The sovereign street: making revolution in urban Bolivia

Abstract

"The Sovereign Street analyzes how indigenous-led mass movements and protests in urban space reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Through protest actions that took over the streets, Bolivians realigned the political system, placing social movements, community organizations, and politically and racially excluded groups at the center of civic and political life. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews in Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz, the book argues that mass protests succeed by demonstrating their own political legitimacy, control over space, and ability to affect daily life. By focusing on issues studied by ethnographers-social life as experienced through the human body, the meanings attached to place, and social movement practices-it explains how race and power are lived and changed through street protest. It also charts the emerging tensions between President Evo Morales' government and left grassroots movements, and demonstrates how the same processes of protest and disruption that brought him to power have become the key methods for challenging his leadership"--