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Book Review
| Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 398. $23.95 (ISBN 978-0-8223-4067-6).
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| In April of 1952, Bolivia experienced what is probably the least studied social revolution in Latin American history. Scholarly accounts of this revolutionary episode have tended to emphasize the role of mine-workers' unions in radicalizing what has been most commonly treated as a brief, predominantly urban insurrection spearheaded by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR). In A Revolution for Our Rights, Laura Gotkowitz broadens the interpretive frame by situating the revolution within a history of ongoing indigenous struggles. In so doing, she makes a major contribution to Bolivian historiography. |
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Gotkowitz takes as her point of departure the aggressive liberal reforms of the late 1860s and early '70s (chapter 1). These aimed to privatize communal indigenous landholdings and undo the traditional authority structures of Indian communities, while implementing programs to "civilize" the rural indigenous population. As Gotkowitz demonstrates, this provoked a range of innovative legal and political responses by indigenous activists, setting in motion a pattern of agrarian contention that persisted through 1952. |
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Gotkowitz thus makes the eighty-year period preceding the 1952 revolution the focus of her ambitious study. She maps a complex socio-political landscape populated by indigenous hacienda workers and community members, indigenous leaders, elite hacienda owners, local state administrators and legal authorities, and urban political reformers and state makers. By following the shifting relationships among these actors, Gotkowitz is able to trace unfolding conflicts over the legal status of Indian communities and communal land, over the authority of indigenous leaders, and over the meanings of indigenous rights and citizenship. |
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The first three chapters set the stage for the rest of the book by documenting early challenges to the liberal project by an emerging network of indigenous leaders. They then analyze the ways in which these leaders influenced and were influenced by the national congressional debates of the pre-Chaco War period. |
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The remaining five chapters cover the dramatic events that followed Bolivia's devastating defeat in the Chaco War. After the war, debates raged over the citizenship status and overall treatment of the indigenous population (chapter 4). These culminated in the Constitutional Convention of 1938. While the new constitution contained only limited gains for the indigenous population, the constitutional debates provided activists with valuable rhetorical resources and triggered a wave of rural mobilization (chapter 5). Partly in response to this mobilization, the military populist government that emerged in 1944 cultivated the ideal of a mestizo "nation" and attempted to incorporate indigenous movements by staging a national Indigenous Congress (chapters 6 and 7). While this Congress again rendered only modest gains, ambiguity about the new laws, and the fact that the state provided no channels (apart from the indigenous delegates themselves) for publicizing these new laws, helped to stimulate another wave of rural insurrection in 1947—what Gotkowitz calls the "revolution before the revolution" (286). |
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Indeed, the climax of the book's historical narrative is not the 1952 revolution itself (which is discussed only in the conclusion), but its 1947 precursor. In her sophisticated analysis of this understudied episode (chapter 8), Gotkowitz details compelling continuities with earlier uprisings: in the geographic distribution of events, language of claims making, repertoires of contentious practices, and (perhaps most importantly) institutionally connected networks of legally and politically experienced indigenous leaders. But while Gotkowitz argues that the 1947 "cycle of unrest" played a key role in producing the 1952 revolution (286), it is precisely the strength of her analysis of the origins of the former that highlights her lack of similar evidence for (indeed, the lack of a substantive chapter on) the proximate rural and indigenous causes of the latter. |
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That Bolivia experienced a more or less continuous history of rural indigenous activism from the 1870s through 1952 is now indisputable, thanks to this important study. That this history must have in some ways "helped pave the path for Bolivia's 1952 Revolution" (3, my emphasis) is equally evident. But the precise nature and degree of this influence remains unclear. Lacking data from the 1947–52 period, and with only vague suggestions as to the connections between the events of 1947 and 1952, Gotkowitz does not specify exactly how Bolivia's history of indigenous struggles helped produce and shape the revolution. Thus, it must be noted that while A Revolution for Our Rights establishes a novel and compelling interpretive frame for 1952, it does not attempt to revise MNR-centered accounts by presenting new evidence for the revolutionary period itself. Rather, the book should be understood as an exemplary study of Bolivia's long and complicated history of indigenous struggles over land, labor, rights, and representation, as well as a subtly executed examination of the creative ways in which activists engage with legal language, authorities, and practices to challenge the status quo. |
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| Robert S. Jansen
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| University of California, Los Angeles |
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