categories overlapped, as I will show. The first category, and the majority, were indigenous rural peasants. An overview of the differences of dress, livelihood and language of the different groups of peasants in Tapacarí is given later in this chapter. 'Peasant' (itself a term with many, contested meanings – see Kearney 1996) is an imperfect translation of the Spanish term 'campesino', but the closest approximation. When briefly surveying people from rural Tapacarí, this was the term they used to describe themselves, although the words 'indigena' and 'originario' were also used, mostly by political activists. In some parts of the province, with stronger adherence to cultural traditions and ancestral patterns of landholding, people referred to themselves as
'originario' more readily; however, when it came to the villages immediately around
Tapacarí, only one person self-identified, when asked, as 'indigena' rather than
'campesino'. He also affirmed that he thought 'indigena' to be an accurate description of
everyone in the communities in his sector. It was probably not coincidental that this person was a political activist leading a struggle in his subcentral to recover control of a small limestone mine from the former patrón of the area. At the meetings through which this campaign was carried out and organised (held in the riverbed, by the mine), the most active contributors made frequent references to the new government, specifically the fact that it was headed by indigenous people and was leading by example in nationalising natural resources, placing them back under the control of the 'people of the place' (gente
del lugar). In these comparisons, the leaders and other participants of the campaign to
take back the limestone mine explicitly placed themselves and their relationship to the owner of the mine as equivalent to Bolivia's relationship with the transnational energy companies with whom the government was renegotiating contracts to place natural resources under public control.
The town of Tapacarí was home to at least fifteen families whose adult members had been born in a rural community rather than the town itself. There were, in addition, several elderly people, mostly women, who lived by themselves in the town and who had come from rural communities. My neighbour Doña Olimpia was one such person, both originally a peasant and now an established vecina in the town. She had grown up in a rural village, came to the town when she got married, and stayed there when her marriage dissolved since she could make a living by herself selling chicha. She was de pollera and spoke Quechua in preference to Spanish, and her adult daughter who lived in Quillacollo was a smart de vestido professional who helped her out with a place to stay and money when she needed it. When she had first come to the town, she said, people called her
'india' and were snobbish towards her, but over time they had mellowed.
Doña Olimpia had been settled in the town for many years and did not retain land in her community of origin, but there were also several families who lived in the town some of the time (for example during school term time) while continuing to have a house and plots of land in a nearby peasant community, where they would attend meetings of the peasant trade union (sindicato campesino) and thus continue to form part of the political organisations which apply pressure to (and form part of) the municipal government. In addition, many indigenous peasant people passed through the town regularly, staying for periods ranging from one night to several weeks or even months. Their living arrangements and relationship with the people whose houses they stayed in are discussed in Chapter 4.
The second category of people found in the town, a category in which Doña Olimpia would sometimes place herself, were those whose parents were from the town, and who
had grown up speaking Spanish as well as Quechua and, in the case of the women, wearing non-pollera clothes. (The clothes worn by the men were not obviously distinguishable between peasant and townsman, with the exception of shoes and hats.) Doña Cristina and Don Wilfredo – who owned the shop, pensión and chichería on the corner of the plaza – fell into this category. When they married, they took over Don Wilfredo's parents' shop. Don Wilfredo also operated a large bread oven, which he allowed others to use for a fee, and had also been named town corregidor. In addition, he was an ambulance driver, as well as cultivating a couple of fields of crops for domestic consumption, regularly earning himself mockery from other townspeople when seen returning from a day's work there 'dirty, like a peasant'. Don Wilfredo was keenly aware that despite his position of relative power and affluence in the town, he was also subject to wider hierarchies which marginalised and stigmatised him. Once, when drunk, he commented (with bemusement rather than anger), 'If I went to your country, what would they say to me? Fucking indian, right?' in explicit recognition of the way discrimination against indigenous people in Tapacarí scaled up to an international level in the form of racism against, and marginalisation of, Bolivians in the European countries to which they emigrated. He was a keen MAS supporter and had helped arrange the visit by then-parliamentarian Evo Morales to the town in 2002. This was an unusual position for a townsperson to take at that time. Don Wilfredo and Doña Cristina were on good terms with many of the peasants who lived in and around the town, and had a reputation for fairness. Like many townspeople, they complained that the town was 'silent' and empty, and they could not do business any more. Their three children were all pursuing their education in Quillacollo, the youngest being in high school and the other two in university.
The third group of people were the residentes tapacareños who no longer lived in the town, but had settled in Quillacollo, the city of Cochabamba or further afield and visited only occasionally, usually on the occasion of the fiesta for the Virgen de Dolores.
'Residentes' is a general title given to people no longer living in their place of origin,
which was applied to all people from the town of Tapacarí (emphatically not the rural communities around it) who now lived elsewhere. It also referred to a formal residentes' group which had registered legal status and held weekly meetings, as well as regular campaigns intended to pressure the municipal government into moving their offices back to the town of Tapacarí. Most of the attendees of the formal residentes' association were university-educated professionals, ranging from successful lawyers to engineers and administrators, who displayed a keen sense of class solidarity with each other and worked to promote an image of the town of Tapacarí as a historic and distinguished place, previously inhabited by wealthy families. For the residentes, the town's past was a more comfortable topic than the present. They were unanimous in the opinion that the town had shockingly deteriorated since their youth.
The fourth category was of people not from the town who were working there. These were few in number: a dozen or so teachers, four police (two on duty at a time), a judge and prosecutor (present only intermittently), the staff of the cottage hospital, two nuns and a man who worked for the parish, and occasional visiting engineers or technicians. Some of the teachers were the children of townspeople, but most had grown up in Cochabamba or in other parts of the country and were doing an 'año de provincia', a year of service in a rural community before passing on to a better job. The teachers usually arrived on the Sunday lorry and left on the Thursday one, rarely spending a weekend in the town if they could help it. The police came for two-week stints, and then had another
two weeks off to spend elsewhere. The nurses and parochial staff mostly spent time with each other, rarely venturing from their offices. Stuart Rockefeller describes a similar subset of people in San Lucas, Potosí, terming them the 'rotational elite' who passed through the town occupying the upper social niches and were sometimes co-opted by the town elites into personal or party political causes (Rockefeller 2010). Similarly, in Tapacarí the teachers, police and healthcare workers were courted by some townspeople as godparents, for their prestigious connection to higher education and the city. The teachers were, themselves, often from lower middle-class or rural backgrounds in other parts of Cochabamba or Oruro and had worked hard to attain professional status, distancing themselves from their origins – literally in some cases, by working in a different part of the country to where their family lived. As Canessa (2012) points out in the case of schoolteachers in rural La Paz, those who have gone to great pains to distinguish themselves from the peasant class from which their families come may be more inclined to disparage indigenous and peasant attributes than others of a more secure middle-class background. Teachers in anthropological literature of Bolivia are depicted as agents of the state, inculcating patriarchal norms and imposing physical and mental disciplines regarding movement, dress and language which can erode or coexist with indigenous practices (Luykx 1999, Arnold 2005, Canessa 2012). In Tapacarí, the chief criticism of the teachers was that they were often absent and cut short their working week in order to return to the city.