coca under the power of the state, as the constitution states that natural re­ sources are part of the state domain. Thus, by promoting coca, the state would also increasingly acquire more power over coca issues. Obviously, past governments also had the power over legal decisions regarding coca; however, Yungueño leaders who were present in the seminar seemed to fear that by allying themselves too closely with the government, they would lose their voice rather than gaining. In addition, while at the moment Evo Morales is the president and supports coca, any other government could practice a very different policy. As a participant claimed, they should not give too many responsibilities to the state but instead sign specific, single agreements (con­ venios): “If we are going to leave the whole matter to the state, the state will change, and what will happen to us?” he rhetorically asked. And as another participant remarked, “We have a corporate legal entity [personería jurídica], thus we are an enterprise; there is no reason that we should obey the state.” Even more critically, another participant exclaimed, “We are handing ourselves over to the state. ADEPCOCA is not from the state!” The relation of  Yungueños to the current government and to the MAS was a sensitive issue, and deep disagreement existed. As soon as some participants expressed criticism of the current government, others who identified as followers of  the MAS, like those who represented Piñapata, loudly and aggressively whistled and automatically considered these others to be from Agrupación (the local opposition party). The discussion regarding their relation to the government was marked on the one hand by the issue that people wanted the state to promote coca while on the other hand they wanted to retain power over all decisions about coca issues, as well as a political and economic monopoly on coca. As the second day went on, people increasingly became unsettled, and factions—those who supported the MAS versus those from Agrupación— increased. This restlessness prominently started when the commission conducting the proceedings reached the issue of research, and again the same young

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 1 5

man guided the discussion. People started shouting that the commission of ADEPCOCA did not do anything and that they were only there for “doing politics” because, as everyone knew, the members of the commission were followers of Agrupación. Next to me, Eulogio whistled, heatedly shouted, and proposed to start from the very beginning of the seminar and discuss the entire law again. Tempers abated but then reached another peak when the discussion about organic coca cultivation started. After a heated debate, the attendees decided to eliminate the article that stated that organic coca growing should be promoted by the government, since some, including Eulogio, feared that otherwise there would be no market for those who would not or could not produce organically. In addition, many feared that additional fragmentation would emerge among Yungueños: “To say ‘organic coca’ is a synonym of division,” as one participant from the region of Asunta—and thus outside the core of the “traditional zone”—claimed. At that time, everyone was so hungry that people started whistling and shouting, and one of the participants exclaimed, “Please pass around the lunch, we are all leaders, we deserve respect!” As some sandwiches were finally passed around, everyone suspected that ADEPCOCA board members had put some money in their own pocket. In particular, the four people from Piñapata who sat next to me were very angry and ascribed this whole unsatisfying situation to the fact that the ADEPCOCA commission was from the opposition party. Another heated debate started when the commission members who were sitting in front and guiding the discussions passed to the topic about social control, the new coca policy of the government, which supports and conveys control of coca cultivation limitation and illegal processing to the communities (see Farthing and Kohl 2012). Mostly leaders from the core of the “traditional zone” strongly argued against its imposition in the Yungas, so that the commission members adjusted the text in the PowerPoint presentation to state that “social control” would be applicable only to the “nonoriginary” zones, thus not for the Yungas, since they already have their own system of communal organi­ zation. Being against social control, and thus against the government’s new coca policy, automatically seemed to allude to an anti-MAS position, and a majority of people stood up—among them Eulogio and the others from Piñapata—whistling and shouting and went to the front of the room with their libros de actas (minute protocols from the communal unions), in which they should receive a signature to confirm to their communities that they really had attended the seminar.

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Desperately trying to calm people down, Cordero invited Jorge Medina, the Afro-Bolivian Yungueño parliamentary deputy, to give a short speech; he would ultimately be the one to defend Yungueños’ propositions officially. He started talking, but drowned out by the whistles and shouts, he spoke in vain. “Let’s go!” people said. In the end, Jorge Medina did not really give his speech, nor did they discuss the remaining seven articles of the law regarding infractions and punishment, and now everyone stood up and went either to the front with his or her book or outside. Eulogio angrily complained to those standing nearby that they had been sitting for two days in vain in this big cinema, without having a proper lunch, and that the propositions they made would anyway not be taken into account. It is a feeling people often express after politically laden events, such as elections and meetings, as they suspect that political strategies and agreements among the leaders defined the outcome long before the grassroots were asked to participate. What this discussion of the new law on coca clearly indicates is that regarding decisions on coca issues, Yungueños systematically tried to exclude all other so­ cial groups and institutions that were not from the Yungas. They, as Yungueños, want to be those who cultivate coca, those who trade it, those who industrialize it, those who do research on it, and, if they need additional people for these tasks, those who give licenses and permits. The state, however, should create a market in order for Yungueños to realize all these tasks by themselves. This desire for autonomy implied on the one hand a strong distancing of  Yungueños from the Chapare, but on the other hand it also created a division among Yungueños, with those from the core of the “traditional” region feeling that they had a more privileged standing to define issues of production and commerce vis-à-vis those from more recent zones. Interestingly, there was another seminar, organized by the government, intended to redefine this notion of a “traditional zone.”

Redefining the “Traditional Zone” The “traditional zone” is commonly defined as including those areas where coca has historically been cultivated, which, by leaders in the Yungas, is often interpreted as meaning the time before 1953 and thus where there are ex-haciendas. The term traditional is inscribed in Law 1008, and Yungueños invoke the term repeatedly to assert their unique right to grow coca. The word traditional, however, is not uncontested, and it acquired new meanings in recent years. In the

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 17

new political constitution, for example, traditional is not used anymore, and coca is defined as originario y ancestral (“originary and ancestral”; Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia 2009: Article 384). José is a politically experienced, sixty-year-old man in Piñapata. He was married to a woman from Piñapata, while he is originally from another Yungueño community. He still owns coca fields in Piñapata, although he is separated from his former wife and generally lives alone in the house he had built. He always has a cheek full of coca leaves, like a ball, that he likes to chew during work and in the evening. On one evening, I went to his house, and we sat on one of the cement benches outside, along the wall, that almost all houses in the Yungas have in front. Politically active, he was eager to tell me about the most important political development of the last weeks and months, and as is true of any political leader in the Yungas, he quickly started to talk about Law 1008. He wanted to explain that the word traditional should no longer be used: In Law 1008 the issue is about “traditional,” and every leader is used to saying, “We are from the traditional zone.” “We are,” until now they say that, the presi-

dent of ADEPCOCA, Ernesto Cordero: “Comrades, or brothers, long live the

traditional zone! Long live the coca growers of the traditional zone!”  That’s what

he says, thus still [it is used], it is inserted in Law 1008, traditional zone, “traditional,” they say, now they get used to it. But now, in the constitution, in Arti­

cle 384, it says that coca is of cultural use, everything, medicine, for example, they

say it is “ancestral y milenario” [literally “ancestral and thousand-year-old”]. Thus, all this does not say “traditional” anymore. (Interview, January 30, 2011)

However, the difference between the term traditional and the terms ancestral and milenario (thousand-year-old) is not self-evident; neither is it clear why local leaders such as José put much effort in repeating that now everyone should use these new terms. One issue is surely that the term traditional is associated with Law 1008, which is perceived as an imposition of the United States. As I was sitting in the kitchen with Eulogio, peeling vegetables for the evening soup, he stated, “We Bolivians didn’t put in ‘traditional’; the word ‘traditional’ has come from the United States.” Thus, in not using the term traditional anymore, people try to set themselves apart from Law 1008 and a U.S.-guided policy. However, there are other aspects as well. On another occasion, I met José and Cristóbal, a young man in his thirties who was born and still lives in Piñapata. They had come back from a workshop organized by the government

1 18  chap ter 4

that they had attended, and we met on the back of a pickup to return to Piñapata. We were lucky, because the pickup was almost empty, something that rarely happens; generally, they are full of bags with items purchased from the market in the town. Passengers are expected to accommodate themselves in any possible way between the bags, often standing while holding the metal tubes that should allow the pickup to be covered with a large plastic tarp, with one’s whole body swinging around at every curve. José and Cristóbal were very enthusiastic about the workshop and proclaimed that now it is no longer correct to say traditional but instead one should say ancestral milenario. Interestingly, when I asked them what the difference was and why the terms had to be changed, Cristóbal explained that traditional refers to people, while ancestral milenario refers to the land. He went on to explain that as people can move, they can go and colonize new areas of land and start growing coca, which then would be “traditional,” but when talking about ancestral milenario this is not possible, since the land is defined as such, and only there, where the land is an­ cestral, should coca growing be allowed. José jumped in and explained that tra­ ditional expands, while ancestral milenario does not. On another occasion, when I met Rene in his house, he explained the same issue. He is a man in his late fifties, light skinned with black dyed hair, and has a son who just finished his studies of law in La Paz. Rene had held many community posts in the peasant union and was known to be very experienced. In our conversation, he strongly asserted that the term traditional had been ap­ propriated by “colonizers,” by which he meant highland migrants who go to the lowland and start cultivating coca. As Rene said, “With the word ‘tradition,’ they are expanding more coca cultivation.” This means that coca production is limited and cannot be expanded to new regions, while within the same region people can expand their own fields. This very much reflects the ethic of accumulation and expansion described in chapter 2, whereby the individual families aim at expanding their fields. The definition of ancestral milenario, according to Rene, José, and Cristóbal, thus situates Yungueños in a privileged position, because their region obviously falls within the boundaries of what would be considered ancestral land. In a similar way, Eulogio put much emphasis on differentiating between tra­ ditional and ancestral, and in addition to the aspect of geographical expansion mentioned in the above accounts, he made reference to history. He repeatedly explained to me that “traditional” means that people do something “only because of tradition,” like fiestas, which are a tradition or, as people commonly say, a “custom” (costumbre). In contrast, “ancestral milenario,” as he said, goes back much

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 19

further, since coca cultivation has existed in these regions “for thousands and thousands of years.” He explained that “ ‘ancestral’ is, let’s say, that it has existed since before, since the time of our great-great-grandparents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, who recognized the coca for everything, for all kinds of, how can I explain it—for all kinds of  beliefs” (interview, April 20, 2011). When I insisted that traditional also makes reference to a time before, he responded that “ ‘traditional’ does not come from before,” only from 1952. In these definitions of traditional versus ancestral milenario there is something inherently contradictory. On the one hand, as we have seen in chap­ters 2 and 3, expansion is a basic aspect of Yungueños’ ethic of life in the sense of expanding coca fields and the possibilities of further economic accumulation. On the other hand, although expansion is an important aspect of  Yungueños’ ideas of life, they fiercely defend the term ancestral milenario, which specifically implies the impossibility of expansion. It also contradicts their claims that rather than legalizing illicit zones, the government should allot—and thus expand—additional legal hectares to the Yungas. Thus, as Cordero stated in an interview I did in the board office in the ADEPCOCA building in La Paz, “Sometimes we really struggled in vain, because for years they have recognized us with twelve thousand hectares, us, the Yungas of La Paz” (interview, March 15, 2011). By virtue of being from the “traditional zone”—a region of “ancestral milenario” coca cultivation—Yungueños have the right to expand, a right that is denied to others. These rivalries and the struggles around recognized amounts of legal hectares are often interwoven with political and party issues—for example, when Cordero in the same interview says that those from the Chapare have “the power of government.” Yungueños like José, Eulogio, Rene, and Cristóbal “authenticate” the Yungas as an exclusive zone of coca cultivation by reinterpreting the change in terminology from traditional to ancestral milenario for their own processes of differentiation, a change initiated by the government. In addition, there are other “authenticating” agents—for example, the municipality of Sud Yungas, who created a similar notion of  “tradition.”

Displaying Yungueño “Traditions” In 2009, the municipality of Chulumani organized for the first time a harvester’s competition (concurso de k’ichiri), and this occurred again in 2011. Ernesto Ticona, a Yungueño secondary school teacher in the town of Chulumani, was president of the municipal council at that time and coordinated the organization of the

1 20  chap ter 4

event. As he repeatedly asserted in an interview that I conducted with him, the objective of the event was to preserve the “traditional zone” of the Yungas and to revalorize the coca leaf, which is something only the “traditional zone” should be allowed to do. A precursor to this harvester’s competition was the election of the mujer coca (or “coca woman,” a kind of Miss Coca), which took place in the 1990s. Equally part of the aim for distinction of the “traditional zone” were events of música y canto (music and songs), for which people composed songs that were inspired by the coca leaf. The harvesters’ competition was directed only toward women, since they are the ones who spend most of the time harvesting, and the idea was that each of the sixty-four communities in the municipality would send one representative. The municipality had to first find a coca field that was appropriate for such a big harvesting group and whose owner was willing to lend his or her coca field for the event. Although only half of the expected number of participants registered before the event, on the day of the event there were many more, and in the end there were around ninety participants. According to Ticona, there were around twelve criteria on which the women were classified by a judging panel (consisting mainly of men). The criteria consisted of the following: First, harvesters had to pick the leaves with care, and the leaves should not be cracked. The second criterion, related to the first, was that they should not damage the coca plants by breaking buds or branches. Third, each harvester had to bring her own plastic bag in which to collect her leaves so that the quantity of leaves in pounds could be measured. These three first criteria correspond to the general idea of  “good harvesters” in everyday life, as people are expected to harvest both carefully and quickly. Another criterion was the clothing of harvesters. According to Ticona, they were expected to wear a green skirt ( pollera) made of  lamb’s wool with only a few small tiers, an old bowler hat, a white awayt’asiña (a fabric people put over their back for protection from the sun) with embroidery that represents the Yungas (such as birds or flowers), a green mit’iña (fabric put around the hips to collect the picked leaves in) or one of awayo (colored Andean textiles) or a white fabric made from flour bags, and a blouse, which should also be white. Their hair should be gathered into plaits and fixed with a tulma, which consists of strings of lamb’s wool with pompons, generally worn by Aymara women. Further, women had to bring their snack wrapped in a small white cloth with embroidery (mi­ rinchinu) or banana leaves, and the snack should consist of products from the Yungas, such as peanuts, rice, bananas, and walusa (tuber), rather than noodles,

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 21

for example. Not only what they brought for lunch but also the way they had their lunch was defined: Ticona explained that they should eat not with a spoon but with their hands. Further, they were expected to share their lunch, exchanging with each other parts of their snacks. The behavior of harvesters was also assessed. They should not harvest in silence but should converse and chat continuously. However, even the content of the conversation received a qualification: ideally, they should talk about their families, their children, health issues, or their communities—for example, that they lack a road and a school for their children. During the breaks, they were also assessed on chewing coca, and they were expected to carry it with them in a small piece of awayo (tari). Furthermore, there was also a criterion regarding the way they were handling the picked coca leaves: the way they were putting them in the plastic bag and thus not leaving them in the sun but stowing them in a shady place. According to all these parameters, out of the ninety participants, the judges selected twelve who would receive an award consisting of a gas cooker, gas cylinder, or pots. Among the winners was Beatris Pariguana, who later became part of the municipal council as a MAS candidate. However, since they did not want the other participants to leave empty-handed they bought more pots and gave one pot to each participant. As Ticona repeatedly stated, their objective was to recover the Yungueño traditions. Throughout the interview he used the term tradition (tradición) or sometimes custom (costumbre). He likewise associated the term tradition with the time before 1952: “We [the municipality] historicized all that, meaning that we gathered this information from the persons on the question of how people worked on the hacienda” (interview, February 5, 2011). When I asked Ticona until what time these customs existed that they defined as criteria for the competition, he said, “Until [the time of ] the hacienda. Or until when they were established until [19]52, before the land reform.”1 Thus, “the objective was to go back to this time with the competition, remember these times and resume it in a book [which has been published by the municipality].” The time of  landlords, before 1953, is thus depicted as a time of tradition and custom, which is quite similar to the idea that Eulogio expressed. Describing the time of landlords (tiempo de hacienda) as one of “tradition,” however, also expresses an ambivalence that people in Piñapata have toward this period: it is negatively associated with abuses, discrimination, exploitation, and bad treatment but also positively remembered as a time of “tradition” and “customs.” Thus, when people nostalgically talk about lost “traditions,” they often add that

1 22  chap ter 4

this was during the time of the haciendas. This again challenges the government discourse, in which pre-Columbian traditions and customs are reified and anything in relation to the Spanish colonizers and the landlords is strongly rejected in an aim of  “decolonizing” Bolivia. In addition, this competition is a stark stereotyping of  Yungueño life: rural, everyday work is reified as being peaceful, idyllic, and communitarian. This is, for example, apparent in Ticona’s description of how people should share their lunch: according to my experience, although it sometimes happens that people exchange some parts of their lunch, generally people eat their lunch in a hidden way by covering it with the mirinchinu (cloth in which the plastic bucket is wrapped) so that others cannot see what they are eating. People do not want others to see their plate, as Rita once explained, because they feel ashamed. This is especially true if people are poor and, for example, have only some bananas and eggs. Alternatively, if they own huge coca fields but carry with them a poor lunch, they are regarded as cheap (see also Spedding 1994:75– 76). This practice of taking individual lunches and covering them up seems to be specific to the Yungas and contrasts with the approach taken in the highland, where food sharing seems to be much more common and fits the government’s discourse on communitarian indigenous peoples much better than Yungueños do. Furthermore, the way Ticona describes women is a problematic form of gender stereotyping: although the work of harvesters is highly appreciated, he speaks about women as if they were children—for instance, by often using the diminutive grammatical form (for example, by saying “su pollerita” or “estar dobladita”), something that although extensively used in the Spanish language is seldom used when referring to men. Even the kinds of conversation allotted to women correspond to the romanticized realm of women’s sorrows: it consists of children, family, and related issues such as health and school, and as such, women are represented as apolitical actors. Also, the idea of holding this type of harvesters’ competition is implicitly based on a kind of paternalistic act that tries to make women’s daily work visible, which assumes that women are not able to become visible by themselves. This view wholly ignores that women are the ones who—besides harvesting—are most active in coca commerce and also participate in retailing activities that take them to places far beyond the local community. Finally, I must confess that I have never seen people dressed up in the way Ticona describes the supposedly traditional dress. Also, regarding the mit’iña,

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 23

there seems to be an inconsistency: Alison Spedding (1992), for example, explains that because of the symbolism of Andean colors, the mit’iña used to be blue rather than white, as Ticona argues. Thus, it is not clear whether Ticona made up some of these parameters at the time of the interview, since the photograph of the competition that has been published by the municipality in a booklet shows women with skirts in all different colors, and with mit’iñas and awayt’asiñas not only in white but also in blue (Estrada 2010b:13). If we put these things aside and analyze the interview with Ticona beyond his mere personal opinion, however, the idea of the concurso de k’ichiri as a public display of “traditions” and “customs” seems to be the local way a politics of indigeneity is expressed. The public display of “traditions” and “customs,” however, does not mean that the municipality claims a political position for Yungueños as “indigenous peoples” vis-à-vis the state: such public displays rather underline the legitimacy of the “traditional coca-growing region” and as such reinforce the claims of the Yungueños, as a specific kind of coca grower, to rights and priv­ileges regarding coca cultivation that others would not have—not because these others are less “indigenous” but rather because they are not equally “real” coca growers. While this harvester’s tournament invokes traditions of short-term history, the municipality has in other instances tried to construct a long-term history in connection with the nation-state.

Creating National History In 2010, when Ernesto Ticona was president of the municipal council, the municipality published a booklet written by the historian and poet Fidel Estrada Paredes (Estrada 2010a). He is Yungueño himself, an “underground writer,” as he has said, and he has written several books about the Yungas, as well as school­ books about politics and society, which he edits, publishes, and distributes throughout the schools of the Yungas. The title of the booklet in question is “Chulumani: Where the War for Independence Was Organized” (“Chulumani: Aquí se organizó la guerra de la independencia”). In this book, he locates the Yungas within Bolivian national history and asserts that Chulumani substantially contributed to the history of  Bolivia. As is generally recognized, the siege of La Paz in 1781, under the indigenous leadership of  Tupac Katari, foreshadowed the war for independence of Bolivia in 1825 (Thomson 2006). Estrada

1 24  chap ter 4

takes up and repeats this argument from other authors (Aguilar 2005; Thomson 2002, 2006) and states that there was a siege in Chulumani in 1771 (thus, ten years before the one in La Paz) and that the one in the Yungas served as an example for the famous siege in La Paz led by Tupac Katari. As he explained in an interview, The history of my fatherland, Bolivia, is written in an inconclusive way, it’s badly written. . . . Everyone thought that Tupac Katari made his movement up of Andean indigenous people, and they all mention the Yungueño participation only on

passing. And this is a lie. Our grandfather Tupac Katari went—in 1771 in Chulu-

mani there was the huge indigenous mobilization, and they besieged Chulumani,

because there was the caste, the colonial elite, well, huge and more powerful. . . . Thus, ten years later, Tupac Katari gets to know about this siege. . . . He gets to

know, and he says, “Right, there is the revolutionary seed.” . . . “There it is,” he says, and he moves there [to the Yungas] in order to do his military service. Recently married, with Bartolina. And there he starts to disguise his revolutionary activity with the activity of exchange. Tupac Katari was cocani [middleman or intermediary in coca trade]. . . . Thus, Tupac Katari said, “If I cut the supply of the big ex-

ploitation in Potosí and in other parts of the country, if I cut the coca, everything will break down, the Spanish activity will collapse, because it is sustained by the

coca,” this is what he said. Thus, “If I cut the supply, I will ruin the Spaniards; there I will take them down.” . . . The Yungueño peasant has a more pronounced

revolutionary consciousness compared to the peasants in the highlands; why?

Because of the economic importance of coca, the overexploitation was very pro-

nounced. . . . The siege of  La Paz is more or less a copy of the siege of Chulumani, right. . . . Thus, there, [Tupac Katari] meets Pedro Obaya, a youngster . . . with

temperament, because the oral tradition in Ocabaya states that here was living Pedro Obaya, that’s where the name of [the town] Ocabaya comes from. Pedro

Obaya was [Tupac Katari’s] right hand, his principal representative in the siege

of La Paz. Thus, look at this relationship. That’s what I responded [to]. That’s why, when they tore Tupac Katari in four parts in Peña [a town in the highland], they

took one leg to Chulumani in order to exhibit it. Ah, they discovered that the

seed of the great katarista movement was in Chulumani, and they went and said, “Take care that this does not happen with you.” Otherwise, why would they carry

a leg [to Chulumani]? They could have hanged it here in La Paz, if there wouldn’t

have been a revolutionary seed. Right, if not, why would they carry [the leg]? They needed three days to carry the leg. (Interview, March 10, 2011)

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 25

In Estrada’s narrative, Tupac Katari tried to copy the indigenous rebellion from the Yungas in La Paz, which gives the Yungas a special position in national history. As Estrada asserted in the interview and throughout the book, this idea is underlined by the description of  Yungueños as being intrinsically revolutionary and at the forefront of struggles that tried to free them first from colonial oppression and later from the oppression of the antinarcotics force. Similarly, Nelson Aguilar (2005:5), five years before Estrada published his book in the municipality, wrote that in 1771 “the town of Chulumani was the scene of one of the most important and dramatic uprisings of the indigenous Aymaras from the Chapi Yunkas against the colonial power of the Spaniards” (my translation). In 1781, these same communities participated “in the most important indigenous rebellion in the history of the Andes” (Aguilar 2005:5 [my translation]), and it was, also according to Aguilar, no coincidence that the Spaniards took one of the legs of  Tupac Katari to Chulumani after quartering him. Sinclair Thomson, the original author of this hypothesis, analyzed in great detail these social uprisings in the Yungas and La Paz during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and concludes that the siege of Chulumani was one of the most radical ones of the time (2002, 2006). When Ticona proudly recounted this argument in the interview with me, he added that under his presidency in the municipal council, they changed the motto from “Chulumani: Villa de la libertad” (town of freedom) to “Chulumani: Cuna de la libertad” (cradle of freedom), which refers to the hypothesis that Yungueños spearheaded the war of independence in the nineteenth century. This kind of rhetoric ties in very well with the identity politics of the government, particularly with Evo Morales’s speeches, in which an anti-imperialist attitude and a history of struggle are very much emphasized and homage to indigenous heroes is extensively paid (Morales, for example, named Bolivia’s first and only satellite “Tupac Katari”). In addition, although Yungueños and cocaleros in general have often been described as lacking deep historical roots as a social movement (see Rivera 2010), I suggest that they reclaim and reappropriate their long historical memory by connecting themselves in an explicit way to Tupac Katari. This is, in contrast to the above-mentioned strategies, not a recuperation of “tradition” but a reappropriation and reinterpretation of national history. In this way, they create new articulations between the Yungas and national history and create a very specific positioning in the discourse on indigeneity by focusing on struggles, rather than an intrinsic relationship with the land.

1 26  chap ter 4

The Long History of Land and People Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui coined the idea that social movements in Bolivia make reference to either a “long memory” or a “short memory,” whereby she refers to a historical memory and to a long-term or short-term history of struggles. With “long memory,” she refers to social movements with a historical experience of struggles against colonial and neocolonial powers (Rivera 1993; see also Albó 2008:14) and movements that ground their activities in the experiences of the Aymara uprisings in the eighteenth century, led by Tupac Katari (Rivera 1993). In contrast, short-term memory is associated with social movements that rely on struggles, political organizing, and demands that emerged after the national revolution of 1952, not during colonial or precolonial times. These movements are linked to the syndicalization of social movement politics and are organized as unions. Coca growers are generally mentioned as the most emblematic movement of this character, since many of them became so through the colonization of the lowlands, mainly in the Chapare region during the twentieth century and as a response to antidrug policies beginning in the 1960s. This distinction between social movements of short-term and long-term memory has now become commonplace in the literature on Bolivia. However, I want to expand this classic conceptualization of long and short memory by suggesting that Yungueños’ understanding of what the “traditional coca-growing region” is implies that it is not people who have a long memory or history but principally the land—because memory is politically constructed and, in addition, follows plainly economic interests. Thus, in contrast to the scholarly literature, Yungueños hold that what has a long history is the land, and it seems that from this perspective, people themselves—including “indigenous peoples”—cannot have a long history at all. For José, Cristóbal, and Rene, in their explications of  what traditional means, the term makes reference to a short history (dating from 1952), while ancestral mi­ lenario makes reference to a long history. Invoking this kind of long history by insisting on coca cultivation being “ancestral” and “milenario” is a way for them to reify themselves as “real” and “authentic” coca growers. It seems that while ancestral milenario makes reference to a defined natural space, traditional implies the idea and possibility of invention, as Eulogio articulated it by comparing it to a fiesta, because, as he said, anyone can just start celebrating fiestas at any time. This idea seems to imply that some practices are rooted in and

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 27

embodied by the land and soil, while others are not, and any people can take up at any time other “customs” or “traditions,” which are not thought to be localized in the geographical space. The same idea of history being rooted in the land rather than the people is also expressed when people say that cocaleros from the Yungas are the “originary coca producers.” The term originary (originario) refers to geographical space, particularly to being born in a specific place. As Maria, a young woman, told me, “ ‘Originary’ is what is current [es lo actual ], those who were born here. I am Yungueña, my father is Yungueño, but the father of my father was from Peru.” And when I asked her again, who the “originarios” are—because in the Yungas people from the highlands are often thought to possess purer traditions and language skills—she said, “The Yungueños who currently are [in the Yungas]” (interview, November 2010). Thus, for questions of being “originary,” where people come from in a line of ancestry is not important, nor does it bear any weight that Yungueño ancestors were migrants less than a hundred years ago. People often equate originario with the word lugareños ( gente del lugar, “people properly from this place”) or say that originario means the “essence of a place.” Most people in Piñapata hold that all Yungueños are “originary” of the Yungas, in the sense that they belong to the Yungas because they were born there. The definition of who is Yungueño and who is not is officially and formally defined by the place of birth (the jus soli principle). Thus, anyone born in the Yungas is Yungueño; he or she is neto yungueño, a lugareño, and a cocalero originario (originary coca grower). The term neto is very important here. Although Yungueños do not use the term authentic, they often use the term neto, which has a similar meaning: a kind of “real” and “proper” way to be and of being a wholly legitimate and recognized member of a specific social group. The term is generally used to indicate that someone is a formal and legitimate Yungueño because she was born in the Yungas and is socially part of  Yungueño society, thus, she is a proper and “real” Yungueño. They say, for example, about highlanders that they are “neto Aymara,” because they speak Aymara properly and are plainly defined by this. In addition, loyal followers of the MAS are called “neto MAS” because they plainly subscribe to the party. Thus, neto is difficult to translate exactly: Marisol de la Cadena (2000:275), for example, has extensively analyzed this term in the Peruvian context, in relation to negotiations of “indian” and “mestizo” categories. According to de la Cadena, neto does not need to be an idea of “pure tra­ ditions” but implies rural origins as well as urban education; in some parts of

1 28  chap ter 4

the book (for example, pages 30 and 276), she even translates the idea of neto into “authentic” and “indigenous.” In line with de la Cadena’s formulation, the closest translations in the Yungueño context are “real,” “proper,” and “authentic.” Thus, while ancestral milenario refers to an idea of “authenticity” in the sense of a proper and legitimate activity—of being neto—which is endorsed in the jus soli principle, the term traditional seems to make reference to a kind of opportunistic, illegitimate profit-seeking activity or person.2 Thus, the way Yungueños understand the government’s new term, ancestral milenario articulates with the locally used terms neto, lugareño, and originario, all of which put the history of the land, rather than the people, at the center. While the government changes the terms from traditional to ancestral milenario as part of its politics of indigeneity, however, Yungueños adopted the change of the terms but interpreted the terminology in a way that allowed them to authenticate their coca cultivation and to foster their economic aims without adopting the etiquette of being indigenous. Rather, by insisting that ancestral milenario refers to the land and thus invoking the long history of the land as a cocagrowing zone—and exactly not the long history of themselves as coca grow­ ers—Yungueños ensure their economic interests and claim a legitimate cocalero identity. Interestingly, the way Yungueños claim such legitimacy contrasts with that of Chapare peasants: Thomas Grisaffi notes that Chapare coca growers “have asserted their right to farm this product [coca] based on cultural arguments and through union and political action” (2010:430). In Grisaffi’s discussion, these cultural arguments seem to make Chapare peasants “indigenous people,” since they claim indigeneity through the coca leaf: “By delegating responsibilities to the millenarian hoja sagrada (sacred leaf ) the coca growers do not have to be forever present doing indigenous things, because conveniently the coca leaf stands in for the people concerned” (2010:427 [italics in the original]). In contrast, people in the Yungas not only put forth historic and legal arguments that derive from their position in Law 1008, and put much emphasis on the so-called traditional uses and qualities of their coca, but also have started a territoriality-like discourse. Thus, the discourse on “having history”—which Cordero used in the ADEPCOCA meeting to express his disagreement with the government’s proposed date for the national holiday—does not automatically lead to the self-expression of being “indigenous,” something the literature on indigeneity implicitly pre­supposes (cf. Jackson and Warren 2005). Although the idea that

What Ha s a Long His tory Is the L and   1 29

ancestral milenario refers to the long history of the land evokes scholarly discourse about indigeneity—in which, as Adam Kuper (2003) has argued, a “blood and soil” ideology is often prominent—it is difficult to capture the dynamics that take place in the Yungas in the context of this scholarly debate. Rather than being a means of indigenous self-identification, the way different terms—ancestral milenario, traditional, neto, lugareño, and originario—play out locally indicates Yungueños’ aim to ensure their economic advantages in the coca market and to distinguish themselves from other coca-growing regions such as the Chapare. Indeed, the relation with these other areas of coca production is mainly an economic issue, as the state assigns to each coca production zone a lim­ ited number of hectares, and coca prices are wholly regulated by supply and demand. Thus, even while the government invokes a culturalist discourse on coca and indigeneity, coca politics remains an arena of economic interests. As a consequence, Yungueños apply both protectionism and a free market approach where and when it suits them and use the elements of the discourse of indigene­ ity where it supports these economic, rather than cultural, aims. This is not only because Yungueños like to manipulate the market and might be viewed as egoistic (Spedding et al. 2013:274) but also because the discourse on indigeneity leaves only limited space for free market participation and social mobility, which is generally considered to be nonindigenous. By ascribing history to the land rather than the people, Yungueños secure for themselves economic possibilities and deny them to others. No matter how well others cultivate coca and no matter whether these others claim an indigenous identity, the “traditional zone” becomes a kind of brand that guarantees a unique selling position.

5 Indigenous Morality and the Immoral Economy

T

he market economy and an idealized indigenous morality—ideal­ ized, for example, in the discourse on “living well” (vivir bien)—have an ambivalent relationship with each other in the current context of  Bo­­ livia. In this chapter, I analyze this issue by looking at the relationship be­­ tween on the one hand Yungueños’ and on the other hand   jaqis’ conception of economy, and the government’s idea of indigenous morality. This relation­ ship becomes evident in the economic circuits of two substances that are vital in Andean rituals and ceremonies, in which the material and spiritual wellbeing of the community (that is, the “living well”) is invoked: coca and fat. Dis­courses on indigenous morality can be seen in local interpretations of the belief   in kharisiris (human fat stealers whose victims die), as an example of the ways different economies relate to moral practices. Through their very spe­ cific interpretation of the kharisiri, Yungueños affirm their position as afflu­ ent peasantry and express their understanding about the basic mechanisms of economic accumulation and social mobility. The relation between indigenous peoples and morality, which is expressed through the discourse on “living well,” has rhetorically been pushed by the Mo­ rales government, and morality is thought to be embodied by the indigenous peoples of the state. In Evo Morales’s speech at the United Nations in 2007, he explained what “living well” means and opposed it to “living better,” which makes reference to the capitalist system:

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  1 31

In order to live better sometimes it’s necessary to exploit, in order to live bet­

ter sometimes it’s necessary to steal, in order to live better sometimes it’s neces­

sary to discriminate, in order to live better sometimes it’s necessary to depredate, while living well is living in community, in collectivity, and not only between

humans, living well in harmony with mother earth; the earth is something sacred for the indigenous movement, the earth, the mother earth is our life, it’s mother earth, the Pachamama, as we say in our language. This cannot be converted into a

commodity, a business, the mother earth; if we are talking and protesting against

global climate warming, then first we have to understand that it is mother earth. If the earth gives us life, we are obligated to revise our politics but also to take up from our indigenous movement: we have lived in collectivity, in community, who

knows here there is a debate about collectivity, the communitarianism against capitalism; we should debate and gather these lived experiences in order to de­ fend life and in order to save humanity. (Morales 2008a [my translation])

According to Morales, “living well” refers to communitarianism, modesty, and environmentalism and is essentially anticapitalist. He closely relates the idea of   “ living well”—in contrast to the capitalist “living better”—to socialism; however, according to him, socialism needs to be redefined as “communitarian socialism” that emerges out of Andean rather than Western cultures.1 The idea of an Andean approach to “living well,” as opposed to capitalism, is not an in­ novation of the Morales government, although through Morales’s discourses it is diffused and enforced on a much wider scale; it can be viewed in the context of idealizations made about Andean societies as precapitalist or protocommu­ nist (see the discussion in Murra 1980). Even before Evo Morales’s presidency, some intellectuals discussed the con­ cept of   “ living well” (e.g., Medina 2001a, 2001b; Yampara 2001), but the integra­ tion of this concept into the New Political Constitution under Morales’s gov­ ernment fostered the production of a huge amount of writings on the topic (see Albó 2011; Farah and Vasapollo 2011). Rafael Bautista (2010), for example, while he is highly critical of the government’s discourses, very much embraces the idea of “living well” in his writings and likewise explicitly opposes the idea of “living well” to capitalism. According to Bautista (2010:42), capitalism depends on the destruction of the environment in order to produce, and he also asserts that capitalism presupposes a rationality that to produce more is an end in it­ self. He describes capitalism as a zero-sum logic, in which resources are imag­ ined as limited. In a similar way as Evo Morales does, Bautista summarizes the

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capitalist logic as “living better”: “ ‘Living better’ means a continuous state of dissatisfaction, which, as the process of accumulation (an infinite curve) con­ tinues, shows the chimerical (even defiant) issue of this avarice” (2010:64 [my translation]). And this, according to Bautista, produces a “collective suicide of humanity” (2010:64 [italics in the original; my translation]). In contrast, “living well” implies the logic of reciprocity and complementarity. It is anticapitalist and implies values such as environmentalism, sustainability, communitarian­ ism, justice, and dignity. It is a different way of   life, a life that is assessed qualita­ tively rather than quantitatively and does not aim at accumulation. In Bautista’s account, “living well” ultimately embraces a kind of humanist utopia. Other scholars, such as Freddy Delgado and colleagues (2011), see the idea of “living well” as a new concept for an “endogenous sustainable development.” Still oth­ ers make a connection between “living well,” solidarity, and either anticapital­ ism (Pagliccia 2011) or explicitly socialism (Hendel 2011). Morales’s discourses and the issue of “living well” have been criticized by many scholars (see Ali Condori 2012; Fabricant 2013; Goldstein 2012; Gutiérrez 2012; Postero 2007b; Spedding 2010) and have led to considerable debate in re­ cent years. David Ali Condori (2012:4), for example, argues that “living well” is a discourse limited to the central government: it is debated with much less in­ tensity in governments at the municipal level and has not had any concrete im­ pact on Bolivian society, because it has not led to any public politics. Criticiz­ ing the concept itself, Alison Spedding (2010) states that the whole discourse on “living well” lacks a close relation to actual practices, as well as an empiric foundation of its postulates. It exclusively attributes any reasoning of people to cultural rather than economic ideas and leaves out structural aspects of society that constrain or enable access to certain actions and behavior (Spedding 2010). Also, Goldstein (2012) argues that in Morales’s discourses, indigenous peoples are romanticized and become stereotypical representations of the past, of ru­ ral areas, and of another “race.”  This “race-space-time” (as Goldstein [2012:17071] calls it) has not altered; it has merely become inflected with positive value. Rather than serving as a different conception of “indigenous people,” as might be assumed in the aftermath of Morales’s election, it is thus still rather a nor­ mative question of   how they become represented. This discourse, which assigns morality to indigenous people by definition, sharply contrasts with the way Yungueños evaluate different economic prac­ tices, and that is where the horrifying stories about kharisiris come in. Here is a

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  1 33

representative story as told in the Yungas: A kharisiri is generally a person one does not know who sits next to you, makes you sleep, and steals your fat from below your ribs and kidneys. Kharisiris are generally active while people travel in the city and in rural areas. When kharisiris make people sleep, there is no way of resisting; they do so by blowing a powder of   human bones toward the victim or by doing something like hypnosis or by reciting the Lord’s Prayer backward. When people wake up, they do not feel anything; generally, they are just a bit weak and sleepy for some time. However, they lose their appetite, weight, and the motivation to do anything. When victims of kharisiris eat any kind of fish, they will vomit and become very ill, which is a major sign of being a kharisiri’s victim. People also say that, in some cases, after the person has died, a small scar appears where the kharisiri took out the fat. However, nobody knows for sure how kharisiris take out the fat. What I heard most often was that they use something like a syringe or camera, and in the latter case the kharisiri can take out the fat from far away. There are a great variety of   ways to cure kharisiri sick­ ness; some of them include preparing an infusion with the dry umbilical cord of a baby, drinking arnica (herbs prepared and sold in pharmacies), or eating soup made out of human meat or bones (which people get in the cemetery). Most important in this treatment is that the person who cures the patient (most often a family member or a traditional healer) must in no case tell the ill person that they have been attacked by a kharisiri, for if they did, the treatment would no longer work (which Spedding [2011:13] calls the “anti-placebo effect”). Accord­ ing to the stories told about kharisiris, people die when treatment comes very late, because as soon as the kharisiri has sold the fat he took out, there is no lon­­ ger a cure for the victim and he or she dies. What happens with the fat, however, is an open question. People generally are not sure about what kharisiris do with this fat; some think they sell it to hospitals to be used as medicine, and others think they sell it to traditional healers to cure kharisiri sickness. However, most people just know that the fat is sold in a sort of   black market for a very high price, just like “drugs” (which generally refers to cocaine). This last idea about what happens with the fat is striking, since people in the Yungas emphasize first of all the high price of human fat when sold on the black market, but they are very unsure about its further usage. Thus, the destiny of the fat is not what is most important about kharisiri stories (see Fernández 2006; Spedding 2011); the high economic value of fat is what determines the existence of the kharisiris.

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This account about kharisiris, although in some points specific to the Yun­ gas, resembles those told throughout the Andes (in Peru, the kharisiri is called pishtaco, ñak’aq, or nakaq). For Bolivia, Spedding (2011) has collected more than two hundred cases of kharsutas (people being ill of kharisiri) in the region around the capital city, La Paz (including the Yungas), and systematically ana­ lyzed them in terms of symptoms, treatments, and occupational and cultural background. In this chapter I focus on aspects specific to the stories told in the Yungas. The first is that kharisiris in the Yungas are perceived as being ex­ clusively from the highland region and are thus jaqis. They do, however, act in the highlands as well as in the Yungas. Second, Yungueños are very specific in thinking that the fat has the potential to generate a high income for poor peo­ ple that is comparable with the high income generated by the coca economy for people in the Yungas. So why do Yungueños think that people from the high­ land are kharisiris while they themselves are not? To answer this question we must analyze the cultural logic of how the phe­ nomenon of the kharisiri is interpreted—his “real” existence is debatable, al­ though he is a real person as described in the Yungas—and the way it expresses a moral system (see Herzfeld 1981 on the evil eye in Greece). To analyze this cultural logic also has its traps, since at the moment the “attack” happens there is no suspicion of Otherness: until cured, the person ill of kharisiri should not be told that the kharisiri is the cause of his or her illness (Spedding 2011). With the question I pose about why Yungueños perceive kharisiris to be exclusively highlanders, I do not want to argue that Yungueños fear highlanders as a kind of Other. Just because Yungueños think that kharisiris are mainly highland­ ers does not mean that they fear highlanders in everyday life—although they do take some precautions when accommodating highlanders in their houses as day-wage workers, such as not sleeping in the same room with them. For Yungueños, the coca economy and the fat economy are both market economies, while the fat economy is clearly less legitimate than the coca econ­ omy. This differing legitimacy stems from specific “modes of reasoning” (Roit­ man 2006) about the value of time, about social aspirations of consumerism, about culturally constructed ideas of wealth, and about their perceived position vis-à-vis the state. However, both economies challenge the discourse not only on indigenous morality but also on the idea of the peasant economy as a moral economy that is based on a subsistence ethic. E. P. Thompson (1971, 1991) and James Scott (1976), the most prominent exponents of the concept of a “moral economy,” imply with the term a “subsistence ethic,” and in both accounts, the

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  1 35

moral economy leads to rebellions that challenge the disproportional accumula­ tion of wealth by elites. In the case of the Yungas, however, people do not fol­ low a subsistence ethic and there are no rebellions. Rather, economic practices are evaluated on the way wealth, labor, and fair participation in markets come together and how individual and collective prosperity overlap. In this sense, the local moral economy is basically about the idea of a legitimate distribution of wealth, how wealth is related to labor and production, and how the distribu­ tion of wealth is politically negotiated and legitimated. As such, the notion of moral economy is not a separate realm from the market economy. The moral economy is not the “living well” invoked by the government; rather, in the Yun­ gas, capitalist market relations are very much part of ideas about moral person­ hood. As Marc Edelman (2005) has argued, the moral economy needs to be expanded beyond the subsistence ethic to take contemporary peasant societies into account. The moral economy in the Yungas is—to apply a description that Edelman (2005:337) has used for such contemporary rural societies—“a new, contemporary rural moral economy, informed by an urban imaginary and urban consumption expectations.” The kharisiri is part of so-called occult economies, which, as Jean Coma­ roff and John Comaroff (2000:313) argue, are characterized by the possibility to produce wealth without labor. The kharisiri makes gains without human labor by stealing the fat from the victims and then selling it on a free market that is regulated by offer and demand. Because the fat was stolen, rather than paid for—speaking in economic terms—the marginal revenue is much higher than when gains are made through the investment of   human labor. As an occult economy, the kharisiri exemplifies an “immoral economy,” be­ cause he uses immoral means to make individual economic profits that do not reenter the collective circuits of resources and labor. In using the term immoral economy   —  which is an analytical term—I draw attention to the economic di­ mension of the phenomenon as perceived in the Yungas. Immorality in this con­­ text describes the local idea of   what kind of economic practices trespass on the legitimate accumulation of   wealth. While accumulation and economic grow­ ing are important ambitions in coca peasant communities, their legitimacy highly depends on how they have been achieved. Coca and fat are both related to eco­nomic accumulation, and kharisiri suspicions express the moral tensions created by the circulation of commodities, money, and peasant labor. Consid­ erations about the functioning of the market, legitimate accumulation, and ex­ pected redistribution play a vital role when people try to make sense of who

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these kharisiris are and why they are acting in such a manner. A comparison of coca and fat makes clear that the kharisiri phenomenon is interpreted as an economic rather than an ethnic or a cultural phenomenon.

Kharisiris: White or Indigenous? The kharisiri phenomenon in the Andes has been mostly analyzed in the lit­ erature in terms of a symbolic expression about the fear of an external, ethnic Other. Generally, the kharisiri is conceptualized as a white Other (Castellón 1997; Manya 1969; Salazar-Soler 1991; Vallee and Palomino 1973; Weismantel 2000; Zapata 1989) who takes fat out of indigenous people, rather than be­ ing an indigenous person him or herself. Different authors describe them as white, bearded men wearing long black or gray coats and riding a horse or a mule (see Vallee and Palomino 1973:13). Historically, the kharisiri, or pishtaco (as it is called in Peru), has been perceived as a priest, since people believed that the fat was used for holy oils and for church bells, which were said to sound better when human fat was used in their fabrication (Szeminski and Ansión 1982:210). Today, medical doctors and nurses are also occasionally associated with the kharisiri, possibly because they “open” the body of people just like the kharisiri does, and the fat is said to be used in hospitals for curing (mainly skin) diseases (Castellón 1997). Although most scholars agree that the phenomenon of the kharisiri flourished in the colonial period, they recognize that this figure is a pre-Columbian one, having its roots in the ritual slaughterer.2 As a continuation of the idea that the fat stealers are the white Others, some scholars have proposed that they represent the exploitation of indians by the colonizers and today’s elites (Ansión 1989a; Ansión and Sifuentes 1989; Mo­ linié 1991; Szeminski and Ansión 1982; Weismantel 2000, 2001). The fat they take out stands for surplus labor, and the extraction of it signifies the extraction of labor power. However, even if the economic characteristics of the fat are taken into account, it still follows that the fat stealers are white Others, or at least people who are elites and live off the exploitation of indians. The same logic also lies behind arguments that look at the fat stealers as an expression of crisis among the poor and marginalized (Degregori 1989; Hua­ nacu and Pauwels 1998; Portugal 1993; Wachtel 1997). On the one hand, these scholars argue that the fat stealers emerge as an emblem of the political, eco­

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  1 37

nomic, and social crisis of modernization. On the other hand, they argue that creating rumors about fat stealers is a means of defending the collective iden­ tity of Andean people during such a crisis. These accounts, however, all im­ plicitly make an equation between exploitation, modernity, and ethnic or racial Others. Whether the kharisiri is effectively white or a modernized indian who is associated with the “white world,” many authors agree that kharisiris are gen­ erally located on the boundaries between oneself and the cultural Other and thus tell something about the people on both sides (Canessa 2000; CrandonMalamud 1991; Rivière 1991). In the Andes, these two sides are   jaqi (in Aymara) or runa (in Quechua) and q’ara. As we have seen throughout the book, a jaqi or runa is generally described as someone pertaining to an Aymara or Que­ chua community, while the q’ara is someone who is part of mestizo, often ur­ ban, society and thus a member of the upper classes. Andrew Canessa (1999, 2000) notes that the distinguishing element is the relations of reciprocity with other community members and with the spirits. In this latter case, fat plays a crucial role: it is not only the vital principle of life but also a major means of achieving personhood, which is attained by knitting a net of relations ever more tightly with the social community and the spirits. He observes that fat and its cognate substances play a major part in most rites de passage in Andean com­ munities (such as naming, or sutiyaña, and the first haircut, called ritucha) and thus contribute to the growing of a person as jaqi. Fat and bones, both associ­ ated with the kharisiri, symbolize vitality (fat) and wisdom (bones), and people ideally reach a balance between the two (Canessa 2000:709–11). The kharisiri breaks into the cycle of fat, destroying reciprocal relations—as there can be no reciprocity with the kharisiri (e.g., Flores Galindo 1987:54)—and using the fat outside its cycle. To cure the kharisiri disease, then, the fat needs to be brought back into its cycle, which is done by using the same human fat the kharisiri ex­­ tracted (Canessa 2000). Similarly, Peter Gose (1994) has shown how the circu­ lation of fat and water are interconnected and how important these are for the integrated formation of class and ethnic categories. In the Yungas, however, it is not the non-jaqis who are perceived to be fat stealers but the jaqis themselves—the highlanders who migrate to the Yungas. It is therefore not the exploiter but the exploited who extracts fat; not the rich­ est but the poorest ones; not the white people or those assimilated to urban culture but the most “indian” ones; not the one outside of Andean culture but

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the one who embodies Andean culture most. Is it therefore possible to say that the kharisiris in the Yungas are the “indigenous Others” instead of the “white Others”? In the Yungas, highlanders are thought to be more traditional than Yungue­ ños are. This is, for example, the case regarding their knowledge about rituals and healing, their more conservative dress, their reputation of   being united, and the speaking of the Aymara language. Equally, being a kharisiri has something to do with these traditions, as Yungueños think that it is something that needs to be learned, and they are convinced that highlanders learn this in a special school near Achacachi (a highland town). Interestingly, people from Achacachi are perceived as being the most indian by many Bolivians (Spedding 2011:46). However, highlanders are also perceived to be jaqis, which refers much more to economic conditions and epitomizes the logic of explaining perceived cultural differences in economic terms (see chapter 2). Importantly, the word   jaqi is far more used in everyday life than is indígenas (indigenous peoples). Yungueños seldom use the term indígenas on their own in everyday life, and although high­ landers might comply with the image of “indigenous peoples,” Yungueños do not generally use this frame to speak about them. In line with the observation that kharisiris in the Yungas are not necessarily whites or mestizos, there are some, although rare, accounts of kharisiris being indians in the existing literature. Wilfredo Kapsoli (1991:68), for example, notes that pishtacos do not need to be white people; they are often indians or black people. Similarly, Andrew Orta (2004) argues that the kharisiri does not create a boundary between self and Other, as he describes cases of kharisiri accusa­ tions from indians against other indians. The boundaries of inclusion, he ar­ gues, are situationally defined, and people might suddenly be accused of being fat stealers (Orta 2004:254). As another example, Nathan Wachtel (1994, in Canessa 2000) analyzes a case of a kharisiri accusation directed toward a shop owner among the ethnic group of the Chipaya, in which the ethnic background is not necessarily what accounts for the accusation, but rather the accused being marginal to the community, as he apparently does not participate in communal work and is one of the very few shop owners in the community. Wachtel’s case illustrates that the boundaries created through kharisiri accusations are not al­ ways strict ethnic ones but may take the person’s life course in the community into account. In addition, there are also some notions in the literature, often as minor com­ ments, that indicate the economic importance of becoming a kharisiri. Olga

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  1 39

Yana (2006:14–18), for example, notes that the main objective of extracting the fat is the high cash return (although, strikingly, the kharisiri’s economic condi­ tions did not improve). Comparing the phenomenon of the pishtaco to the sacaojos in Lima—although not entirely unproblematic because of the different importance of fat and eyes in Andean culture (see Canessa 2000)—Gonzalo Portocarrero Maisch and Isidro Soraya Irigoyen (1991:13) similarly state that the major motivation of this practice is perceived to be a high economic gain. Carlos Degregori (1989) even goes a step further and compares the fat trade with other lucrative economies, as he recounts that during the events related to Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Ayacucho, people were convinced that the government had sent pishtacos to rural areas to pay the country’s debts with the income from this business. People note that the government had chosen to pay these debts horrendously with the eyes and the fat of indians before turn­ ing to the alternative of doing so with the returns of drug trafficking, especially cocaine (Vergara and Ferrúa 1989:128). If we consider highland people to be “indigenous people,” then the kharisiri might really be the “indigenous Other” and therefore a kind of cultural, ex­ ternal Other. However, in Yungueños’ perspective, kharisiris are jaqis—a word far more embedded in everyday life than is indígenas, “indigenous people” (see chapter 2). Accusing jaqis of   being kharisiris is therefore not about ethnic Oth­ erness, since jaqis are not perceived as being an ethnic Other to Yungueño so­ ciety. Rather, jaqis share many cultural attributes but are involved in different— though overlapping—economic circuits. Kharisiris do not participate to the same degree in the coca economy and emerge because of the economic needs that the highland economy produces. However, by making money from the fat they steal, they circumvent fair market participation. This point became apparent as people in Piñapata commented on a kharisiri case in a nearby village.

Doing Business with Fat and Coca Maria is a woman around thirty years old who has lived in Piñapata for several years, as her husband is from Piñapata. She comes from a nearby village and a very large family with eleven siblings. She has no children, and she is known as a very skilled harvester and an especially hardworking woman; she repeat­ edly asserted to me that she loves her work. When her husband went to La Paz for work, she stayed in the community and managed her coca fields alone. She

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explained that she does not want to leave them, because they represent her ef­ fort, and she therefore feels securely bound to them. She and her husband live in a rented room, but two years ago, they started building their own house on a patch of   land they received from the peasant union, as many other young peo­ ple did. The house still needs to be finished, and Maria’s aim is to save money to move out of the small, rented room. Maria is part of a big harvesting group of people (between eight and fifteen persons) who work only in ayni (reciprocity) for each other. On one of these harvesting days, she told me about a kharisiri in her home community in the Yungas. In this community, there are many who migrated only recently from the highlands to the Yungas. The kharisiri was a man, and generally, kharisiris are men, and they walk during the nighttime, which is also what makes them deserving of suspicion. He was from Achacachi, a center of radical Aymara politics, and his father had a plot of land in the Yungas, where his son came to work and stayed there from time to time. Suddenly, a woman from the community became ill, and she died a few days later. When she was dead, a little cut appeared at the level of her ribs, and people knew it was a kharisiri’s work. But they did not know who the kharisiri could be, until they saw the man walking around and observing people from far away. The commu­ nity decided to expel him, but after some time he came back and a young man died of the kharisiri disease. The kharisiri disappeared but had been seen in the provincial capital. A few days later, Maria’s sister became ill after her mother bought fish; people say when someone eats fish, the symptoms of the khari­ siri disease show up. She vomited and had diarrhea and pain in her hips. To see whether it was really the kharisiri disease, her mother gave her beaten egg whites: if this alleviates the pain, it is kharisiri. Because people can live with the kharisiri disease for only twenty-four hours before dying (according to Maria), her mother quickly went to the pharmacy and bought a bottle of arnica. When I asked Maria what arnica is made of, she did not know, but she told me that people from the highlands know about these things. Her sister had to drink it warm by the spoonful and was cured. After some time, Maria’s brother-in-law also ate fish and became ill. This time, people had the kharisiri arrested by the police, who stripped him. He had a jacket on with many pockets, and in one of these he carried a small machine that was confiscated by the police. According to Maria, people say that it looks like a camera and there are buttons on it like a remote control, and with this the kharisiri can take out your fat from far away.

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Because this kharisiri lived in La Paz and is from Achacachi, Maria suspects that he learned how to extract fat in one of those places: his wife has a stall in La Paz where she sells sweets near a college, and she is the one who sells the fat. Maria suspects that they must have contacts with the people who buy this stuff. However, Maria is not sure who buys the fat; she thinks it must be people from the city. But she has no idea what it is used for. When I asked her why these people are always from the highlands, she said, “They must have no money, they must have seen it as a business, like we here with the coca. . . . That is what we are living from, from the coca; as Yungueños we almost do not dedicate our­ selves to this [extracting fat]; that is why people from there devote themselves to it” (interview, November 2010). On another occasion, I pressed Maria to tell me what happens with the fat, what it is used for. She answered that she did not know what it is used for and that the only thing she knew was that it is sold in secrecy, as drugs are sold; the people concerned surely would have their contacts and agreements (convenios) and know where and to whom they can sell it. In addition, she told me, the fat is said to be very expensive, just like drugs, and although people imagine the fat taken out by the kharisiris as being a thick liquid, she believes that the fat they take out is like powder, like cocaine. While Maria is very specific in thinking that the fat equates to cocaine in re­ gard to its high price, the selling of it on a black market, and its physical texture, other people in Piñapata compare in a more general way the economic impor­ tance of fat for the highlands with that of coca for the Yungas. Yola—who is a woman in her thirties, was born in Piñapata, and owns a relatively big coca field for her age—explained that the fat is sold at a very high price and that highland people have to engage in the fat business because they can harvest their potatoes only once a year and then sell them very cheaply, while people in the Yungas harvest their coca year-round. Gloria, another woman born in Piñapata, who is now in her forties, equally implies that this agricultural cycle is the reason why highlanders engage in the fat trade. She stated that highlanders are kharisiris because they learned how to do it, and when I asked her why Yungueños do not learn it, she explained that highland people have time for such things but that “we, Yungueños, don’t have time; we have so much work.” In general, people often say that highlanders are kharisiris because “they have seen the business” (han visto el negocio). As discussed in chapter 3, this expres­ sion has a particular meaning: “To do business” (hacer negocio) is related to social

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mobility. But the expression can, in some contexts, also have a murky connota­ tion and point to the uncertain legal character of an activity. As I traveled, for example, with people from Piñapata to the fiesta of a large town close to the city of El Alto near La Paz, which is known for its smuggling activities, people as­ serted that there people “live on doing business” and that this is why they have such nice, big houses. Flavio—who has lived for more than twenty years in Pi­ ñapata—explained that kharisiris are people like thieves (rateros) who want to acquire money quickly, and they take the fat in order “to do business”; they are “ambitious people,” as he said. Furthermore, José, for example, describes people who live entirely on retailing coca without producing coca themselves anymore as “people who ‘do business’ with coca,” which has a contemptuous undertone. People thus use the expression “doing business” when talking about stealing, smuggling, trading fat, commercializing coca, and drug trafficking—all activities that are totally or partly involved in shadow economies where goods are secretly sold. “Having seen the business” thus means that people found ways to make high economic gains without physical work by selling commodities on a market with an ambiguous character. In all these accounts there are some important aspects to point out that as­ sociate the idea of the kharisiri with the coca economy in general and in some specific points with the drug market. Fat is expensive, and it compensates for the cheap agricultural products cultivated in the highlands. As such, it parallels the coca economy in the Yungas: fat and coca are both commodities that achieve a high price and help people to build up a livelihood. In addition, through the no­­tion that kharisiris “do business” with fat, people express an analogy to other sha­­dow economies. However, Flavio’s expression that kharisiris are “like thieves”—actu­ ally, they are thieves, since they do not pay their victims and take the fat in a clandestine manner—points to the immorality of this particular activity. All accounts hold that fat is sold secretly, and Maria specifically compares this to the way drugs are sold. In her account, the shadow economy of fat is character­ ized by people who have established contacts, and knowing the social milieu thoroughly is necessary. The business is surrounded by secrecy, since nobody else knows where and to whom the stuff is sold. It is also a risky business, since the police may detain you, but it is also highly lucrative, as the fat is sold very expensively. The way in which the fat market is described regarding secrecy, contacts, risk, and economic gains is very similar to how people talk about their experiences as retailers when involved in partly unofficial activities and “doing business.” Since

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2006, coca growers have had the opportunity to work as retailers (as described in chapter 3). President Evo Morales passed a law that additionally allows coca growers to sell their coca directly to the consumer, which is not the case when selling it in La Paz, as there it is sold to intermediaries. People who registered to become retailers selected specific places to sell the coca all over the country. On the way to these places—for example, the lowland city Santa Cruz—there are many police checkpoints, where they need to get their permit stamped. Although most people retail their coca legally, there are some who are in­ volved in illegal activities (FM Bolivia 2010; Noticias.com.bo 2011). When peo­ ple talk about their partial involvement in the shadow economy while traveling as retailers, their accounts are always surrounded with some secrecy and make clear that they have special contacts with people who conceal their identity and are referred to only by nicknames. It is also clear that some of them take much risk in selling their coca, and they are nervous and afraid well before they reach their destination. It is dangerous, because there are many police checkpoints, but taking the risk is generally economically worthwhile, since they can sell their coca at a higher price than in La Paz (although not as high a price as if they sold it by the pound to consumers). They therefore express in their accounts the very obscure structure of shadow economies. Yungueños perceive being a kharisiri as a way of making a lot of money and compare it to the participation in coca trade. While making money out of fat is how some ambitious highlanders try to obtain money, making money out of coca is the Yungueños’ way. However, there is obviously a flaw in this logic, which states that highlanders are kharisiris because they are poor—as one could also suspect that urban, white, rich people have money because they are kharisiris, and one could ask why highlanders remain poor. In addition, it also seems contradictory that kharisiris are said to be poor highland migrants, while they seem to possess highly modern technology to extract the fat, such as the camera-like machine in Maria’s account. And finally, as discussed in chapter 2, it is not the case that all Yungueños are affluent and all highlanders are poor; there are also poor Yungueños in communities such as Piñapata, and there are highlanders who bought big coca fields and are perceived to make good eco­ nomic gains. So why are poor Yungueños not accused of   being kharisiris? On the one hand, poor Yungueños might not be accused of being kharisiris because they are still involved in the coca economy, which does not leave them time to dedicate themselves to other activities (as claimed by Gloria, above). Even if people own only small coca fields, as is the case with Ariel and Ediberto,

14 4  chap ter 5

they work year-round and earn a day wage on the fields of others. In contrast to the highlands, this is possible in the Yungas because there is a demarcated wage labor system. Highlanders, in contrast, do not have the possibility of earning a day wage in their own communities during extended agricultural resting peri­ ods; they need to migrate to the Yungas or other regions. On the other hand, successful highlanders in the Yungas still travel regularly to the highlands, where they thus potentially come in contact with ways to learn these techniques. How­ ever, being successful through the coca economy in the Yungas—which means owning a patch of   land and a prosperous coca field—seriously reduces the likeli­ hood that highlanders will be accused of   being kharisiris. In general, the accusation of being a kharisiri is tightly linked to the degree to which people are involved in the coca economy and thus to the degree to which they grow alongside their fields (see chapter 2), for both Yungueños and highlanders; but for Yungueños as coca growers, this is obviously much more self-evident and much less questioned. The kharisiri as being a poor indian ex­ emplifies the lack of moral economic growing through coca, although at the national level, both highlanders and Yungueños would belong to the category “indian.” Rather than symbolizing fear of an ethnic Other, the interpretation of the kharisiri phenomenon in the Yungas shows a lack of comfort with deceit­ ful profits—with doing business without complying with honesty in the mar­ ket, which means paying an adequate price for a purchase by considering labor costs. Thus, in the Yungas, for example, day wages are closely tied to coca-leaf prices—which again are based on offer and demand—and strictly follow its in­­ creases and decreases: when coca prices go up, day-wage laborers of the big har­­ vesting groups demand higher wages, which people in Piñapata are obliged to pay if there are no other laborers around who are ready to work for a lower wage. Yungueños are thus part of a highly monetized labor market system, and the most natural thing in such a system is that time and labor each has a de­ fined value that needs to be remunerated—which in turn is a basic principle of the moral economy. It is this basic principle which the kharisiri violates.

The Moralities and Immoralities of Fat, Coca, and Drugs The coca economy contains both legal and illegal aspects and gives Yungueños the possibility for economic accumulation and redistribution in their communi­ ties. Although not based on a subsistence ethic, it is a kind of   “moral economy”:

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  145

based on a locally perceived fair remuneration of peasant labor—one that facili­ tates becoming part of a local middle class—it creates resources that allow for full market participation. Growing alongside their coca fields, participating in local monetized labor systems, and “doing business” by retailing coca—all these activities imply that resources flow back to the community in one form or an­ other and that people are integrated in these communities by having access to land. The coca economy thus provides the means to maintain an economic level locally defined as adequate and through means that imply a fair participation in the market. Kharisiris do their business out of an economic need by making use of im­ moral practices: their economic growth is based on theft and the death of their victims. There is no clear relationship between wealth and labor, and their mar­ ket participation does not follow the rules, as they are part of “occult econo­ mies.” Because the kharisiri causes harm and death to his victim, the immoral­ ity of stealing fat and the horror these figures cause lie in the importance of fat as a life-providing substance, as well as a substance for rituals and conceptions of personhood (Canessa 1999; Crandon-Malamud 1991; Fernández 2008). In addition, the eventual wealth that is generated through fat stealing does not return to the reproduction of community life, neither between people nor in the relation between people and spirits. The kharisiri generates wealth without physical work, which stands in sharp contrast to the morality of accumulation through coca cultivation, wherein year-round hard work is necessary and so­ cially expected. Although in some ways compared to the illegal trade of coca and drug, in the “production chain” of fat there is no human labor involved. By creating rewards from other people’s fat, kharisiris contribute to the “com­ modification of human beings” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003:151, on zombies), something that the coca economy does not do. Quite interestingly, the case of the kharisiri in the Yungas is comparable to other phenomena, such as witches in (mainly West) Africa (Ardener 1970). An especially interesting example comparable to the kharisiri study of the Yungas is Peter Geschiere’s (1997) ethnographic case of witchcraft in Cameroon. He shows how the ambiguous character of witchcraft—at the same time trying to overcome inequalities and creating new ones by accumulating power—eas­ ily integrates changes of a wider scope and “modernity.” As in the Yungas, the danger of occult forces comes from within, not from outside, since in Cam­ eroon, changes on the macro-scale are reinterpreted through the suspicion of witchcraft from within the family. Kharisiris in the Yungas and witches in Af­ rica are therefore similar in the sense that they are both perceived as being real

146  chap ter 5

people who acquire economic accumulation through immoral practices and as constituting a danger from within. In both cases, people identify witches and kharisiris as such only in the interpretation of an event after it has happened. In addition, both accusations cause one to have fear not only about his economic or social basis in the community but often also about his life (e.g., Los Tiempos 2010, on intended lynching of accused kharisiris). Comparable phenomena in Latin America—such as the devil pacts—have generally been interpreted in terms of a contradiction between a moral econ­ omy based on subsistence production and an emerging capitalism that exploits the peasant labor force. Michael Taussig (1980), for example, analyzed the be­ liefs in Colombia about devil pacts that are thought to create sudden wealth, and he suggests that they emerged alongside increasing capitalism, which in­ cluded agrarian wage labor and led to the proletarianization of the peasantry. In this sense, he argues, such beliefs about the illegitimate creation of wealth have their origin in the local exploitation of the labor force. Revising a story about a devil pact in Costa Rica, Edelman (1994) has expanded this perspective and argues that such narratives do not necessarily rely on exploitative relations of production but that they reify a kind of hypermasculinity: individuals who en­ ter into devil pacts are admired and envied as well as despised and condemned. However, kharisiri stories in the Yungas do not represent resistance to capi­ talism. Rather, Yungueños’ involvement in market or capital relations directly contributes to their becoming full-fledged members of the community. In ad­ dition, kharisiri stories in the Andes existed well before the rise of capitalism (Canessa 2000:715). Further, while Yungueños assert that highlanders are poor and that this makes them potential kharisiris, they do not perceive that this poverty is based on exploitative labor relationships: they ascribe the poverty of highlanders to the production system and the cultivated products themselves, which do not reach such a high price as coca does. Although some exploitation takes place at the local level when Yungueños employ highlanders, this kind of exploitation is still part of a peasant economy rather than of capitalist produc­ tion. In addition, Yungueños would deny that there is exploitation at all, since they perceive themselves to be the ones who pay the highlanders a fair day wage and think that they help the highlanders in acquiring badly needed cash rather than exploit them. However, even if we assume that there is exploita­ tion regarding highlanders, this means that in contrast to the Colombian case on devil pacts, it is those who exploit others who hold these beliefs about the exploited—not the other way round.

Indigenous Mor alit y and the Immor al Economy  147

In the Yungas, kharisiri stories are related to the realm of peasant produc­ tion, but they do not create a contrast between wage labor and subsistence, because almost any form of labor arrangements (including nonmonetary ones such as ayni) can be converted into a wage labor system, and to pay wage labor­ ers does not create a social boundary. Edelman (1994), for example, describes the case of a man who suddenly became wealthy and resembled a landlord be­ cause he had wage laborers; as a result, he was accused of having made a devil pact. In contrast to this, however, in the Yungas, those who become affluent and are able to pay day-wage laborers might be those who are the least likely to be accused. It is specifically the possibility of being able to acquire external wage laborers—who work on the field and whom everyone sees from far away—that makes a successful coca grower. Although Yungueños contrast the economies of coca and fat regarding no­ tions of moral personhood, in the end, both cut through the logic of moral­ ity expressed in public government discourses, which is often associated with the indigenous sphere: indigenous people are “the moral reserve of humanity” (Morales 2006), as Evo Morales has called them in the context of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist statements. In these discourses, immorality therefore be­ comes constructed as part of the nonindigenous sphere, which stands in sharp contrast to Yungueños’ conception of immoral indian kharisiris. However, coca and fat, I suggest, are part of   both the indigenous and the nonindigenous realm: In their natural form, they are perceived as part of the indigenous, moral sphere, as they are part of indigenous rituals, of conceptions of the body, and of recip­ rocal relationships with the spirits. In their extracted and eventually processed form, they pass officially to the nonindigenous realm: sold to doctors or priests who are part of urban upper classes, turned into cosmetics for nonindigenous people, or consumed as cocaine in the United States and Europe. Coca and fat, therefore, although clearly distinguished by Yungueños with relation to eco­ nomic accumulation and fair market participation, need to be analyzed in an in­­ tegrated framework. Upon leaving their “natural” circuits, they go beyond eth­ nic categorizations and enter into a global capitalist system. The coca economy is part of this global capitalist system, and as Edelman (2005) has suggested, the new moral economy implies sensibilities about distri­ bution and sovereignty beyond the local level. But this does not imply an anti­ capitalist or antimarket ideology, I would add, such as the idea of an “indigenous morality” implies. The coca economy implies the possibility of   becoming affluent based on peasant labor and commerce, and this success is very much based on

148  chap ter 5

being able to understand how the market works and to participate in it accord­ ing to its rules, not by ignoring them, such as the kharisiri does. The way Yun­ gueños interpret the kharisiri stories expresses a lack of comfort with deceitful profits, rather than a general discomfort with free market economies. The moral economy of coca is bound to honesty in the market, where people are expected to pay the real value of something they acquire and to make gains through the investment of labor. The immoral economy of stealing fat is bound to incom­ pliance with market rules—getting something for nothing, thus, theft—and a failure of making profits out of peasant labor. In contrast to the government’s discourse on indigenous morality, Yungue­ ños assign immoral practices—such as stealing fat—to indigenous peoples, to jaqis. Highlanders do not participate in the coca economy as Yungueños do and thus stand, apart from selling their labor force, outside of a local market system and mercantile logic, which is specifically bound to the coca economy. By standing outside of the coca economy and its mercantile logic, highland­ ers epitomize a communitarian ethos that contrasts with the high moral value that Yungueños put on individual economic gain. This communitarian ethos is part of the pejorative characteristics of the jaqi, rather than the noble way of an indigenous “living well.”  The kharisiri seems to break with this communitarian ethos, because he aims at accumulating individual wealth. While this could be interpreted as suiting Yungueños’ ethic of accumulation, which implies marketbased and sometimes individualistic initiatives, this is not the case, because the kharisiri specifically does so through immoral means—theft and death—rather than through the coca economy. Yungueños’ perceived legitimacy to accumu­ late wealth is bound to the specificities of coca: it is at the same time a product of indigenous spiritual importance and a lucrative commodity. As Yungueños interpret the kharisiri phenomenon in economic rather than ethnic terms, they break with the discourse on “living well,” which explains people’s behavior pri­­ marily through cultural arguments. Thus, coca is part of the government’s dis­ course on an indigenous “living well” even while in local communities it cre­ ates market-based social relations, which are part of a global market economy where coca and its derivate substances enter as yet another consumer product.

Conclusion

Y

middle class with increasingly entrepreneurial, market-based activities in both production and commerce. They experience an increased standard of  living together with a reinforcement of their coca peasant identity in the context of  the government’s identity politics, with Morales being—from their view—a “coca-growing president” rather than an “indigenous president.” By experiencing social mobil­ ity, Yungueños illustrate the shifting articulations between ethnic identities and wealth in the plurinational state of Bolivia. These shifting articulations and the emergence of new middle classes create new political positionings. Instead of positioning themselves as “indigenous people,” Yungueños have created a notion of being “real peasants,” while at the same time they understand themselves as a socially upward-moving group. As Nico Tassi (2010) has noted for affluent urban indigenous groups, they detach the idea of a middleclass standard of   living from other social and economic practices of middle-class life. Yungueños’ new “peasant middle-classness” is based on lucrative peasant labor, not on ideological, educational, or ethnic criteria. Their prosperity emerges only so long as they remain rooted in the production process, and thus without becoming exclusive traders or retailers. By using the term middle class in a self-referential way, Yungueños challenge the idea of middle class as an ethnic and occupational category, as it is broadly held to be in Latin America (see Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999). ungueños are an emerging peasant

1 50 conclusion

While Yungueños experience social mobility without becoming mestizos, they also reject being   jaqis: I open the book with the anecdote about Nora contemptuously noting that she and the other Yungueños are not jaqis anymore— something she anchored in the fact that Yungueño hosts offer the more expensive Coca-Cola instead of a cheap imitation at their fiestas and other gatherings. As Yungueños, they have expanded economic possibilities, and rather than con­­ ceptualizing the term jaqi as a respectful recognition of having achieved full personhood in compliance with a communal way of life, Yungueños put a lack of economic power at the center of the term and evaluate this lack of economic power contemptuously (as described in chapters 2 and 5). That such a lack of economic power is deserving of contempt can also be seen in the fact that Yungueños accuse only poor highlanders of being human fat stealers and assign to them immoral practice—immoral because they cause death, ignore fair market participation, and deny the creation of wealth out of peasant labor. The way Yungueños interpret the kharisiri stories reinforces their position as an affluent peasantry who create legitimate wealth. This disrupts the way we think about indigenous peoples: Yungueños do not simply contradict Evo Morales’s discourse on indigenous peoples being anticapitalist but have even created their own capitalist ethos, and they perceive the market as such—as moral. Instead of embracing indigeneity, Yungueños are constructing a specific kind of middle-classness that is not bound to urban spaces or becoming mestizos, and thus they are conceptually located in a gap of national and global ideas of belonging—as “neither” or “in-between.” While reluctantly being included in the government’s identity politics on “indigenous peoples,” Yungueños have carved out a space for themselves between the common identity categories of “indigenous,” “nonindigenous,” and “mestizo,” and—rather than creating no­ tions of  indianness—they have created their own notion of  what “real” and, spe­­ cifically, “traditional” coca growers are. As such, they have chosen to frame their political activism in terms other than indigeneity. The specific features of the coca economy (see chapter 2) are what allow for the emergence of these new political positionings: the steady production cycle and the high demand for an external labor force; the high price of coca leaves and the stable national (and international) demand for it; the high quality of Yungueño coca because of the altitude where the crop is grown and the Yungueños’ thorough knowledge of coca cultivation; and the possibility of transforming almost any labor arrangement, including the Andean principle of reciprocity, the ayni, into a wage labor system. Emerging entrepreneurial activities

Conclusion 1 51

and the employing of others are not uncontested within the local community, and not everyone agrees that they lead to social mobility. They do, however, lead to an increasing disarticulation between economic prosperity and ethnic identity. The coca economy is a special economy. It is both a cash crop and partly a drug economy, while it cannot simply be compared to either of them. Thus the legal status of coca is one issue that structures this economy in a very specific way, and the other is its relation to notions of indigeneity. Very much in contrast to cash crop economies in general (such as, for example, coffee) and to plainly defined drug economies (such as poppy and cannabis), coca can in some cases index indigeneity (see Grisaffi 2010). This combination of aspects of indigenous identification and the importance of coca as a market product has its historical roots in the expansion of the mines: as Jane Mangan argues, “The trade of coca leaf is exemplary of economic changes in this era [mid-sixteenth century], because it shows the transformation of a product with highly ritual significance into one with commercial purpose” (2005:30). However, the special significance of coca is also tightly linked to the current identity politics of the Morales government that turn on the discourse on “indigenous peoples” and on “living well.” “Indigenous peoples” are supposed to produce culture, not cash, and coca is actually part of these cultures. Neither other cash crops like coffee nor other raw products like cannabis and poppy index indigeneity in the way coca does. Interestingly, the coca economy combines a mercantile logic with as­­so­­ ciations with indigeneity, although producers do not necessarily actively claim such an indigenous status. The coca economy is thus a kind of market economy combined with the idea of noncapitalist culture. In contrast to common notions of market productions that are integrated into a capitalist system, the coca economy is not necessarily related to environmental destruction, an extraction economy, or depletion—at least through the cultivation methods used in the Yungas. Yet Evo Morales, some government representatives, and some intellectuals (e.g., Bautista 2010) explicitly connect capitalism with environmental destruction, and this link underlies the rheto­ ric on “living well” (vivir bien). Thus in 2008, during the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples meeting at the United Nations, Morales stated that ca­ pitalism needs to be eradicated to save the planet from global warming (El País 2008) and that “either we follow the path of capitalism and death, or we advance the indigenous path of harmony with nature and with life” (Mora­­ les 2008b). Although Hans Salm and Máximo Libermann (1997), for example,

1 52 conclusion

present ample evidence that coca growing does not damage the environment, coca growers are often accused of doing so (see Conzelman 2007a). If we consider that their activity does not damage the environment, coca cultivation thus might be seen as a kind of market economy that is part of a global capitalist system but nevertheless compatible with the idea of  “ living well.” New commercial possibilities—such as retailing all over the country—however, have led Yungueños to distance themselves from the idea of “indigenous people” and have moved them closer to the idea of “middle class.” Yungueños’ level of consumption, their employing of day-wage laborers, and their investment in business ventures have significantly increased, and the evolving retailing activities account for the expansion of the wage labor system into the realm of production. This move toward the middle class, however, is critically assessed in a syndicalist discourse dominant in Yungueño communities. Prosperous retailers thus pose a problem to Lucio’s “three-strata model” (discussed in chapter 3) because by working in production and laboring on the earth, Yungueños still pertain to the peasantry, but they experience economic power that goes beyond. Retailing does not merely allow for an increased level of consumption and the increasing of external labor but also opens up new national experiences. As Rudy, Yola, and Nora travel to distant places to sell their coca directly to consumers, the idea of creating national economic movements becomes an embodied experience. These national experiences, however, are not equally accessible to everyone, and many people in communities like Piñapata cannot afford to participate in retailing activities, on the one hand because they do not have coca fields or enough capital to comply with the requirement of supplying six takis of coca leaves each month, and on the other hand because getting a retailing license involves bureaucratic processes that are very costly. The definition of being “real” peasants, or a “real” coca grower more specifically, also implies a redefinition of “tradition” and “history” (as analyzed in chapter 4). By reinterpreting “tradition” and “history,” although referring to the language of indigeneity, Yungueños reify themselves as “real,” “authentic,” and “traditional” coca growers. Reinterpreting these terms and reifying themselves as the only legitimate coca growers, they follow economic aims and set themselves apart from other coca growers, such as those from the Chapare. Thus, to use history and tradition does not mean that Yungueños would reify themselves as “indigenous.” Yungueños are selling the value of the territory they live on and the value of the plant they cultivate, not their own ethnic value. This is not the same as claiming a long line of ancestry or of “having been here since

Conclusion 1 53

before,” as they are putting the long history of the land at the center of their discourse, rather than the history of themselves. For these coca peasants to claim a long-term history between people and territory is problematic, because Yungueños today are migrants from only a few generations ago and the coca economy in the Yungas has long depended on the influx of migrants from the highlands (see chapter 1). This conclusion contrasts with the literature that assumes ethnicities to gain major market value by making ethnicity a “brand” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff observe, “[T]raditional leaders had decided to move the politics of ethnicity into the marketplace” (2009:7) and started to commercialize their ethnic identity—making it a “brand”—and transforming it into a commodity. In the case of coca, however, it is not that coca growers would sell their ethnic identity: the political struggles for recognition of the coca leaf in the context of the War on Drugs was probably more powerful for their political positioning than any ethnic value attached to them (see chapter 1). By creating their own political space and filling it with a very specific notion of  “coca growers,” Yungueños set themselves apart from other social sectors, because to make reference to the discourse on indigeneity would reluctantly unite them with these others. The global notion of indigeneity is one that facilitates alliances and a common struggle against historical injustices (see Niezen 2003; see also the discussion in the introduction). However, coca growers are especially hesitant about such a transnational alliance: they are a highly fragmented group, not only because their conditions are regulated by different national laws, which makes it very difficult to find a common cause (for example, with Colombian coca growers [see Ramírez 2011]), but also because within the single national jurisdiction of   Bolivia there is a struggle centered on economic and symbolic privileges because coca cultivation is—to use Georg Foster’s (1965) term—a “limited good,” as the amount of   legally cultivated hectares is constrained. As Yungueños try to maintain a privileged economic situation, they constantly need to negotiate their own benefits and the ways they want to share these with others. Rather than trying to find allies and uniting them, therefore, Yungueños make an effort to create differences. The creation of differences goes along with a shift in Yungueños’ structural position as an emergent middle class—and some of them use this very same term. In the next part of the discussion, I lay out this issue in more detail by reflecting on how a middle-class standing and a peasant identity are brought

1 5 4 conclusion

together and what this means for our conceptualization of  “middle class.” I also consider the main paradox that arises out of   Yungueños’ reluctance toward the discourse on indigenous peoples and discuss what this means for our conceptualization of  “indigeneity.”

The Plurality of Middle Classes The question of   whether peasants or workers who become affluent really change their class position, from a structural point of   view, is an old debate that has been discussed under the issue of “embourgeoisement.” The original proponents of this concept, Mark Abrams and Richard Rose (1960), argued that the increasing prosperity of   workers would lead them to shift their class position and their political orientation (cf. Goldthorpe et al. 1967, 1969; Savage 2005). However, John Goldthorpe and colleagues, who a few years later conducted their classic study about the “affluent worker” in Britain, denied that the workers whom they interviewed changed their class position. According to these authors, it was much harder for workers to get where a white-collar worker might stand, and they had fewer possibilities for further occupational development. Although their consumption increased, their consumption style differed from that of the classic middle class. In addition, affluence did not have an impact on their political orientation (Goldthorpe et al. 1967). Class position, according to the authors, is therefore dependent not only on income and consumption but also on the position people occupy in the social division of labor and, thus, in the realm of production (Goldthorpe et al. 1969:24). In contrast to the embourgeoisement hypothesis, they proposed that the rapprochement between the classes happens through conceptual models of collectivity and individuality: while the collectivism of the working class became weaker, white-collar workers became less individual and more family-centered (Goldthorpe et al. 1969:27). Although the study about the affluent worker related to a specific time in British society, in regard to coca peasants this raises the question, are Yungueños simply affluent peasants or are they changing their class position and really becoming middle class? Yungueños are still primarily engaged in the realm of production, rather than commerce or service, and have thus not changed their occupational position. However, the time they invest in business activities has expanded in the last few years. Their political orientation is also likely to differ from that of the mestizo middle class, although Evo Morales has received

Conclusion 1 55

political support not only from peasants and miners but also from middle-class intellectuals. Actually, Yungueños do not want to become part of the mestizo middle class at all. As Andrew Canessa has noted, economic growth, increased consumption, and access to capitalist markets are the basic aims of coca growers, while at the same time they clearly distance themselves from urban mestizo society: Coca growers and urbanites see themselves as excluded parts of the nation and want their rights protected from global capitalism, large scale landowners, and a

mestizo creole elite which has long dominated Bolivia’s political and economic

life. Their discourse may be anti-capitalist on one hand in the sense of being against large multinational corporations but [it] clearly seeks economic growth in

capitalist markets; they simply want better access to these markets. In the case of coca growers, they seek the legalization of [the] market. In this context, opening up new areas for coca growing or destroying the highlands plains for the extraction of lithium makes perfect sense; it is about creating wealth and distributing

resources to a majority group who have been largely excluded from power and

do not want to join the mestizo middle class, although they clearly do want to increase their consumption. (Canessa 2012a:30)

To aspire to become part of a peasant middle class does not mean that Yungueños want to join the mestizo middle class in the sense of the embourgeoisement debate. Rather, they emerge as a “parallel middle class,” to speak with Jeff Himpele’s (2003) term. He uses this term to describe indigenous businesspeople in La Paz and argues that rather than becoming integrated into the mestizo middle class, these businesspeople enhance their own (indigenous) social status and thus compete with the mestizo middle class. However, similar to the way Goldthorpe and colleagues’ approach is limited by its focus on a Western context and looks mainly at the middle class in the singular, Himpele’s approach is incomplete in the sense that there is not just one westernized mestizo middle class and one urban indigenous “parallel middle class.” Instead, I suggest that there is a middle class that is neither mestizo nor in­­ digenous. In the Bolivian context, middle classes must be thought about in the plural and beyond the mestizo-indigenous dichotomy. The various middle classes orient themselves on differing values, ambitions, and symbols of prestige, but they all have in common the aim of expanding their participation in national society (see Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Liechty 2003). This means that in Bolivia,

1 56 conclusion

there are more than two parallel middle classes and thus diverse ways in which ethnic identity and class position are linked with each other. In addition, class is not just a position but also a project, as Sherry Ortner (2003:13–14, in Dickey 2012:562) has argued, and for Yungueños, their prosperity and engagement in employing and commerce constitute such a contemporary project. This project, which they follow as coca peasants, creates new political positionings and impacts on their self-perception of having a middle-class standing—even though mestizo middle classes might be highly skeptical of or reject it. To become middle class and to simultaneously maintain a peasant identity, such as the Yungueño case indicates, is novel in the context of Latin America. Generally, the accumulation of wealth and social mobility are associated with a simultaneous shift in ethnic identifications, and these identifications are often thought to be mutually exclusive in mainstream political discourse (see de la Cadena 2000). Thus, as Marisol de la Cadena (2000) has argued, people are ex­­ pected to be either “indian” or “mestizo,” and with migration to urban centers and increasing prosperity, people are expected to shift their self-expression from indian to mestizo identities. However, as de la Cadena’s research on so-called grassroots intellectuals has shown, people often combine such categories in un­­ expected ways, being “indigenous” and “mestizo” at the same time. As she argued, although people challenge the dominant discourse by combining these ethnic categories in new ways, they also very much follow the dominant hierarchies and power relations in that they still place “indians” at the bottom and thus reproduce racism. Yungueños, by applying the word jaqi to highland migrants, do in fact reproduce an urban middle-class attitude toward poor, indian populations (see chapters 2 and 5). Yungueños do not, however, combine the issues of “indigenous” and “mestizo” as is the case with de la Cadena’s “indigenous mestizos”; they instead combine “peasant” and “middle class.” This Yungueño “peasant middle-classness” does not focus on ethnic issues but is strongly bound to their political positioning as “coca growers.” Entrepreneurship and middle-classness do not depend on a permanent migration to the city (although often there is dual residence in the city and the village). The econo­mic resources that form the basis of this middle-classness are generated entirely through the coca economy and involve production as well as commerce. Thus, although Yungueños’ engagement in coca commerce is a significant springboard for their social mobility, the basis for economic success still lies in the production of coca leaves—they are “doing business” while they are at the same time engaged in peasant production and physical labor. Even the richest people in the

Conclusion 1 57

community still work every day in the field, although with more paid day-wage laborers around them and an increased engagement in commerce. Their political position corresponds to their everyday economic interests—which center on the coca leaf—and is one of  “coca growers.” Although novel in its specificities, the case of the Yungas is not unprecedented. It nicely relates to Otavalo textile artisans and merchants that Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld has described as the “native leisure class” (as discussed in the introduction). In both cases, the issue is about the creation of rural wealth, and in both cases, rural “indigenous” people engage in a market economy and become prosperous but do not change their ethnic status to mestizo identification. Thus, the inhabitants of Ariasucu in the Otavalo valley maintain a strong emotional and cultural link to their native community despite their social mobility in national society. In addition, the Otavalo case shows that social mobility and the emergence of a “native leisure class” are significantly fostered by the fact that these people became entrepreneurs themselves without allowing for outside middlemen who would commercialize their textiles (ColloredoMansfeld 1999:14). In addition, Colloredo-Mansfeld (1999:xii) mentions that com­­ mercial possibilities created increased social fragmentation and that in such a situation, consumption replaces other common cultural practices and becomes an important pillar in negotiating social identities. In the case of the Yungas, middle-classness is not merely bound to increasing consumption but also derives from the increasing ability to invest money in paying day-wage laborers and buying others’ coca leaves. Both of these investments are visible by others and underline a coca grower’s economic ascendency. By starting a business and engaging in retailing, people have less time to work in and expand their fields but have more economic possibilities of doing so through the paying of day-wage laborers. Through engaging in business, Yungueños foster the idea of upholding the national economy by “creating movement,” increase their perceived societal participation, and reposition themselves toward other peasant societies. Further, middle-classness is also linked to being able to afford cars, houses, and urban education for their children. Thus, both the increased economic purchasing power and the occupation in doing business or employing others on the coca field are part of how middle-classness is expressed and experienced in everyday life. The peasant middle class in the Yungas and Colloredo-Mansfeld’s native leisure class in Otavalo are both examples of postpeasant identities which Michael Kearney (1996) described (see Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999:161).

1 58 conclusion

Another resemblance to the Otavalo case that can be seen in the Yungas is the fact that increased social mobility for some—to emerge as a peasant middle class—does not mean that everyone in such a peasant community experiences expanding economic opportunities and societal participation. By suggesting that coca growers are part of an emerging peasant middle class, I am not suggesting that all coca growers get rich or become entrenched elites. This general upward mobility is not equally accessible to all Yungueños, and there is a demarcated socioeconomic stratification in Yungueño society. Such increased socioeconomic differentiations, however, often go along with a discourse of equality. Maria Lagos (1994), in her ethnography about peasants in Cochabamba, describes how after the land reform a merchant class emerged that extracted the surplus of the peasants through practices disguised as “traditional,” equal, and reciprocal, such as coparenthood (compadrazgo). Internal social differentiation of peasant communities took place, but such stratification was covered up by egalitarian discourses. In a similar way, although on a state level, the current identity politics of “living well” are permeated by an imperative of reciprocity, complementarity, equality, and community, while at the same time, under the Morales administration, there seem to be expanding possibilities for new processes of social differentiation. While Otavaleños are still proudly indigenous, however, people from Piñapata in contemporary Bolivia under Evo Morales’s presidency are not only proud coca peasants from the “traditional zone” but also proudly MAS—Morales’s political party, Movimiento al Socialismo. While from my ethnographic descriptions and the way Yungueños only reluctantly embrace the discourse of indigeneity it could be assumed that they might be very critical of the government, the contrary is true. People from Piñapata are fierce supporters of the MAS; indeed, Piñapata is probably the one community in the region that supports the MAS the most. However, not all Yungueño communities support the MAS, and the municipality of Chulumani is deeply divided between those who support the MAS and those who support the local oppositional party, called Agrupación. The matter becomes even more complicated when considering that people from Piñapata strongly associate indigeneity with the political party MAS. In what follows, I discuss this paradox: while Yungueños are reluctant to self-identify as indigenous people, at the same time they link the concept of indigeneity with the MAS and ally themselves with that political party, although it is one of the main actors from which emanates the discourse about indigenous peoples. In the complex and ambivalent relation

Conclusion 1 59

between Yungueños and the state—in which they do but also do not fit its identity categories—indigeneity is filled with new meanings that are related to the party program of the MAS.

Indigeneity as Party Politics In Bolivia, there aren’t any indigenous people. The only indig­ enous people are those who are in the government. There they are. There are none, because, you know, the notion of  “indigenous” does not only lay violent hands on the name of the autochtho­nous communities, but it also erases identity. . . . There are no in­dige­ nous people in Bolivia. There aren’t any. I believe so; or did you see any? —F e r n a n d o U n to j a , d i r e c to r o f t h e i n d i g e n o u s n e w s pa p e r Ay r a , f o u n d e r o f t h e pa r t y M K N ( N at i o n a l K ata r i s t M o v e m e n t, r e n a m e d K ND, D e m o c r at i c N at i o n a l K ata r i s m ) , a n d l e c t u r e r i n e c o n o m i c s at t h e s tat e u n i v e r s i t y U M SA i n L a Pa z ; i n t e r v i e w w i t h t h e a u t h o r , J u n e 2 2 , 2 0 1 1

This book has taken the conjuncture of indigeneity to which Untoja refers— an economist and a politician with highland Aymara roots—as the context in which Yungueños carve out a political position and develop a politicized identity bound to economic dynamics, the creation of legitimate wealth, and new meanings of history and tradition. The government’s discourse on indigeneity is conferred through its promotion of the idea of  “ living well,” which is repeatedly made in public speeches by the president, inscribed in the new political constitution, and reproduced by some intellectuals. However, as Untoja indicates, this discourse seems to have limited repercussions in social reality. And so, according to Untoja, it is mainly people from the government, some leftist members of the urban middle class, and foreign activists who embody this discourse of  “indigeneity,” rather than those Aymara or Quechua people who are actually addressed by it. Since for Yungueños the category of  “indigenous people” is not part of their self-conception, in their political practices with the state and its institutions, they circumvent the government’s discourse on indigeneity. When negotiating with the government to receive development projects, for example, people

160 conclusion

create a space of agency beyond culturalist discourses of indigeneity by emphasizing party politics. The word indígenas (indigenous people) has a wide spectrum of meanings in the Yungas, reaching from the monte jaqis (as discussed in chapter 1) to the chunchus, or lowland indians, up to the highlanders. Beyond this variety of interpretation, however, there is a consensus that the term indí­ gena (indigenous) is increasingly linked to the government, its discourse, and its public politics. In Piñapata, many people of all ages and different degrees of political activism define indigeneity in explicit political and party politics terms: in hearing the term in Morales’s and other government representatives’ discourses, they associate indigeneity with the government party. One example for this imagining of indigeneity in terms of the MAS is the wiphala flag, which by the government is represented as an indigenous symbol. As we were at a demonstration for the “national day of coca chewing” in January 2011 and people were carrying these flags, I asked Yola about the flag. Without thinking twice, she said that this is the flag of the MAS, of Evo, and that it is a symbol for coca. Similarly, while getting on a bus to Coroico (a town in Nor Yungas) to attend the inauguration of the government’s electrification project, where Evo Morales gave a speech, Vidal (who is a sixty-five-year-old, politically active man from Piñapata) insisted that wiphala flags be attached to the bus’s side mirrors to indicate clearly that the people of Piñapata are adherents of the MAS party. This is remarkable, because the MAS also has its own party flag of   blue and white, which could have been attached instead. Yola’s aunt, who is a woman in her late fifties, made the most explicit statement: when I asked her why she thinks Evo is often called an “indigenous president,” she answered promptly that it is because he is “neto MAS.”  This no doubt alludes to the local idea of being “neto” (as explained in chapter 4)—for example, in being “neto Aymara”—but it also locates indigeneity in explicit party politics terms. These associations of indigeneity with the government party imply that adherents, and thus “indigenous people,” are those who benefit from government policies. By being affiliated with the government party, people also become part of what they think are “indigenous peoples”; as they become included in the government’s politics, they feel that the discourse on “indigenous peoples” also speaks to them. At the same time, however, they reject being “indigenous peoples” in the way the term is defined in a culturalist way regarding traditions, economic conditions and marginalization, and historical ancestries. Thus, to some degree, Yungueños’ own perceived indigeneity is bound to a political party:

Conclusion 161

being active as members of the MAS—a political party that declares itself to encompass indigenous people—means to a certain degree to be part of the indigenous cause. Thus, indigeneity is not only a political positioning (see Li 2000) but also, more explicitly, an instrument of party politics from the perspective of the state and a form of identification with party politics from the perspective of Yungueños. Thus, in some cases the MAS as a political party (or party identification) becomes a vehicle for an indigenous identification. This relationship between indigeneity and party politics has been noted by other scholars as well. Robert Albro (2010), for example, states in relation to his discussion on llunk’us  —  who are the despised, unreliable clients of powerful politicians  —  that with the Evo Morales administration indigenous people became partners of the government rather than submissive clients. By being partners, they now have to find new ways of expressing coalitions. For Albro, the new indigenous subject in Bolivia emerges out of these coalitions with the MAS government, which is “an alternative kind of indigenous subject to the one routinely celebrated by the state or by transnational indigenous advocates” (Albro 2010:57). The new indigenous subject is created through the alliance with the state. In the case of Piñapata, there is thus an inherent paradox: on the one hand, the people of Piñapata are reluctant to identify themselves as “indigenous people,” and the new meanings of indigeneity develop in close relation with the MAS program. On the other hand, they put much effort into publicizing their party affiliation with the MAS (for example, through statements read on the regional radio), which—following this logic—would mean that as people from the MAS, they would become “indigenous.” So how can they create a differentiation between themselves and “indigenous people” while at the same time binding the concept of indigeneity to the MAS and allying themselves to it? This paradox might be explained through the ambivalent relation Yungueños have to the state. This ambivalent relation is expressed through the fact that they constantly seem to walk a fine line between alliance with the state to be protected regarding coca cultivation and to receive public works, while at the same time keeping a secure distance from the state (an example of which appears in chapter 4) by trying to maintain a monopoly over decisions regarding coca cultivation and commerce. Through their organization ADEPCOCA, they have, for example, plans to build a hospital, a technical institute, a life insurance company, and a bank only for Yungueños. Thus, Yungueños prefer not

162 conclusion

to bind themselves too much to the state, above all regarding issues of property and coca regulations. In addition, this paradox can also be explained by the fact that Yungueños might be quite conscious that from the perspective of the state, they really are its indigenous subjects. They know that they receive public works that are paid through the “indigenous fund” (   fondo indígena) of the municipalities and the central government—thus, money that the state assigned to “indigenous people” and also very concretely to them. At the same time, they perceive it to be necessary to be allied to the state in order to receive these projects. Thus, being allied to the state means that people become the indigenous subjects of the state; Yungueños (specifically, people from Piñapata), however, seek such an alliance only in some instances, while in others they clearly reject it. The new meanings of indigeneity arise not out of the resistance against the state but out of alliance with it. In seeking alliance with the MAS, Yungueños are not guided by an indigenous self-identification or some culturalist discourses but are instead concerned with securing personalized relationships and a space of agency. Indeed, personal relations in Bolivia have always been a means for cit­ izenship participation (see Lazar 2004, 2008). Yungueños know, however, that through alliance with the MAS they become the state’s indigenous subjects. When Yungueños create an alliance with the government party through such clientelistic relationships, they understand that they become removed to a space that the government has allotted for “indigenous people.” Rather than being guided by a self-expression of being “indigenous people” when making alliances, Yungueños engage in pragmatic ways with the state. Similar to Pedro Portugal’s joke that I recount in the introduction, in which the Europeans projected on the American indians a behavior they thought was guided by a thorough knowl­­ edge about nature, although they only copied the Europeans, and similar to Untoja’s statement above about the nonexistence of indigenous peoples in Bolivia, indigeneity is constituted by the way the state projects these ideas on different people, and it is fueled by the alliances that people make with the state. Finally, the argument could be made that it is exactly because Yungueños know that from the perspective of the state they are its indigenous subjects that they so fiercely need to create a differentiation between themselves as “traditional coca growers” and “indigenous people,” which in turn allows them to claim a privileged economic position. By putting themselves in the place of “indigenous people” through their alliance with the political party MAS, they

Conclusion 163

might receive political support and public works from the state, but this positioning does not allow them to claim a political position as affluent peasants. Thus, while they cannot claim such a position through the language of indigeneity, they can claim benefits from the state by using this language. The new middle classes emerge out of these new meanings of indigeneity, which are tightly linked to the program and the rise of a political party. However, coca growers are not the only new middle class that has risen under the Morales government. Ton Salman (2009), for example, describes three additional sectors of Bolivian society who have emerged as “new elites”: the blanco-mestizos (that is, journalists, NGO staff, and professors) with a middleclass appearance and leftist ideology, which accounts for their main identification with the MAS since they are not “indigenous”; the leaders of social movements and intellectuals, who form a kind of opposition to the MAS government; and the emerging wealthy indians, mainly those who work in trade and smuggling. While under former governments they were “rich but improper,” now they are “rich and acknowledged” (Salman 2009:100). While they are “ethnically close to Evo Morales, the political differences in interests are considerable” (Salman 2009:102), as they are not interested in the equalizing ideologies of the government. Miriam Shakow (2011, 2014) likewise recently described the emergence in Bolivia of “new middle classes,” which, in particular, are characterized by the ambivalence between personal dreams of prosperity and the political identification with the MAS, which promotes an equalizing discourse. Such “new middle classes” express in new ways “their desire for upward social mobility, personal prosperity, the disappearance of racism, and national economic salvation” (Shakow 2011:10). Thus, the new middle classes redefine indigeneity not as an ethnic or a cultural feature, not even simply as a general political position, but as a form of identification with party politics. While indigeneity discourses might exactly encompass jaqis, Yungueños do not want to be jaqis at all, but they do want to be part of the government’s project of redistribution and political participation. Instead of becoming jaqis, Yungueños reach out for new ways of making their business work and of finding their voice. And while there are emerging gaps and inequalities between those who succeed in becoming entrepreneurs and those who do not, the new possibilities give almost every Yungueño the feeling that it is once more the moment to continue and push forward the successful history of Andean coca growing and marketing.

Abbreviations

ADEPCOCA Agrupación

CSUTCB DIGCOIN

FELCN MAS MNR UNODC

Asociación Departamental de Productores de Coca (De­ partmental Association of Coca Producers). “Departmental” refers to the department of   La Paz. Regional opposition party to the MAS (the full name of the party is Agrupación ADEPCOCA). According to the con­ stitution, citizens’ associations can register as a political party, which seems to be the case of Agrupación. Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Sole Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers of   Bolivia, or National Confederation of   Bolivian Peasants). Dirección General de Comercialización e Industrialización de la Hoja de Coca (General Direction of Commercializa­ tion and Industrialization of the Coca Leaf ). This is a gov­ ernment institution. Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico (Special Force for the Struggle against Drug Trafficking). Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism). This is the current government party of   Evo Morales. Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolution­­ ary Movement). This is the party that led the national revolu­­ tion in 1952. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Notes

Introduction 1. Mestizo is a term generally used for descendants of mixed native and Spanish origin. It is often discussed as an ambivalent identity, as it implies a mix of racial and cultural elements and is often associated with social mobility (see Fried 1961; Harris 1995; Spedding 1996a:11–12). 2. Mestizaje means the process of how indian populations become included in national society through racial and cultural transformation (see also Wade 2010:93–94). Charles Hale (2001), for example, states that mestizaje in Latin America was a counterpart to nineteenth-century Western ideas of racial de­­ generation. On indigenismo, mestizaje, and nationalism in Latin America, see, e.g., Arnold 2009; Barragán 1992, 1996; Bigenho 2007, 2012; Bonfil Batalla 1972; García Linera 1996; Hale 2001; Rivera 1993, 1996a, 1996b; Saignes and Bouysse-Cassagne 1992a, 1992b; Spedding 1996a; Stavenhagen 2002:27–28; Ströbele-Gregor et al. 1994; Tomoeda and Millones 1992; Urban and Sherzer 1991; Van Cott 1994:4–5; Vasconcelos 1961; Wade 2010. 3. See Barnard 2006; Bowen 2000; Gausset et al. 2011; Kenrick and Lewis 2004; Kuper 2003; Paradies 2006; Ramos 1994, 1998, 2003; Saugestad 2004; Warren and Jackson 2002. 4. See also Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999:113–14 about the prosperous indigenous Ota­­ valeños in Ecuador.

168  Notes to Pages 25–49

5. ADEPCOCA is the Asociación Departamental de Productores de Coca (De­­ partmental Association of Coca Producers). 6. Between 2010 and 2011, I conducted seventy-eight semistructured interviews that are relevant for the arguments made in this book. Of these, forty-six were carried out with community members, six with Yungueño intellectuals such as two teachers, a radio presenter, a priest, a columnist, and a notary, six with local union leaders, six with representatives of the government such as ministers, and fourteen with indigenous intellectuals and politicians from La Paz who are critical of the Morales government and are part of movements, organizations, and groups that originated in the highlands and aim at revitalizing an indigenous identity.

Chapter 1 1. For all the information from the settlement registers, see “Archival Sources” section in the reference list. 2. Yungueño peasants, or colonos, had entered the market since colonial and re­­ publican times and sold coca leaves grown on their usufruct land on the haciendas or on land in communities where there were no haciendas (called comunidades originarias, communities of origin). 3. He left the ministry and the government party, Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism; MAS), in 2007 after an incident with the traffic police. In 2015, he became governor of the Department of La Paz for the party SOL.BO (Sovereignty and Liberty for Bolivia). 4. In Spanish, this is called pasta base. Cocaine paste, an intermediate product in the production process of cocaine, is also called “crude cocaine.” Its production mainly requires coca leaves, kerosene, sodium carbonate, sulfuric acid, and calcium carbonate (chalk), and it can easily be fabricated in rural areas. 5. The so-called gas war was the peak of social unrest in Bolivia at the beginning of the 2000s. It escalated in August 2003 over a debate on whether Bolivia would export natural gas through Chile or Peru; there is a historically tense relationship between Bolivia and Chile because Bolivia lost territory to Chile in the Pacific war in the nineteenth century. Protests included from the start more demands than only the gas issues (that is, a protest against its exportation), such as a transformation in coca law and the resignation of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who ultimately escaped to the United States.

Notes to Pages 63–90  169

Chapter 2 1. The relation between the household cycle and the production cycle in peasant societies has been widely discussed in anthropology. Alexander Chayanov famously showed how the consumer/producer ratio changes with changes in the demographic structures of the household (see Harrison 1975), which means that with the growth of the household (children) there are more consumers than producers, and thus each producer needs to allocate more time for production (see Yanagisako 1979). Chayanov argued that peasants produce only for subsistence and not for profit or investment (see Hammel 2005). In the Yungas, the production cycle really does follow demographic changes, but this is a function of not only the demography but also the development cycle of the coca plant. In addition, as Sylvia Yanagisako (1979:168) has noted, Chayanov based his model on the idea that without acquiring paid labor, the household disposes of the labor of only its own members. This is not the case in the Yungas, where (although paid labor is important) various labor arrangements exist that are not strictly monetized and do not consist of only an internal labor force. In addition, Yungueños clearly invest in their means of production and thus produce more than only subsistence. 2. The reference to speaking a language “sweeter” reproduces power hierarchies in general, not only with reference to the Aymara language. Rita, for example, holds that negros (Afro-Bolivians) speak sweeter Spanish than other Yungueños do. It is again, on the one hand, an appreciation of language skills, as “sweet” implies that it is spoken “nicely.” On the other hand, however, as mentioned in the text discussion, people occasionally make discriminatory statements regarding black people.

Chapter 3 1. Dirección General de Comercialización e Industrialización de la Hoja de Coca; General Direction of Commercialization and Industrialization of the Coca Leaf. 2. Many of these local traders state that they gain by reselling coca because they buy the coca leaves from their community members dried but not packed: leaves need to be humidified so they do not break when being pressed in the

170  Notes to Pages 91–1 28

fifty-pound bags, and the humidified leaves weigh a bit more. Sometimes, however, the local traders lose money, as, for example, when they have miscalculated the price and pay a higher price in the community than they can get in La Paz. 3. Bolivian migrants in Argentina are also consumers of coca leaves, but they would not necessarily buy the highest quality. They chew the leaves during the working hours and accumulate big quantities in their cheek, while Argentinians seem to chew only small portions. Argentina as a market for the traditional consumption of coca leaves in the form of chewing is a rather new phenomenon that seems to have existed only since 1989, when Argentina began to permit the selling of coca leaves (Spedding 2004:58). 4. Differences in quality based on the thickness of the leaves and how much they have been eaten by parasites are often encountered between the core of the “traditional region” (e.g., Coripata, Chulumani, and Coroico) and the more recently colonized parts of the Yungas (e.g., Asunta). 5. For some years now, there has been a growing concern about the degradation of soil and the cultivation of organic coca. In addition, people in Piñapata know that using synthetic fertilizers leads to only a short-term maximization of profit, as it exhausts both the plants and the soil. Furthermore, people in Piñapata say that the leaves are of lower quality and cannot be stored as well as those produced without synthetic fertilizers. In Piñapata, there is thus an implicit imperative to not use fertilizers, in order to care for the community land.

Chapter 4 1. Although the land reform took place in 1953, people often refer to 1952, which was the year of the national revolution that led to the land reform in the following year. 2. Some authors have proposed that a distinction between authenticity and indi­ geneity is useful to differentiate between different claims (Gausset et al. 2011; Geschiere 2009). However, by making reference to a differentiation between ancestral milenario and traditional, I do not want to tie it in with the concep­ tual differentiations of those authors. Interestingly, the word autochthon is of­­ ten used in Bolivia for specific music genres (for example, tarqueada, zampo­­ ñada, and sikureada) that urban populations perceive as coming from Andean

Notes to Pages 1 31–1 36  171

indigenous populations. These genres are all played by troupes arranged in a circle. However, autochthon is used as an adjective only for a genre of music, not for the people who play it.

Chapter 5 1. See also Patzi 2010 for a similar conceptual idea: “the third system” (el tercer sistema). 2. See, e.g., Bellier and Hocquenghem 1991:49; Molinié 1991:88; Morote Best 1988; Taylor 1991; Vallee and Palomino 1973:14; Wachtel 1997.

Glossary

A harvesting arrangement in which the owner gives the coca field to another person for one harvest, and that person will need to hand over to the owner half of the harvest. acullicu/aculli: Coca chewing thought of as a social gathering and event. afiliado: In the Yungas, this term (which translates as “affiliated”) generally refers to a member of the peasant union. awayo: An Andean textile (traditionally woven by hand but nowadays also consisting of industrial weavings). This is a colored fabric used mainly by women to carry things on their back; it is also used to carry babies. away t’asiña: Fabric, generally white, that covers a person’s back while he or she is harvesting on the coca field. ayni: Reciprocity. In the Yungas, it can commonly involve the exchange of   working days, beer, gifts, or money. camba: People from the lowland, especially Santa Cruz. campesino: Peasant. cantón: This is a territorial-administrative unit. Administrative units in Bolivia are as follows (from the lowest to the highest): cantón, municipio, sección, provincia, departamento. cargo: Political office in the union. carpeta al detalle: Permission to engage in retailing. a medias:

174 Glossary

A measurement of extent used in local parlance and used by the government for its coca politics. Depending on the region (with different soils and climate), one cato is defined by the government as 2,500 square meters (in the Yungas) or 1,600 square meters (in the Chapare). Chapare: Region in the lowlands in the department of Cochabamba that is publicly known for having extensive areas of illegal coca cultivation. chiquiñero: Local membership category in Piñapata consisting of people who received a patch of land from the peasant union without formally owning the land. chola/o: In popular imagination, cholas/os are urban indigenous people. The term is commonly associated with social mobility and trading activities. Women are generally characterized by wearing Andean skirts (   polleras). chunchu: Contemptuous term for lowland indians. colonos: Workers on the haciendas (large estates). They received a patch of usufruct land and in turn had to work for the owner of the hacienda. In the Yungas, when referring to the time of the haciendas, the term is generally used as a synonym for peones. comadre/compadre: Terms that the mother/father of the godchild and the godfather/godmother of the child use to address each other. corte: Vertical line of terraces (wachus) on the coca field. department: Highest territorial-administrative unit in Bolivia (see also cantón). detallistas: Retailers. dobleada: Double day wage in the Yungas consisting of approximately eight working hours (compared to a normal day wage, which consists of approximately six working hours). faena: A term used to describe working days when the owner of the coca field invites many workers and provides bread, beer, and wine. This kind of work is done only on special occasions (such as first harvest of a field, harvest after pruning, terracing a coca field). galpón: Hall in the coca market according to different regional sections. hacienda: Large estate/landholding, generally guided by a landlord (known as hacendado, patrón). indígena/s: Indigenous person or indigenous people. jaqi: Person. jornal: Day wage. k’ichiriña/k’ichiris: Harvesting/harvesters. kharisiri: Human fat stealer. cato:

Glossary 175

Term generally used for people from the Andes, especially the department of   La Paz. Law 1008: A law that was enacted in 1988 under U.S. pressure; it defines coca cultivation, commerce, and punishment for illegal activities regarding coca and other controlled substances. libreada: Harvesting arrangement; being paid per pound of harvested, fresh coca leaves. millka: Going ahead, competition. mink’a: Laborer. mit’iña: Fabric that people strap around the hips and in which they stow the picked coca leaves while harvesting. monte jaqi: A being between animal and human. originario: Originary, native. peones: Workers on the large estates (haciendas) (see also colonos). pollera: An Andean tiered skirt. Women often wear several of them, one over another. q’ara: A term generally used for white and mestizo urban populations. This is an Aymara word meaning “peeled” or “naked.” sacilla: Big plastic bag used for stowing the dried, delicate coca leaves. taki: A packed fifty-pound bag of coca leaves. Tupac Katari: National hero who led the indigenous uprising and siege of   La Paz in 1781. utawawa: People who are “adopted” and live in the same house under the con­­ dition that they help work. They do not receive payment but get full alimentation. The term is an Aymara word deriving from uta (house) and wawa (baby, child). wachu: Terrace on the coca field. wawa coca: Young coca plants until they are pruned. wiphala: The “indigenous” flag, popularly imagined as having been derived from the Inca Empire and its four regions. It consists of several rows of colored squares arranged in a specific way. yanapero: Helper; derived from the Aymara word yanapaña (to help). In the Yungas, the term yanapero is used for people who own no land and no coca field and thus earn a living only by working for others on a day wage basis. kolla/colla:

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Archival Sources Yungas: Padrones republicanos (Settlement Register of the Republican Period), South Yungas Province. Archivo y Bibliotéca Nacionales de Bolivia, Sucre, Bolivia. 1817 1828 Yungas: Padrones republicanos (Settlement Register of the Republican Period), South Yungas Province. Archivo de La Paz, La Paz, Bolivia. 1829 (Book 1) 1838 (Book 2) 1843 (Book 3) 1852 (Book 4) 1858 (Book 5) 1863 (Book 6) 1870 (Book 7) 1877 (Book 8) 1882 (Book 11) 1882 (Book 12) 1882 (Book 13) 1882 (Book 14) 1883 (Book 15) 1883 (Book 22) 1895 (Book 40) 1895 (Book 41) 1895 (Book 42) n.d. (Book 45) 1935 (Book 47)

Index

Abercrombie, Thomas, 32 Abrams, Mark, 154 accumulation of   wealth/economic ac­cumulation: and highland mi­ grants, 79; and kharisiri, 130, 144; legitimacy of, 18, 19, 148; and mid­ dle class, 20; and personhood, 66– 69, 77; and so­cial mobility, 156. See also ethic: of accumulation; “growing” acullicu  /aculli. See coca: chewing ADEPCOCA (Asociación Departa­ mental de Productores de Coca), 47–48, 89, 161, 168n5; assembly, 50–51, 107–9, 128; committee, 110; license, 93; seminar, 110–16 Afro-Bolivian: movement, 23; people, 22–23, 38, 169n2 Agroyungas, 46 Aguilar, Nelson, 125

Albó, Xavier, 39 Albro, Robert, 161 alcohol: during   faena, 71; prodution on the hacienda, 35; as part of retailing, 98. See also beer Allen, Catherine, 9, 57 alternative development, 46 ancestry: and highland 32, 35, 51; and in­ digeneity, 152, 160; and Lecos, 42–44, 52; and “originary,” 127 archipelago, vertical, 13, 38. See also Murra, John V. Asociación Departamental de Produc­ tores de Coca (Departmental Asso­ ciation of Coca Producers). See ADEPOCA authenticity, 109, 126, 127–28, 170n2; “authenticators,” 109, 119; and “indian,” 127 Aymara (language), 77–78, 79, 108

198 inde x

Aymara (people). See ancestry; high­ land migrants, Aymara ayni: concept and definition of, 60, 70– 74, 150; and ethic of accumulation, 63, 76; and ethnic identification, 70  –  72, 84; and gender, 68; and “growing,” 68; and highland migrants, 79; and “indian,” 70, 72; and mestizo, 70, 72, 84; and personhood, 77; selling, 72–  73; and social function, 68. See also reciprocity Bautista, Rafael, 131 beer, 66, 67, 68, 71, 79. See also ayni; fiesta bilingualism, 4, 5, 77; and multi­ culturalism, 7 camba, 42, 97 campesino, 7, 21, 39, 44. See also peasant identity Canessa, Andrew, 8, 77, 78, 89, 137, 155 cargos, 67, 68 carpeta al detalle. See retailing Carter, William, 111 cato, 37, 75; cato politics, 48 Chapare: and drugs, 86, 109; and eradi­ cation, 46–48, 108; and indigeneity, 128; as region, 10, 45, 126; and Yun­ gueños, 50–51, 108–9, 113, 116, 119, 129, 152 Chayanov, Alexander, 169n1 chola  /cholo, 20, 104–5 chunchu, 43–44, 160 citizenship: concept of, 88; and military service, 88; and national territory, 88, 104; and personal relations, 162

coca: as cash crop, 21, 66, 83, 151; chew­ ing, 6, 9, 10, 56–57, 121; coca econ­ omy, 13–14, 22, 57, 134, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147–48, 150–53; “coca for development,” 46; coca politics, 9– 13, 46–49, 52, 112, 114, 115; consum­ ers of, 89, 91, 170n3; cultivation, 58; and environmental damage, 151–52; eradication, 10, 47, 48; as ethic of people’s life, 57; fields, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69; and indigeneity, 6, 128, 129, 151; industrializing coca, 12; in­ ternational regulations on, 6, 9, 46; market, 86, 90–94; national day of coca chewing, 49, 160; and national economy, 13; and national identity, 6; new law for, 12, 26–27, 110–16; as opposed to cocaine, 6, 9, 111; organic, 115; prices, 91, 94; production cycle, 63, 73; qualities, 91; as sacred, 9, 109; selling and reselling, 64, 81, 87, 90– 94, 96, 97, 157, 169n2. See also Con­ vention on Narcotics, Single; retail­ ing, trade; Vienna Convention Coca-Cola, 4, 77, 150 coca-growing regions, 10, 11, 45, 112; illicit or illegal, 10, 11, 108, 112, 119; traditional, 10, 11, 23, 48, 50, 51, 116, 119, 123, 126; transitional or exceeding, 10, 11, 50, 112. See also Law 1008 cocaine, 47, 86, 168n4; as opposed to coca, 6, 9, 111. See also under drugs coca production. See coca: production cycle Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi, 20–21, 104, 157

inde x 199

colonos (servants, tenants), 36. See also peones Comaroff, Jean and John, 135, 145, 153 commerce: and new law on coca pro­ duction, 12, 26–27, 110–16; and so­cial mobility, 147, 149, 156–57; and gov­ ernment, 113–14, 161. See also coca: coca economy; entrepreneurism; retailing commodities: 135, 142; coca as commod­ ity, 14, 142, 148; ethnic identity as com­ modity, 153; fat as commodity, 142 community: authorities, 110, 111; and communal land, 35, 68, 69, 170n5; and communal politics, 67, 68, 79, 95; encounter, 3–4; and eradication agreements, 46, 47; “intercultural communities,” 41; and “living well,” 5, 131, 158; of political struggle, 32, 49, 51, 52. See also cargos; personhood compadrazgo, 62, 66, 79, 81–82, 158 Condori, David Ali, 132 Convention Against Illegal Trade in Narcotics and Controlled Sub­ stances. See Vienna Convention Convention on Narcotics, Single, 9, 46 Conzelman, Caroline Sommer, 49, 50 credit relations, 62, 83 debts, 65, 83; and ayni, 72. See also credit relations Degregori, Carlos Iván, 139 de la Cadena, Marisol, 16, 127–28, 156 Delgado, Freddy, 132 Dickey, Sara, 20 DIGCOIN, 86, 93, 169n1

Dirreción General de Comercialización e Industrialización de la Hoja de Coca (General Direction of Com­ mercialization and Industrialization of the Coca Leaf ). See DIGCOIN drugs, 51, 86, 94; drug trafficking, 94, 99–100, 139; and kharisiri stories, 133, 141–42, 145; War on Drugs, 47, 153. See also cocaine Dudley, Meredith, 44 economic calculations, 70, 75; and mar­ ginal revenue, 75, 135; and opportu­ nity costs, 75, 83 Edelman, Marc, 135, 146, 147 education: educational reform, 7; and national revolution, 7; in Piñapata, 37; and social class, 149, 157; and ur­ ban residence, 74 entrepreneurism, 57, 66, 69, 81–84, 96, 101, 104–5, 149, 150, 156; and business activities, 104, 139–44, 145, 152, 154, 156–57 environment: and coca, 151–52; and “liv­ ing well,” 131, 132 Estrada Paredes, Fidel, 38–39, 123–25 ethic: of accumulation, 76, 77, 84, 118– 19, 145, 148, 150; and anthropology, 24–28; coca as ethic of people’s life, 57; communitarian ethos, 78–79, 148; economic ethos, 24; “ethic-moral” principles, 5–6; Protestant, 82–83; “subsistence ethic,” 20, 134–35, 144 exports: of coca, 13, 35, 45, 48; of co­ca products, 12; of natural gas, 168n5

200 inde x

faena, 71, 75. See also labor: arrangements Farthing, Linda, 50, 89 fat, chap. 5. See also kharisiri fiesta, 66–67, 79, 81, 86; sponsoring, 66– 67, 79, 87–88 Foster, Georg M., 153 Friedlander, Judith, 32 gender, 67, 78, 94; and ayni, 68; and personhood, 67; stereotypes, 122 Geschiere, Peter, 145 Goldstein, Daniel, 79, 132 Goldthorpe, John, 154, 155 Gose, Peter, 70–71, 137 government: and coca issues, 45–48, 52, 93–96; and identity politics, 5, 6, 7–8, 122, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 159; and Yungueños, 39–41, 44, 47, 49, 50, 105–6, 107–16, 119, 128, 158, 160–63. See also Morales, Evo; Movimiento al Socialismo Grisaffi, Thomas, 128 “growing,” 61–70, 83, 135, 144. See also under personhood hacienda, 34; and Law 1008, 45, 112, 116; “time of the hacienda” (tiempo de hacienda), 35, 44, 52, 121; and tradi­ tions, 121 Hall, Stuart, 17 Harris, Olivia, 19 harvesting: coca, 55–57, 58–60, 67; har­­ vester’s competition (concurso de k’ichiri), 119–21; groups, 60, 62, 74–75, 96, 101, 144; itineraries, 54, 56, 57. See also labor: arrangements

Heater, Derek, 88 Hendel, Verónica, 132 highland migrants, Aymara: and accu­ mulation of wealth, 79; and ayni, 79; and coca production, 4, 22, 31, 35, 37, 38, 45, 60, 62, 66, 71, 74–76, 81, 148; as “colonizers,” 118; and eco­ nomic growth, 77–80; and kharisiri, 134, 137–38, 139, 141–44, 146, 148, 150; and poverty, 4, 24, 78–79, 143, 146, 156; and traditions, 127, 138, 139; and unitedness, 24, 78–79, 138; and Yun­ gueños, 5, 24, 31, 32, 35, 38–40, 42, 43, 51, 60, 68–69, 77–80, 104, 124, 127, 137, 146, 156. See also jaqi Himpele, Jeff, 20, 155 history, national, 123–25 household, and coca production, 57, 62–63, 68, 69–70, 72, 73, 75, 81, 105, 169n1 houses, 17–18, 54, 61, 65, 81, 96–97 immorality, 29, 135, 142, 145, 147 Inca, Empire, 13, 38, 90; Incas, 43 indian: and authenticity, 127; and ayni, 70, 72; highlanders as, 78; and khari­ siri, 136–39, 144, 147; and poverty, 19; and social mobility, 156; Yungueños as, 21, 80 indigenismo, 7 indigenous/indigeneity: and ancestry, 152; 160; and coca, 6, 128–29, 151; concept and definitions of, 16, 32, 104–5, 126, 128, 160, 162; discourse on, 5, 8, 106, 109, 122, 129, 132, 150, 151, 153; and identity politics, 5, 7–8, 123, 149, 151; “indigenous peoples’ debate,” 16;

inde x 201

“indigenous peoples’ slot,” 5, 6, 89, 109; indigenous movements, 90; and jaqi, 5, 6, 148; and “living well,” 148, 151, 159; and MAS, 158–63; and mid­ dle class, 20–21, 155, 157, 163; mo­rality, 5, 130, 132, 134, 147, 148; and party politics, 160–63; and poverty, 15; re­ ject being classified as, 7, 15, 149–50, 152–54, 159–63; self-definition as, 5, 128–29; and social mobility, 129, 157; and “tradition,” 125, 152; and Yun­ gueños, 123, 128–29, 160–63. See also anti-imperalist rhet­oric; Morales, Evo; Movimiento al Socialismo inheritance, 61, 69, 101 irrigation, 58, 101 Jackson, Jean, 109 jaqi, 4, 52, 84, 100, 102, 137; highland migrants as, 77–80, 138; and indig­ enous, 5, 6, 148; kharisiris as, 139, 148; and poverty, 77, 78; reject being, 150, 153. See also under highland migrants Kapsoli, Wilfredo, 138 Katari, Tupac, 123–26 Kearney, Michael, 105, 157 kharisiri, 132–48, 150; and accumula­ tion of   wealth, 130, 144; and coca economy, 141; and “indian,” 136–39, 144, 147; as jaqi, 139, 148 Kohl, Benjamin, 50, 89 Kuper, Adam, 129 labor: arrangements, 70, 73–  74; day wage, 25, 58, 62, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 82, 144, 146, 147, 150; day-wage laborers,

4, 22, 57, 60, 63, 69, 71, 72, 78, 80, 81, 96; shortage, 70, 72; wage labor and social mobility, 152, 156–57. See also harvesting: groups; and under highland migrants Lagos, Maria, 83, 158 land, ownership, 68, 69, 101 landlord ( patrón), 33, 35–36 land reform, 35–36, 45, 52, 121, 170n1 language(s): and highland migrants, 127, 138, 77, 78; and migration, 41; and po­ litical constitution, 5, 40, 108; and power hierarchies, 78, 169n2; and Yungueños, 4, 5, 79, 108. See also Aymara (language); bilingualism; Quechua (language) Law 1008, 10, 45, 46, 48, 51, 112, 117, 128; opposition to, 46–47, 108 Lazar, Sian, 88 Lecos, 42–44; and ancestry, 42–44, 52 Lema, Ana María, 13, 45–46, Léons, Madeline, 13–14, 46 Libermann, Máximo, 151 Liechty, Mark, 19–20 Li, Tania, 5, 17 “living better”: concept of, 5; 130–32 “living well”: and coca, 152; and com­ munity, 5, 131, 158; concept of, 5, 130– 32, 135, 158; and environment, 131, 132; and Evo Morales, 130, 151; and in­ digenous, 148, 151, 159; and political constitution, 131, 159 Lucero, José Antonio, 109 lynching, 47, 146 Mamani, Mauricio, 111 Mangan, Jane, 151

202 inde x

“march for dignity and sovereignty,” 47 markets/marketplaces, 90–91, 93–94, 97–98, 99, 100–101. See also coca: market; retailing marriage, 37, 53, 77 Marshall, T. H., 89 Mayer, Enrique, 75 Meisch, Lynn, 104 Mennonites, 98 mestizaje, 7, 39, 167n2 mestizo, 6, 8, 19, 167n1, 77, 84, 105, 127, 137, 138, 156, 157, 163; and ayni, 70, 72, 84; middle class, 20, 21, 154–56; na­ tion, 7; and social mobility, 21, 80, 150; traders, 13, 89 middle class: and accumulation of wealth, 20; attitude, 80; as concept in Latin America, 149; and indige­ nous identity, 20–21, 155, 157, 163; new middle class, 6, 19, 149, 153, 155–56, 163; “parallel middle class,” 20, 155; peasant middle class, 149, 153, 156; urban middle class, 17–21, 156, 159; and Yungueños, 6, 21, 28, 80, 102, 104, 145, 149, 150, 152, 153–58, 163. See also under mestizo; social mobility migration: and language, 41; interna­ tional, 61, 85; national, 61, 102. See also highland migrants; Yungas miners: as consumers of coca leaves, 22, 89; and Evo Morales, 154–55; and the national revolution, 7; and Yungueños, 80 MNR. See Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario moral economy, esp. 134–35, 144, 146

Morales, Evo, 10, 12, 48, 49, 149; and anti-imperialist rhetoric, 108, 125; and indigenous morality, 5, 29, 130, 147. See also immorality; indigenous: “living well” morality. See immorality; Morales, Evo; indigenous: morality; “living well” Movement Toward Socialism. See Movimiento al Socialismo Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), 10, 87; being critical of, 106, 108, 114; and coca politics/policy, 10–13, 48–49, 52, 112, 114, 115; and Evo Morales, 10; and indigeneity, 158–63; supporters of, 49, 105, 114, 158–61. See also coca: coca politics Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), 7, 36, 48 multicultural politics, 7–8 Murra, John V., 13, 38, 131 Muruchi, Félix, 89 narcotics. See cocaine; drugs national identity, 6, 9, 20 nationalism, 7, 167n2 National Revolutionary Movement (MNR). See Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario Niezen, Ronald, 16 O’Dougherty, Maureen, 20 Oliver, Dawn, 88 Orta, Andrew, 138 Otherness, 134, 136–39, 144 Pachamama (mother earth), 131 Pagliccia, Nino, 132

inde x 203

patrón. See landlord Patzi, Felix, 40, 168n3 peasant identity, 21, 27, 39, 152; campe­ sino, 7, 21, 39, 44; postpeasant iden­ tities, 88, 105, 157; and social mobil­ ity, 19, 104–5, 130, 149, 150, 153–54, 156–57, 163. See also middle class: peasant middle class; peasant union peasants. See peasant identity peasant union, 36, 37, 68, 69, 97; and Marxism, 103; and social movement politics, 126 peones, 31, 36 personhood: and accumulation of wealth, 66–69, 77; and coca, 57, 84, 147; and coca fields, 60–61, 83; and communal politics, 67; and fat, 145, 147; and “growing,” 62, 67, 69–70; and market relations, 135; and reci­ procity, 4, 77, 137; and working, 59. See also “growing” Piñapata, description of, 17–18, 33–37 political constitution of 2009, new, 5, 44, 90; and Aymara, 108; and coca, 114, 117; and “intercultural commu­ nities,” 41; and languages, 5, 40, 108; and new law on coca production and commerce, 110; and thirty-six nations, 5, 23, 40; and traditional, 117–19; and Yungueños, 39–41 Portocarrero Maisch, Gonzalo, 139 Portugal, Pedro, 14–16, 162 poverty: being represented as poor, 27; and highland migrants, 4, 24, 78– 79, 143, 146, 156; and indian, 19; and indigenous, 4; and   jaqi, 77, 78; and

kharisiri, 134, 137, 143, 146; in Pi­ ñapata 62, 64–65, 67, 74, 81–83, 96, 122; and retailing, 100–101, 104. See also jaqi; and under highland migrants Pratt, Mary Louise, 16 PRODES (Proyecto de Desarrollo Chapare Yungas), 46 prosperity, 58, 76, 77 Proyecto de Desarrollo Chapare Yun­ gas. See PRODES q’ara, 77, 78, 137 Quechua (language), 44, 66, 80, 86, 100 Quechua (people), 5–6, 20, 40, 41, 43, 159 reciprocity, 4, 5, 70–74, 84, 132, 137, 150. See also ayni redistribution, 66–67 residence, 25, 37, 74, 156 retailing, 85–106, 142–43; control, 86; experience, 152; and harvesting groups; and illegal activities, 100, 142–43; intermediaries in, 94, 99, 100; license, 69, 84, 85, 86, 94, 95, 96, 100, 113, 152; and nation building, 88; permission, 62, 86, 87; routes, 86; and social mobility, 104, 105, 152, 157; and women, 122 revolution, national, 7, 36, 126, 170n1 ritual kin. See compadrazgo rituals: and coca, 8–9, 10, 14, 130, 147, 151; and fat, 130, 145, 147; and person­ hood, 77; knowledge about, 138 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 126

204 inde x

Roitman, Janet, 134 Rose, Richard, 154 Salm, Hans, 151 Salmann, Ton, 163 Sanabria, Harry, 13–14, 38, 46 sart’a (asking for the woman’s hand), 53 Scarborough, Isabel, 104–5 Scott, James, 134–35 Shakow, Miriam, 105–6, 163 Silverblatt, Irene, 32 social function, 68, 69, 84, 94, 95, 96, 105; and ayni, 68 social mobility: and accumulation of wealth, 156; and business activities, 104, 141–42, 152, 154, 156–57; and class position, 102–5, 154; and ethnic iden­ tification, 6, 19, 80, 149, 151, 156, 157; and “indian,” 156; and indig­eneity, 129, 157; in Latin America, 19, 20, 156; and mestizo, 21, 80, 150; and peasant identity, 19, 104, 105, 130, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156–57; 163; and retailing, 104, 105, 152, 157; and social stratification, 158; and wage labor, 152, 156–57; and Yungueños, 77, 80, 84, 104, 149, 150. See also entrepreneurism social stratification, 37, 70, 83; and social mobility, 158 Society of Landowners of the Yungas, 45 Soraya Irigoyen, Isidro Valentin, 139 Soux, Maria Luisa, 13, 35 Spedding, Alison, 47, 50, 62–63, 69–70, 76, 96, 123, 132, 133, 134 Starn, Orin, 16

taki, 86, 91–96, 99–100, 152. See also coca: selling and reselling; retailing Tassi, Nico, 149 Taussig, Michael, 146 Ticona, Ernesto, 42, 43, 119–23 Thompson, E. P., 134–35 Thomson, Sinclair, 125 “three-strata model,” 102–6, 152 Toranzo Roca, Carlos, 13–14, 57, 99 trade, 13, 27, 88, 89–96, 113, 156–57; inter­ mediaries in, 90, 91, 94, 105, 113, 143. See also retailing “tradition,” 6, 20, 51, 119–23, 127, 150, 152 traditional: definition of, 116–19, 126; identification as traditional coca growers, 28, 32, 44, 49, 50, 106, 111–13, 150, 152, 158, 162; and Law 1008, 117; versus ancestral milenario, 117–19, 126–29 “traditional zone.” See coca-growing regions; traditional Tsing, Anna, 16 United Nations: and drug reports/ studies on coca, 14, 46, 113; and Evo Morales, 6, 130, 151; and indigenous peoples, 16; and Yungueños, 50–51, 113 utawawas, 62, 65 Van Cott, Donna Lee, 48 Vienna Convention, 9, 46 vivir bien. See “living well” Wachtel, Nathan, 138 wachu, 58, 76

inde x 205

wages. See labor: day wage Warren, Kay, 109 wealth, creation and distribution of, 105, 134, 135, 145, 149, 150, 155, 157. See also accumulation of wealth Weber, Max, 82–83 whitening, 6. See also mestizo; social mobility witches, 145 wiphala, 90, 160 women: and Aymara language, 78; and coca production, 94, 119–23; and personhood, 67–68. See also chola  / cholo; gender Yana, Olga, 138–39 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 169n1 yanapero, 57, 68, 71, Yungas: description of, 21–24; and Incas, 38, 43; migration to, 35, 38–43, 51, 127; and pre-Hispanic empires,

23, 38. See also highland migrants; Yungueños Yungueños: and Chapare, 50–51, 108–9, 113, 116, 119, 129, 152; and govern­ ment, 39–41, 44, 47, 49, 50, 105–6, 107–16, 119, 128, 158, 160–63; and highland migrants, 5, 24, 31, 32, 35, 38–40, 42, 43, 51, 60, 68–69, 77–80, 104, 124, 127, 137, 146, 156; as indians, 21, 80; and indigeneity, 123, 128–29, 160–63; and language, 4, 5, 79, 108; and miners, 80; and political con­ stitution, 39–41; and social mobility, 77, 80, 84, 104, 149, 150; as traditional coca growers, 28, 32, 44, 49, 50, 106, 111–13, 150, 152, 158, 162; and United Nations, 50–51, 113. See also Yungas Yuval-Davis, Nira, 88 zambita (woman of mixed African and indian descent), 31, 53

About the Author

Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón is a research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. She did her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Zurich and the University of Essex and finished it in 2013. She was a lecturer at the University of Zurich and taught introductory courses in social anthropology and methods courses, as well as courses on citizenship, indigeneity, Latin American anthropology, and new middle classes. Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón has been carrying out research in Bolivia since 2006. Her research interests are indigeneity, identity politics, citizenship, kinship, social security, coca issues, and peasant economies.