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This paper analyzes the processes by which “indigenous autonomy” is being constructed in two dozen Bolivian municipalities and territories, in accordance with the 2009 Constitution. It finds that indigenous autonomy is being implemented, most importantly, in the context of Bolivia’s 1994 decentralization reforms, which created the county’s system of municipalities, aggregating particular social constellations and reconfiguring local agents’ political horizons. Some indigenous people view as favorable the representative and/or material gains they have achieved under the municipal system, which helps explain why more majority-indigenous municipalities and territories have not yet chosen to exercise the legal option of indigenous autonony. However, the new constitutional and legal framework also limits indigenous self-governance because territorial delimitations of the country’s 339 municipalities are, in general, inconsistent with the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples. Consequently, there is frequently an incongruity between the cartography understood or imagined by those seeking to exercise self-governance and the colonial-based geography to which indigenous autonomy must adhere. Moreover, new institutions of indigenous self-governance are legally obligated to include legislative, executive and administrative functions, reflecting not indigenous norms and procedures, but a municipal structure of liberal design. With regard to the implementation of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this study illustrates that indigenous self-determination can encounter obstacles where indigenous territorial jurisdictions are legally required to coincide with contemporary boundaries of colonial origins, rather than pre-colonial regional territories. Legal reforms that seek to enhance indigenous self-governance are likely to be more effective where they minimize this incongruity.