Bolivia is made up of a multitude of cultures, with a complex mix of racial groups as diverse as the land’s topography. Many different indigenous groups have lived in various areas here for millennia, from the lowlands of the Amazon to the heights of the Altiplano. Throughout history, these groups have interacted with each other in commerce and in cultural exchange. Later, the colonial period saw the arrival of European populations who arrived with their own economic agenda. Enslaved Africans were brought over by some of these new arrivals and forced to work in Bolivia's mines, and eventually moved to its coca fields. Today, their descendants constitute an increasingly visible Afro-Bolivian community in various regions, particularly in the high-altitude tropical rainforest of the Yungas.
Over time, these groups engaged with each other more and more, and terms have come to pass to describe the progeny of this mixing of groups. These terms have carried different weights at different times, and among different classes. In colonial times, someone of means with mixed heritage may have simply been called white, while someone from the countryside or of lower classes may have been called mestizo. And even the significance of being Aymara has morphed; a word that once for many people brought an image of an indigenous farmer in a far-flung community now just as strongly can bring forth an image of a young university student in El Alto who listens to hip-hop music.
This type of racial categorization can be a messy business, as the terms and their meanings change over time and take on their own political, and too often derogatory, connotations. So like much of the region, Bolivia is a place where individual identity can be a difficult thing to unpack. One cannot simply meet a person and, upon observation of their place of birth, skin color or last name, fully understand who they really are. As with people anywhere, to be ‘Bolivian’ can mean many things at once, and defining a person by their race or heritage becomes more and more difficult every day. The government has tried to recognize these complexities in a constitution that now recognizes 36 original nations representing nearly any permutation of ethnicity imaginable, as well as Afro-Bolivians.
A close look shows much more complex connections between the people and places that make up this country. So in this issue of Bolivian Express, we explore the idea of ‘blurred lines’ to celebrate ambiguity, to bask in the grey areas, to find out when truth is anything but. We traveled to borders, physical and metaphorical, where worlds collide in big and small ways to make reality less than clear.
We visit Bolivia’s fronteras to see how proximity to other countries can challenge communities’ notions of being Bolivian. Conversely, we talk with individuals from other Latin American countries who have travelled across borders to arrive here in Bolivia, a place often adopted as their new home. We look at areas of cultural and political contention between Bolivia and its neighbours, from this country’s claim to the sea to the true origins of the salteña. Internally, we revisit the tumultuous history of the clásicos between La Paz’s two most prominent football teams, where each side has its own version of what happened during controversial games of the past. We explore communities that are changing definitions of their spaces, from the Takana people of the Amazon basin, bridging the gap between the physical and spiritual world, to the women in El Alto bringing a piece of the agrarian countryside to their urban neighbourhoods.
In many ways, ambiguity is the spice of life. One just needs to look at the rich tapestry of culture and tradition that comes from each ethnic and cultural group here, and at the results of the connections between these groups across generations. Not knowing answers is what keeps things interesting, what keeps us exploring. And Bolivia is a fantastic place to look deep to try and sort it all out.
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Finding home across the border
According to the National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia, the country had 562,461 immigrants living inside its borders in 2012. Yet, in an increasingly complex and intertwined world, what does it mean to be from one country versus another? Bolivian Express decided to investigate why an increasing number of extranjeros are not only visiting Bolivia, but learning to call the country home.
Efrain Maestre is not tall, but he stands out in an average crowd of Bolivians. In just the same way, his accent stands out because it is speckled by yeísmo. It instantly labels him as one of the many extranjeros who have recently moved to the eje central of Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and La Paz. Although he was born and educated in Venezuela, Maestre moved to Bolivia when a fellow Venezuelan offered him a graphic design job in La Paz he simply couldn’t refuse.
According to UNICEF, the top five countries represented by immigrants in Bolivia as of 2013 do not include Maestre’s beloved Venezuela. Rather, immigrants namely come from Argentina, Brazil, México, Perú and Chile. Within La Paz, there exist pocket populations of foreigners, like the Peruvian immigrant community concentrated in El Alto. In other parts of the city, like Zona Sur and Sopocachi, there are many international organisations and even more foreigners. One Chilean Sopocachi resident, Ignacio Saavedra, declared that ‘It is not unusual to hear many Colombians and Mexicans in the streets,’ who are exposed, like Maestre, by their distinctive accents.
In 1976, extranjeros made up 1.3% of Bolivia’s population. Forty years later, they make up 2% of the country. Although Bolivian immigration levels have remained relatively low and stable over time, the demographics of its immigrants has changed noticeably in the past few years. Instead of Arab, Jewish, and Japanese immigrants, Bolivia now receives foreigners mostly from other Latin American countries.
According to Daniel Bordas, the Programme Director of the International Organisation for Migration, Latin American foreigners choose Bolivia as their home because ‘The cost of living here is cheap, especially for people like students coming from Brazil.’ Simply, more foreigners from Latin America are moving here for the economic opportunities, especially from countries currently plagued by economic crises like Venezuela and Argentina. Even so, Maestre solemnly reflects, ‘Regrettably, there is a crisis in Venezuela, but that is not why I’m still here.’
So why is Maestre still in Bolivia, if not for economic reasons? Undeniably, the economic opportunities and low living costs in Bolivia are favourable for people looking to move. However, when you ask immigrants why they choose to remain in Bolivia, many do not initially reflect on this fact. Interestingly, extranjeros in La Paz mention paceños as the primary reason they enjoy living in Bolivia. ‘Paceños are well educated,’ Maestre explains, ‘they respect me. They are nicer and more caring people. When you go somewhere and you are received well, you can make it your home.’
More frequently than not, Latin American foreigners come to Bolivia and stay longer than they initially planned. Maestre thought he would stay for a maximum of one year, but he sits across from me 16 months later and asks, ‘Do you like salteñas?’ He sips on his instant coffee, takes a substantial bite into his mid-morning snack and says, ‘They’re a bit too sweet for me.’
Photo: Courtesy of Efrain Maestre
Illustration: Hugo Cuéllar
History is a series of ambiguities. Oftentimes, political and economic power determines what we see as truth. One example of how power blurs the line of truth is by determining which businesses and enterprises are legitimate and which are illegal.
The United States frequently criticises Bolivia over the problem of drugs. In 2013, President Obama identified Bolivia, Burma, and Venezuela as the three countries that have consistently failed to meet the objectives of the US War on Drugs. Yet it could be argued that the United States, in fact, was history’s first ‘narco nation’. Today, few people realise that the wealth of the United States was, in part, originally based on the sale of drugs. In the 18th century, before the advent of heroin and cocaine, the United States was the world’s largest producer of tobacco and the drug nicotine.
For many centuries, prior to the arrival of Europeans in North America, indigenous people used tobacco for medicinal and cultural purposes. Tobacco had a place in these indigenous cultures much like coca still has in Bolivia. Indigenous people did not use tobacco or coca for recreation or commercial purposes.
The English colonists in North America recognised the potential profit from tobacco and created a market for it. Meanwhile, governments around the world had outlawed this dangerous, addictive drug. The Ottoman Empire banned tobacco in 1633, China in 1612, and Russia in 1613, and in 1617 even Mongolia made smoking a crime. Using the still relatively new technology of the printing press, American tobacco producers and their English marketing partners launched a massive propaganda campaign of books, pamphlets, and illustrations to promote tobacco as healthful and to portray it as fashionable in European cafés and royal courts.
In a world not yet accustomed to advertising and propaganda, these false claims about tobacco succeeded. Tobacco became so wildly popular in the royal courts of Europe that the American colonists quickly became wealthy. In the middle of the 18th century, the colonies in North America produced an average of 18,000 kilogrammes of tobacco each year. The trade became so lucrative that every colony produced a crop, but production was centred around the Chesapeake Bay and in the area of the present-day Southern states.
American colonial growers sought to control not only the cultivation of tobacco, but also its sale, which required the wresting of the market away from the English and the cessation of the heavy taxes paid to the Crown. And so they revolted against British rule.
This new tobacco market financed the American Revolution, as the colonists’ burgeoning army was supported with taxes on tobacco and loans from the French using tobacco as collateral. Unlike Bolivia and Mexico, which each had vast silver deposits from which to mint coins, the North American revolutionaries did not initially have their own currency and instead used tobacco as money. So important was tobacco to the revolutionary cause that the British military targeted tobacco crops and warehouses for destruction as the key to defeating the rebels. The British Navy blockaded the ports of the incipient nation and managed to confiscate 15,500 kilogrammes of tobacco bound for sale in Europe. Because of the importance of this one commodity, the war between the new American nation and Great Britain became known as the ‘Tobacco War’ in the area around the state of Maryland and the modern-day capital of Washington, DC. Today, the war has the more politically powerful name of the ‘American Revolution’, which ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
Tobacco enabled the creation of a new narco nation, the United States of America. In 1787, delegates from the 13 former colonies met in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the emerging country. The most powerful delegates to the Constitutional Convention represented the tobacco growers in the South, and they fought to protect their tobacco interests, in particular the importation of slaves from Africa and the expansion of lands to the west for more tobacco plantations. Of the first five American presidents, four were tobacco growers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. To solidify their hold on the new American government, the Southerners moved the capital from Philadelphia to tobacco country along the Potomac River, where Washington, DC, sits today. To illustrate the importance of tobacco to the American economy, the new congressional building was decorated with tobacco plants and its columns were crowned with tobacco leaves.
In hope of finding new areas for tobacco cultivation, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the French lands along the Mississippi River in 1803, doubling the size of the United States by adding over 2 million square kilometers, an area almost twice the size of modern Bolivia. New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, became the drug supplier to the world. As the United States grew and pushed westward, the new land was less suitable for tobacco cultivation, and slowly the country found new crops, such as cotton and maize (which was easily transformed into another intoxicant, corn whiskey).
Tobacco grower James Monroe, who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase for Thomas Jefferson and eventually succeeded him as president, extended US influence into Latin American markets by creating the Monroe Doctrine, which limited the activity and influence of Europe in the Western Hemisphere. This project established the precedent for perpetual US interference in the commerce and politics of Latin America.
These North Americans of European ancestry created the first global drug trade with tobacco, and soon capitalists around the world followed their example by expanding into the production of other drugs, such as opium. Scientists helped to create even stronger substances, such as heroin (from opium) and cocaine (from coca). But just as US citizens became some of the heaviest users of tobacco, they also became addicted to other drugs. Ironically, the United States now has a massive substance-abuse problem, and, unable to control its drug problem at home, US officials constantly divert attention by accusing Bolivia and other developing countries of being the source of the problem.
Today the United States is the centre of the international drug trade. It is the world’s largest drug market, and it supplies the bulk of the funds in the international narcotics trade. For nearly 400 years, the United States has been a leading producer and consumer of licit and illicit narcotics, pointing the finger of guilt at Bolivia and obscuring the fact that it is still history’s leading narco nation. If only the people and the government of the United States would look at their own history, they would understand their country’s central role in the creation and maintenance of the global drug trade.
Anthropologist Jack Weatherford was born on a tobacco farm in South Carolina. He is the author of El Legado Indígena, which examines the contributions of indigenous Americans to world history.
Illustration: Nikolaus Hochstein Cox
Claiming the right to call something your own.
Whatever your style, whether it’s strolling to the local salteña kiosk, sitting in one of the many salteña-selling chain restaurants or independent cafes, or eating out of a serviette whilst rushing to work, salteñas form an important part of the matinal routine if you live in Bolivia. In Colombia, I was regularly asked about the quality of Bolivian food. Keep your empanadas, your tamales and your arepas, I would say, salteñas beat them all.
I asked Bolivian cook and salteña enthusiast Virginia Gutierrez if salteñas were sold in other countries. ‘I think they have them in Argentina,’ she said. ‘I'm not sure, though, you'd have to check.’ But a Plaza España salteña-seller was more adamant. ‘Only in Bolivia,’ she told me.
Yet, it is true that the very name of this Bolivian staple locates its identity in Salta, Argentina. The creation story is as follows:
Juana Manuela Gorriti – a salteña of the non-edible variety – and her family relocated from Argentina to Bolivia in 1831, escaping the Rosas dictatorship. Well-known for her intellect, writing and grief-strewn life, Gorriti was also the inventor of the salteña, and thus named the delightful creation after her home province.
‘It's all in the name,’ goes the well-known phrase. Yet, in this case, all is not in the name. First created and sold in Tarija, salteñas belong more to Bolivia than to the Argentine province in which their creator was born and died.
A person born in one place and then raised in another is often asked where they feel they belong: the country from which they originated, or the one which has grown to be their home? Unfortunately, consumibles are unable to answer such complicated questions. So, this time, I'll provide the definitive, unbiased answer: salteñas are Bolivian, through and through.
If name does not define identity or origin, what does? An official declaration, an agreed split-patrimony, a battlefield victory – the methods used are abound. But do they work? Let’s look at a few other examples of contested, multi-national treasures.
‘The Morenada is linked in no way to the Peruvians,’ claims Milton Eyzaguirre from The Museum of Ethnology and Folklore in La Paz. ‘In Peru,’ he explains, ‘they say the dance is part of a common culture that belongs to all Aymara people.’ But Milton contends the dance, which originated in the Bolivian municipalities of Guaqui, Achacachi and Taraco, has since been adopted by those living further afield on the altiplano. But how did the Morenada leave the confines of these remote communities? According to Milton, ‘Part of Aymara logic is to expand beyond Bolivia, to undertake a cultural conquest.’ Sharing is caring, is it not? Not when others try to claim shared items as their own.
Sometimes, sharing with Peru can be permitted, as is the case of the great Lake Titicaca. The independence of Peru in 1821 and Bolivia in 1825 gave way to the division of the lake, giving Titicaca a dual-nationality. It is almost perfectly divided between the two countries in a compromise that seems to compromise nobody in particular.
Another water-based, less peaceful, but certainly Pacific example, comes in the Bolivian-Chilean dispute over the sea. When Chile conquered Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, it took the country’s access to the sea. All is fair in love and war, right? Wrong. Bolivians to this day are fighting to claim back what they believe is rightfully theirs. However, for Chile, the military victory equals lawful possession, so it adds Bolivia's former piece of coastline to its already vast collection.
Just as salteñas are unable to declare where their allegiance lies, so too are dances, lakes and bits of land. Whether it is claimed, shared or won, possession remains forever disputed as countries continue to fight over what they desperately want to call their own.
