Indigenous Politics in Bolivia's Evo Era: Clientelism, Llunkerio, and the Problem of Stigma

Indigenous Politics In Bolivia's Evo Era: Clientelism, Llunkerío, And The Problem of StigmaAuthor(s): Robert AlbroSource: Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World EconomicDevelopment, Vol. 36, No. 3, Power, Indigeneity, Economic Development and Politics inContemporary Bolivia (FALL, 2007), pp. 281-320Published by: The Institute, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40553606 .

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Indigenous Politics In Bolivia's Evo Era:

Clientelism, Llunkerio, And The Problem of Stigma

Robert Albro School of International Service

American University

ABSTRACT: This article offers an analysis of the cultural construction of patronage-clientage relations in Quillacollo, Bolivia, since the return of democracy and in a political climate of new social and indigenous movements dedicated to breaking with the vertical politics of the past, which equated indigenous political participation with clientage. I consider local accounts of the practices of notoriously bad clients called Hunk' us, a stigmatizing insult referring to self-serving, even corrupt, political conduct. This argument pursues the implications of stigma, as it operates in Quillacollo' s political theater. I consider how the stigmatization of dangerous clients is part of a cultural politics that connects expressions of social hierarchy to assertions of unitary indigenous identity, which promotes a patrolling of the borders of indigenous political projects by activists. The exclusivity of cultural belonging this promotes undermines the kinds of indigenous-popular coalition building crucial to the success of the political movement of Bolivia's current indigenous president, Evo Morales.

281 ISSN 0894-6019, © 2007 The Institute, Inc.



282 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 36(3), 2007

"The inferior man is a human animal. Through inheritance his mentality is possessed of the condensed instinctive tendencies

that constitute the 'soul of the species/ His ineptitude for imitation impedes him in adapting to the social medium in which he lives. His personality does not develop to a

contemporary level, as he lives beneath the morality of the dominant cultures, and in many cases, outside of legality."

Jose Ingenieros, EL HOMBRE MEDIOCRE

"In every man there is the possibility of his being - or, to be more exact, of his becoming once again - another man."

Octavio Paz, THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE

In a recent public forum concerned with Bolivia's surprising withdrawal from the World Bank-sanctioned international process for the arbitration of investment disputes, Pablo Solón (a well-known non-indigenous economist, social movement activist, and current charge d'affaires for trade with Bolivia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs) offered a now standard remark about the country's president, Evo Morales: "Bolivia," he prefaced his comments, "is at a key moment. For the first time in its republican history, we have a president that comes from the indigenous sector, who is the majority."1 Solon's remark (framing a discussion of Bolivia's efforts to get out from under the agenda of global financial institutions in terms of the country's indigenous turn) is a typical formulation expressed by the current Morales and MAS (Movement Toward Social- ism) administration. In fact, among both supporters and detractors, the Morales presidency has been widely understood as a watershed event and historical crossroads for Bolivia, and perhaps for Latin America and the Global South.

This crossroads is most often represented by the Morales administration's turn away from a strictly neoliberal policy,



Albro: INDIGENOUS POLITICS IN BOLIVIA 283

rejection of the "politics as usual" limited to elite decision-making, restoration of national sovereignty against the imposed pressures of economic globalization, and greater attention to the political needs, recognition, and participation of Bolivia's indigenous and popular majority. Evo, as he prefers to be called, has been regularly feted, internationally as well as domestically, for his indigenous Aymara ancestry, taken to literally epitomize and politically represent the empowerment of Bolivia's long-suffering indigenous peoples (see inter alia, Albo 2006; Albro 2006a; Canessa 2006; Postero 2007a). Given the goal of indigenous participation, we are to understand, the very nature of political representation will be different than it was before, including the ways elected officials get elected, perform their duties, and are held accountable to their mostly indigenous constituencies.

Since the Revolution of 1952, the most characteristic political participation of primarily indigenous "peasants" (campesinos) had been as a rural power base for successive regional and national leaders (see Dandier 1983; Dunkerley 1987; Gordillo 2000). They were valuable mostly when elites needed to manu- facture popular voting blocs. In multiple national elections, "runas on trucks,"2 as my counterparts in Quillacollo called them,3 were routinely transported in from the countryside to vote en masse as a way to maintain successive populist gov- ernments in power. Indigenous leaders often served as vassals and as valuable clients to national Bolivian politicians. If important, their participation was almost entirely at the bottom of a vertical national system of political patronage. Seldom power brokers or policy architects, indigenous people were occasional beneficiaries of state promises, and more rarely of state largesse.

Local politicos with whom I worked in the urban Quillacollo of the 1990s, and who also made a point to emphasize their indigenous descent, often voiced an intention to "break with the vertical politics of the past." They linked the rejection of




post-1952 patronage politics with the embrace of an indigenous identity in a fashion consistent with the call for indigenous autonomy so basic to the efforts of Bolivia's indigenous movements from the 1970s through the 1990s (e. g., Rivera 1984; Ticona 2000). The rejection of elite (and now international) patronage has complemented the goal of political autonomy as linked cornerstones of indigenous political projects in Bolivia for a long time.4

Breaking with vertical politics is also part of the promise of the Evo era on the national level, and Quillacollo is a municipal- ity which is now dominated by MAS politics. The success of the MAS, however, has been achieved significantly through the construction of new indigenous-popular coalitions, presented as alternatives to the status quo of traditional patronage. As I have argued elsewhere (Albro 2005a; 2006a), through its effec- tive coalition-building, the MAS has expanded the possibilities of indigenous inclusiveness, and has made indigenous priori- ties more central to national governance. But the strategy of coalitions also has had the effect of making the strict borders of indigenous identity harder to locate and to patrol for indigenous activists. This creates a potential problem: If it is less clear where indigenous identity begins and ends, then a political project of autonomy becomes harder to bring into focus.

Here I consider how people discuss patron-client relations in Quillacollo. I examine in detail the lexicon of clientage as a fundamental dimension of political coalition-building in this provincial capital. I am particularly concerned with the stigma attached to regular accusations of llunk'u (Quechua: flatterer), who people understand to be a problematic, bad, or even dangerous client. As I develop here, llunk'us are almost always men and stigmatized for their transgressive behavior. Understood to be indigenous clients who embrace the upwardly mobile sensibilities of non-indigenous patrons, the charge of llunk'u amounts to the accusation of breaking faith with indigenous identity as a well-defined categorical location, a location un-




derwriting the goal of political autonomy historically at the heart of indigenous activism in Bolivia and throughout the hemisphere.

As I suggest here, the problem of stigma is largely gener- ated by the unitary assumption of indigenous identity that underwrites the accusation of llunk'u, an assumption leaving little room for recognition of the coalitional relationships so important to the MAS' s political project. This analysis, then, pursues how an explicitly cultural politics of indigenous empowerment remains in tension (and even at odds) with the coalition-driven sources of indigenous political power in contemporary Bolivia. To this end, I examine entrenched symbol talk about gender in Bolivia, as applied to stigmatized popular masculinity in the mode of llunk'u, as a type of cultural account of clientelistic political relationships, which I understand to be a deeply problematic legacy of indigenous politics inherited by Evo and the MAS.

Of the Patron and Personality

Quillacollo, as a provincial capital, is a town where only a few decades earlier people would have interacted primarily in the terms of such then prevailing distinctions as between the urban gente decente (town dwelling mestizos) and rural campesinos (small scale farmers), expressed through well-defined roles and expectations of patronage and clientage. If moral valuations of the supposed relationships between these terms continue both to circulate and inform local discourse, the ongoing dissolu- tion of traditional boundaries between city and country, indio and mestizo, the popular or the elite, Spanish and Quechua, has also dislocated any presumption of a transparent ease of interpersonal reference in such terms.

Nevertheless, verbalized judgments and criticisms of others often seem to rely on the presumption of a traditional classifica-




tory hierarchy. This includes a public priority in peoples' talk given to the possession and projection of a unitary masculine "personality" (personalidad), largely as built up from a definite recognizable formación (upbringing or education), and as distinct from the corrupt sensibilities of the llunk'u. Via different yet formally comparable appeals to a clarity of self-definition, the cult of well-defined personality rhetorically locates its for- mación in various status-defining social institutions of urban elite social life and composing the privileges of patronage relations, including those of family name, fatherhood, school, church, and political party, statuses which have been increas- ingly displaced as constituting social life in Quillacollo since the years following the 1952 Revolution.

Personality is also often used in public reference to the continuity of such collective identities as distinctively regional culture, thought to be under severe duress recently, given substantial in-migration. This "regional personality" is identified with signature features of local qhochala culture5 and spectacu- larlized as a folkloric object. It is referred to in public speeches, conversation, and journalism as a patrimonial inheritance, that is, a kind of birthright of sons from their fathers. So-called "patrimony" (patrimonio), as something "inherited from our parents [padres]" (Zelada 2001), is a part of the lexicon establishing the commensurability of cultural tradition with social origins. As an important and essential wellspring of public male identity ultimately enshrined in the patria (the fatherland), one's patrimony is also projected as a personality writ large.

How do people talk about having personality? Take this complaint by a town mayor commenting on one of his rivals:

The problem as well is that [his rival] is the fruit of a sort of manipulation. I dare say that he does not have a defined personality... His derring do, his audacity, make him come out with certain views which aren't the fruit of knowledge.




This is an indirect way of asserting the indigenous heritage of the subject. And here we find a similar statement from another local politician reflecting on the popular political style suspiciously associated with política criolla (mixed politics):

This is an example of the fragility of the personality. There is no formación, no transparent behavior. They are devices to gain notoriety... But they've lost their effectiveness and don't gain credibility. There is no affinity, either through tradition, or through family, or by their ideology.

As they are excoriated, this fragility and lack of a well-defined personality serve as an implicit explanation of Hunk' us. The "audacity" of llunk'u artists is also described as sundered from that which typically provides formación, most notably, tradition, family, or political ideology, all of which express what sociologists like to call ascribed status. The llunk'u, goes the reasoning, is defined by the absence of a basis in a well- defined identity.

The trilogy of values mentioned in the previous quote rehearses those of the erstwhile vecindario, the town-dwelling pre-1952 elite, where at least heuristically clear cut distinctions could be publicly indulged. At the same time it is also clear that those lacking formación (that is, the stable shape of a public self) are also imagined to lack moral definition, and so, to fall victim to moral uncertainty. Yet even as those lacking in personality are singled out as practitioners of llunkerio, they are also victims of manipulation. Llunk'us do not enjoy the fruits of positively ascribed status, but are instead entangled in the activities of llunkerio.

The notion oí formación, as synonymous with such terms as preparación, certainly carries assumptions of status. Difficult to translate into English, formación might be employed to refer to a "proper" upbringing as a child in a well-known local family counting itself as part of a provincial elite (a meaning that




would have been much more likely several decades ago). But it is also routinely used to refer to advertised signs of education, such as a degree (and the right to the title licenciado). At the same time, formación is the term of choice when leftists explain their working mastery of a Marxist doctrine, or their time served in a political career with one party or political op- tion. It might even be used to describe someone who shows adeptness for public speaking. In a generic sense, it can also be a basic reference to one's sense of dignity, usually as against known detractors (e. g., "Yo tengo mi formación también!"). Such a claim of dignity (with due respect) is often synonymous with a claim of unswerving loyalty to one's social origins (whether elite or popular), with personality thus intact (e. g., "Sigo siendo lo que soy I"). In my experience the idea of formación is used in conjunction with personality as a way of conveying depth of personality.

Men with personality are able to use their ancestral claim to reject the machinations of clientage. A past regional caci- que criticized such an attempted subordination, saying: "No one controls me. I have my convictions, and I will not betray the soul of my father " (Rivas 2000: 59). A recent town mayor similarly complained about his detractors: "Sometimes they disparage me. But I have my roots/7 When asked to consider whether he has changed through life at all, a local politician readily acknowledged such changes (primarily in terms of the external trappings of social mobility). Yet he hastened to add:

But deep inside, that is, in the depth of my personality, there exists the attitude that I shouldn't separate myself from what I was before. Because this would be to reject my origin, to reject my family, and to reject as well what amounted to my education in the first years of life.

Male dignity, then, is expressed in claims of fateful, usually genealogical, continuity with one's social origin, as a personal




patrimony. In Quillacollo's realpolitik, in fact a man's father's prior career meaningfully frames many possibilities for his own, as a potential member of the town's " traditional political families" (see Albro 2001a). Depth, in this sense, is synonymous with the idea of formación, and as a self-justification analogous to the "interiority" of the modern subject (Keane 2002: 74). It is also commensurate with the claims of indianist politics in an essentialist mode, and the goal of political autonomy.

Even when criticized, the equation of a strong male identity with personality is treated as an already foregone conclusion, as an inevitably established precedent. Take this local lament to the social folly of the macho cult:

What a sad and stupid opinion we have of manhood! It seems that a child can only become an adult after traveling a road of blows and bruises, in the hopes of forming a strong and powerful personality (Zapckovic 2001).

An ambivalent or unknown origin is not part of this con- struct of the personal present through a decisive past. Any behind-the-scenes maneuvering might receive a similarly gendered censure. When former clients secretly tried to defect and to found a new party nucleus, the then-head of the local party is reported by his wife to have grabbed a pistol, and stormed out to confront them with the words, 'Til teach them to be macho!" As a symbolic currency, then, personality tries to commonsensically establish the source of its own authority, as a precedent that is elaborated in the relation of father to son or patron to client, that is, in the elision of social origin with the cultural trappings of patronage.

In Quillacollo in this sense the word "respect" marks off the claims of genuine culture (if imagined to originate from traditional town-dwelling gente decente) from a variety of corrupt contemporary versions, including perceived newer neoliberal cultural sensibilities to pursue self-interested agendas. In




ways similar to de la Cadena' s analysis, such an emphasis on "respect" is a critical indicator of morality that "maintains the culturally conceived cleavage dividing elites and commoners" (2000: 219). In just this way in Quillacollo, the term "respect" asserts a publicly legitimate morality associated with having personality, while the llunk'u suggests a less-than-public (as in, behind-the-scenes) and illegitimate stance of personal moral corruption.

This cultural paternalism, with its associated assumption of patrimonial continuity, serves as precedent for many complaints by would-be patrons about untrustworthy and shiftless clients. "Fragility of personality," as is often implied, is the moral flaw of the universe of the infamous cholo (upwardly mobile or urban Indian), who more easily embraces tactics of llunkerio. A perceived faithlessness is often insultingly disparaged as less than masculine. As such, popular men can be inf antilized, often dismissed as lloqhallas (Quechua: striplings). Lloqhallas should not be taken seriously, and do not deserve respect, since they are supposed to have dishonorably discredited themselves, often through some llunk'u-'ike past behavior. Lloqhallas are, therefore, shiftless clients and disrespectful sons. As I was told, "Nowadays sons throw dirt on [sacar la mugre] their fathers." A subtext of the frequent laments is that erstwhile clients are more apt to disavow adherence to the official trappings of patronage relations.

Personality seeks the authority of words. Poor public speakers "lack personality," while good public speakers "ask the word" (pedir la palabra) and make sure to "have the word" (tener la palabra) often. Authoritative words are treated as transpar- ently representative. The successful possession of words, and a direct equation of words with the identity of speakers, is a part of the symbolic capital of personality. People with personality speak de frente (man to man), while llunk'us often speak detrás de las cortinas (behind the scenes). That this is decisively about male language use is apparent in a common complaint like,




"No one talks to so-and-so de frente. There's no one willing to wear the pants!" Similarly, a friend extolled the virtue of speaking "simply one time" in public meetings. He insisted, "It's important to define whatever. If one talks without personality, this is chaku talk [Quechua: a lack of continuity]. And so, no one believes him. In this way he loses his essence as a person." Personality, in this case, is a transparency and correspondence of meaning with words. If such a close correspondence of words and meanings is indicative, then the idiom of the gender ideology of patronage celebrates the referential function of language, where the symbol of "personality" is itself used as part of the lexicon of patronage.

Personality, it must be noted, does not particularly refer here to the public signs of the unique individual. For example, Greenblatt's (1980) notion of "self -fashioning" certainly does not inform the projection of "personality" in Quillacollo. The term is itself a deeply engendered cultural symbol of the sharp public expression of patronal values, of what has been called the region's "paternal absolutism" (Larson 1998: 385). It is an expression of traditional expectations of patronage, in every way the semiotic complement to the unreliability, the unpre- dictability and the transgression typical of llunkerio.

There are, nevertheless, formal affinities we can point to between the modern subject and a dominant gender ideology of masculinity in Quillacollo. Personality helps to underwrite a unitary gender code marking out what men should do (rather than what they actually do), and works as symbolic capital for a publicly valuable gender myth. This includes public demonstrations of agency as a sign of manhood (Albro 2000b), as suggested in a eulogy for Bolivian ex-president Victor Paz Estenssoro, aptly titled "The Role of Personality in History." The eulogy discusses Bolivia's greatest political progenitor as "the silhouette projected from the depths 'fondo] of the historical scene" (Velasco Romero 2001). Such a commanding personality would never trade in his own self-respect, honor, or code of




justice, even if he is also "everywhere a sewer of bastards" (Za- pckovic 2001). Among other things, men with personality might act to bring the potential for llunkerio into the world, although it cannot be the other way around. In such ways, "personality" marks out a male territory for the self that is similar in form and role to the imagined gender order of modernity, with the "self as the ground of human existence" (Mansfield 2000: 15). As with the modern subject, in Quillacollo, masculinity (represented by the institution of patronage) seeks to express itself as the source of its own authority.

"Personality" is strategically invoked as a transparent cultural essence, and marked by canonical definitions of manhood, expressed as "symbols that stand for themselves" (Wagner 1986). These are a contrastive means to disempower popular clients of traditional provincial male authority, lacking in this very essence, and thought to nurse hidden, unclear, and potentially dangerously transgressive motives. As an interpretive practice, personality is a label, a token, or a cipher that promotes an illusion of the integrity of a cultural worldview over time. Such a practice imitates the interiority of the unified subject of modernity, taken both as a primordial ground of experience and as "the source of its own value" (Keane, 2002: 75). Such a self-evident semiotic of discursive- symbolic labeling is, also, as Roy Wagner succinctly put it (1986: x), "apt to constrain the meaning of naming things within the naming of meanings." Through assertions of hierarchy, unitary identity, and cultural exclusivity, symbolic expressions of patronage, as part of both elite and indigenous projects, promote a disempowering suspicion regarding clientelistic politics. This poses a fundamental challenge for the MAS, with its plural popular and indigenous constituency, to effectively culturally frame its project of governance.




Of the Pinche and the Llunk'u

The Quechua term "llunk'u" regularly finds its way into the code switching of mostly Spanish-speaking people in and around Quillacollo to characterize shiftless clients. Lara's re- gionalist dictionary (1971: 161) primarily defines the llunk'u as a figurative adjectival expression for adulador (sycophant). In its verb form, llunk'uy, is used synonymously with rebañar or with arrebañar, that is, "to glean, to gather, or to scrape to- gether/7 Lara also notes a synonym for llunk'u, the adjective, which is llajwaj, meaning lamedor, or licker, one who "laps and licks/7 Though in its verb form, llajway also means "to lick,77 or "to taste,77 or "to enjoy a mouthful77 (Lara 1971: 153). And as a noun, llajwa is of course the ubiquitous spicy sauce of ground ají, a staple at the table for self-respecting Bolivians.

A comprehensive Quechua dictionary by Angel Herbas Sandoval (1998) makes the connection between "llunk'u" and "licking77 more explicit. The adjective is given to mean lisonjero, or "parasitical, flatterer, and wheedler.77 And a second meaning is also listed as lamedura, or "the act and effect of licking.77 Sandoval lists a further form of the verb, llunk'ukiyay, defined both as "to flatter,77 "to wheedle,77 but also with the Spanish halagar, that is, "to cajole,77 or "to coax77 (1998: 242). He also lists a synonym, the verb qhanaymay, defined as "cajoling in obtaining some end77 (1998: 393). A noun form, qhanayma, is a "demonstration of cariño with gestures.77 This adds a slightly different emphasis. A qhanaymachi is a person "with some interested proposition, [who] offers praise [alabar] to another.77 Of course, alabados are the sacramental hymns recited by children during All Saint's Day, as they go from family altar to family altar praising the dead to be rewarded with sweets.

In my experience in Quillacollo, llunk'us are always someone else, always men (though women also participate in politics), and already in a clientelistic relationship. The term llunkerio most typically refers to varieties of dishonorable, usu-




ally political, shenanigans of some sort. As a political friend in Quillacollo insisted to me, the many activities of llunkerio "dam- age the dignity of men/7 In this way, "llunk'u" (and its many euphemisms) is among the key words that compose a public nomenclature of masculinity in the cultural cross currents of rapidly expanding peripheral boom towns like Quillacollo.

A cynical, but also playful, discourse about the moral corruption of politicians remains a favorite pastime of people in Quillacollo, of those deeply involved in as well as largely disengaged from politics. In this spirit, a tongue in cheek editorial in the Bolivian newspaper LOS TIEMPOS playfully suggested the need for a new kind of measuring device of "human servitude" called "el lluvk'omeiro" (Guzman 2000). Such a fanciful llunk'ometro would measure the enthusiasm with which Bolivian politicos two-facedly suck up to powerful patrons. In the quite self-consciously Machiavellian arena of provincial politics, where as the saying goes, things are often decided "between roosters at midnight," the llunk'u is understood to be a notorious figure, j anus-faced, treacherous, traitorous, and self-serving. The llunk'u is presented as among the least redeemable of figures in public Bolivian life, a familiar fate for popular men.

Among men, then, who counts as a llunk'u? First, llunk'us are practitioners of so-called política criolla. This is creole or mixed politics, referring as well to the racial, cultural, and moral miscegenation originating with the Conquest, at best a local brand of realpolitik, and at worst loudly condemned as morally suspect or corrupt behavior. In the words of one local political type describing a close associate, a llunk'u "is superlatively clever [es sumamente viváz]' [He] is always on the lookout for people of weight [gente de peso], as a sycophant [adulador] who often acts indirectly [soslaya]." This makes one thing clear: A llunk'u-like stance describes the attitude of a client, with regard to a patron. This suggests that such disrespectful and disdained male identities are also typically already inscribed within a




social dyad of patrón-pinche (loosely, boss-crony). Indeed, a frequent synonym for llunk'u is lambeculo (gloss: asslicker). One need only think of English equivalents such as "ass kisser" or "boot licker" to get the idea. But this very disrespectfulness also makes clear the competitive possibility of role reversal, and so, the potential instability of this dyad.

Llunkerio, as a classifiable sort of behavior, covers a range of situations. A prototypical situation is that of political betrayal. Two erstwhile insiders in a local party opportunistically para- chuted into another party. Such c'est la guerre antics caused an exasperated former fellow militant, also the wife of the local party leader, to call them "llunk'ukus de doble jila" (literally, double-edged, that is, two-faced). The ultimate self-serving betrayal is the political informer, called an alcahuete (literally, whoremonger), or in Quechua, purajuya, generally defined as someone who simultaneously "adheres to or defends two people, or contrary groups" (Xavier Albo: personal communica- tion). The alcahuete (or any llunk'u) is assumed to lack substan- tive moral conviction for the cause, in his shameless pursuit of egoismo or yoismo. Llunk'us employ a "tactical flexibility" which political analyst Fernando Mayorga (1991) has associated with the strategies of recent neopopular party politics in Quillacollo. The llunk'u, then, lacks ideological fortitude, blows with the political winds, which in Bolivian politics is also called a pasa- pasa. Anyone who selfishly plays a double game, and presents one face publicly while nursing secret motives, is potentially a llunk'u. If a llunk'u is structurally a client, nevertheless he is a client aggressively primed to commit political parricide.

Such self-misrepresentation points to what the anthropolo- gist F. G. Bailey (1991) has aptly phrased the "prevalence of deceit" in politics, which can take the shape of an obvious and outright lie, or a less public dissimulation. Public displays of virtue masking self-interest are another likely scenario for sus- picions of llunkerio. Such is the case with a now commonplace local distinction people make between "genuine ritual compa-




dres" and "compadres de interés'' (Albro 2001b) in Quillacollo. If the former traditionally institutionalizes and sanctifies a mutual respect, the latter is done for purposes of "job security/7 in order to "grease the wheel" with the powerful. Compadre ties de interés, one is told, are devoid of meaningful "spiritual attachment," and such a compadre might unexpectedly turn tables and "screw you" (joderte). One implication is that llunk'us (the hyper-individualist cholos they are supposed to be) lack a spiritual depth defined through ideas like respect. These two strategies of respect and self-interest exist in ambivalent tension when people talk about ritual kinship in Quillacollo.

Another llunkerio is the highly elaborated, at least in Quil- lacollo, allegorical equation between the política criolla and adultery, best illustrated with the aventura amorosa (illicit ro- mantic entanglement). Politics, of course, is often talked about in the terms of the aventura, and political types are often publicly called to dance the cueca, a traditional flirtatious dance. An instance of graft might also be discussed as the lifting of a woman's pollera "to taste the dish underneath." These kinds of aventuras often figure literally in politics, as with the case of the surefire political tactic of getting the party higher ups (or any potential patron) laid. Even if one is married, this tactic re- quires "sacrificing" (not my word choice) one's own girlfriend, or negra (not one's wife), to the cause of currying favor.

But this allegory also points to deeper cultural duplici- ties. It is commonplace that in public local men of provincial descent will proclaim the virtues of the stalwart, conservative and traditionalist chola cochabambina (who, it is often noted, should never switch from pollera to Western skirts). They might even insist on their own "humble origins," proudly exclaim- ing, "I am of the pollera/' In fact public events in the company of women de pollera are de rigeur these days for any populist politician in Quillacollo (Albro 2000a). And yet many of these men routinely seek private liaisons with whiter women, clas- sified as cambas, or rubias, often in clandestine trips to clubs or




brothels, or to round off a viernes del soltero (gloss: guys' night out) (see Paulson, this issue). In public these women are likely to be disparaged as khuchi warmis (Quechua: dirty women). While such relationships with white prostitutes might actually be consummated, talking about the virtues and exploits of cholas is typically folkloric fantasy. As adultery, the aventura is an often exploited political allegory expressive of a thorough cultural ambivalence, and is a familiar semantic register of accusations of llunkerio. Peoples7 political experience is best characterized as regularly moving within and between both popular and indigenous modes of cultural expression and consumption, a prevailing fact of politics in Quillacollo. This is not, however, the way indigenous identity has been situated historically in the cultural politics of Bolivia's indigenous movements.

The Identity Problem

I recall the response of a man, himself "of humble origin/' who when confronted by a ragged panhandler, offered the cold response: "Ama sua, ama Hulla, ama khella, ama llunk'ul" To the famous Inca maxim of "never steal, never lie, never be lazy/' he had pointedly added, "never flatter." In another moment, a local agrarian union leader told me of factional goings-on within the union, including his rivalry with another man he claimed was not a "true campesino" (a way of referring to indigenous identity in rural Cochabamba) but was instead, llunk'u-like, trying to cash in on his leadership reputation at the expense of "las bases." It was well known that the first man, his rival, did not earn a living from working in the fields, but from running a chichería (a watering hole, a prototypical setting for political manipulations). So he was unfit for the role of campesino union leader because he was unrepresentative, as a non-campesino, a point the dirigente made by issuing a public challenge with the loaded question, "How do you make a living?" A llunk'u,




then, might also be anyone unlikely to reciprocate, perceived to want something for nothing, or who does not directly earn his "daily bread" with his own sweat.

The following is a field note gloss of another conversation with the man who shot down the panhandler, a transporter by trade. The note begins:

He feels a part of the populacho [popular masses]. For example, in contrast to a typical politician's attitude, he described how "when we eat with a campesino we eat the papa wayku [a type of potato], otherwise it is an insult../7 Políticos, in contrast, "live by lies." But if you don't live by your own works, then "one forgets his own class, his own neighbors."

As I was told on many occasions, "work dignifies the man/7 or "in our culture people who don't know how to work have no value." The familiar conviction that work makes the man, often voiced in Quillacollo, echoes the famous slogan of the Agrarian Reform: "La tierra es para quien la trabaja" [The land is for those who work it]. If Hunk' us "live by lies," as I was told, "in the campo we live from what we sow." Such sentiments as these cross both class and political allegiances in Quillacollo. In this same manner, the toiling "Bolivian worker" (fabril, obrero, trabajador) traditionally has been used as symbolic capital for political pamphlets circulated by leftist parties. In a similar spirit we have this remarkable proclamation, part of an essay published in a book compiled by Bolivian sociologists titled El país machista:

Here is an aspect of modern life: the man in his shop, in the street, in the office, in the highest circles of industry, in the government, wherever he wants to be found. What does he do?

He works! For who? For his woman, for his children, for his home!




And the woman talks still of slavery! (Flores 1977: 53).

Male value is exhibited through a transparency of the direct correspondence in kind between physical labor and the fruits of labor (like Marx's "use values'7). This is what Nancy Fraser (1989: 124) has called the "masculine subtext of the worker role." But for our purposes, and in marked contrast to llunkerio, work (as a social practice of transparent correspondences) further defines a stance of public clarity of male self-definition, as farmer, as worker, and apparently even as a successful industrialist. Such clarity of self-definition publicly reinscribes traditional understandings of the relationship between patron and client respectively, as it insists upon visible evidence for the recognized roles of each.

Linking works to words as proofs of personal transparency is a primary diacritic for the dismissal of llunkerio. While "see- ing is believing [las obras entran por los ojos]/' political patrons "make promises they don't keep [promesan pero no cumplen]." llunk'u politicians are often condemned for a lack of commitment to their own words, a failure felt to be epitomized by the figure of the cholo. Consider this note about a peasant leader shaking his head over the characteristic doings of a longtime cholo rival:

Campesinos speak a "true Quechua/7 Cholos talk more and say less, so to speak. They are linguistically slippery. Illustrating this point, he laughingly claims that for every one word he speaks, [his rival] would speak ten. His rival's son... is worse still, averaging fifteen words to every one of his own. "The cholo is a braggart/' he added.

Self-serving rhetoric and words not particularly bound to their objects, such as tall tales by local authorities about prom- ised works or goods never to materialize, are considered stock in trade of the llunkerio of cholos. As I was dismissively told,




'Their attitudes are tremendous! They'll try to sell you bridges where there are no rivers!" The Hunk' u I cholo harnesses language as his own end, "simply to shoot off his mouth [sólamente para pistolear or disparar]/' And this is in stark contrast to man- fully speaking de frente (face-to-face). Offering his expertise on speaking and politics in his memoir, a onetime political strong man from Quillacollo approvingly repeated the saying, "Lo cor- tés no quita lo valiente" (Rivas 2000: 146), that is, a silver tongue cannot replace real character. And while machos are typified as valientes (men with character), cholos just talk. The suggestion is that if ornamental language might influence appearances, it is no substitute for the valor or value of self-worth.

These interconnected ideas inform a pervasive attitude about cholo speech as uttering mostly "pendejadas" (loosely, "tricky stories" or "silly stories"). One example is a complaint appearing in LOS TIEMPOS, the regional newspaper, about the indigenous leader, "Mallku" (Aymara: Condor), described by the author as a "cholo vivo" and as a "cholo pendejo" (that is, a "tricky" or "stupid cholo"). The outraged commentator begins with a criticism of Mallku' s confrontational form of public speaking, which the author dismisses as pendejadas:

The pendejada is a meeting of deceits carried to the extreme, that is trickery [picardía]. The pendejada is an attitude contrary to that of the gentleman [caballero]. And if honor defines the gentleman, what defines the pendejo? Dishonor. Dishonor animates the pendejada. And dishonor signifies a broken promise. Not honoring the given word. And the given word is the essence of the social pact among free men (Suárez Ávila 2002: 1).

This ringing condemnation asserts the desirability of transparency between a respected public masculinity (such as "gentlemanliness") and "the given word." Speaking their pendejadas, these cholos are accused of trickiness, of cooking up corruption behind the scenes. As a feature of política criolla,




the picardía of cholos is emphasized here as a means for local political types to distance themselves from the widely decried morally suspect underbelly of popular identity, an identity that is felt to be somehow misrepresentative. This trickiness is the source of a disconnect attributed to cholos between words and their referents. It also suggests the difficulties for men of popular descent of signifying a unitary identity using referential symbols of the dominant gender ideology of patronage.

The linguistic expression of this moral suspicion of cholos as llunk'us is a denial of their public access to propositional signs of language. Their words are suspicious because of a felt lack of correspondence to their apparent objects or referents.6 In this sense, cholos only play language-games, where the evident linguistic object is hidden, displaced, or nonexistent. In comparable fashion, in his discussion of "sincerity" as a fundamental dimension of the language ideology of Protes- tant conversion, Webb Keane emphasizes how the "modern subject" seeks out the authority of words as a form of "public accountability" (2002: 75). This is in conspicuous contrast to Bolivian cholos, whose tricky use of language makes them unreliable moderns.

These cases of public dissimulation, such as the uneasy co- existence of cultural strategies (between the stances of "respect" and "self-interest") for ritual compadres or the allegorical ambivalence of the aventura, could be multiplied here: the scourge of illegal land speculation, accusations of embezzlement, or even the double entendre of joking (such as with the rhyming couplets sung during Todos Santos), and the like. Such cases make it clear that llunk'us adopt self-conscious and multiple stances of cultural interpretation: from respectful to disrespectful, from public to intimate, or from straight up to ironic. As critics of llunkerio also make apparent, their transgressions of the boundaries of any straightforward cultural identity are viewed with suspicion. Cholos (popular men) are not transpar- ently self-evident. Their works, their words, and their inten-




tions fly in the face of the glassy essence of masculine ideals in many respects. From the point of view of traditional patrons (as provincial elites), popular men are unreliable clients. As symbolized, they are immoral.

To explore the meanings of llunkerio is also to examine the production of political subjects across relations of patronage (or from within the patrón-pinche dyad). As a dialogical con- textualization of patron-client relations, llunkerio functions as the stigmatized underside of public male symbology, the bad client to the morally upright patron. When described from the patron's point of view, the majority of llunkerio happens "backstage" (Goffman, 1959: 112) (and so outside of the patron's own purview) involving parenthetical efforts between men in political networks to manipulate each other. Patrons describe lunk'us as aggressive, tricky, and untrustworthy clients, and the semantics of llunkerio fill out a public symbolic account of the stigmatized cholo. At the same time, the semantic theater of clientage behavior (of "licking," "flattering," "wheedling," "cajoling," "coaxing," and "praising") is one of mixed mes- sages, where clients move between and manipulate multiple cultural domains.

Gender, Hierarchy and the Nation

While in Bolivia women are participating in politics in ever larger numbers, patronage is nonetheless perceived to be a heavily male-gendered activity in Quillacollo. We cannot treat vertical relationships of patronage or clientage as simply politically expedient, however, without also recognizing that they articulate pervasive and symbolic expressions of hierarchy, as cultural capital. In Bolivia, patron-client ties are part of interrelated constructions of race, gender, class, culture, and especially national identity. Symbolic hierarchy is one basic part of the cultural articulation of clientage. And as caught up




in prevailing notions of gender and national identity, it is also hard to dislodge. In Bolivia, elite and creole notions of gender have been historically invested with superiority over popular and indigenous conceptions of gender (e. g., Alonzo 1995; Rivera 1993; Dillon and Abercrombie 1988). These gendered distinctions compose a hierarchical arrangement of national identity, where a male-coded "fatherland" (patria) is aligned with the political class and from above, and is complemented by a more locally and culturally bounded engendered identity from below (e. g., Harris 2000), which is usually coded as female. As de la Cadena (2000) has shown for the case of Peru, women are routinely taken to be "more Indian."

For Bolivia, Paulson and Calla have tracked the insistence with which policymakers have located "the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the bodies of indigenous women" (2000: 119). The authors point to one effect of the multicultural insertion of ethnicity into gender-based policymaking in the Andes: a preconceived commitment to "gender complemen- tarity" as purportedly basic to the collective and ethnically specific symbolic aspects of Andean life. We can call this effect the reversal of polarities for male and female in new projects of nation building. In contrast to the elite idea of the fatherland, they note how constructions of popular or indigenous women are often used to stand in as the symbolic basis of claims about the "Andean nation" as culturally distinct, and in ways that can obscure their relationship to other social inequities (for further discussion, see Paulson 2006).

A good illustration of this is the role of the chola (the woman who wears the signature gathered skirts) in Bolivia, now as a positive symbol of regional and national identities. In the provincial capital of Quillacollo a political and f olkloric argot includes the town's female patron saint, the Virgin of Urkupiña, as a symbol of fecundity and as official patroness of "national integration." At the same time, the female chola is regularly invoked by politicians, intellectuals, journalists,




and writers as a "symbol of the valley/' or regional qhochala culture,6 and as such, widely depicted in graffiti, posters, song, folkloric dances, and literature (see Albro 1998, 2000a). At the same time, indigenous intellectuals have promoted "the idea of the pollera as a symbol of resistance or refusal to wholly embrace Western culture" (Stephenson 1999: 32). As a symbol, the chola is used to patrol the hierarchically inferior border of the uniquely Andean.

The chola is promoted in Bolivia as a key symbol by elites and indigenous intellectuals to animate indigenous-derived accounts of Bolivian nationhood. The understanding of the chola as an important new political protagonist has found recent support in the widely publicized images of women de pollera as front line "water warriors" in 2000, photographed pelting riot police with rocks.7 It has also found support in the new prominence of female coca grower leaders, as well as pollera- wearing MAS deputies, cholas in the national legislature, and cholas appointed to occupy new cabinet posts by Evo' s administration. These are each instances of cultural capital used for asserting distinctiveness, if in the terms of hierarchical inequality. For the Evo era, however, a horizontal lack of hierarchy has been foregrounded (particularly in the discourse of grassroots social movements) as the basis for a new national indigenous political project. Yet, hierarchy, which links cultural distinctiveness to indigenous clientage, is still very much part of the current political climate, as critical assertions like "Evo, Chola of Chavez" (graffiti visible throughout the department of Santa Cruz critically referencing the Bolivian president's close relationship to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez) bring home.

The chola' s male counterpart, the cholo, has a very different public profile. The creole nation takes shape in the form of the male patria, while the multicultural nation promotes the positive symbol of the female chola. Her ostensible partner, however, is publicly depicted in uniformly negative terms. Virtually synonymous with popular masculinity, the so-called cholo (neither




adequately indigenous nor acceptably non-indigenous) is a stigmatized figure that also threatens to shortcircuit elite and indigenous symbolic constructions of gender and nationhood. Most important for present concerns, it is the cholo who is the most artful and regular practitioner of llunkerio.

Unlike the often strategically essentialized chola, in Bolivia the cholo is an ill-defined villain. As the epigram taken from Ingenieros's El hombre mediocre suggests at the outset of this article, the "mediocrity" of the cholo coincides with a pejorative lack of positive identification as elite or indigenous. The term cholo is a near universal slur used to denigrate morally suspect, mendacious, and boundary-transgressive men of popular and indigenous descent. Such a public stigmatization of popular masculinity, it turns out, is widespread in the literature on gender in Latin America, where we find a gallery of suspects. Most famously, this gallery has included the likes of "bandits" (Hobsbawm 1959), "rogues" (Da Matta 1985), horse thieves (Paredes 1958), machos (Guttman 1996), pariah "pachucos" (Paz 1961), drug dealers (Bourgois 1995), "nacos" (Lomnitz 2001), and in the Andes, cholos: neither elite, nor Indian, erstwhile bumpkins, urban migrants, untrustworthy, faithless, self-interested, and probably corrupt.

Recent research on gender in the Andes has highlighted the reinforcing sociopolitical, intellectual, and folkloric, contexts of the symbolic construction of gender, denaturalizing these symbolic constructions by linking them to the historical repro- duction of social inequality and power (see de la Cadena 2000; Gill 1994; Seligmann 2004; Stephenson 1999; Van Vleet 2005; Weismantel 2001). An important part of this work has been the critical reappraisal of an earlier generation of Andeanist scholarship on gender, which, in the words of Weismantel (2001: 139), asserted the fact of a "peculiarly Andean sex-gender system." As such, the cultural construction of gender was a means to distinguish Andean from non- Andean notions of gender. However, this newer generation of scholarship has, in turn,




placed the symbolic construction of such an Andean sex-gender system in its own context of production, as instrumentally used in diverse efforts of Andean nation building that make liberal use of indigenous cultural content. This is particularly descriptive of the present MAS administration.

But if symbolic representations of women have been routinely deconstructed by scholars of gender in the Andes, popular men have rarely been given the same attention. Par- ticularly in the context of successive culturally defined projects of national identity, cholos are at once less Indian than their female counterparts, while also reflecting elite masculine traits of patrón and patria, if in stigmatized, negative, relief. In other words, the stigma attached to cholos expresses a double nega- tion: neither adequately indigenous nor adequately male. Most consistently, cholo-like sensibilities are entailed in clientage-like arrangements criticized in the terms of practices of llunkerio. The problem of the llunk'u points to the hierarchical cultural assumptions that inform the unitary identity politics not just of elite but also of traditional indigenous political projects in Bolivia. These assumptions, with their appeals to a unitary cultural identity, do not describe the coalitional realities of the MAS particularly well.

For popular men, stigma is reinforced through this relatively uncritical history of the construction of negative male figures or types, like the cholo in Bolivia. In scholarship on gender in the Andes, I argue, this typecasting of popular men is part and parcel of the pervasive symbol talk briefly rehearsed in this section. The pairing of "gender symbols and cosmological forces" (Silverblatt 1987: 29), or the symbolic construction of Andean cultural differences, has been widespread in Andean scholarship, policymaking and politics. Gender, in this way, takes for granted the unitary symbolic construction of gender. In the public life of the nation, gender symbols circulate as fixed and unitary cultural categories. However, as Guttman (1996: 190) has convincingly shown for the Mexican macho, popular




masculinity is distortedly represented in the terms of "unitary male traits/7 In Bolivia, there is, in short, a deficit of ways to talk about such people and the typical social arrangements of which they are a part without subjecting them to stigma, both from elite and indigenous perspectives.

Current scholarship and policymaking on gender would be well served to recall available critiques of the symbol concept. These point out how the assumption of unitary meanings as inherent in symbols can give them a problematically "taken- for-gr anted quality" (Kertzer 1988: 4) in public life, and where they acquire an "ineffable, if not mystical" (Fernandez, 1973: 1366) character, largely cut off from their subjects, referents, and contexts of production. Evo, too, has made it a point to utilize this sort of generic symbolic content in staking the claim of indigenous identity as a defining characteristic of his government (Albro 2006a; Postero 2007a). In this way, ubiquitous symbol talk among elites, policymakers, politicians, indianists, and intellectuals, easily becomes both entrenched and polarized (Paulson and Calla, 2000: 128), and acts as a unitary but limiting code that poorly describes indigenous-popular coalitions and misconstrues the identity of the people who seek to build them.

In the Era of Evo

The status quo of clientelistic politics in Bolivia had been undergoing a slow but steady transformation, since the "return of democracy" in 1982, and as novel political figures of popular descent surged to the forefront of national politics. New political options like CONDEPA (Conscience of the Fatherland) and the UCS (Civic Solidarity Union) helped speed along the erosion of traditional political party affiliation (see Archondo 1991; Mayorga 2002). But the shape of the national political arena has changed even more dramatically since 2000 with the




combustive appearance of issue-driven, indigenous-popular social movement coalitions, which engineered a series of largely successful direct action protests over unilateral government decision-making regarding such public sector resources as water and gas (inter alia, Albro 2005a; Dangl 2007; Garcia Linera 2003; Gustafson 2002; Gutiérrez et al. 2002; Olivera and Lewis 2004; Postero 2005), which culminated with the surprising victory of Evo Morales in the 2005 presidential election.

In this new context of the elevation of an indigenous project to power in Bolivia, social movement advocates have celebrated their break with the pervasive politics of patronage using a discourse that embraces a less vertical and more horizontal politics of participation. This is described as a collective "social space of encounter among equals" (Garcia Linera 2004: 72), a form of participation understood to have taken its cue from a more indigenous-derived face-to-face politics of assembly (see Albro 2006b; Lazar 2006). The organization of the MAS (where national representatives refer to themselves as "spokespeople," emphasize responsiveness to the grassroots, and avoid the mer- est suggestion of membership in Bolivia's traditional political class) is a principal illustration of these redrawn political relationships and boundaries (Albro 2005b). But, we can ask, how easy is it for a head of state to break with vertical politics?

As suggested by the significant number of indigenous representatives in Evo7 s cabinet and in the national legislature, empowerment as Evo' s MAS party has pursued it, means at once reversing the historical role of the indigenous masses as docile clients of the state while at the same time embracing political representation through state office, but not in the traditional mode of the patron. With regard to the administration's efforts to nationalize Bolivia's hydrocarbons industry, as Evo, as Solón, and other MAS representatives have repeatedly in- toned: "We want partners not bosses." In its repudiation of a subservient clientelism, this statement represents a rejection of the status quo of indigenous clientage as it is built into the




international economic system and into Bolivia's traditional political establishment.

While the first year and a half of Evo' s administration has not been marred by the large scale upheavals visited upon his immediate predecessors, we might nevertheless consider what challenges a MAS-style program and politics will have to confront over the long term in Bolivia. If Evo's undeniable popularity represents new (even Utopian) possibilities for an indigenous political agenda for the foreseeable future, he is not the first national indigenous leader to occupy a high profile political post in the Bolivian government. Most recently, katarista Victor Hugo Cárdenas served as vice-president during the first Sánchez de Lozada administration (1993-1997), as junior member of a surprising partnership between the neoliberal MNR and the indianist MRTK (Albo 1993). The decision to participate formally in the government was, however, politically costly for Cárdenas.

If at the time celebrated by the indigenous rank-and-file and the media, Cárdenas was also often accused of selling out by political rivals. Once a star, he is now entirely marginal to the present currents of indigenous politics in Bolivia, accused of having exhibited a "servile and fawning attitude" (Ticona et al. 1995: 195) while part of the government. That is, he was repeatedly accused of being a llunk'u. As another leader explained the problem, "When we were llunk'us we expected much and got virtually nothing!" At least in politics, the llunk'u draws attention to the expectation of patronage but also represents suspicion, a lack of trust, and selling out, among indigenous movements. Cárdenas was evaluated by his peers as having displayed an unacceptably clientelistic attitude, and so was perceived to have been co-opted by the Sánchez de Lozada government and its neoliberal project. As such, he was accused of having abandoned indigenous interests and his own identity. Cardenas' s downfall demonstrates the risks run when leaders




of indigenous and social movements choose to participate in government.

In fact, Cárdenas was a political casualty of a recurrent problem at the heart of indigenous political projects in Bolivia and in Latin America, which promises to be a thorny issue in the Evo era as well: How to balance the call for indigenous political autonomy with the decision to work through the state apparatus? Past (and some present) indigenous political projects in Bolivia were blunt in rejecting the state as anything other than an illegitimate post-colonial institution imposed upon indigenous peoples, who were prior to and distinct from the state, as independent nations at least equal in political stature to the state itself (see Albo 2002; Hurtado 1986; Ticona 2000). If indigenous currents in Bolivia are now more willing than in the past both to engage with the state, and in the case of the MAS to use the state as an instrument of social transformation, the cultural politics that have informed indigenous political projects in Bolivia for decades continue to be highly influen- tial, and receive substantial international support. The cultural politics of Cardenas' critics assume both historical autonomy and a definition of indigenous belonging in terms of collective cultural distinctiveness, the boundaries of which are routinely highlighted, patrolled and defended by indigenous activists.8 In short, they are potentially significantly at odds with MAS-type coalition-building and engagement with the state.

More broadly, patronage and clientage are problematic for many indigenous activists, since they point to boundary-cross- ing relationships among people differently hierarchically located in the political arena. But in the Evo era (with its emphasis upon breaking with the vertical politics of the past, horizontally organized social movements, rejection of "bosses/7 the goal of indigenous empowerment, and with a widely prevalent indianist identity politics of self-determination) state representatives like the president himself face a daunting task of finding a new political language to describe their own practice and cultural




location. Otherwise, Evo runs the risk of becoming a political casualty, caught betwixt and between two irreconcilable goals: control of the state and indigenous self-determination and autonomy. On the one hand, posters throughout Bolivia deliver a hopeful message of the state's patronage: "Bolivia deserves, Evo delivers/7 On the other, and in hundreds of speeches in small towns throughout the country, Evo tells assembled crowds, "I am like you." But can he be both government patron and indigenous spokesperson?

Llunk'u-like patronage-clientage relationships are an important political fact distributed across the everyday and intimate indigenous-popular coaltions so important for the Evo era. If MAS-like coalitional political movements are to successfully redraw the political landscape in Bolivia, they are going to need to come to terms with the implications of the problematic stigma represented by the widespread criticism of the practices of llunkerio: its rejection of patronage, assertion of autonomy, and reinscription of exclusionary cultural politics that would more strictly control and insist upon sharp distinctions about who should be considered "indigenous," and under what circum- stances. That is, llunk'us are stigmatized in part because they confound any clear distinction between indigenous and non- indigenous cultural locations. In the mode of condemnation, the oft-noted corrupt behavior of the llunk'u also represents the corruption of indigenous identity. But such a corruption is, I hasten to emphasize, productively crucial to the success of the MAS. If the Morales presidency is going to succeed, I suggest, the indigenous cultural politics that continue to underwrite many of its practices and goals will have to change.

The Prison-House of Culture?

"Personality" is currency in the cultural borderland of Quil- lacollo as a cultural device insistent upon essentially defined




masculine traits of respect, work, upbringing, and ideology. It is formally of a piece with the practice of discursive-symbolic labeling that underwrites unitary cultural identity projects, both elite and indigenous. And from the perspective of the patron, the llunk'u is a tangle of contradictions, a social shape shifter, and a corrupt bastard of uncertain social origin. The llunk'u is described as aggressively playing a selfish double game, rarely reciprocating or working for his daily bread. He uses language as flattery or persuasion, to achieve his ends, and his words are described as untrustworthy, and not honorably bound to their objects. In these ways he is accused of misrepresenting himself, and of disregarding the virtues of respect or a spiritual depth of formación. He is described as an adulterer and as a person shot through with a dangerous cultural ambivalence. The llunk'u is above all "vivo" (clever). For this reason, he is an untrustworthy client.

These negative associations have made it difficult to see anything else in the political activities of coalition-building than potential corruption. This is so, at least, if we accept the patron's modernist view. In a famous meditation, Octavio Paz (Mexico's patron of letters) had some unflattering words for the pachuco, the similarly transgressive boy /child of Mexican migration to the U. S. Paz saw the pachuco as caught between two cultures, two nations, and rejecting both Mexican and North American options. Paz's portrait of the pachuco begins: "His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma. Even his very name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything" (1961: 14). Paz's narrative of out-migration as the erasure of cultural identity works too for the public stigmatization of highly socially mobile Hunk' us in Bolivia, as one way to describe the supposedly morally corrupt popular arena in which they operate.

Paz' s bird's eye view is an account of unstable moderns defined by their lack of a unified self. But as I have explored for




Quillacollo, within the dyadic arena of patrón-pinche relations, llunkerio is a cultural idiom and politics that addresses Bolivia's "third republic/' a complexly urban- Andean experience (see Barragán 1992). Political analysts have largely failed to identify such political experience in Latin America in ways other than as ephemeral populist class coalitions (Laclau 1977). This is particularly true in nations like Bolivia where the two extremes of urban elites and rural Indians have preoccupied us more. These extremes take conceptual shape as basic antagonists in academic and policy debates. Such a polarized frame tends to locate the patrón-pinche dyad of llunkerio exclusively or primarily within the assumed historical contrast and cultural conflict between, on the one hand, the elite patria (fatherland) (and its political penetration from above in the form of patronage relations) and more localized Andean political and cultural projects.

But this makes several basic errors. First, the tacit commitment to separate domains of "top down" and "bottom up" cultural commitments overrepresents the extremes of social life at the expense of the third republic or of the typically urban middle, where indigenous-popular coalitions, and "category- transgressing peoples" (Abercrombie 1996: 62) are the rule. Second, this is done in the familiar terms of contrasting elite to Indian, modern to Andean, and national to local, in ways allowing that these two might yet be at least conceptually two autonomous cultural provinces of meaning and experience, which makes little sense. Third, due consideration is rarely given to stigmatization; itself a gesture in negative relief of the tensions between claims of unitary cultural subjects and political experience that is otherwise.

The Bolivia of Evo Morales is a country passing through a transformation that promises to create many more political opportunities for its popular and indigenous majority. At the same time, the language of the political project of Evo and the MAS derives its relevance from social and indigenous move-




ment activism, which legitimates their projects through the maintenance of strong working relationships with grassroots constituencies. The success of the MAS, however, is owed only in part to indigenous support. It is also owed to members of the urban and informal economy, to a popular, working-class, and middle-class rejection of the neoliberal governance in Bolivia that made their lives more difficult. If the MAS has successfully expanded participation in an indigenous political project, it remains to be seen if Evo and the MAS can maintain broad support among largely urban and indigenous-descended social sectors that have worked closely with indigenous representatives in the successful popular protest coalitions that made possible Evo7 s unprecedented rise to the presidency.

In Quillacollo and elsewhere these close everyday working relationships are informed by expectations of patronage and clientage. And yet, in an era of indigenous political empowerment, these relationships are also suspect and framed, llunk'u- like, in ways that promote exclusive and collective cultural commitments (consistent with historical projects of indigenous autonomy) which can easily undermine the viability of indigenous-popular coalition-building in the future. Analysts of Bolivia's changing indigeneity have sought to clarify how best to talk about indigenous engagement with new urbanities (see Guss 2006), with a new kind of state and "post-multicultural citizenship" (see Postero 2007b), and with disparate cultural frameworks constructing a new "indigenous cosmopolitanism" (see Goodale 2006). But we also need to pay attention to ways that intimate cooperative engagement with non-indigenous political experience has moved more to the center of indigenous projects in Bolivia as, itself, a part of what it means to be indigenous (in political terms) in the first place.




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The field research for this article was primarily conducted in 22 months of archival and participant-observation fieldwork between 1993 and 1995, with return visits in 2001 and 2003. This research was funded by the Uni- versity of Chicago's Latin American Studies Center, the Tinker Foundation, the Fulbright and the National Science Foundations, as well as a faculty research grant from Wheaton College (MA). An earlier version of this argument was presented at the inaugural meeting of the Bolivian Studies Association (March 16, 2002). I thank Josefa Salmón for her organizational efforts and Susan Paulson, Andrew Canessa, Guillermo Delgado, Xavier Albo, Marcia Stephenson, and Pamela Calla for their useful comments on earlier drafts and in different conversations. Any confusions, misconcep- tions or inaccuracies are my own.

NOTES

1 Quote from Pablo Solón as part of a discussion on foreign investment in Bolivia, sponsored by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Washington, D.C. May 31, 2007.

2 The term runa literally means "people," "person" or "human being" in Quechua. Among mostly Spanish-speaking politicians, the term historically has been used generically to refer to both Quechua and Aymar a indigenous clients.

3 I conducted participant-observation in Quillacollo, Bolivia, from 1993 to 1995, examining populist grassroots political responses to structural adjustment measures in that country, and have returned several times since, in 2001 and 2003.

4 The scholarship of patronage relationships has also tended to treat them as collisions and negotiations between the distinct "interests" or "social positions" of patrons and clients, respectively, each of which are understood to represent membership in distinct and competing social statuses or groups (cf. Cohen and Comaroff, 1976), such as indigenous and elite.

5 Qhochala is the word used to refer to people from the region of Cochabamba.

6 This distinction about cholo discourse recalls similar distinctions such as Wittgenstein's (1981) discussion of the differences between Augustine's classic propositional theory of language acquisition and his own notion of "language-games."




7 " Water warriors" is a reference to participation in the Water War of 2000 in Cochabamba, an ultimately successful grassroots effort to reverse the attempted privatization of the city's waterworks (Albro 2005b).

8 Such cultural politics, for example, have been written into the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, under consideration for ratification in the United Nations since 1993, and which Morales and the MAS have publicly affirmed.

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Indigenous Politics in Bolivia's Evo Era: Clientelism, Llunkerio, and the Problem of Stigma

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Transcript of Indigenous Politics in Bolivia's Evo Era: Clientelism, Llunkerio, and the Problem of Stigma