| dc.description.abstract | The twin cities of El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia are often perceived through a Manichean lens: La Paz as a modern city of mestizo wealth and power, and El Alto as an impoverished urban extension of the rural indigenous countryside. This dichotomy obscures the heterogeneous nature of these locales and the increasingly porous, ever-shifting boundaries that separate them. I argue that El Alto is neither a place of timeless indigenous culture nor one of ontological difference. Instead, the city’s residents create distinctly modern lives characterized by movement between multiple socio-cultural and geographic spaces. My data is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in El Alto, La Paz, and their peripheral rural areas. I conducted semi-structured interviews with a socio-economically and ethnically diverse set of informants and served as a participant observer of how residents construct lives in an environment characterized by structural precarity. I explore the forms of popular commerce and transportation central to life in El Alto, using these as a lens through which to examine how quotidian urban indigenous realities often exist in tension with the Bolivian state’s vision of indigenous progress. Furthermore, I describe how residents maintain deep connections to their originary communities and inhabit identities that are simultaneously rural and urban, highlighting a unique interplay between co-constituting forms of indigeneity and modernity. Finally, I recount residents’ experiences of the 2019-2020 period of political and public-health crisis. Despite narratives of violent polarization between La Paz and El Alto during this time, my fieldwork reveals that residents responded to the crisis in varied and contradictory ways, not always aligned with assumptions based on their class, ethnicity, or place of residence. As the West increasingly looks to indigenous practices as possible solutions to modern problems, this research demonstrates how urban indigenous populations are producers of a contradictory modernity that encompasses progressive and sustainable cultures, as well as novel adaptations of capital and state power. | |
