Envisioning an Orderly Altiplano: Middle Class Discourses of Moral Geography on El Alto, Bolivia

Resumo

Since the early 2000s, Bolivia has undergone extensive social and economic shifts. This is in part tied to the presidency of Evo Morales, the country’s first Indigenous-identified head of state. The city of El Alto, often considered an «Indigenous city,» may be understood as a microcosm for understanding these larger shifts. Residents of the capital city of La Paz, which sits in the valley just below El Alto, have long thought of the neighboring area as a place of danger, filth, crime, and chaos. But as political, economic, and identity dynamics have changed throughout Bolivia, discourses about El Alto shifted to highlight the ways El Alto is «progressing» socially and economically. This paper concentrates on discourses about El Alto that middle-class residents of La Paz (called Paceños) circulate on a daily basis, and through which they actively produce understandings of the intimate connections between city center and periphery. This makes clear how aesthetic, affective, and corporeal valuations of space are implicated in economic and social development, both producing new forms of identity and reconfiguring others. Based on ethnographic research from the 2010s, I use the concept of moral geography to understand the valuing of space and how notions of «modernity», «development», and «orderliness» become positively assessed in the context of Bolivian middle-class identity. Yet, in 2019, in the wake of a contested finish to the country’s presidential election, violence occurred in the streets in cities across Bolivia. In La Paz, middle class residents contributed to discourses that blamed this violence on El Alto residents, reinscribing notions of danger and chaos. Thus, this article traces the ways discourses on El Alto reflect shifting ideologies of class in Bolivia, within global notions of progress. As middle class Bolivians express desires for their country to more closely reflect global indicators of development, they repeatedly come back to the notion that as goes El Alto, so goes Bolivia.