The Entrance to the Marvelous City: Cable Car System, Ethnicity and Labor in a Bolivian City

• In Event: 452 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Race and Citizenship

Abstract

In 2014, the Bolivian national government inaugurated a massive cable car system between the cities of La Paz and El Alto. The new transportation service generated a sense of pride among citizens who in general received it positively. However, it also opened the door for renewed strategies of ethnic differentiation and boundaries-setting among neighbors, public transportation carriers and street vendors. Those who attempted to settle or work in some of the surrounding areas to the stations confronted residents' mobilizations, or physical and in some cases violent clashes against competitors. This paper seeks to analyze this phenomenon by focusing on how the inauguration of the cable car at one station of El Alto reshaped the perception of residents about their areas of livelihood; how it transformed the relationship between residents, on one side, and street-vendors and public transportation carriers on the other; and how it exacerbated the competition between these same bus drivers. Through interviews, news stories and participant observation, this study argues that current ethnic distinctions are produced by a structural context marked by a colonial history of discrimination against indigenous populations, combined with three decades of structural adjustment reforms. The ‘new’, clearly identified, undesirable populations in these urban environments, are those of indigenous origins who make a living in the informal markets.

Author

• Jorge Derpic, The University of Texas at Austin