Hispanic American Historical Review

548 HAHR / August

Rhythms ofthe Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia. By raquel
gutiérrez aguilar. Translated by stacy alba d. skar. Foreword by sinclair
thomson. Latin America in Translation / en Traducción / em Tradução. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xlviii,
284 pp. Paper, $25.95.

This gripping book monitors the surge of popular mobilizations that disrupted Bolivia’s
neoliberal regime and opened the way for Evo Morales’s ascent to power in the tumul-
tuous years between 2000 and 2005. Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, a Mexican mathematician
involved in Left politics there, traveled to Bolivia in the mid-1980s, where she plunged
into the sizzling culture of revolutionary and neoindigenist politics in La Paz. According
to Sinclair Thomson’s elegant and insightful foreword, Gutiérrez Aguilar ‘‘acquired a
quasi-legendary status there as an intense, brilliant activist and radical intellectual’’
whose solidarity networks extended into Central America’s concurrent liberation
struggles (p. ix). As veteran activist and friendly critic of Bolivia’s popular movements,
the author exudes a sense of passion and urgency as she tries to wrest the larger historical
and ideological meanings from Bolivia’s most recent cycle of political rupture and
transformation. Part political memoir, part social analysis, this hybrid text offers the
reader an insider’s critical reading of why and how Bolivia’s emancipatory politics
overwhelmed neoliberalism, inverted relations of power (in a metaphorical pachakuti, or
world turned upside down), and (arguably) came to constitute ‘‘the most successful
example of the recent struggle ‘against’ capital and ‘against’ the state in Latin America’’
(p. 188). Indeed, the book’s overarching purpose is to show that ‘‘the Bolivian uprisings
were the most radical . . . of anti-neoliberal struggles that have emerged in Latin America
since the beginning of the twenty-first century’’ (p. 186). That claim rests not on any
analysis of policy or institutional outcomes at the state level, or even on a comparative
analysis of Latin American antiglobalization movements. Rather, the author stakes her
claim on what she sees as the novel ideological and political work (new repertoires of
political organizing and new projects for social emancipation) that emanated from the
very process of popular mobilization and struggle in Bolivian regions beginning around
2000.
The study is divided by theme and chronology into two sections. Part 1 plumbs the
depths of the three regional popular movements, examining the organizational and
ideological mortar that held them together and projected their collective goals onto the
national screen. The author identifies distinctive features that infused emancipatory
meanings and social agency into each of the three popular movements she profiles. In
Cochabamba, the popular struggle for the public right to water was built around an
extraordinarily participatory organ, La Coordinadora, which introduced new ways of
‘‘making politics’’ and new ‘‘horizon[s] of meaning’’ without succumbing to the rigidities
of union, class, or ideology (pp. 25–26). In contrast to the Quechua valley mobilizations,
Aymara peasant politics in the altiplano were fueled and framed by the cultural discipline
and communal ethos of highland communities. In 2003, Aymara people organized and
sustained massive roadblocks, marches, and occupations of the capital city while they put
forth popular agendas for fundamental change in the nation’s political order. In the

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 Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews / National Period 549

semitropical Chapare, on the other hand, coca growers (cocaleros) deployed the tools of
militant union organizing and ‘‘illicit’’ coca production while also pursuing electoral
strategies, eventually building their own mass party (the basis of Morales’s Movement
toward Socialism, or MAS). In part 2, how these three popular regional movements
converged during the explosive year of 2003 is chronicled in exhaustive detail. We are
made privy to ‘‘the new emancipatory goals for social transformation that had been
growing up to that point’’ (p. 127), as well as the ‘‘weakness that limited the emancipatory
potential for the uprisings over time’’ (p. 126). Diagnosing the movement’s internal
dynamics, the book lays out the political ‘‘compromises and ‘catastrophic balance’ ’’ that
finally brought down the neoliberal regime of Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada and opened
the way for Morales’s 2005 election.
Unfortunately, the narrative ends abruptly at that culminating moment. This is a
function of the fact that, as political history, this text is now somewhat dated. Thanks to
Duke’s Latin America in Translation series, the original 2008 Spanish-language version is
now available in beautifully rendered English, but the author gives only a proverbial nod
to the epochal changes and tensions that have buffeted Bolivia’s political culture and
institutional climate since 2005. Indeed, the author’s explicit aversion to Leninist notions
of revolutionary ‘‘state power’’ (and her critical view of Morales’s state-centered and
extractivist policies) opens a curious void in a study like this one, which purports to
examine the relationship between ‘‘indigenous uprising and state power.’’ Instead, the
author explores the internal workings of popular politics, as well as the ideological
contours of her own ‘‘interior horizon’’ (p. xx). This book provides a platform for this
author/activist to reexamine theory and praxis of popular movements, including the very
notion of ‘‘social emancipation’’ that emerged from, and shaped, the ethos of community-
popular forms of struggle (p. xxii). In such passages, the reader might well imagine
herself in a smoky salon with erstwhile comrades debating the meaning of emancipation
and the potential for an inverted order of things as they try to figure out what, prag-
matically speaking, comes next. There seems to be an internal dialogue going on here, at
least in the book’s extended preface, that is a bit obtuse. That said, this book—as political
memoir and social analysis—offers an intriguing inside view of the kinds of issues that
drove debate among a few members of the intellectual vanguard during Bolivia’s most
recent cycle of popular unrest.

brooke larson, Stony Brook University

doi 10.1215/00182168-3088944

Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics ofMining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. Edited
by anthony bebbington and jeffrey bury. Peter T. Flawn Series in Natural
Resource Management and Conservation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Photographs. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xv, 343 pp. Cloth,
$60.00.

It is tempting to resort to the old cliché that ‘‘the more things change, the more they stay
the same’’ upon first encountering Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury’s volume on

Published by Duke University Press