"we have to learn to ask": hegemony, diverse experiences, and antagonistic meanings in Bolivia

The Virgin is for both poor and rich, but she loves us differently ... We have to learn to ask as poor. -a pilgrim In 1989, when Jaime Paz Zamora landed in an air force helicopter just next to the shrine of the Virgin of Urkupifa in Cochabamba, he was doing what thousands of Bolivians do every August: paying a visit to the Virgin, either to ask for material goods and prosperity or to thank her for having granted such a request. Paz Zamora's visit was, in a way, special; he was thanking the Virgin that congress had elected him president of Bolivia. This was an unexpected, even "miraculous" outcome, since he had come in third in the popular vote, and it, like countless other "miracles," helped to increase the fame of the Virgin and to attract more and more people each year from more distant places. In recent times, over half a million people from a total Bolivian population of some six million have participated in the fiesta of the Virgin of Urkupina.1 New pilgrims have introduced new ritual practices and incorporated others from festivals across the country, giving rise to a festivity strikingly different from the local one that was celebrated by people from the surrounding peasant villages and haciendas until the 1950s. In the course of this transformation, customs and ritual practices that were viewed as too Indian and "pagan," too rural and "backward," have been replaced by what many today would consider "modern" and "civilized" traditions; these are nevertheless practiced alongside old "pagan" customs and other "backward" practices that have been recently introduced. Simultaneously, the festival now brings together professionals, transportistas (transporters),2 students, merchants, contrabandists, cocaine dealers, workers, beggars, and the unemployed, along with peasants, who were once the major participants, in a common ritual and quest for money and capital. These changes, in both scope and ceremony, have earned the Virgin of Urkupifa the name "Patron of National Integration," and Quillacollo-the town where the celebration takes place-has been recognized as one of the centers of Bolivian "folklore."3 The massively increasing scale of the festival and the major changes in rituals and symbols reveal substantial social transformations in Bolivia. But the festival is far from simply derivative This article examines the celebration of the Virgin of Urkupinia in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as one cultural arena of contestation in which hegemony, conceived as an ongoing formative process, is constituted. By situating the festival in a context of historical transformations, emergent forms of domination, and changing relations between the state and civil society, I show how various groups, class fractions, and institutions struggle over the meanings of shared concepts and symbols. In the course of this struggle, involving cultural imposition, appropriation, and transformation, the cult of the Virgin has changed dramatically from a rather local peasant and Indian festivity into a multiclass and multiethnic national phenomenon. [Bolivia, hegemony, power, ritual, cultural change]