In The Limits of Revolution: Worker Citizens in a Bolivian Miner City, Elena McGrath explores the centrality of mining communities to the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement’s (MNR) state-building projects of the 1950s and 1960s. Using court cases, company archives, municipal records, and union documents from local and national archives, McGrath argues that women’s labor and activism in mining communities is as central to our understanding of the Bolivian Revolution as that of male mine workers. She also details how the MNR reorganized family life in these communities. The Limits of Revolution is an engaging and exciting analysis of Bolivia’s revolutionary period and its aftermath.

While the scholarship on the revolution has long recognized the significance of the miners’ alliance with the MNR government, McGrath examines this relationship from a new angle. Rather than discussing miners as male laborers, she examines mining communities, making women, children, and families central to the story. While the book is not a gender history, it does weave women seamlessly into the narrative. Based on the assertion that mining communities are more than sites of labor output or production, McGrath puts forward the concept of “worker citizenship” – the transformative vision mining communities had of their role in creating social change in national politics, economics, and culture. Worker citizenship was a broad and potent idea, encompassing exercising power through political office but also the daily material benefits workers received through their social contract with the MNR. McGrath explains the benefits—such as preferential treatment, influence, and investment—and drawbacks of this arrangement; since worker citizenship was miner specific, it was also exclusionary, thereby hindering cooperation with other groups of laborers, specifically rural and Indigenous ones. For this reason, while worker citizenship outlived the MNR and survived military dictatorships, it could not endure the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s.

The book unfolds chronologically. Chapters one and two focus on the pre-revolutionary period (1895–1952) and explain how miners became a political force allied with other social movements, making both worker citizenship and the revolution possible. Chapters three and four focus on the period of MNR rule (1952–1965), detailing the creation of the welfare state that provided benefits to worker citizens and empowered women. Chapters five and six explore the period of dictatorship and democratic transition (1961-1985) when the material benefits of the welfare state still existed but mining communities were increasingly cast as enemies rather than allies, and were thereby subject to brutal repression. Women’s activism became increasingly important in this context, where McGrath documents the origins and importance of the vastly understudied Housewives’ Committee. The book ends with the closing of the nationalized mines in 1985, ironically under President Victor Paz Estenssoro, the same president that benefitted from a pact with the worker citizens in the early 1950s.

The Limits of Revolution takes a single mining community, Corocoro, which is often on the margins of conversations about Bolivia’s mining industry (since it is a copper rather than a tin mine), and makes it central to Bolivian history. McGrath provides a long view of Corocoro’s contributions to national politics, exploring its role in making and undermining the revolution as well as fighting the military regimes that dominated the 1960s and 1970s. Far from a microhistory, McGrath deftly weaves the history of Corocoro into the history of the nation and the broader political shifts happening in Latin America between the 1950s and 1980s. Indeed, one of McGrath’s stated goals is to “reinstate Corocoro to its rightful place as an important locus of Bolivian history” (22). For these reasons, the book is intellectually sophisticated and makes a substantial contribution to the scholarly literature.

Overall, The Limits of Revolution puts forward an account of the Bolivian Revolution that at times complicates and at other points upends established chronology and narrative. This makes it an exciting scholarly contribution, useful to anyone interested in revolutionary state-building, labor politics, and family history.