Studies of the origins of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution have usually emphasised the role of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, MNR), which worked in conjunction with the country's tin miners to overthrow the old oligarchy. Peasants, meanwhile, are assumed to have engaged only in sporadic revolts prior to April 1952, when the MNR triumph supposedly ignited peasant demands for agrarian reform. Laura Gotkowitz's inquiry delves into the neglected topic of rural indigenous mobilisation in the seven decades before 1952, revealing a long history of political activity. Her book questions prevailing views of the roots of the Bolivian Revolution, and in so doing also challenges standard assumptions about indigenous political action in Bolivia and elsewhere.
The narrative focuses particular attention on two periods: the emergence of trans-regional networks of caciques apoderados in the 1910s and 1920s, and popular struggles against rural servitude in the 1940s. Chap. 3 details the struggles of indigenous communities, led by a new generation of caciques with strong ties to the grassroots, against the liberal push for land privatisation. The networks that emerged in the 1910s and 1920s were considerably broader, both geographically and in terms of their demands, than previously thought. Caciques apoderados flooded the courts with legal petitions that cleverly engaged both liberal-era and colonial legislation, selectively utilising laws in a way that ‘linked corporate rights with full equality’ (p. 89). These legal protests often played national elites against local ones by invoking the rule of law and the ‘civilising’ mission of the national state when it was advantageous to do so. The protests also reaffirmed communal autonomy and condemned a wide range of abuses by landlords. Faced with liberal and republican campaigns to ‘incorporate’ the Indian into the Bolivian nation, the caciques apoderados and their supporters actively negotiated the terms of that incorporation.
The creative engagement of indigenous actors with state laws, discourse and institutions is also a key theme in Gotkowitz's discussion of rural mobilisations in the late 1930s and 1940s. These mobilisations sought to defend usufruct land rights and denounced forced labour and other abuses on haciendas, but also demanded greater political power for communities and hacienda workers. Community petitioners and hacienda workers (groups that were not always mutually exclusive, Gotkowitz notes) often appealed to the 1938 Constitution and other laws issued under the ‘military socialist’ governments of 1936–9, reinterpreting and radicalising the meaning of official legal discourse.
In 1945, indigenous mobilisations compelled the Villaroel–MNR coalition government to sponsor an Indigenous Congress, an event unprecedented in the Americas. Both during and after the congress, indigenous delegates rejected the government's vision of gradual reform under state control. The official 1945 decrees against forced labour were cautious and moderate in scope, but the government found itself unable to control the popular interpretation of its declarations. The Indigenous Congress and ensuing decrees raised expectations throughout the countryside, and the process of change quickly spiralled out of government control. As Gotkowitz emphasises, at stake were not just labour conditions but how democracy, citizenship and Indians' place in the nation would be defined – and despite the government's best efforts, Indians themselves played a central role in this process of definition and negotiation.
The book's historical narrative climaxes in 1947 with the famous Ayopaya rebellion and the wave of strikes, land occupations and court battles that accompanied it elsewhere. Again, these mobilisations involved material demands but were also assertions of political rights. Though crushed, the unrest in 1947 raised the spectre of Indian revolt, leaving behind ‘a visible image of what a revolution might be’ – for the rural poor, for the big landowners, and for the middle-class leadership that would take power in 1952 (p. 286). Together with the cacique apoderado networks of the 1920s, mobilisations of the 1940s helped pave the way for rural reforms after 1952. MNR reforms, Gotkowitz argues, in large part simply ‘formalized, within particular institutional rubrics, what rural people had already made true’ in the preceding decades (p. 290). The linkage between pre-revolutionary agitation and post-1952 mobilisation remains a bit hazy, however, and that ambiguity is perhaps the book's only (minor) weakness. As Gotkowitz notes, the relationship between disparate cycles of rural mobilisation and the topic of MNR–peasant relations during the 1948–52 period both require further study.
The book also challenges several of the standard binary assumptions about indigenous mobilisation: for example, Gotkowitz questions facile distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous activism, and between extralegal and legalistic political protest. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the relationship between indigenous activists and the non-indigenous Left has not always been marred by paternalism and manipulation. In the late 1920s, for example, the urban-based Grupo Túpac Amaru began collaborating with indigenous activists in rural Bolivia. In 1939 urban activists assisted rural workers in a wave of hacienda strikes, and prior to the famous ‘cycle of unrest’ centred in La Paz and Cochabamba in 1947, urban anarchists and hacienda-based unionists joined together in demanding an end to rural abuses and in promoting the unionisation of hacienda workers. Surprisingly, these alliances usually ‘did not lead to the suppression of Indianness as a political identity’ (p. 162). This finding coincides with recent revisionist studies by Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson for Bolivia and by Marc Becker for twentieth-century Ecuador.
Contrary to another traditional assumption, rural political protest often combined legal campaigns with land occupations, sit-down strikes and occasionally violent revolt. Rural protesters ‘viewed petitions and uprisings as interconnected modes of political practice’ (p. 156). Here the book's arguments bear much in common with those of historians like Charles Walker and Sergio Serulnikov, who have recently drawn similar conclusions about indigenous political activity in the southern Andes.
A Revolution for Our Rights is a path-breaking study of peasant and indigenous political action. It fills a major gap in the historiography on Bolivia, and because of its conceptual innovation and fascinating empirical findings it also raises new questions for the study of rural political mobilisation elsewhere in Latin America.
