Embodied Matters: Bolivian Fantasy and Indigenismo

Embodied Matters: Bolivian Fantasyand Indigenismo

By

Michelle Bigenhohampshire college

r e s u m e n

Presento un nuevo análisis del indigenismo boliviano, basado en una investigación de

la revista musical “Fantasía Boliviana” de los años 50. Trabajando a partir de historias

orales de quienes participaban en esta producción musical, el artículo plantea una

visión compleja de cómo funcionaba el discurso del indigenismo en la ciudad de La Paz

durante la época del gobierno Revolucionario. A diferencia de la literatura o pintura

indigenista, en esta producción los participantes representaban lo indígena a través de

sus propios cuerpos. Fantasía Boliviana atraía a participantes de clases sociales distintas

y de subjetividades étnicas que no cabían fácilmente en las clasificaciones de “indio” y

“mestizo.” Varios participantes desarrollaban un discurso que alababa las representa-

ciones indígenas de esta producción, tomándolas como expresión máxima de la nación.

A la vez, participantes hablaban de su trabajo en términos del “Arte,” respondiendo en

parte a un régimen de valor que venía del mundo occidental. Fantasía Boliviana

demuestra un indigenismo que servía no solamente para transformar las actitudes de

mestizos-criollos hacia los indígenas, sino también para influir en las opiniones sobre

Bolivia que podrían tener los extranjeros.

palabras claves: nacionalismo, la folklorización, el Arte, la música, el cuerpo.

keywords: nationalism, folklorization, Art, music, the body.

Indigenismo generally refers to early 20th century cultural discoursesthrough which Latin American Creoles and mestizos reflected on the position ofindigenous populations in their respective countries. These reflections oftenbecame part of regional identity claims and nation-building projects. Ifindigenismo is said to speak for indigenous subjects without including them,

Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 11, No.2, pp. 267–293. ISSN 1085-7025, online ISSN 1548-7180. © 2006 by

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Embodied Matters 267

indianismo, emerging in the second half of the 20th century, is said to critique theexclusionary cultural politics of the former, and to promise a project in which fleshand blood indigenous subjects reclaim their positions as agents of their own history(Favre 1998:11). According to Henri Favre, contemporary processes of globalizationand “tribalization” leave indigenismo in the dustbin of history as a new Indian-nessemerges through indianismo (1998:149–150).

Favre’s discussion of indianismo seems to fit the Bolivian context of the late 20thand early 21st centuries. A contemporary indigenous leader, Felipe Quispe, alsoknown as El Mallku, who emerged from the 1970s’ radical indigenous Aymara poli-tics of the Kataristas, has been demanding public attention with statements like:“Q’aras who think with foreign heads must be Indianized” (Sanjinés 2002:52–53).“Q’ara” literally means peeled or skinned, but is used by Aymaras to refer to non-Indians (mestizos or whites). El Mallku insists that Indians need “a pedagogy inreverse,” that they need to “unthink” mestizo ways (see Sanjinés 2002:53). The “Octoberagenda” of 2003—dramatically expressed through the popular ousting of PresidentGonzalo Sánchez de Lozada—brought into high profile Bolivia’s management ofhydrocarbon resources, the cry for a constituent assembly to reconstitute the Boli-vian nation-state, and the 2005 special electoral process through which Evo Moraleswon the presidency with a record percentage of the vote. Morales’ indigenousroots—something that has already come under scrutiny as a more recently elabo-rated personal narrative—have been central to framing the moment in which it is feltthat an indigenous majority is finally represented in the highest office of the land.

It may seem untimely to reconsider indigenismo when indigenous actors finallyseem to be taking center stage within the state—that is when indianismo seems torule the day. But I argue that over-simplified readings of indigenismo need to be re-examined, and that a more complex understanding of this discourse of the past canshed light on current cultural politics, which some scholars are already tentativelycalling revolutionary (Thomson 2006). The discourse of indigenismo has often beencoupled with its fraternal twin, the discourse of mestizaje: an ideology of cultural/racial mixing that supposedly shapes homogeneous citizens for the nation-state. Inthe zeal to underscore the problems of the mestizaje/indigenismo project and itstyranny as experienced by indigenous peoples—for example, the erasure of indige-nous subjects and the appropriation of indigenous expressions by non-indigenouspeoples—analyses have skirted a careful consideration of how these discourses oper-ated more broadly. Elsewhere, I more closely re-examine the discourse of mestizaje(Bigenho 2006). In this article, I look specifically at indigenismo through the lens ofstories about a 1955 staged musical review called Fantasía Boliviana (Bolivian Fantasy).1

Supported through the government-backed Instituto Cinematográfico Boliviano(Bolivian Motion Picture Institute), the staged production of Bolivian Fantasy incor-porated about 60 people who performed two and three performances a day to

268 Jour nal of Latin Amer ican Anthrop olo g y


sold-out theaters for month-long seasons. Participants included symphony orches-tra musicians, comedians, classically trained ballet dancers and choreographers, folk-lore musicians who had been taking the stage since the 1930s, musicians who playedindigenous pan pipes in troupe style, an artist who painted 18 different changes ofscenery, a “company pianist,”and a producer who initiated the endeavor and broughtit to fruition on a grand scale. The company performed in the Bolivian cities of LaPaz, Cochabamba, Oruro, and Sucre. The show then toured the Latin American cap-ital cities of Asunción, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires.

Bolivian Fantasy was squarely located within the cultural politics of the 1952Revolution. The generally accepted academic narrative of the Revolution goessomething like this: as a consolidation of political processes put in motion after theChaco War (1932–1935), the 1952 Revolution not only moved marginalized Indianexpressions to the center of a nationalist cultural project, but also brought univer-sal suffrage, universal education, the abolition of the hacienda system (AgrarianReform of 1953), the nationalization of mines, and the unionization of peasants. Theliberal model of citizenship embodied in these policies explicitly sought to create an“imagined community” (Anderson 1991) of mestizos out of the different Bolivianethnicities and classes. It sought to construct uniform and productive Bolivians,even though it simultaneously reinforced existing social hierarchies (see RiveraCusicanqui 1993:62–89). The marginalized flesh and blood “Indians” were incorpo-rated into relatively recently formed political parties as they also came under thenew class-driven label of “peasants”(Albó 1987:381). Meanwhile, the symbolic worldof Indian-ness was corralled into the heart of the national body politic. Class iden-tifications were promoted as legitimate means of organizing for social change, whileethnic identifications were symbolically made to serve Bolivian nationalism.Indigenista productions became the cultural politics of the Bolivian State (Rossells2004:307).

While the extravagant production of Bolivian Fantasy can be interpreted as partof an indigenista mestizo-Creole national project, its participants came from a widerange of Bolivian social classes, and expressed varied perspectives about what theywere up to in this staged production. Through oral histories of people who wereinvolved in this production, I explore Bolivian Fantasy’s operatic nature and its fan-tasy work that made box office successes out of staged and choreographed repre-sentations of indigenous things.2 This interpretation of a 1950s indigenismo in LaPaz provides insights into shifting cultural politics and reconfigurations of Bolivia’sshared urban spaces. The indigenismo that emerges from participants’ memories ofthese embodied experiences, I argue, reflects an over-arching concern with drawingassociations between indigenous expressions and a powerfully construed edifice of“Art.” This production can be located in relation to broader 19th and 20th centuryLatin American and world trends in cultural politics, in which “vernacular,”

“cultural,” or “folk” forms were put at the service of ideologies of nationalism, her-itage, Art, and the modern (Herzfeld 1982; Handler 1985; Clifford 1988; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; De la Cadena 2000; Guss 2000; Hagedorn 2001; Holton 2005;R. López 2006). In Bolivian Fantasy, the references to Art revealed participants’desires to locate Bolivian Fantasy not only as a nationalist undertaking, but also asa modern project that would be viewed as such on an international stage. I alsoargue that the embodied practices of staging indigenous representations in BolivianFantasy played a crucial role in transforming how different urban residents viewedtheir nation. A critique of Bolivian indigenismo could focus on the exclusion ofindigenous subjects from this mestizo-Creole project, but such a narrow interpre-tation is problematic because it remains within the essentializing binaries of Indianand non-Indian, and because it tends to overlook the social changes that did markthe period. The Revolution has been called an “uncompleted”project (Malloy 1970),and it was without a doubt a bourgeois revolution that has been interpreted by someindigenous groups as a threat against their ethnic organizations (Rivera Cusicanqui1993). But the Revolution’s cultural politics were also about changing the attitudesof those who held power, and about the breaking down of their racialized viewsabout who “belonged” in what spaces. As I focus on the memories of those whoembodied Indian-ness on stage, the boundaries between indigenous and mestizo-Creole categories begin to blur. While it is not the main focus of this article, myinterpretive emphasis on embodiment suggests that analyses of Bolivianindigensimo—and for that matter Bolivian indianismo—could benefit from femi-nist theoretical attempts to bring back the body to discursive analysis; feminist the-ory does not completely get beyond binaries—like Indian versus mestizo—but itproductively disrupts them.

Embodied Indigenismo

Bolivian indigenismo originally grew out of mestizo-Creole fears following theindigenous rebellions at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th(García Pabón 1998:126; Paz Soldán 2003:13; Rossells 2004:311; Salmón 1997:21; Sanjinés2004:71–78). Land appropriations led to numerous indigenous uprisings and thesemovements momentarily converged when the indigenous caudillo, Zárate Willka,came to fight on the Federalist side of the 1899 Revolution (see Rivera Cusicanqui2003 [1984]; Zavaleta Mercado 1986). Images of El Temible Willka (“The DreadedWillka”), as he was called, and memories of the massacre that occurred in Mohozaled to mestizo-Creole nightmares of “a race war” and the fear of a separate “patriaindia” (Indian nation) (Zavaleta Mercado 1986:155). In a desire to control indige-nous populations, mestizo-Creole elites began to re-think what they called “theIndian problem.”



Many interpretations of Bolivian indigenismo focus on how the image of theIndian entered new creative spaces of mestizo-Creoles in writings, paintings, andfilms of the period (García Pabón 1998; Paz Soldán 2003; Rossells 2004; Salmón 1997;Sanjinés 2004). The letrados (learned, of letters, of writing) wrote melodramaticnovels through which the Indian was seen to contain a telluric connection to theenvironment, while the mestizo was seen either as the obstacle to, or the hope for,the future. For example, Alcides Arguedas in Pueblo enfermo (1909), through whatEdmundo Paz Soldán calls “a discourse of degeneration,” exalts an imagined pureIndian but considers the mestizo as a negative element for the formation of theBolivian nation (Paz Soldán 2003:19). In his analysis of the work of Franz Tamayo,author of Creación de una pedagogía nacional (1910), Javier Sanjinés coins the term“discourse on the autochthonous” to refer to the liberals’ “ambivalent racial senti-ments of pride, nostalgia, and fascination with the Indian”; the Indian was to bestudied, exalted, disciplined, and enlightened (2004:35). As a program to stop theindigenous threat from below, the discourse on the autochthonous emergedthrough mestizo elites’ observation, representation, and distortion of indigenousdifference (Sanjinés 2004:37–47). For example, paintings of Cecilio Guzmán deRojas represented Indians with positive attributes: the noble, serene savage who wasnever located within social contradictions or conflict (Sanjinés 2004:69–75).

In 1952, the Revolutionary government took up indigenismo as an accompani-ment to the discourse of mestizaje. How did that discourse of indigenismo work?And how did it spar with mestizaje, its discursive twin ? As ideological discourses,mestizaje and indigenismo are—following Michel Foucault’s definition—sets of“limits and forms of the sayable” within a particular historical moment(1991:59–60). Foucault called for an analytical focus, not on the laws that emanatefrom a discourse, but on the “conditions of its existence,” and not on the minds ofthose who engendered it, but on “the practical field in which it is deployed”(Foucault 1991:60–61). The practical fields of mestizaje and indigenismo includedthose related to language, literature, and the lettered, but also those related to bod-ily practices, hygiene, sonorous landscapes, and kinesthetic experiences.3 As men-tioned above, many discussions of Bolivian mestizaje and indigenismo focus onnovels, film, and plastic arts—all expressions that privilege sight and vision as waysto interact with and know the world. But how did these discourses work throughembodiment, through the actual practices of the socio-cultural agents involved inthe body politics of the time? And more specifically, how did mestizaje and indi-genismo, as nationalist discourses, work through all bodies involved in the bodypolitic? A focus on embodied practices takes the analysis closer to the lived experi-ences of those who created and performed the representations. Painting pictures ofstoic Indians who were then contemplated from an observational distance was quitedifferent from dressing, dancing, and singing like Indians.

While I agree with many arguments presented about indigenismo, my work onBolivian Fantasy calls for a re-examination of certain assumptions that often remainimplicit in these analyses. First, I share with Josefa Salmón (1997:18) a skepticismabout the instrumental top-down model of indigenismo whereby clear connectionsare assumed between mestizo-Creole artistic productions, the Bolivian State, andcorresponding assumed effects of such projects. In moving beyond a model of themonolithic elite state, I echo Néstor García Canlini’s claim that “interpretations ofhistory that place all the weight on conspiratorial intentions and Machiavellianalliances of the dominant powers impoverish the complexity and the conflicts ofmodernization (1995:60). Such interpretations flatten the complexities of social lifeand the place of art within it. In moving away from a functionalist interpretation ofart and adopting instead a semiotic perspective, Clifford Geertz wrote: “Anythingmay, of course, play a role in helping society work, painting and sculpting included;just as anything may help it tear itself apart. But the central connection between artand collective life does not lie on such an instrumental plane, it lies on a semioticone” (1983:99). A view of indigenismo that only interprets the discourse as a mono-lithic expression of elite political processes falls into this kind of functionalist flatness.Through a quite different line of argument, Sherry Ortner (1995) has used the term“ethnographic refusal” to refer to resistance literature that dissolves subjects andrefuses to thickly describe processes that do not fit a model of easily separable spacesof resistance and domination.When analyses read indigenismo as a direct and func-tional expression of elite artistic sensibilities, they engage in similar processes of dis-solving subjects and ethnographic refusal. The challenge is to move beyondinstrumentality and ethnographic refusal without losing sight of the issues of powerand inequality that structure indigenismo.

My second concern, related to the first, is that analyses of indigenismo seem tobe constrained by a binary framework in which mestizo-Creoles and indigenouspeoples are easily distinguished, equally essentialized, and located within clearlybounded positions of the dominators and the dominated. I suggest that these essen-tialized binaries are occasionally reappearing in the indianismo of the contempo-rary moment. Judith Butler provides a framework that disrupts such binaries bypositing alternatives to the essentialist-constructivist conundrum of identities, andby bringing the body back into discourse analysis, but not as a “natural” pre-linguistic entity (1993). Butler proposes a discussion of subject formation through arecognition of what must be excluded through abjection in order for the subject totenuously exist (1993:3). But at the same time Butler wants to avoid the discussionof subject formation that easily falls into either (1) radical constructivism wherebodies and matter fall out and everything is simply discourse and language; and(2) essentialism where bodies are present but the process of exclusion and abjectionis erased (1993:8). Butler wants to keep in sight the relational understanding of subject



formation—what has been excluded—at the same time as she brings bodies andmatter back into poststructuralist analysis (1993:9–10). Citing Luce Irigary, Butlersuggests that “binary oppositions are formulated through the exclusion of a field ofdisruptive possibilities” (1993:35). If it is impossible to avoid the Indian-mestizobinary, I at least want to consider the disruptive possibilities that buzz around thisconstruct, and these disruptions emerge prominently within a focus on embodiedexperience.

While clear binaries reveal how power relations are colonially structured andthus make obvious the on-going racism of Bolivian society, they prove limitingbecause they overestimate indigenismo’s restraining effects on people who may self-identify as indigenous, at the same time as they underestimate indigenismo’s effectson those who may self-identify as mestizo-Creoles. Given the sustained trajectoryof indigenous organizing and uprisings in the 20th and 21st centuries (see Patzi Paco2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2003 [1984]; Ari 2005), the discourse of indigenismo hardlyseems to have limited indigenous subjects’ space of action, even if those actions havenot always succeeded in bringing significant changes. Indigenismo’s effects are per-haps more evident in the shifting attitudes of mestizo-Creoles. For example, indi-genista paintings reflect an ideology that is aimed at the very classes that producedthese works (Rossells 2004:306). And Leonardo García Pabón claims that even asTamayo’s work is about how “the Indian can and should be integrated in thenational project,” the principal interlocutor of Tamayo’s text is not the indigenousperson (1998:140). My interpretation of Bolivian Fantasy calls for a closer look atthese sometimes overlooked effects of embodied indigenismo.

Embodied indigenismo includes the folklorization of Bolivian indigenousmusic and dance forms, a process that began around the 1930s. At that time, mes-tizo women singers played a crucial role in bringing stylized indigenous songs tourban stages where otherwise such genres would never have been accepted(Bigenho 2005). Rather than falling into the easy dichotomy of the written word asbelonging to the powerful and the embodied performance belonging to the weak,I follow Diana Taylor’s lead as she states that: “Performance belongs to the strongas well as the weak” (2003:22). If Sanjinés refers to “viscerality” as a bodilymetaphor “that helps explain how indigenous subalternity has resisted giving upits identity to rationalist Western discourse” (2004:4), I want to invoke visceralityfor all subjects in that such a move may help disrupt—although I can never getbeyond them—the binary analytical straight-jackets that seem to limit analyses.Bolivian Fantasy is about the viscerality of a represented indigenous world, aboutmestizos and others who stage indigeneity through their own bodily actions. Many,although not all, of those who embodied folklorized representations of the indige-nous world did not consider themselves indigenous subjects. Part of the ideologi-cal work of mestizaje and indigenismo was precisely the transformation of

attitudes about Indians and mestizos, in all sectors of Bolivian society. The 20thcentury began with a rather negative reading of mestizaje.4 But with Bolivia’sdefeat in the Chaco War (1932–1935), Bolivians began to rethink this category asthey reconceptualized the nation through mestizaje (Barragán 1992:18–21). Howdid this despised category become, in 50 years, the core of a national project? I con-tend that folklorization, the staged embodiment of indigenous expressions con-tributed greatly to this transformation.

As the stories from Bolivian Fantasy show, many participants in this productionwere not so easily categorized as either Indians or mestizos. By 1955, the veryprocesses of rural to urban migration began to reshape Bolivia’s urban social land-scapes, and to make it impossible—if indeed it ever was possible—to delineate sucha facile social dichotomy. Much as García Canclini calls for a deconstruction of “thescientific and political operations that staged the popular” (1995:146), an under-standing of indigenismo needs to deconstruct the oppositional categories of q’arasand Indians. My intention is not to erase the contradictions that certainly playedout—and continue to play out—between subjects who may identify as indigenousor as mestizo-Creole. My intent instead is to dislodge the analytical complacencythat accompanies the implicit acceptance of these categories.

Let, now, the curtain open on Bolivian Fantasy.

Ballerinas and Movie Stars

The lights dimmed. Music began to emerge from the orchestra pit of La Paz’sMunicipal Theater. The Municipal Theater, although refurbished at least once sincethe 1950s, is today a regal structure that seems to denote the desire of La Paz’s eliteto have a small European opera house. Seats are offered at orchestra level, in balconyboxes, and in the gallery for the more popular classes. Red velvet curtains frame themain stage and cover the doors that access the orchestra seats. While an artist todaymight opt for La Paz’s amphitheater because of its ample seating capacity, theMunicipal Theater still carries the greatest prestige as a performance venue. BolivianFantasy was presented through scenes like “Joy of the Countryside,” “EasternRomance,”“Cochabamba of My Dreams,”“Indian Song,”“Chapaco Love,”“On theBeaches of the Beni,”“Carnival of the Devil,” and so on.5 The scenes were not inte-grated within any narrative plot. Instead, individual scenes profiled comic skits andvignettes like a drunken man’s dreams, a representation of “the seven sins,” theArchangel Michael, and the diablada (devil’s dance). The different scenes of thistwo-and-a-quarter-hour musical review were held together through the positing ofan imagined national community that celebrated this staged cultural diversity inspite of the hierarchical and dependent relations that still characterized Boliviansociety (see Lomnitz 2001).6 Bolivian Fantasy was intended to reach a broad



audience, and from participants’ memories, the show seemed quite successful onthis level. Participants said that Bolivian Fantasy broke with the de facto segregationof the city, bringing under the same theater roof, mestizo elites and urban Indians.Participants specifically recalled the presence of women who were wearing thepolleras (wide gathered skirts) and boler hats that mark the urban Aymara women,“indigenous mestizos” or cholitas in La Paz.

The man who claimed authorship of this show was Waldo Cerruto, a militantof the party that came to power in 1952, the MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolu-cionario, National Revolutionary Movement). In 2002, I interviewed an elderly andailing Cerruto in his ornately decorated home, in the upper-middle class neighbor-hood of Sopocachi. Cerruto proudly spoke of his role in the creation of BolivianFantasy. When I pressed him for certain details, he assured me that everything Iwould want to know was in a book his daughter had published about his politicalwork (Cerruto Moravek 1996). Throughout his life, Cerruto remained well-connected to the upper echelons of Bolivian political society. He moved throughdifferent political persuasions, working with the MNR during the Revolution and,as he told me several times, working in the diplomatic corps under Hugo BanzerSuárez. When discussing the origins of Bolivian Fantasy, he remembered a conver-sation he had with President Victor Paz Estenssoro (also of the MNR) shortly afterthe 1952 Revolution. Cerruto’s sister was Paz Estenssoro’s wife. Politics and familywere tightly knit. According to Cerruto, Paz Estenssoro was looking for a way toteach people about the Revolution and movies were seen as a particularly effectiveway to reach the masses of Bolivian society. With Paz Estenssoro’s support, Cerrutofounded the Bolivian Motion Picture Institute which, in 1952, began to producedocumentaries about the Revolution, the different regions of Bolivia, and theAgrarian Reform. During the interview with me, Cerruto claimed to have drawnfrom his own resources to sponsor many of these activities. Other participants sim-ply remembered that the MNR backed all these activities, including the productionof Bolivian Fantasy. In 1953, Cerruto placed an advertisement in the newspaper,inviting people to join the Bolivian Movie Club that would have a technical wing tolearn film-making and an artistic wing to promote activities in radio, theater, music,dance, drawing, make-up, and stage sets (Cerruto Moravek 1996:64–66). The artis-tic wing was supposed to mould future Bolivian movie stars. As Cerruto said in apublished interview:

[The Institute] needs artists and young people . . . the possibility is open to all

because we all have something of an artist in some part of our spirit. Who has not at

one time had the illusion of turning into a Greta Garbo or an Elizabeth Taylor or to

play well the part of a Novarro or a Tyrone Power? (Cerruto Moravek 1996:71)

Garbo, Taylor, Novarro, and Power were all Hollywood movie icons at the time.7

The Movie Club advertisement did not even hint that the artistic wing would beinvolved in “national,”“indigenous,” or “folkloric” activities, but it did call on youngpeople to make “sacrifices” for “all that is related to art” (Cerruto Moravek 1996:64).Cerruto was appealing to young people’s supposed longings to be on the silverscreen. At the time, La Paz’s movie houses were filled with films from the UnitedStates. Throughout Latin American countries, the arrival of sound films opened thedoor for Hollywood productions, and in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, sound cinema“would become the principal interlocutor of Latin American modernity—as CarlosMonsiváis says, where Latin Americans went not to dream but to learn to be mod-ern” (A. López 2000:72). Cerruto’s overall project, with its heavily patronizing tone,aimed to turn this powerful medium towards a pedagogical project of nationalism,to teach “our people who until now have lived in ignorance” (Cerruto Moravek1996:69). In 1954, the Movie Club presented a first attempt at a musical review. It wastitled Viajando por nuestra tierra (Traveling Through Our Country) and was,according to the press reports and other participants’ interviews, not well receivedby the public. While Bolivian Fantasy’s successful national and international pres-ence in theaters, beginning in 1955, did not last more than a couple of years, it com-peted with and inspired other choreographed folkloric presentations.

Before placing the advertisement for the Movie Club, Cerruto had contactedChela Urquidi, a dancer who had studied ballet in Buenos Aires when her husbandwas there on a fellowship. Cerruto shared an Argentine connection, having studiedagronomy in the 1940s at the Universidad de la Plata. While Cerruto was away fromBolivia he also edited Horizonte, a magazine of Argentine-Bolivian interculturalexchange (Cerruto Moravek 1996:13). Cerruto told me:

I looked to Chela Urquidi as the first ballerina and I made an agreement . . . Could

she collect dances from here as well as from the interior, Beni, Pando, etc? And could

she teach [these dances] to young people? And she said to me “Where am I going to

find the young people?” “Don’t worry. Tomorrow an ad will come out announcing

the opening of the Movie Club.”

Urquidi accepted the contract and began a paid research trip through different areasof Bolivia.

Yolanda Pol, one of the Fantasy’s participants, was 16 years old when sheresponded to the call for Movie Club members. What caught her attention was theadvertisement’s mention of possible international travel. She was already studyingballet with “a Russian teacher,” because she “wanted to be a classical ballerina.” Shedescribed arriving at Chela Urquidi’s dance studio not knowing what to expect.“Noone told us we would be dancing folkloric dances.” She described the awkwardness



with which she first danced a cueca (a Bolivian dance): “We were more classical inthe way we moved the handkerchief . . . We were more formal in the choreography.”Pol told me that as she became more involved in these activities, even teaching otherstudents what she herself had only recently learned, other people chided her: “Howare you classical dancers going to go dance those cholo dances?” While the term“cholo” has multiple meanings, it is here used as an insult and a racial slur. Polclaimed she and other performers ignored these taunts, responding that: “Weshould have been doing this a long time ago.”

But the ballet shoes were not deposited at the door before entering BolivianFantasy. Chela Urquidi choreographed a sequence where a drunken man dreamedof cholitas dancing the cueca in tutus and toe shoes. Just about all my intervieweesmentioned this sequence and the harsh critique it received from the national andforeign press. A critic in Bolivia called the stylized cueca “an adulteration of folk-loric sensibilities” (Cerruto Moravek 1996:114). And a critic in Argentina claimedthat “the stylized ‘cholitas’ defraud the public that seeks the authentic” (CerrutoMoravek 1996:154). In a published interview, Cerruto defended the heavily stylizedcueca: “Why do we Bolivians always feel humiliated by our things? Because thesethings always have been presented in the primitive state they are in” (CerrutoMoravek 1996:118). His comment located such un-stylized expressions as “primi-tive” but salvageable through associations with a world of art, and he rejected thecritiques that were based on a notion of unadulterated indigeneity. Cerruto sawUrquidi’s dream sequence of toe-shoe-clad chola dancers as an admirable artisticdecision that raised a notch the level of Bolivian folklore. Thus, Bolivian Fantasy wasborn out of the ideas of a well-connected MNR militant who founded the MotionPicture Institute, and pitched the project to young people by appealing to anassumed universal desire to become movie stars.

A Symphony Orchestra, Opera Voices, and Pan Pipes

Bolivian Fantasy called upon the musical talents of symphony orchestra musicians,pan pipe troupes, and artists who were already calling themselves “folklore singers”or “folklore musicians.” The orchestra members, who had a more formal musicaltraining and who claimed to have music “literacy” came from middle and upperclasses. “Folklore musicians”—a rather recent category in Bolivia, emerging in the1930s around the urban performance of rural and indigenous genres—includedperformers from interstitial categories that defy an easy mestizo-Indian divide.Some of them were self-taught and did not claim to read music, while others wereconnected to music teachers and benefited from the prestige implied by a studiedapproach to music. Today, pan pipe troupe music performance—the practice of 12to 20 musicians playing the same wind instrument—is highly valued as a

contemporary marker of indigenous “authenticity” within an urban performanceof Bolivian music (Bigenho 2002:109–113), but in La Paz of the 1950s, pan pipetroupe members were self-taught, generally came from the lower working classes,often maintained connections to an Aymara world, and did not necessarily call theirwork “folklore.” The heterogeneity of the social sectors represented by this array ofmusical talents was part of what made this musical review so operatic. Here, I amthinking along the lines of Herbert Lindenberger’s characterizations of opera:monstrous translatable productions that have wealthy sponsors, hyperbolic repre-sentations, expressions of “comic overdrive,” and a hybrid mixing of “high-lifes andvernaculars” (Boon 1999:9–13). The inclusion of different musical traditions,embodied by distinctly trained musicians, certainly fit the 1952 Revolutionary lib-eral model of citizenship that emphasized mestizaje and universal inclusion.

Cerruto expressed his own ambivalences about the mixing of different aestheticprojects.He talked about the importance of bringing on board the director of Bolivia’sSymphony Orchestra, Antonio Montes Calderón.8 But then Cerruto complainedbecause the orchestra sounded too much like a “symphony orchestra.”“This isn’t whatI want,”he had told Montes Calderón.“I want it to sound like chicha [a corn beer asso-ciated with indigenous or peasant contexts], like beer, not like champagne.” WhenMontes Calderón explained the instrument ratios of the symphony orchestra—aboutseven stringed instruments for every wind instrument—Cerruto, in his admittedlyexaggerated response, demanded an inversion.“Put seven wind instruments for everyone violin!” While Cerruto may have said that he wanted the music to sound likechicha—that is rustic, country, and therefore folkloric—the inclusion of the sym-phony orchestra brought an elite cachet and a perceived possibility of “universal”translation in the international performance of the work.When Bolivian Fantasy trav-eled to Asunción, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, Montes Calderón was the onlyorchestra musician who toured with “The Company.”Upon arriving at the neighbor-ing Latin American capitals, he approached the local symphony orchestra directorswith scores, musical parts, and the authority to contract the individual orchestramusicians needed to put on the show. Cerruto emphasized that these were paid pro-fessional musicians who performed with them in these other Latin American spheres.

While some singers in Bolivian Fantasy sang folklore, they framed the tales oftheir experiences with references to opera and classical music traditions. TheCamacho sisters, for example, had made their name through government-sponsored folklore festivals during which they performed with their father, a localteacher from Quillacollo, a city just outside of Cochabamba. Work in folklore even-tually brought the Camachos to the city of La Paz.9 “My father was from the schoolof opera,” Norah Camacho insisted when I interviewed her and her sister in 2002 inthe middle class La Paz neighborhood of Miraflores. The Camacho sisters attributedtheir success in folklore to their father’s ability to arrange their folkloric music in “five part



harmonies that didn’t go outside of the authentic.” In telling their stories, theCamacho sisters emphasized performances in the Sodre Theater of Montevideo.Norah Camacho claimed that the Sodre was “a special theater for opera, whereopera companies arrived from Europe.” When I was interviewing her, she insistedon finding among her mementos a glossy brochure that showed the modern planof this theater. The Camacho sisters emphasized the fact that they sang without anymicrophones: “Not like today where singers use a microphone even when they singin a tiny room.”They talked about having to develop “operatic voices”and describedone of their musical interventions as ending in “one of those majestic finales, anoperatic-type ending.” During our interviews the Camacho sisters would oftenbreak into song and their vocal style, with an exaggerated vibrato, seemed to imitatean aesthetic of opera singing. While James Boon references “the operatic” as beingabout the mixing of different social aesthetics in a single huge production(1999:9–13)—something that rings sympathetically with an overall view of the sto-ries about Bolivian Fantasy—these women reference opera in an appeal to whatthey perceive as a high art form, one that places their Bolivian folklore songs on apar with their own high perception of this foreign model of staged musical repre-sentation. Through referencing elaborate harmonic arrangements, operatic vocalstyle, and the prestige of the theater where they performed, these singers sought toincrease the value of Bolivian musical expressions that previously had been despisedby their own social class. The associations with the art world of opera were aboutboth proving value for a Latin American audience and making indigenous repre-sentations acceptable to Bolivian national elites.

Other folklore musicians who joined Bolivian Fantasy continued to frame theirwork with a European point of reference. Cerruto approached Tito Yupanqui(stage name) and told him that he needed someone in Bolivian Fantasy who couldrepresent “the Aymara man.” As Yupanqui remembered it, Cerruto told him thathe needed “a man who expressed the solitude of the highland plain, who expressedthe feeling of these unique surroundings that we have in the Andean mountainpeaks.” Cerruto’s words, as recalled by Yupanqui, sound like the previously men-tioned mestizo-Creole distanced view of an indigenous world—a perspective onan imagined world that was viewed as naturally connected to a specific Andeanenvironment. But Yupanqui’s own subject position complicates the picture.Yupanqui was born to peasant parents, an Aymara father and a Quechua mother.His parents moved to Copacabana and then to the city of La Paz. As Yupanquistated of his parents in a 2002 interview: “They wanted to improve their standardof living. They came to the city and they worked in whatever they could.” From ayoung age,Yupanqui’s life took a rather cosmopolitan turn. With a fellowship fromthe Eva Perón Foundation, he studied art at the Buenos Aires’ Escuela Superior deBellas Artes (Superior School of Fine Arts).

Yupanqui’s life story perhaps exemplifies García Canclini’s discussion of LatinAmerican modernisms and their contradictions: in the first half of the 20th century,paths of social access opened up, shaking up clear distinctions between high andpopular classes.As he put it “Cosmopolitanism [was] democratized”(García Canclini1995:41–58). When the scars of a childhood accident made Yupanqui blind, heturned to music as a way to express his artistic side. When I pressed him to name hispreferred instrument, he responded:“Art is something born inside of you, and whenthere is something here inside, the other questions are just mechanical.”Yupanqui’sstatements point to similarities with Deborah Poole’s findings on the early 20th cen-tury Cusqueño artists who emphasized the individual as a source of artistic talents,a construct in which sentiment was valued over skill (1997:176). Upon returningfrom Argentina, Yupanqui sold all his works to a representative from the U.S.embassy who had seen his art exhibit. With his earnings, he began to tour Bolivia,studying and collecting the music and typical clothes of different regions, extend-ing his artistic sensibilities in areas of both texture and sound. Back in La Paz, hebegan performing this music in theaters. By performing Indian-ness on principalstages of La Paz, Yupanqui was pushing against the racist social barriers that segre-gated the city and determined where Indians and Indian things could and couldnot be. Under these conditions, his initial performances were far from raving suc-cesses, and he remembered a performance in the Municipal Theater in which theaudience initially hissed at him.

To fill the cultural niche of “the highland Aymara man,”Yupanqui’s research, cos-tumes, and music were incorporated into Bolivian Fantasy.Yupanqui also drew asso-ciations with a world of “high culture,” talking about his indigenous dress as his“tuxedo” at a European guitar festival in Alsace, and talking about the importance ofplaying Mozart on Bolivian musical instruments in order to prove their culturalworth. Playing folklore in a theater was particularly significant to Yupanqui. He men-tioned the cultural richness of Bolivian entradas—folklore entrance parades that areoften organized around ritual celebrations, and that feature dance and music troupesthat perform through the city streets. Yupanqui claimed that Bolivian Fantasy wassomething else all together. “It’s something else when it’s a spectacle in a theater. Ithink this is why the Moulin Rouge exists in Paris. This is eternal. It’s never going todisappear because renewal is constant. A spectacle is constantly being changed.” Ofcourse, entrance parades were also constantly undergoing change and renewal andwere, at the time, beginning to take on the popular forms that they have today, forexample, in the Fiesta del Gran Poder (see Guss, this issue). But I want to emphasizeYupanqui’s perspective on the theater venue as a unique space of artistic innovation,his point of comparison to a French cabaret, and the tacit placement of entranceparades in a contrastingly static and unchanging space. His moves placed BolivianFantasy in a discursive field located somewhere between “folklore” and “art.”



Troupes of pan pipe musicians completed the array of musical talent presentedin Bolivian Fantasy. These groups carried names like Los cebollitas10 (The LittleOnions), Los choclos (The Ears of Corn), and Los sicuris del altiplano (The Pan Pipesof the Highland Plain). Los cebollitas received second prize in a 1953 folklore compe-tition sponsored by the Motion Picture Department of the MNR government, andtheir notoriety in the contest won them an invitation to join “the Company” thatwould eventually perform Bolivian Fantasy (Cerruto Moravek 1996:77–78).Members of these pan pipe troupes were usually canillitas, a term that refers to peo-ple who sell newspapers and shine shoes. While I have not been able to interviewany canillitas who participated in this production, I interviewed Fausto López, ashoemaker who performed in Bolivian Fantasy with Los sicuris del altiplano. Lópezwas born in the lower middle class neighborhood of San Pedro, in La Paz. When Iinterviewed him in 2002, he told me the story of how as a baby he was lost, pickedup by Aymara Indians, and raised in the countryside of La Paz. He told me thatthrough his childhood he learned to speak Aymara and began to play Aymarainstruments like the pífano (cane flute) and the sikus (pan pipes). After completinghis military service he became more involved in musical activities in the city. López,unlike the others I interviewed, did not feel the same connection to Bolivian Fantasy.Others talked about being invited to join “the Company”while López seemed to talkabout Bolivian Fantasy as just one more gig out of many. The kinds of music beingplayed were clearly separate in his mind: “Since they had their own musicians anda piano player too, they only used us for the indigenous dances. For the ballet, therewas another kind of music . . . They told me to play national music because they[were] going to enter dancing as little Indians.”

What emerges prominently in López’s account is not the location of indigenousmusic on an equal footing with art, but rather, the concerns of people around himthat he was associating with “those people,” the canillitas. He told me that one friendsaid to him: “How are you going to play with those crooks? . . . They are canillitas . . .You are a maestro. How are you going to get involved with people like that? You’reno longer of that class. You belong to another class of people.” López ignored hisfriend and joined the pan pipe group, but his own feelings seemed rather ambiva-lent with respect to this group and its presence in Bolivian Fantasy. López’s storyplaces him in an interstitial space that defies easy categorizations. His narrativereveals an adoption of Aymara cultural ways, and his coming-of-age story thatemphasizes his military service resonates with Lesley Gill’s contemporary ethnog-raphy about the intersection of Aymara masculinity and Bolivian citizenship (1997).To interpret López’s position in relation to the canillitas, it is useful to return toZulema Lehm and Silvia Rivera’s study of artisans and anarchism in the first half ofthe 20th century (1988). The authors described the conflicts that emerged whenAymara migrant labor to La Paz displaced existing artisans, a process that accelerated

after the Agrarian Reform of 1953 (1988:267). López’s story profiles these complexways in which class and ethnicity have intersected in the everyday interactions of LaPaz’s residents.

López was one of the few people I interviewed who did not invoke a personalrelationship to Art. But he did draw direct associations with other Latin Americanmusical forms that were popular among La Paz’s residents: mambos, tangos, andboleros. He told me that on the trip between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, the panpipe troupe informally entertained all travelers on board, playing Pérez Prado’smambos and tangos like “La Comparsita.” A pan pipe troupe that brought theseLatin American popular genres into its repertoire crossed another social symbolicboundary in the process, showing that these indigenous instruments could inter-pret any kind of music. Even if López did not invoke Art, his story, like the otherscited here, faced outward towards a foreign aesthetic, one marked by the increasedcirculation of internationally recorded Latin American genres. Members of thesepan pipe troupes shared a stage with classically trained musicians, but pan pipemusicians came from a different social class, one connected to specific labor organ-izations that were populated by rural migrants to La Paz or sons and daughters ofthese migrants.11

The musical projects within Bolivian Fantasy featured distinct social classes andstyles of musical formation, and these groups remained rather separate within theoverall production. But the participants’ references to opera, classical music, andmass-produced genres that circulated through a burgeoning Latin Americanrecording industry all reflected a shared concern with positioning themselves as cit-izens of a modern nation.

Making it Art, Modern, and National

Many of Bolivian Fantasy’s participants talked about their work in terms of “Art,”drawing on the power that this term evokes. But, with the exception of Cerruto’spreviously mentioned advertisement that called for “sacrifices” in the name of Art,the usual suspects in an art system ideology seemed absent. These usual suspects ofan art system ideology might include—and here I have in mind Pierre Bourdieu’swork on the field of cultural production (1993)—the belief in art’s internal valuewithin an autonomous field; that is a belief in art’s value because it does not sell tothe masses—what Bourdieu calls the “anti-economy” of art (1993:36, 40, 50–51).Such an art ideology system, which is often associated with Western contexts, worksto create the illusion that any artistic production is independent of worldly concernsand social contexts. Bolivian Fantasy participants may have drawn associations withan art world, but no one seemed to claim art as autonomous from a social context;in fact, they seemed to claim quite the opposite—the very rooted-ness of these



indigenous representations, and therefore their rightful position as “national”expressions. They claimed their work was art, but did not locate art in anautonomous sphere, what would have been a common move within ideologies ofmodernity and modernism. As other authors have already signaled for Latin Americain general, modernisms cannot be grasped through a model that assumes a uniformapplication and interpretation of a Western-centered modernity (García Canclini1995; A. López 2000; Pratt 1999; Wade 2000). 12

Bolivian Fantasy did not express an artistic vanguard in the European sense.13

But within the Bolivian context, its production included radical boundary-crossings between social classes, ethnic groups, and musical learning styles. Mostinterviewees commented with pride about Bolivian Fantasy’s popularity across dif-ferent social classes. When Bolivian Fantasy was running a second season, anothergovernment body, the Sub-Secretary of Press, Information, and Culture, sponsoreda competing musical folkloric production headed up by Celso Peñaranda and titledEmbrujo (literally,“charm” or “spell”). When these productions ran competing per-formances, with Bolivian Fantasy in the Monje Campero Theater and Embrujo inthe Municipal Theater, typical newspaper advertisements for these productionswould pitch the shows by claiming how long a successful season had been runningto full audiences, by listing the numbers of spectators who had seen the shows, andeven by printing the specific amount of money made to date on the sale of ticketsfor these productions. The popularity of Bolivian Fantasy was a selling point fororganizers, a point of pride for participants, and hardly something to be buriedbehind participants’ parallel claims to participate in a respectable art world.

These combined expressions of popularity and claims to Art point to the mul-tiple meanings of Bolivian Fantasy. For Bolivians who could not stand the thoughtof Indians moving into their urban spaces, Bolivian Fantasy shifted the panorama.Although racism did not vanish from the equation, urban residents began toreassess indigenous expressions not as objects of national embarrassment, butrather as sources of national pride—a transformation that should not be underes-timated in its symbolic significance. One participant told me a story about how theaudiences who previously rejected his performances turned to a position of accept-ance. Humor was the catalyst in the transformation he described. The musician wasperforming in La Paz’s outdoor theater and he had incorporated a llama in his act,borrowing the animal from the neighboring zoo and decorating her for his stagedperformance. Just as they called him to the stage, one of the other artists jabbed thellama with a needle. The musician said: “The llama came out running and I wasdragged out by her, with my hat over here and my instruments over there . . . For meit was a disaster. But for the public . . . That was when the real interest was born forwhat we were doing.” Somehow humor, involving an animal and representations ofIndian things cut through discrimination, but without eliminating it.14 This artist

who performed folklore clearly expressed the challenges of getting beyond the racistattitudes of the time. He saw his own work as important in this anti-racist agenda.But national acceptance came through slapstick humor in which there was still aseparation between “real Art” and what was not to be taken seriously as such.

Acceptance of indigenous representations in the Paceño urban space of the1950s moved the image of Indian from one problematic model to another: the stoicnoble savage was temporarily replaced by a clown. The beautiful Indian was put onthe nationalist face that turned outward to the international context, but the comicIndian was what facilitated acceptance at home.15 Comic skits were an integral partof Bolivian Fantasy, with comic actors like Tito Landa and Lucho Espinoza featuredprominently on the printed programs. But their humor was also critiqued in theforeign press. One Bolivian Fantasy participant, giving an example of the kind ofhumor used in Bolivian Fantasy, told me that he played a part in the comic groupTrío Vernáculo (Vernacular Trio). One person introduced the three of them as Ver(to see), Na, (no meaning), and Culo (anus). One critic in Argentina wrote, “Theonly thing that took away from this spectacle was the inclusion of some unneces-sary comic sketches of poor taste and crude humor” (Cerruto Moravek 1996:154).The comic skits may have worked in Bolivia, but they were poorly received by inter-national audiences. The Argentines wanted to see pure (read serious) Bolivian folk-lore, while within Bolivia, the humor was necessary to the fantasy work of thisstaged production. With “fantasy work” I am playing with the telling title of thework itself that evokes a national imagining. But I am also suggesting a reference to“fantasy”as the Lacanian reality prop that masks desires of the Other (Zizek 1989:47,118). When an artist like Tito Yupanqui entered the stages of La Paz theaters in the1950s, he was transgressing a social boundary. “ . . .[I]t was really bad. You couldn’teven play a piece [of indigenous music] without people looking at you like a strangeinsect.” Humor played a key role in crossing that boundary in the Bolivian context;it dressed up the fears that accompanied these transgressions.16 Bolivian Fantasy’sparticipants had to balance their acts between satisfying both national and interna-tional audiences, and I suggest that the musical review, as a genre, was helpful forthis double agenda. Bolivian Fantasy may have contained comic skits, but in gen-eral, it did not follow a narrative plot; unlike indigenista literature, it presented nointer-ethnic love stories with melodramatic characters standing in for the epitomeof good and evil (see Paz Soldán 2003:16–17). These morality plays, with Indian-mestizo relations at their center, might appeal to Bolivian audiences, but not neces-sarily to Argentines, Paraguayans, and Uruguayans. Comic skits made nationallyinternal boundary-crossings acceptable, but the international audience, in theirpress reviews, focused on Bolivia’s staged indigenous other-ness.

Bolivian Fantasy took the stage when various mass media were just beginningto enter circulation in Bolivia in a significant way. Radio was becoming more



popular as Radio Illimani became an important cultural voice of the Revolutionarygovernment. Various folklore singers gained national notoriety as they workedunder on-going contracts with Radio Illimani. Cerruto’s appeal to everyone’s inneraspiration to become a movie star and his recognition of film’s pedagogical poten-tial took shape within an urban environment in which Hollywood and Mexicanfilms continually arrived at the movie houses. While Bolivian musicians had forsome time been traveling to Argentina to make their recordings, a local recordingindustry began to develop.17 Although Bolivian Fantasy was a staged live perform-ance, the potentialities of mass media set the scene for its production.

During this period, nationalist forms dominated stages all over the world. Sincethe end of the 19th century, Europe began staging world fairs that were driven bydeveloping industry’s search for new markets and the curious ideal that world peaceand world trade went hand-in-hand (Mattie 1998). Representations of picturesquetowns called “a Spanish village” or “Old Belgium” were popular displays at these fairs(Mattie 1998). Blanca Muratorio studied the Ecuadorian presence at some of thesefairs, arguing that the indigenous Other was not presented there as a historical sub-ject, but rather as a remnant of a “pre-modern” past that was useful to the expressionof European and “white mestizo” Ecuadorian imaginings of national identity andmodernity (1994). The Portuguese folklore projects and state-sponsored folklorecompetitions between the 1930s and 1950s also bear an uncanny resemblance to theBolivian processes of the same period (see Holton 2005:26–38). García Canclini jus-tified writing about European fascination with folklore “because the motivations oftheir interest in the popular, its uses and its contradictions, are being repeated in LatinAmerica (1995:149). Bolivia was one of many Latin American countries involved inthese artistic nationalist stagings. A “Mexican Fantasy” was performed in 1919 inMexico City. The composition supposedly featured Anna Pavlova’s participation as adancer and the music was composed around a popular Mexican genre that had beenstylized for elite acceptance and consumption.18 Bolivian Fantasy recalls the uniquemodernism encountered in Poole’s reading of 1920s’ Cuzqueño indigenismo whosemodernism only partially imitated European ideas (1997:185). One can see clear par-allels between Bolivian Fantasy and the Misión Peruana de Arte Incaico (PeruvianMission of Inca Art), a theatrical, musical, and dance production that emerged out ofCusco, Peru in the 1920s (see Mendoza 2004). Although Bolivian Fantasy was pro-duced 30 years later, and makes no reference to Incas, it shares with La Misión inter-esting Argentine connections, an inclusion of multiple social classes in its cast, and aconnection to cosmopolitan and indigenous artistic ideas.19 In contrast with La Misión,however,Bolivian Fantasy was sponsored,at least in part,by the Bolivian government.But even here, Cerruto’s entrepreneurial approach and Yupanqui’s personal artisticmission against racism would hardly appear within an interpretation that assumes atop-down monolithic State and its dominant imposing politics.

Conclusion: Rethinking Indigenismo

Indigenismo discourses abound in ambivalences about self-other boundary cross-ings. Diana Fuss understands identification as the “detour through the Other thatdefines the self” (1995:2). In part, indigenismo was a discourse in which powerfulnon-indigenous subjects took a detour through the indigenous Other in order todefine a national self. When a ballet-trained dancer interpreted the cueca on toeshoes and when an orchestra director made his musicians sound like beer, each sit-uation was about a mimetic process of relating to and drawing power from thatsymbolic world of difference by embodying that Other (Taussig 1993). But thisrelational framework as applied in the Bolivian context depends heavily on theIndian-mestizo binary. Unlike many Bolivian indigenista productions in writingor painting, Bolivian Fantasy involved the staged embodiment of an indigenousworld. Indigenous things were not just the topic of literary fictions or the subjectof distanced contemplation. Bolivian Fantasy required that its participants tem-porarily dress, dance, and sound like Indians. But when a son of indigenousmigrants to the city returned to the countryside, studied indigenous music, andstaged it as folklore and Art, embodied participation defied simplistic ethnic cate-gorizations.

Bolivian Fantasy was also located within the particular historical moment ofBolivia’s 1952 Revolution. While the Revolution failed in many ways, and Bolivianstoday are re-negotiating the terms of state-society relations so as to account forthe country’s indigenous majority, listening to different stories of Bolivian Fan-tasy’s participants provides a glimpse of the changes that did occur during theRevolution, no matter how circumscribed they may seem from today’s perspec-tive. When I emphasize the social diversity of this staged production, I do notmean to suggest that it represents the successful application of the Revolution’sideology of mestizaje. Nor do I read into this diversity an emancipatory promise;the case may ultimately express the all-encompassing effectiveness of “discourse”in Foucauldian terms. Rather, my point is that while the critiques of mestizaje andindigenismo often depend on the reification of a cultural binary, the subjectivepositionings of those involved in Bolivian Fantasy disrupt this binary in produc-tive ways. For example, the stories of López and Yupanqui reflect different per-sonal investments in the Revolutionary project that cannot be easily labeled aseither “Indian” or “mestizo.” While an analysis that disrupts the Indian-mestizobinary also risks losing sight of how colonialism has shaped relations of powerand difference, an emphasis on how people talk about their art (see Geertz1983:102) keeps in focus the on-going racism and power-laden relations of thecontext. Cerruto’s paternalistic tone and Yupanqui’s personal struggles against



racism keep power very much at the center of these stories, but without com-pletely working within the model of the dominant elite state that uniformlyimposes its will on subordinate subjects.

While Bolivian indigenismo was about forging nationalist ideologies, BolivianFantasy demonstrated that indigenismo was also about locating Bolivia as a modernnation, as one that could develop its own native-inspired art forms. When BolivianFantasy’s participants talked about their work, they made connections between folksongs and opera, folk dances and classical ballet, and indigenous costumes and tuxe-dos. These associations often appeared in tension with what international critics,like those in Argentina, expected of a Bolivian “folk” spectacle. Participants werepartially inspired by European art models, but in their creations, they were nevercompletely encompassed by them, as they sought the international status associatedwith an art world while they also built a sense of nationalism that remained rootedin indigenous expressions. But throughout the world, countries were finding “thenation” in “the folk.” The complexity of Bolivian Fantasy ultimately calls for ananalysis that blurs several boundaries—those between mestizos and Indians,between folklore and Art, and between the Bolivian nation and the world. After re-thinking indigenismo, I close with a suggestion that it would be productive to reflecton the embodied practices of contemporary indianismo, and on the boundariesthat are blurred within this now more fashionable discourse.

Acknowledgments

Research for this project has been supported by Hampshire College Summer Fac-ulty Development grants from 1999 to 2005. For sharing their stories with me, I amindebted to Norah and María Luisa Camacho, Waldo Cerruto, Jaime Gallardo,Fausto López, Eduardo Mazuelos, Yolanda Pol, Chela Urquidi and Tito Yupanqui.These individuals are, or have been, well-known artists within the Bolivian contextand they all wanted to be named in reference to their stories. In most cases I haverespected this request; but I have given them some anonymity where privacy mightbe an issue. In various forms, this article has been presented at the meetings of theLatin American Studies Association in 2004 and 2006 and at a conference onMestizajes held at the University of Cambridge in 2005. Within these contexts andothers, this piece reflects intellectual exchanges with Rossana Barragán, PamelaCalla, Julie Hemment, Brooke Larson, Rick López, Zoila Mendoza, Beth Notar, andJoshua Roth. I also appreciate the comments I received from two anonymousreviewers for the Journal of Latin American Anthropology. Of course, I alone amresponsible for any shortcomings in the analysis.

Notes

1This article is part of a larger project that examines the lives of folklore workers and musicians who

were active between 1930 and 1964.2Contacts with these artists have been facilitated by my own work as a musician in La Paz since 1994.

In fact, some of the people interviewed for this project are parents of musicians and dancers who are

today at the center of Bolivia’s staged folkloric projects.3For example, Marcia Stephenson’s work (1999) examines bodily education and hygiene as state

practices aimed at indigenous assimilation through pedagogies of cleanliness. Brooke Larson also

analyzes how colonial and national subjects are formed through the organization of bodily practices

(2005).4Alcides Arguedas’ Pueblo enfermo (1909) marks this moment of negativity while Franz Tamayo’s

celebration of mestizaje, published in 1910, is revisited in the 1952 Revolutionary politics.5Other scenes had titles like “Highland Wedding,” “The Alacitas Fair” (Alacitas is a January fair at

which people in La Paz purchase in miniature the things they hope to acquire or achieve during the com-

ing year),“Country Serenade,”“Chant to the Sun,”“The Llama Herders’ Dance,”“Chants from the Back-

lands,” and “Hellish Invasion.”6Claudio Lomnitz reorients Benedict Anderson’s take on nationalism: Lomnitz places the roots of

Latin American nationalisms, not in the 18th or 19th centuries, but in Spanish colonization and even in

the Spanish Reconquista. This historical reading leads to an interpretation of nationalism, not as a process

of secularization, but as “an offshoot of religious expansionism.” This view also privileges systems of

descent over the imperative of sovereign territories, the historical imprint of the Spanish and Indian

republics. Furthermore, Lommitz’s view of nationalism gives equal weight to the vertical bonds of

dependence that have been just as central to Latin American nationalisms as the horizontal fraternal

bonds that Anderson emphasized (Lomnitz 2001:3–34).7The reference to Ramón Novarro is significant in that he was known as one of the first Latin

Americans to become a Hollywood star; he was from Mexico.8A 1955 published interview with Cerruto revealed that Jaime Gallardo was Cerruto’s first choice as

musical director of Bolivian Fantasy (Cerruto Moravek 1996:119).9In another related piece, I examine the gendered significance of middle class mestiza women

singers as “pioneers” in the staging of indigenous music as folklore (see Bigenho 2005).10In interviews, published programs, and newspaper articles, this group’s name always appeared in

masculine form. The re-gendering of “cebolla” does not seem unusual since the members of this ensem-

ble were mostly, if not all, men.11A similar demographic is emerging within my related work on Paceño estudiantinas of this period

(interviews with Julio Cuevas, 2005, 2006).12Thomas Turino purposefully avoids referencing “modernity” and “globalization” and instead

writes about how “cosmopolitanism” shaped ideas of nationalism and music in Zimbabwe (2000).

While the terms “modernity” and “modern” indeed have their baggage, I continue to use them in this

analysis because of the prominent roles they play in the imaginings of Latin American nationalisms.13In his analysis of the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Bolivian indigenismo, Javier Sanjinés mentions the appar-

ent lack of a political vanguard “that might interact with both local premodernity and cosmopolitan

modernity”; he sees José Carlos Mariateguí, in Peruvian indigenismo, as representative of precisely this

kind of political vanguard (2004:15, 72). He adds that “Artistic production in Bolivia was simply not pre-

pared to enter the stage of self-reflection and criticism” (2004:73).14The presence of the animal and the representation of the Other is evocative of Taussig’s ideas on

mimesis and alterity (1993).



15Michael Herzfeld’s study indicates a similar double vision of Greek folklore projects that looked

both inward to internal concerns and outward to the expectations that Europeans had for the heavily

weighted concept of “Greece” (1982).16Diane Nelson (1999) develops a thorough discussion of Rigoberta Menchú jokes in relation to

Guatemalans’ fears of Menchú’s boundary transgressions.17See Peter Wade’s discussion of Colombia’s recording industry and its importance in the develop-

ment of a “national” music at the beginning of the 20th century (2000).18“Fantasía mexicana”also references a composition by Aaron Copeland called “El salón de México”

that was then adapted and orchestrated by Johnny Green, a Hollywood movie composer.19If one begins with Deborah Poole’s discussion of the Inca operatic of 18th century Paris (1997:38),

and the Inca operas in early 20th century Cusco (De la Cadena 2000; Poole 1997), in Bolivian Fantasy one

can see the cosmopolitan chains of mimesis coming full circle (see Taussig 1993).

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Embodied Matters: Bolivian Fantasy and Indigenismo

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