Come On! A Choquehuanca Is Foreign Minister: The Discursive (Re)Negotiation Of Ethnoracial Boundaries In Bolivia’s Bureaucracy

• In Event: 452 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 09. Race and Politics

Abstract

Exclusion from the state bureaucracy has been a central grievance of the ethnoracial movements that have sought recognition across Latin America. In Bolivia, an unprecedented change in the ethnoracial composition of the national state bureaucracy followed the inauguration of Evo Morales Ayma, an Aymara Indian, as president in 2006. A new guard of public employees who hail from a wide array of indigenous and peasant organizations have filled national bureaucratic posts en masse, occupying mid- and upper-level positions that had been historically reserved to the urban white and mestizo population. This paper examines how this new bureaucratic guard (re)negotiates the ethnoracial boundaries of the public bureaucracy in Bolivia. Drawing primarily on semi-structured in-depth interviews and focus groups with mid-level public administrators, this paper shows that the new guard attempts to redraw the ethnoracial boundaries of bureaucracy through three types rhetoric strategies: unmasking, uplifting, and spoilage. In the process, its members build solidarity, construct a new identity around the category of ‘public servant,’ and articulate a competing notion of the ‘ideal bureaucrat.’ This analysis responds to calls to construct a critical race theory of state by examining the everyday making and unmaking of the state bureaucracy as an ethnoracialized space and practice.

Author

• Marcelo A. Bohrt, Brown University