Bolivia is well known for its politically engaged film industry. Most famously, Jorge Sanjinés directed a series of films with an explicit political agenda, including Yawar mallku (Blood of the Condor), which resulted in the eviction of the Peace Corps from the country, and El coraje del pueblo (English version title is The Night of San Juan) that used community members to reenact a brutal 1967 massacre of striking miners. Over the past several decades, indigenous activists have taken advantage of technological advances in filmmaking to use this medium to forward their own social and political interests. Bolivia continues to be at the forefront of these developments. Since 1997, the nongovernmental National Plan of Indigenous Audiovisual Communication has worked with indigenous communities and organizations to produce and disseminate videos that explore their concerns. Their productions provide a convenient medium through which to understand indigenous realities.
Anthropologist Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal observed the process of filmmaking in Bolivia between 2005 and 2007 while conducting research for her dissertation in anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). It was a propitious time to undertake this project because delegates to the Constituent Assembly were drafting a new constitution that defined Bolivia as a pluri-national state. In this book, Zamorano Villarreal details how grassroots media productions advanced indigenous political demands, including those codified in the new constitution. She argues that these productions do more than document indigenous culture and reinforce ethnic identities—they also advance political demands and influence outcomes, including those articulated in the Constituent Assembly.
In conducting her research, Zamorano Villarreal looked at how popular filmmaking engages with prevailing discourses on indigenous issues, and how those discourses permeated media practices. She examines indigenous media as a political practice that visualizes common imaginaries and possibilities for Bolivia's future political landscapes. Rather than solely reflecting lived realities, media productions also serve as motors to animate collective political practices. One result is a move away from essentialist notions that view identity and culture as static. Film instead becomes a tool for empowerment and social transformation, although Zamorano Villarreal cautions against overestimating its potential. Instead, she focuses on exploring the power relations, aesthetic tensions, and visual economies that emerge out of video production and distribution.
Zamorano Villarreal describes an “indigenized indigenismo” in which indigenous peoples, rather than outsiders, produce, appropriate, contest, and rework visual representations of themselves. Their audiovisual production contributes to the creation of new forms of identity and political engagement.
Through an ethnographic examination of the filmmaking process, Zamorano Villarreal explores how visual reenactments both produce and transform political imaginaries and social relations, with an eye to the material possibilities for Bolivia's political future. She examines the negotiations in which filmmakers engage in order to depict indigenous realities, as well as their participation in political debates that concern the country's future.
Zamorano Villarreal expresses optimism for indigenous people's participation in Bolivia's political process, including the quest for self-determination and a role in shaping the country's political landscape. She embraces audiovisual productions for their potential to articulate shared ethnic identities and craft potential political imaginaries as inspired by the Constituent Assembly, the constitution it drafted, and the proclamation of Bolivia as a pluri-national state.
