Mobilizing Bolivia's displaced
Subtitle: indigenous politics and the struggle over land
By: Nicole Fabricant
Series: First peoples : new directions in indigenous studies
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 257
ISBN-13: 9780807837139; 9780807872499
Subjects: Politics and government; History; Peasants; Movimiento Sin Tierra (Bolivia); Land reform; Indians of South America; Political activity; Land tenure
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.