This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people's enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia's colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region's oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women's marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.

Bolivia and Brazil have universalized their pension and healthcare systems, respectively. Civil society organizations participated actively in social policy expansion, yet they have done so in starkly different ways, reflecting general patterns in each country. Whereas in Brazil, popular participation in social policies takes place through “inside” formal channels, such as conferences and councils, in Bolivia, bottom-up influence occurs mostly via “outside” channels, by coordinating collective action in the streets. Understanding forms of popular participation matters because policies that allow for popular input are potentially more representative, universal, and nondiscretionary. This article argues that differences in the forms of popular participation in social policy expansion can be explained by the characteristics of the institutional context and differences in the types of movements engaged in the policymaking process. By focusing on patterns of participation, these findings add nuance to the literature on Latin America’s welfare states.

This article explores a paradox at the heart of New Left populism in Bolivia and Ecuador – namely, the election of populist leaders in movement societies. Employing Laclau's theory about the emergence of populism, it demonstrates how social movements, not charismatic leaders, first constructed the popular identities that laid the foundations for these regimes. In re-examining theories of populism in light of these cases, this article suggests that populism's transformative and counter-hegemonic potential needs to be given renewed attention, and that the central role of charismatic leadership should be qualified in terms of the origins of populist identity formation.

The 60th anniversary of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 led by the MNR provided an opportunity to review a Latin American political experience of disputed importance in the light of the government of the MAS under Evo Morales since 2006. This essay reappraises the historiography of 1952 from the perspective of MNR officialism and from critical positions, particularly those associated with indigenismo or Katarismo. Bolivia hoy, an influential collection of essays edited by René Zavaleta Mercado in 1983, is identified as a key moment in changing interpretations of the 1952 revolution.

This essay, written in September 2006, considers the first months of the MAS government headed by Evo Morales in the light of the virtually constant political crisis in Bolivia since 2000. The first part asks why the turbulent course of public life in Bolivia has proved so difficult to explain. It seeks to show that the recent period has been depicted in rather narrow interpretations that stress institutional failings, poverty and oppression, or civic heroism, but do not try to find the linkages between these phenomena. The second section proposes an alternative approach, treating the recent experience of conflict as a revolutionary episode in which the idea of ‘Two Bolivias’ needs to be qualified by appreciation of past revolutionary experiences. The final sections suggest that the ardour and complexities of the current conflict might seem more comprehensible if the MAS and its supporters are viewed as essentially plebeian in both condition and ideological disposition. Such a classical and early modern allusion provides a fuller analytical palate for understanding the current conjuncture and the socio-political propositions being made in a ‘semi-modern’ environment.