Carwil Bjork-James, "The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia" (U Arizona Press, 2020)

Welcome to the new Books Network. Welcome to this episode of new books in Latin American studies. Today we're speaking with Dr. Carl Wilby Ork James about his new book, The Sovereign Street, Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia, out with the University of Arizona Press in 2020. Carl Wilby Ork James is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Law at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Bjork James conducts immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, environmental struggles, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia. Since 2015 he has been the lead researcher of ultimate consequences, a database of nearly 600 deaths in Bolivian political conflict. A second research project looks at the political ethical and legal tensions that surround resource extraction projects pursued by quote post neoliberal governments in South America. Both projects draw on his experience as an environmental and human rights advocate and as a participant in direct action protest movements. Carl Wilby Ork James, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. It's such a pleasure to join you. I wonder if we could begin by you telling us a little about the origins of this book and this study. What led you to research these movements in Bolivia and how did the project develop and take shape? Sure. So I had been fascinated by and often admiring of the process of Bolivian social movements in the first half of the 2000s, when I think a lot of people in the rest of the world started paying attention to them. I ended up living in Kautamamba during my research as an anthropology doctoral student, as well as a little bit in Le Paz. But Kautamamba had been the scene of the 2000 Water War, which is actually I came to learn the 1999 and 2000 Water War. One of these first struggles to directly reverse water privatization in a global south setting and just a light of hope in the time of the anti-globalization or alter globalization movement that I had been a part of in San Francisco and also one that was connected to the company back-tell in San Francisco. So folks from that struggle were coming to San Francisco. Friends of mine went to Kautamamba to try and learn about their struggle. And so that's Rumi'en. But then in 2003 and 2005, there had been these more dramatic struggles called the gas wars in which people challenged privatization of gas and also advocated for a re-founding of their country as a foreign national state. And so looking at how do movements coalesce? How do they bring themselves onto the national agenda? How do they break into a political party system which had been overwhelmingly non-indigenous and entirely committed to neoliberalism? All those topics were fascinating. And we're the kinds of coalescing mass movements that I wanted to make my object of study once I started in graduate school. It's really fascinating. And you make the connection at different points throughout the book in terms of your own participation in those anti-year alter globalization movements in protesting what Seattle, San Francisco, and elsewhere. Otherwise, too, I think this sovereign street represents an important contribution to multiple literatures and fields of scholarship. For instance, our understanding of cities and urban space in Bolivia, the Andes region, Latin America more broadly, indigeneity relations between race and space you take up here. And the rise of Evo Morales and the plurian national state, as you mentioned a little bit in Bolivia, water war and gas wars of the 2000s. And for scholars of social movements and popular politics like me, it's really fascinating in how it delves so deeply into the anatomies of strategies of these pivotal struggles in urban Bolivia in the 21st century. And I'm sure others reading it will fill the same way. And then, quote, "a new way of doing politics is what you conclude by outlining." Could you give us an overview of the sovereign street and what you think's most important to understand, what you'd like for readers to understand? Sure. Yeah. And anything about just kind of the major contributions you think the book makes to these fields. So if I were-- when I was thinking about how to write this book and what to intervene in the topic of social movements, what was driving me was this feeling of, oh, I've read these accounts that describe the protagonist, describe their rising social forces, describe who's involved in social change. But they don't really-- it felt to me-- explain how it was that this movement was able to claim the power that it did, change politics in the way that it did, intervene in the way that it did. And often, there'd be a couple of pages if there were x number of people in the street, 150,000 people in the street, and then this government fell. Or there were all of these people here, then this contract was reversed, this privatization was changed. And I wanted to know why. What exactly was making that possible? And so that was kind of the core of my-- the research-focused investigation, et cetera. And it's the question that I try and address in a lot of-- in a lot of the sovereign street is getting into how is it that acts of protest accumulate into political power. So in the first half of the book, I'm looking very much at the accumulation of tactics. And it's built around the concept of claiming politically meaningful and culturally meaningful spaces as a way of exerting pressure and as a way of demonstrating popular legitimacy, broad, popular support, et cetera. And so it's-- Now, do you mean spaces in the strict sense of particular streets and particular parts of La Paz, for instance, or particular plazas, or you mean symbolically, culturally, or a little of both? A little of both, but leaning towards the physical. So that what I'm interested in is why is it that being in the right place at the right time is it were-- or demonstrating one's power in the downtowns of major cities, or converging upon national capitals, and really interrupting the economy in those places can have significant power. And it's not just symbolic, right? But I wanted to speak to what is the symbolic importance of some physical spaces. And this forced me to really think about what are the ways that in non-movement, non-upheaval moments, those same places play a role in the solidity of a government, in its public pageantry and its demonstration of popular sovereignty. Because what emerged in Bolivia in the early 2000s, but I think what emerges in most radical and contestatory social movements that claim a mass space, is a competition between a governing political project that says, oh, we represent the public, and an up and coming or insurgent political project that is making some of the same claims. And I'm also really interested in the parallel exercise of symbolic and practical power that's represented by the movement in Bolivia. And I think by other successful movements around the world, so that the pressure that these movements exerted was quite real and economic and economically disruptive, so social movements in Bolivia function by having what they call general or civic strikes. But this is not a traditional Western definition of a general strike, because many people in Bolivia are informal workers, many of them. Peasants, many of them are people whose workplaces are not the core of the economy, but whose daily participation is significant, but also whose ability to take themselves out of their day-to-day routine and then flood into streets, highways, bus terminals, other places that are key nodes in the circulation of goods in the country. are able to exercise power in that way. So that's one kind of space. It's dispersed a bit, but it was physically occupied. And then there's a second kind of space, which was much more concentrated in downtown, often involved central plazas in Bolivia. And those are places where the state has symbolically said, this is our history of democratic legitimacy. We have a central square, which is a place where 200 years ago during the independence struggles, and 50 or 70 years ago, during the National Revolution in Bolivia in 1952, people came together and established the state the we are. And what does it mean to have 50,000, 100,000 peasants, grassroots urban residents, Indigenous people, in those spaces, calling for economic change and calling for self-representation? What can mean something really dramatic? It can mean an ability for another alternative political community to be asserting its power. Now, what happens if those two things are happening together? What happens if those mass meetings are deciding on the nature of the blockades, are deciding that La Paz may be cut off from groceries, gas, and fuel for days, for weeks at a time, in the process of a political campaign. Then you have something truly powerful, and kind of a public meeting that appears to be directing the direct physical survival of the city, if not the country. And that combination is what I examined in the first half of the book and represents when I see this kind of the nucleus of the way that a new form of politics pushed to the center of the political stage from 2002 to 2005. Thanks. And in chapter one of the book, "Car will you focus on much of what you were just touching on just now, urban space claiming and revolutionary events." But I think you do a really good job in this book. And if you want to talk particularly about those two components and definitions and how they fit into the study in Bolivia, that'll be good. But one thing that you do really effectively-- and I think this book is so user-friendly and would be great for both upper division undergraduate courses and then graduate seminars-- as you include many what are called here boxes, this kind of in-set, three to four boxes. It seems kind of in each chapter or here and there throughout the book, really taking up a particular concept like race in Bolivia or Bolivia's turbulent recent history. So I just wanted to kind of flag that neat feature and user-friendly aspect of the book and then open the way for you to talk a little bit more about urban space claiming and revolutionary events. So let me focus first on the nature of revolutionary events. And this was something where I was-- I found those tools work on the French Revolution really inspiring because what I was trying to think through is why is it that these particular moments, which are dramatic, involve large numbers of people, but don't necessarily have the same kind of force that maybe an earlier generation of revolutions carried through arms represented. It was these on-arm uprisings and mass events, nonetheless, have these bridging, changing impacts. And so what I wanted to draw attention to is the way that we, in everyday politics, concede this idea that, oh, there is a room of people who will fight out our political struggles for us and we just call it the parliament or recall it the Congress. And then what happens with these people power revolutions is that if there's large enough numbers of people on the streets were willing to say, oh, this represents someone, something about our society that can't be overlooked. And it maybe helps a lot if that group of people cannot be cleared from the streets. If they're irrepressible, they're on it unable to be pushed aside. So I guess there's a few different ways of thinking about that force, and I try to work through them based on the premise that there's something unusual going on here that it isn't a matter of, you know, just like war, logistics, ballistics, who has the more force, and yet something changed, right? And yet the walls fell before the trumpet instead of before the candidate. And so trying to think about what exactly are such events? Why do people come to treat them and take them seriously? And I would argue that we live in a long revolutionary era that in some ways ever since the French Revolution, we've understood that good states are founded based on mass popular participation, a mass public mandate, and that generation after generation, we've had different forms of intervention in which mass public upheavals have played a role. And when you look at sort of all of the classical lineage of revolutions, whether it's the French commune or 1917 in Russia or the 1952 revolution in Bolivia or the 1910, in Mexico and the ways that these are foundational cultural events in which ideas about who deserves representation in the state are enacted through physical participation, are enacted through public involvement and engagement, and enacted on the symbolic stage often of national capitals. And increasingly, as we get into the decades that I've been alive and I think about 1981 in Poland or 1989, in Eastern Europe, or the 2011 during the Arab Spring, we have these moments when large, interpersonally connected groups of people claiming this representational right pose a question to elites. And sometimes the answer that comes about is we would rather acquiesce to this than fight it directly. We can't imagine the scale of lunch that's involved in shutting down something like this is beyond our capacity. And we're willing to take a time in the future. On page 48 and 49 in the box, was there a revolution in Bolivia in the early 21st century? You were talking just before that in the book about how did Bolivian revolutionaries themselves identify and define revolution, especially as you mentioned with the 1952 revolution in Bolivia and this history of revolution, much of political discourse tends to be framed by that. But you say the three aspects of revolution laid out here, extra parliamentary intervention of the excluded masses, transformation of the political system, and reordering of economic relations, allow us to get a handle on these divergent views. So would you say anything more about how Bolivian revolutionaries talked about revolution and if they thought what they were doing was, in fact, one? And this gets into both the theory of revolution and then the process of oral history, right? Where when people are making statements, it is always in a particular politicized present, right? So there's, I got to witness the enthusiasm, right? And sometimes the enthusiastic nostalgia of people who remembered particular moments as deeply transformative, deeply personally engaged. And I think that that sense of alignment between one's own actions and large-scale political shifts is the felt experience of revolution for a lot of people. And that lines up with this idea of the intervening, extra parliamentary intervention, right? Like what you do in the streets actually affects the direction of your country. But then also, revolution is an investment in a promised future, right? In a belief that the political system will change that your life opportunities and your life will change. as well. a result of that involvement. And so sometimes the same people, and sometimes, you know, do the same people in different times, or different people in a given moment, would have different assessments of whether the government that was produced, that was brought to power, of Avon Morales represented a revolution. And that goes alongside the question of, were these moments, moments of revolutionary change. And so I think this is a big and significant question for those of us who don't want our society to endlessly reproduce its current power structure, of like, what qualifies as a revolution? How do you see a revolution through? And what do we make of those moments when there's disappointment and betrayal and incompleteness to a revolution? And so one of the things I'm trying to do with this book throughout is to lead people through that process. Both of the like, heady days of immediate impact, end of the internal divisions that follow, end of some of the kinds of shifts that I see present in Bolivia. So I found myself as someone who, you know, once a more liberated world, at, you know, on the cusp of both, like, excitement and disappointment, all the right, just seeing like, oh, these are these ways that people have learned to fight and have rooted in eyes and generated respect for their ability to collectively organize and to intervene in politics. And yet also, these are the ways that, you know, some of the, like, some leaders catapulted into the state, like often, you know, now have the same constraints upon them or shared interests that are brought about by resonance in that state and can, you know, turn against many of the more radical demands that were put forward by Bolivia's vibrant movements. - Thank you, Carwell. In chapter two, you talk about the Water War and how it served as precedent and prototype for key movements in urban Bolivia going forward. And you referenced it a little bit at the beginning of the conversation, 1999, 2000. But what was the Water War about and how does it then, how did the protests then serve as precedent and prototype? - Yeah, so this was a six month period in, in Coach Abamba that emerged in response to the privatization of the municipal water system and the city's water resource. And there's a film called "Even the Rain" that speaks to that latter part that a contract was signed with a newly minted corporation owned by Western investors largely, but also some Bolivian elites to own and operate the municipal water system, Simapa, as well as to control the right to water infrastructure anywhere within the municipality of Coach Abamba. So Coach Abamba, like many other Latin American cities, has substantial self-settled popular neighborhoods where people have built their own housing and in many cases built their own water systems. And they were dispossessed of those water systems in the process. People in the central city faced major increases in their water bills overnight effectively. And the argument was all of this, well, two arguments were made about privatization. One was that foreign capital was needed in order to expand and complete the water system and provide new sources of water. And then separately that all these rises and rates were actually needed to invest in new systems of water and not foreign capital after all. So there was a lot of anger, disappointment at this process. And it also was the symbol of a neoliberal policy, openness to foreign investment, enclosure of common resources, and secretive behind the scenes deals with the new corporate entities that would end up profiting from a public resource. So people started organizing fairly early on and built a lot of ties between very different kinds of people affected by this. So not just these urban ratepayers and para-urban water users, but also the irrigation users in the broader Kojimamba Valley became highly engaged in this. And they created a set of innovative coordination mechanisms the largest of which is called the Kordina Dora of these kind of public platforms for coordinated protests. And they engaged in a series of mass protests over water privatization with some early waves in November and December, and then the largest ones in January and April. And they also hosted a 50,000 person self-organized referendum on water privatization. So it was a gradually building mass movement that utilized several different kinds of pressure. So the rural residents taught urban residents how to engage in road blockades effectively. People mobilized in the center city. They were in some ways propelled along by the fact that the national government had to end the municipal government both tried to prohibit them from gathering in the central square. So that made getting into the central square into a battle all its own. And so you can envision on February 4th and 5th, how after a day and a half of fighting your way into the central square, you're a little bit less forgiving, less willing to negotiate anything other than complete capitulation of the contract. And they really created the sensation across the political spectrum that these protests represented the people of Coach of Amba. And so even the elite newspapers would use Coach of Amba as the verb for the mobilization as in Coach of Amba bent the back of the national government. Right? So there was a broad coalition created in that case, and there was sort of people participating in the mobilizations and protests across different sectors in the case of-- Yes, for sure. And even though people had somewhat different involvements in this, right? Like Mimjana race went up, the sense of-- Different motivations, right? Yeah, the sense of commonality and mutual support that was built up during these moments of protest was quite intense. And the blockades multiplied. You had people blockading tiny roads, even in like bourgeois neighborhoods. You had lots of people who came in from the poor section of the city fighting it out with the police in the center of the city and then being fed by the apartment owners in that part of the city. And so there's lots of memories of transgressive inter-class, interracial alliances that were emerging on the streets. And so people had these really profound moments of felt unity. And I've never stopped being struck by this because on the one hand, I have this very clear story, right, of from the grassroots working class, poor people had never been represented by the city actually coming into the center of city and making demands story. But also a story of like, heady emotional connection across those lines that went far beyond that. And in my experience, what's interesting is, I think, a lot of successful revolutions combined this, right? Combine the leadership and assertion of people who are normally experiencing domination with a felt sense of vast unified agreement behind a new possibility. And that sense is, as I try and document in this story, partially embodied, right? Like, what does it mean to just see other people that you don't know in a space together? What does it mean to march together, to suffer together, and to win together in the very physical block by block sense? And it's in part sociological, right? It's in part that in order to win in a conflict like this, it helps an awful lot. If you really are bridging some traditional divides, you're pulling together more people than you should. And so it's often when you're adversary, in this case, the municipal and national government, overreach and do something that's damaging to more people, right? Damaging to everyone that you have this possibility for these kinds of creative alliances and transformative movements. And do you think it was key? I guess it always depends, is this short answer? But do you think it was key that this was about water, you know, an essential thing for day-to-day life for a kind of necessity for people across the board? I mean, I guess there were some who could handle the fees more than others could, but-- I do think the physicality of it is really profound and speaks to something that was just so tangible and then also to be without it or to not have access to it after it being hard fought or after you, you know, putting up the pipes yourself in your neighborhood to get access to it was profound. And I also think that the materiality of these struggles was also, regardless of the topic, like I don't know if natural gas was as daily tangible, although people heat their home, you know, like cook their food with natural gas in Bolivia. But it's more like there were other substances that also united people so that in the process of these mobilizations, the sharing of food and the providing of, you know, like clearing the tear gas out of someone's eyes or providing, you know, the physical sucker in the midst of these conflicts was, you know, I think all of that physicality really matters. What about the gas war? What did, can you lead us to that development, what several years later, and kind of how it relates to the broader story here? Yes, so we're talking about a scaling up of participation and a, so if the, the water war happens in 2000, there's a set of, I would say, diverse and sometimes coordinated, but often like disconnected struggles that happened in 2001 and 2002. You know, there's, there's pension battles, there's a series of rural strikes demanding better conditions of trade and support for indigenous compassinos, especially in the Highlands. There's a set of coca struggles, there's a whole, whole ferment that's going on, but it's not until September and October of 2003 that a national effort really comes to cocair around the proposed, not privatization of gas and sale of it and export of it through Chile, through multinational ownership. And so that challenge from the grassroots to the two, those new gas policies, but also for a set of other demands around, around having a constituent assembly that would rewrite the nation's constitution in a way that's more inclusive of indigenous people come together into a set of mass mobilizations. A lot, people in Kutramamba were part of the water war are showing up for those things. People who are in El Alto become the core of it. That's the twin city of La Paz. It's a like overwhelmingly I'm a city, probably the fastest growing and most indigenous major city in Latin America during that time period. And it's also something that is sparked in the rural areas as well. So El Alto lives in symbiotic dialogue or caught with the surrounding like, Alteplano of La Paz, because Altenio is our migrants from the Alteplano and that part of rural unionism has been like powerfully engaged in like, in reclaiming indigenous identity while pursuing a kind of rural syndicalism. So you had early on in that struggle in September, right? So people have started marching, started making demands around September 13th. And then on September 20th, there is a military convoy that goes through two major Alteplano towns and risk like in the process. Protesters, but also rural residents in their homes are shot and killed about six of them. And then the response to that is an increase in blockades and mass organization in El Alto. A major rural leader will come and start a sort of five person rolling, sorry, 500 person rolling hunger strike in the Radio San Gabriel in in El Alto. So I wrote by a rolling hunger strike, I mean that people took shifts, right? Hunger struck for days and the other people replaced them. And meanwhile, like that becomes a nucleus of some urban blockades. So it's a tactic that had been tried and tested in September 2000. It's going to come back with very great force in 2003. And so you have just tens of thousands of people engaging in blockades, supplies of groceries and supplies of fuel are going to become scarce in La Paz. There will be a military convoy that attempts to break through that process and kind of leads off what becomes the bloodiest day of bloodiest weekend, rather of Bolivia's entire democratic period killing like 50 people in that one weekend of October 11, 12 and 13th. And then a follow on wave. So there's already at this point people who have been engaged in one of the major protest waves up to that point were mostly already in the streets. And then you have a set of like parliamentarians, human rights activists and like middle class Bolivians engage in these hunger strike pickets, which I think are at a number I think 50 across the country demanding that the president resign after this massacre. And so there's just multiple levels of accumulating force that are happening in that gas war. And then we're seeing that deadly weekend, the vice president will resign and say he can't count minutes being a part of sorry, he doesn't resign. He walks away. He maintains his status as vice president. It kind of recognizes this government can't ruling through this level of violence is not acceptable to him. And that story of how a like moderate neoliberal president in Carlos Mesa comes to public who recognize the force and legitimacy of this very much like dispersed grassroots mobilization comes to honor the dead from the gas war who is own running mate basically ordered the execution of in the opening of because sorry, just I don't want to skip over. Gunsala Santista, Lozada will resign and flee to the United States. He was a vice president. So yeah, and Carlos Mesa, who had been vice president will step up as president in October. And his first act will be to be sworn in and have a moment of silence for the fallen in this gas war who are all but two civilian protesters. And his second act will be going to El Alto and recognizing the central role of El Alto as a defender of the freedom of Olivia. And so it's a really dramatic set of state ceremonies in which basically the fallen in the gas war are recognized as kind of national heroes that are like they're treated as soldiers. And that's a language that is interestingly I think shared inside of the social movements and then echoed by this possibly quite oppositional vice president who becomes president will be challenged on gas privatization a year and a half later and will resign in turn but will not be willing to organize a kind of massacre that we saw in 2013. And throughout that process and those opening years of the first decade of the 2000s, in my correct in saying there's kind of a correspondent rise in power and recognition of indigenous people. I mean, if things are based in El Alto there in the surrounding area and then I mean, isn't that also part of what's such a big deal here is like Mesa going there and basically surrounded by indigenous people and sort of having to go along. Exactly. And I think like I found it difficult in trying to narrate this to get to speak to all of the notes at once and so what I ended up doing in the book was dividing this you know grassroots labor power and grassroots indigenous self representation into kind of two segments of the book even though they took place in a very overlapping process. So you know depending on where you are, if I had if my fieldwork had been in the Alta Plano indigenous self representation is the story of the April and September 2000 uprisings of the 2001 uprising, those are stories about Indigenous peasants coming to govern themselves. And that built on arguably an entire generation or an entire 40 years of struggle from the early 1970s onward to recast the Compassino movement, which had been a pretty, I mean, two things about the Compassino movement. Compassino used to be a term that Indigenous people took on to say they weren't Indigenous. And the Compassino organizations in the beginning of the 1970s were literally headed by the military dictator. Right? So building independent unionism and building unionism that was founded on Indigenous autonomy was the project of people working under the bonds of dictatorship in the 1970s and then emerged in these new generation of Indigenous indigenous defined organizations of peasants in the 1980s. So long struggle that's building up over a long period of time and that very much has a lot of language of Indigenous self-governments, reclaiming of the pre-existent Indigenous social order, the invocation of Koya Suyu, the like southeast quadrant of the Inc. Empire as an alternative name for Bolivia ideas of sovereignty, especially in the La Paz part of the Alteplano and a separate kind of reconstitution of Indigenous traditional governance in an organization called Konamak, which I refer to as the Highland Traditionalists in the Fuck. And so those are all like really powerful ideas and they're very much present in every time that I would say rural Indigenous communities come into the city, but also in the ways that the people that I spent more time with, the like urban Indigenous folks self identifying and walking without fear in these spaces in the city. And so because that's a longer slower struggle about exclusion, political representation, and reclaiming space and like the self-identification and then self-governance through Indigenous collective institutions, that's a story that I take on separately in chapters 5 and 6 to look at what were the forms of the Latin American city was built in exclusion feels like an impartial word and I really try and grapple with that because there's always been Indigenous peoples in the Latin American cities, but they were expected to stay out of power and to be there as servants. Now we're in a situation in Bolivia and some other places as well where most Indigenous people live in the cities and most urban people probably are Indigenous except perhaps in Santa Cruz. So we have a new urban landscape that Indigenous peoples have really emerged into and used those spaces and used their culturally marked presence in to make some really daring political claims. And how did the arrival to the presidency, this is a very, this is the question that could have a very long answer and we're close to the end of time, but how did the rise to power of Able Morales as an Indigenous president at the head of the state, the plurian national state, how did that affect that sense and Indigenous people had of being more secure kind of owning the streets in the cities? I think you can't underestimate the symbolic importance of a new Indigenous president, comfortable speaking in Indigenous languages, using Indigenous dress as part of the ceremonies of state, having a pre inauguration in the ancient site of T. Manacu and then inviting into governments into the halls of government, Indigenous peoples in new and massive numbers, both in the Moss legislative delegation, especially after 2009 and in the constituent assembly in 2006 and 2007, these were moments of, you know, I think a tremendously charged arrival, those very plural, right, very many different people from many different movements took roles in as Moss representatives in the constituent assembly as Moss representatives in the National Congress. And so that that sense of Indigenous becoming and sense of oh, in order for us to be here, we have to redefine the state is, is I think really powerful and the contrast is overwhelming because, if oh, in 1997 was part of this first class of Indigenous representatives in the Congress, there are 130 deputies in the Bolivian Congress, there were four Indigenous people in the '97 and then Morales is inaugurated in what year? 2006. 2006. It is a breathtakingly fast expansion of Indigenous representation. And so we have that, this is like real arrival in a context in which like the demographics should have allowed that for a long time before, but social convention and sense of who is a leader and the party system and the extreme urban biases as well of the representation system were huge. And so some of that groundwork is laid in the '90s by decentralization and the law of popular participation, which is the stepping stone, the Morales party, the movement towards socialism, hyphen political instrument for the sovereignty of the people used to generate some political clout to become an institutionalized party. But it's a country that went from, if I remember correctly, having let's say 33 municipalities to 339. So what used to be true was the rural areas of the country were governed from like one provincial town that oversaw all of them and in which the white residents monopolized political representation. And so there's a, even though like Indigenous peoples had the right to vote from 1952, they're right to self-represent, it's just drastically changed. And their access to the vote was increased dramatically between 2006 and 2010 by this massive voter registration and just identification provision programs that were implemented by the Morales government. Yeah, at the same time, then it becomes a house divided, as you say, in the last chapter of the book chapter seven, mobilization and counter-mobilization within the plurian national state. Yeah, so we have, you know, the Morales government does all of these representational actions and then also is managing a state and an economy and has granted in constitutional text some very far-reaching ideas that it realizes quite, quite rapidly, right? So the Constitution's passed in 2009 and all of the enabling legislation for the Constitution needs to be written in 2010 and '11 and that was the time of my field work. And so they promised autonomy in the Constitution, but what kind of autonomy? An Indigenous March will debate that and will find, you know, the system that's offered lacking. And real autonomy in some ways is grounded in having your own financial revenue stream and the Indigenous Fund will become a political football and then ultimately the site of the largest corruption scandal in the Morales era. The labor mobilizations, which will continue, right? People will demand higher wages and they're running up against a government that is committed to macroeconomic stability, right? That it sees itself as having to prove itself to Wall Street and foreign investors. And I think that's a really challenging situation for any government in the world. And so you have all these fractures and the materiality of Indigenous autonomy is going to be ravely contested because the national government is committed to an extractivist economic project, which is something that honestly is shared across the political spectrum with the other parties. And so the possibility of new roadways and new gas and oil infrastructure and selling, like conversion of the very large forests of Bolivia into new agribusiness all become priorities of the national government. And so these fractures are quite significant. And those are just the structurally explainable ones. I don't know if I have a story for a town like Potosi, right, which 80% voted for Moss, 90% even at one point, right? And then had a set of development demands that they wanted new investment, new other things and went on strike in 2009. 2010 and in 2015 and gradually a wedge Through between urban potency and the mosque government a wedge built of disappointment and Feeling like it's it was the sort of leftover stepchild of the the national government and now that is a city that is Intensely skeptical of the mosque in his project Well to close dr. Bjork James Could we shift gears a little bit and and and Talk about your current research or research projects on the horizon? Yeah, so the thing I've spent the most effort on is building a database around political conflict in Bolivia and it's centered around the lethal consequences of that political conflict so during during the democratic period so Bolivia is an interesting place for this kind of research In general like all of my research because it's one of the most politically involved places in in the world With one of the highest percentages of people who say they've participated in protest in their lifetime And it's also a place where you know, there's some really dramatic outcomes as I've discussed from From protest, but there has been a human cost to that and so I've documented now over 600 deaths since 1982 in this Comprehensive database, which is on its way to being both a Commemorative digital archive in which we remember the circumstances of the assess and a data set in which we can look at Patterns of under what circumstances where people able to Organize successfully in spite of deadly state oppression and I think that that question of What happens when there is deadly state repression how to movement sometimes succeed in that case is one of the most important ones in in a world in which You know states have them not fully aware of violence Well car will be or James we appreciate your time today The book everyone is the sovereign street Making revolution in urban Bolivia University of Arizona press 2020 Thanks for joining us for this episode of new books in Latin American studies