Title: Mobilizing Bolivia's displaced : indigenous politics & the struggle over land /
Authors: Fabricant, Nicole.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press,
Year: 2012
Subjects: Movimiento Sin Tierra (Bolivia); Land reform Bolivia History; Peasants Political activity Bolivia History; Indians of South America Land tenure Bolivia History; Indians of South America Bolivia Politics and government
Abstract: The election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005 made him the first indigenous head of state in the Americas, 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. In Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced, Nicole Fabricant illustrates how landless peasants politicized indigeneity to shape grassroots land politics, reform the state, and secure human and cultural rights for Native peoples. Fabricant 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, she 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.
Contents: Indigeneity, resources, and the limitations of a social movement state -- Sediments of history: resources, rights, and indigenous politics -- The making of a movement in Santa Cruz: uneven regional agrarian development in Obispo Santiesteban and Ichilo -- Ayllu democracy: indigenous law and collective governance as territorial protection -- Agrarian citizenship: alternative models of production and food sovereignty -- Mobile "indigenous" citizenship: marching for a new agrarian reform law -- A social movement state: indigeneity in Morales's Bolivia and a compromised constitution -- Revisiting indigeneity in resource politics and the battles that lie ahead.