Overflow: The experience of an escalating chi’xi revolution in Bolivia

ABSTRACT

The article describes the escalation of protests during the 2003 Gas War in El Alto, Bolivia, an event that led to the overthrow of a president and paved the road for the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first indigenous president. By means of the local idiom of ‘overflow' it is sustained that while the Gas War grew out of the everyday it also exceeded this reality and it produced a qualitative new reality, namely the becoming of the urban indigenous as a relevant political subject. Further, the ethnography indicates how people’s comprehension of past, present and future has been reconfigured in this new era, and it is argued that the Gas War and contemporary Bolivian politics, including the end of Morales’ administration, can only partially be understood by means of conventional political theory because it simultaneously is and is not a revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Revolution
• Bolivia
• overflow
• El Alto
• Indigeneity
• urban

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Cholet’ is a compound word that out together ‘chalet’ with Cholo. It refers to the expensive, colorful and extravagant houses built in El Alto (and elsewhere) by Aymara urbanites.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication – FKK [grant number 11-106524/FKK]; Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR). Fondap [grant number 1511 000 6].