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Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land

Online ISBN:
9781469601458
Print ISBN:
9780807837139
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land

Published:
12 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9781469601458
Print ISBN:
9780807837139
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

The election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005 made him his nation's first indigenous head of state, a watershed victory for social activists and Native peoples. El Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST), or the Landless Peasant Movement, played a significant role in bringing Morales to power. Following in the tradition of the well-known Brazilian Landless movement, Bolivia's MST activists seized unproductive land and built farming collectives as a means of resistance to large-scale export-oriented agriculture. This book illustrates how landless peasants politicized indigeneity to shape grassroots land politics, reform the state, and secure human and cultural rights for Native peoples. It takes readers into the personal spaces of home and work, on long bus rides, and into meetings and newly built MST settlements to show how, in response to displacement, Indigenous identity is becoming ever more dynamic and adaptive. In addition to advancing this rich definition of indigeneity, the author explores the ways in which Morales has found himself at odds with Indigenous activists and, in so doing, shows that Indigenous people have a far more complex relationship to Morales than is generally understood.

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