After reading The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia, a major theme that I engaged the most with was the relationship between social roles, landscapes, and the capacity for protest actions. The ingenuity of the Bolivian people within urban areas allows them to adapt to and embrace the space around them, resulting in blockages in the city and protests on the streets. By determining “meaning-laden spaces (whose meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city),” grassroots activists enact practical and symbolic control, amplifying their impact and sending a message to the government that is difficult to ignore (11). Before reading this book, I was not very familiar with Bolivian social movements, so by following Dr. Carwil Bjork-James’ methods, I quickly came to realize how they achieved their title as “the Latin American country with the highest level of protest participation” (24). Furthermore, based on our class discussions of ethnographic techniques, I was able to connect their practices of political action to the field work required to engage with and comment on the peoples’ efforts (24). I had not thought about how such movements are enacted, so it was useful to read the author’s discussion of why alliances must be made to shut down a city, as one organization alone is often not sufficient. Logistically, “transport workers were the only sector to mount a paralyzing mobilization on their own” because of their access to “other people’s circulation network” (99). From my background in wildlife conservation research and advocacy, I value the interdisciplinary efforts required to promote “mass participation” and maintain the connections necessary to attract attention to an important issue (99).
I also want to address the author’s commentary on racialized and gendered politics in Bolivia that exclude people from positions of power. Whereas, “Specific bodies have been constructed out of the imagination of authority,” it is striking when “no-longer-subordinate people enter the exclusive space or take on the forbidden role. Transgression of boundaries arouses powerful emotions, which can include fear, anxiety, disorientation, and revulsion” (153). This way, not only the peoples’ message, but the number of participants and demographic of “out-of-place bodies” must be “amplified in importance.. to [effectively] threaten the structure of division altogether” (153).
As Ismene and Maddie detailed, the socialization in Bolivia surrounding protestation and protests also stood out to me. I think the context that is given about Bolivia’s neoliberal history also fits in here; unionizing against the privatization and abuse of workers developed into larger strike movements incredibly important to the Bolivian identity. I wonder if this is why, in the US, protesting is seen with more vitriol and is not seen as fundamental to US culture. Furthermore, to Ismene’s point, I also think that unionizing (in addition to protest) is generally seen negatively in the United States. There is an underlying attitude that the corporate elite should know better than their lower-level employees with regard to well-being. This summer, I worked in Human Resources and spent a lot of time with manufacturing plant employees, which were a part of unions for the company. While the company that I worked for seemed to have a lot of respect for their unions, I heard many stories about complaints over lengthy negotiations and other companies refusing to even negotiate with their union. In this ethnography, seeing how unionization can translate into larger-scale political momentum was incredibly interesting to me, and I also really liked how Bjork-James used his own experiences with protest to form genuine relationships with subjects, it made me want to reflect on my own experiences.
Hi Maddie! Great response. I was also very intrigued by the alliances and, as you mentioned, the “mass participation” aspect of Bolivian social movements. I saw Bolivian protesting as a method of community building in this reading. In chapter 3, it really stood out to me that so many people join in on other groups’ social movements, and that protesting is so widely accepted. Dr. Bjork-James writes, “some grassroots groups joined in on collective mobilizations although they were not originally organized around political action” (p. 100). And in terms of Bolivian protests, “the choice to respect rather than defy them, is a form of labor solidarity of mutual recognition by potential strikers” (p. 112). I couldn’t help but think about this in relation to the United States. Although some social movements such as BLM have grown massively in popularity, I do not feel as though US culture is as welcoming and accepting of protests (even though the right to revolt and to protest is supposed to be a key foundational aspect of American freedom). I wonder if media representations of protestors are something that contribute to painting American protestors as deviant. And I wonder if there is a way to inspire Americans to care more about social movements that may not directly affect them, the way that many Bolivians do.