The Emergence of Indigenous Nationalism in Bolivia: Social Movements and the MAS State

The chapter analyzes the birth of the MAS party and its efforts to articulate three very different lines of struggle—for indigenous rights, economic justice, and popular democracy. We see how the formerly dispossessed and excluded came together to form an alliance that enabled them to take state power and defeat the various opposition groups, particularly the white/mestizo elite from the lowlands. As a result, this alliance is also fraught with tensions. I describe one important mechanism by which the Morales government maintains its popularity: in public spectacles, Morales and his government position themselves as representatives of all Bolivia’s indigenous peoples, claiming the legacy of anticolonial warriors of the eighteenth century. I inquire into the ways indigeneity became the central trope for the Morales government, and how this was performed by Morales and the state using cultural and historical images. Here we see how decolonization and indigeneity can serve as a form of emancipatory politics, to use Ranciere’s term, rupturing the “distribution of the sensible” and creating new possibilities for social justice.