Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia

Nancy Grey Postero

ISBN 10: 0804755205 / ISBN 13: 9780804755207

Published by Stanford University Press October 2006, 2006

Seller Inventory # 319539

Synopsis:

Upon winning the 2005 presidential election, Evo Morales became the first indigenous person to lead Bolivia since the arrival of the Spanish more than five hundred years before. Morales’s election is the culmination of a striking new kind of activism in Bolivia. Born out of a history of resistance to colonial racism and developed in collective struggles against the post-revolutionary state, this movement crystallized over the last decade as poor and Indian Bolivian citizens engaged with the democratic promises and exclusions of neoliberal multiculturalism.

This ethnography of the Guaraní Indians of Santa Cruz traces how recent political reforms, most notably the Law of Popular Participation, recast the racist exclusions of the past, and offers a fresh look at neoliberalism. Armed with the language of citizenship and an expectation of the rights citizenship implies, this group is demanding radical changes to the structured inequalities that mark Bolivian society. As the 2005 election proved, even Bolivia’s most marginalized people can reform fundamental ideas about the nation, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and democracy.

About the Author: Nancy Grey Postero is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is coeditor of The Struggle for Indian Rights in Latin America (2004).

Bibliographic Details

Title: Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in ...
Publisher: Stanford University Press October 2006
Publication Date: 2006
Binding: Paper Back
Condition: Very Good