The Ethnoracial State Bureaucracy: Race/Ethnicity and the Transformation of Bolivia’s State Bureaucracy

• In Event: 174 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. The State and Racial Exclusion

Abstract

The electoral success of the MAS party in Bolivia in 2006, a party conceived by the indigenous movement as its political instrument, led to a visible and significant change in the ethnoracial composition of the national state bureaucracy. Indigenous men and women entered the civil service en masse, occupying authority positions which were largely reserved to the white and mestizo population. Drawing on ethnographic data from research in the Bolivian Foreign Ministry and interviews with forty national-level public servants, this paper examines how members of the bureaucratic old guard, primarily white and mestizo, experience and respond to threats by a new guard, primarily indigenous, to their claim to the state bureaucracy. By examining the micro-politics around the transformation of an ethnoracial state bureaucracy, I highlight another much neglected dimension of the racial state: the state bureucracy’s internal entanglements with race/ethnicity. Furthermore, drawing on race/ethnicity theory, particularly that on whiteness, and on neoinstitutional organizational theory, my analysis shows that organizational change cannot be understood absent the ethnoracial dynamics at play in a racialized social system. A race theory of state that seeks to understand changes in racial formation must seriously take the racial dynamics at play in organizational transformations.

Author

• Marcelo A. Bohrt, Brown University