Dr. Bjork-James begins chapter 5 by discussing the implications of race and space in Bolivia. I think often space and race aren’t considered as contributing aspects of resistance that amplify each other. Race and space are intrinsically connected, especially in these urban spaces, where the racial makeup of an area directly contributes to the ways in which people are allowed to move through that space. Furthermore, to take up physical space, to resist the overall racial makeup of a city that has historically been oppositional to indigenous people by residing there even if temporarily, is a form of radical resistance. In places like La Paz, Oruro, and Huanuni racial segregation was legally enforced in the past (150). The public sphere is a racially charged space where the social norms that relegate oppressed people to the margins of society physically manifest themselves. As such, when a crowd of peasants enters the plaza during the 1952 Revolution, becomes one of the biggest tools in the fight for indigenous campesinos who “unmade their status as feudal serfs” (156).
I think this commentary also goes to help readers understand the social body of indigenous people in Bolivia. This scripted understanding of indigenous people as below mestizos and creoles, as servants, as those who do not belong in certain areas of the city all shape a body of an indigenous person that is read by all in Bolivian society as lesser than others. Nirmal Puwar states that there are “specific bodies have been constructed out of the imagination of authority” and it is in opposition to this somatic norm that the indigenous body is then created out of. Without the power to shape their own perceptions of self, indigenous people lose the autonomy to create their own narratives. In order to take power, it is necessary for them to take up space, protest, and resist in any way they know how.