Country of Immigrants? Bolivian History and the Global Turn

• In Event: Nation, Region, World: Perspectives from Bolivian History

Abstract

The culture and economy of Andean-based migrations have been at the heart of Bolivian historiography for decades. Over the past fifteen years or so, work on labor migration has connected Bolivia and the Andes to the Southern Cone, Europe, and the United States. Some scholars have also begun to explore European, Asian, and Latin American migration to Bolivia, primarily for the World War II era. But Bolivia does not figure in the larger Latin American context as a country of immigrants, even though immigration has shaped its modern history in formative ways. This paper will reflect on the role of the regional and the global in Bolivia’s twentieth-century history by putting international migration at the forefront. It will briefly review the literature on migration to, from, and within Bolivia, and then zero in on the transatlantic and transregional networks that shaped the politics of refugee rescue to Bolivia on the eve of World War II (Bolivia took in as many as 10,000 European refugees in the months preceding and following the outbreak of war). While this episode speaks to and benefits from global and transnational perspectives, it is perhaps best understood as a series of connected regional stories—Latin American, South American, Andean, and European—and in the interstices of Jewish and non-Jewish pasts.

Author

• Laura Gotkowitz, University of Pittsburgh