During the early 2000s, Bolivian social movements transformed the country into an icon of resistance by challenging the austerity measures and privatization policies associated with neoliberal capitalism. The stakes of how to interpret Bolivia’s economic experiments over the past two decades, however, are particularly high at this political juncture. Following an extended period of robust economic growth, progressive social policies aiming to redistribute natural resource wealth, and celebrations of Bolivia’s rising Indigenous middle classes, the country has been wracked by a currency crisis and economic contractions that have coincided with sharp internal conflicts within the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party.
Kate Maclean’s book, Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-Economy, is a timely resource to ground debates about the successes and shortcomings of the economic agenda advanced by MAS’s Evo Morales and his former minister of finance and current president, Luis Arce. Under their leadership, MAS promoted a vision of resource nationalism and economic diversity to serve as an alternative to the reign of neoliberal policies and the moderated multiculturalism that accompanied them. The architects of its “pluri-economic” vision sought to loosen the grip of colonial and neoliberal capitalism on the country by drawing on social values and practices—such as care, cooperation, reciprocity, and gift-giving—that cannot be collapsed into capitalist modes of exchange.
Yet as Maclean’s book makes clear, debates over current economic tensions, as well as official government policies and intellectual efforts to foster alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, must be tethered to the everyday realities of people who have been celebrated for embodying that alternative vision, and, at times, cast as a threat to the country’s economic transformation—namely, Indigenous women. In their failure to do so, Maclean argues, MAS’s progressive economic reforms missed an opportunity to bolster the alternative values and diverse economic practices it championed.
As the title suggests, Maclean’s book pivots around cash, clothes, construction, and other key sites and central figures that enliven Bolivia’s economy. Maclean draws our attention to the women—especially the internationally iconic “chola paceña”—whose labor in frequently feminized spaces drives Andean markets. From the rise of Aymara fashion shows to the boom in La Paz and El Alto’s construction industries, Maclean argues Indigenous women’s livelihood strategies in the adjoining cities illuminate the actual workings of economic pluralism.
The book builds on a rich history of ethnographic studies of Andean markets and market women, including works by Rossana Barragán, Juliane Müller, Linda Seligmann, Nico Tassi, and Mary Weismantel, as well as the theoretical insights of feminist economic geographers like J.K. Gibson-Graham. It also intersects with recent critiques regarding the conceptual uselessness of the distinction between the formal and informal economy. Pulling together these analytical threads, Maclean insists that our very conceptualization of economic pluralism is impoverished without paying significant attention to women’s work and how economic theories and practices are gendered.
Chapter 1 traces the leftist and Indianist intellectual roots of the MAS party’s efforts to advance economic pluralism in contrast to colonial and neoliberal capitalism. After a useful overview of dominant theories, including liberalism’s Homo economicus and Marxist, feminist, and decolonial critiques of liberalism’s universalizing tendencies, the chapter presents the vision and limitations of the work of Grupo Comuna, an influential collective of Marxist and Indianist scholars and activists active between 1999 and 2010 that counted among its members former Vice President Álvaro García Linera and public intellectuals such as Luis Tapia, Raúl Prada, Oscar Vega Camacho, and Raquel Gutiérrez.
The collective sought to theorize alternatives to neoliberalism and to challenge Western epistemologies or ways of knowing, promoting instead a vision of a “pluriverse” where many worldviews might coexist. They further theorized the role of labor and social movements in helping to usher in those political transformations, a project that reflected the popular dissent and sense of political urgency that crystalized during Cochabamba’s Water War (2000) and the subsequent Gas War (2003) that rocked El Alto, La Paz, and surrounding hamlets, among other conflicts. Their work gained traction in popular debates but also the MAS platform, even as individual members of the group later fell out with the collective or stood in critical tension with the MAS party.
As Maclean and other critics have noted, despite claiming to challenge colonial and Western gender ideologies, Grupo Comuna’s framework tended to sideline the urban Indigenous Bolivians who populate the so-called “informal” sector and reproduce simplistic understandings of women’s role in the economy. Most confounding for Grupo Comuna’s theories, Maclean argues, were the thousands of Indigenous Bolivians laboring as comerciantes (small-scale merchants) in La Paz and El Alto’s vast urban markets. Maclean shows how Grupo Comuna’s framework reproduced discourses that render these economic powerhouses’ claims on indigeneity dubious, locating “authentic” Indigenous people in almost exclusively rural contexts.
In Chapter 2, Maclean examines the political apertures that made MAS’s economic experiments possible, namely those brought about by the social movements, political practices, and economic strategies that helped bring Morales to power. Nevertheless, some of the very people who were most central to Morales’s base, particularly Indigenous-identifying residents of El Alto and La Paz, were often absent from his party’s discourses surrounding resurgent indigeneity that were later inscribed in the new 2009 Constitution.
Here, Maclean’s work dovetails with the insights of Nancy Postero and others who have grappled with the Morales administration’s efforts to “indigenize” the state and the contradictions those efforts produced. While urban-dwelling Indigenous Bolivians found the Morales administration’s discourses of economic sovereignty and critiques of neoliberal capitalism compelling, the complexities of Indigenous women’s contributions to the economy largely remained invisible within these conversations.
Responding to those erasures, Chapter 3 seeks to visibilize the women whose lived experiences and economic strategies have not been sufficiently taken into account in debates about how to decolonize the Bolivian economy. Maclean interrogates a series of archetypal femininities and racial ideologies that inform popular imaginations about the economic and political roles played by Andean women. She does so by placing historical and more contemporary figures (i.e. government ministers, colonial-era Indigenous rebellion leaders) in conversation with the experiences of women interlocutors she has met through various research projects over the past decades—including rural microfinance loan recipients and city-dwelling used clothing traders. For Maclean, Indigenous women are frequently politicized in reductive terms—alternatively villainized or romanticized—without really considering their perspectives or, more centrally to her argument, how their income-generating strategies may enact the alternative relational values that economic pluralism seeks to promote.
Maclean’s later three chapters on cash, clothes, and construction draw on her ethnographic fieldwork, popular debates, and media coverage to illustrate her driving arguments about how Indigenous women’s economic practices can better illuminate—and, indeed, reconfigure our understanding of—economic pluralism. In Chapter 5, for example, Maclean draws together a host of clothing-related symbols and enterprises, from Morales’s famous chompa (sweater), to the successes of Aymara fashion designers, distribution networks of used clothing vendors, and policy efforts to improve textile exports. These examples shed light on Indigenous women’s economic influence as petty traders and conspicuous consumers, as well as the gender and racial ideologies undergirding varied interpretations of their work and consumption habits—including the racial-class anxieties they sometimes provoke.
For Maclean, these case studies further reveal the profound “tensions between state-led political economy, decolonization, and the livelihoods of those who constituted MAS’s base.” The booming construction industry, eye-catching neo-Andean architecture, and dramatic spatial transformations of La Paz and El Alto, including public debates over how to act at a shopping mall, likewise provide Maclean with fodder to analyze shifting ideas about aesthetics, proper urban behavior, belonging, and Indigenous futurity.
Readers who are learning about Bolivia’s economic experiments for the first time may find some of the earlier theoretical material difficult to parse. However, the case studies that comprise the second half of the book ground those frameworks. These multi-dimensional case studies flesh out Maclean’s arguments about the quotidian ways Bolivians navigate race, gender, and diverse economic practices. Readers more familiar with that context will likely find convincing Maclean’s assertion that grounded ethnographic examples are necessary for understanding the gendered realities of Bolivia’s pluri-economy. But those same readers may also wish Maclean had dwelled a bit more on her ethnographic and interview material or introduced some of it earlier to illustrate those claims, for example, by showing more of the reciprocal practices and relational values she frequently invokes.
The book’s core arguments, however, will likely appeal to readers seeking to better understand the aims and realities of Bolivia’s economic experiments, as well as those seeking to contextualize the turmoil that followed the overthrow of Morales, the revanchist policies of his successor, Jeanine Áñez, and President Arce’s recent political-economic woes. Against the backdrop of the continued centrality of Bolivia’s extractive industries, these national political-economic struggles have galvanized scholars, journalists, and activists and had an enormous impact on Bolivian lives and livelihoods.
Maclean’s book invites those who are invested in thinking beyond the confines of neoliberal capitalism to start from the perspectives, values, and livelihood strategies of urban-dwelling Indigenous women. In doing so, we turn our attention to economic pluralism in practice—and sometimes in tension with those who have sought to theorize it and enshrine it in policy.
Susan Helen Ellison is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College and author of Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia.
