In 1994 the Bolivian Congress approved a national education reform that included a bilingual intercultural component (EIB), whose aim was to promote the teaching of indigenous languages. This book explores the conflicting articulations and networks of power surrounding the history and implementation of this reform in the context of the indigenous activism of the Guarani, who embraced bilingualism as a means of dismantling the coloniality of power and testing the limits of neoliberal interculturalism as a state-mandated strategy to manage cultural difference. Gustafson draws on ethnographic research in addition to his collaborations with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists to engage questions of legitimacy and the politics of knowledge in an ongoing process of nation building.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Resurgent knowledge,” covers the period of the initial resurgence of Guarani political mobilization from 1980 to 1994. Its three chapters trace the history of Guarani schooling to unpack its conflicting roles. On the one hand, historically it constituted a means of domesticating indigenous peoples and maintaining them as a racially distinct lower caste. This was achieved through forced literacy in Spanish and assimilation in order to create passive subjects to be instructed and governed. On the other hand, these colonial practices were transformed into acts of insurgence through the bilingual education movement and the work of Guarani scribes and teachers, supported by nongovernmental organizations and the Assembly of Guarani People (APG). Through textbook and curricular changes, the Guarani reconquered the right to speak and to know in their own language, a version of interculturalism that valued shared identity and difference.

Part 2, “Transnational articulations,” covers the period from 1994 to 1998. Its three chapters shift the field to La Paz, the center of neoliberal reformist networks that were funded through the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and UNICEF, among others. The turn toward market liberalization was accompanied by a different understanding of interculturalism, one that coupled market-led growth with the recognition of the cultural traditions of indigenous peoples without engaging racism, epistemic alterity, or class inequality, and without conceding to radical structural changes. The final chapter demonstrates how the EIB, thus constructed, became a state process for the containment of disruption that attempted to manage difference in the schools through the curriculum, textbooks, and teachers.

Part 3, “Return to struggle,” covers the period from 1998 to 2006. It documents recent events, such as the Guarani hunger strike and an army assault at the Aymara bilingual intercultural teacher training school, in order to demonstrate the rearticulation of indigenous movements in the broader context of the collapse of neoliberalism. The final chapter considers the shift in official discourse from interculturalism to decolonialization from the perspective of the government of Evo Morales and its accompanying educational reforms.

Overall, this book presents an intricate portrait of bilingual education that invokes multiple scales in order to understand indigenous mobilizations within the complexity of the wider political-economic structures that include the state, the market, and the role of knowledge.