Bolivia, ahoy

I've been nerding out a little in order to rev up properly for my time in Bolivia. For those at which I have yet to gush, I should mention that I will be working for Fundacion Pro Habitat, a local non profit that works to improve the lives of squatter residents in the south of Cochabamba. To this end they run programs in sanitation, market building, housing construction, and political lobbying, and partner with other grassroots organizations including a group of women's cooperatives that organize in a horizontal manner. It's pretty much my fantasy job, and it should be interesting to see if participating in this kind of action actually makes me happy.

Squatter's rights has long been an interest of mine, and for those interested, Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World provides a pretty decent overview of the sociological phenomenon across the globe. The Bolivian context is of particular interest to me. Bolivia is one of the poorest, most rural, and most indigenous countries in Latin America. With the election of indigenous president Evo Morales in 2005, the indigenous population is becoming a stronger and more visible political and cultural force. The rural/urban dynamics of Bolivia, charged with hundreds of years of formulations of cultural and geographic meanings, continue to impact social interactions and daily lives. As neoliberal policies devastated rural livelihoods across the country, cities like Cochabamba experienced high levels of immigration, and the squatter settlements that filled these cities took on an indigenous, marginalized, and castigated character. Daniel Goldstein's book, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia provides an amazingly detailed investigation of the urban dynamics of performance, protest, and citizenship in this context. Benjamin Dangl's The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia provides a more basic overview of Bolivian history and social action in recent years.

Bolivia is perhaps most famous, in the activist and lefty world at least, for the large scale protests that took place in major urban centers in the early 2000s rejecting the privatization of water and gas. These resource "wars" were immensely successful and represent one of the few cases of a local population triumphing over large corporations. They are also yet another example of community solidarity, mass political understanding, and direct action. With Morales's public defense of the coca leaf and his partnerships with other, more radical Latin American democracies, politics have remained central to Bolivian social life. I am excited to visit some of the dynamic projects in action in La Paz, El Alto, and Cochabamba, as well as to see a bit of reality in action. Of course I don't expect to find some marvelous utopia of revolutionary struggle. What interests me most is, in fact, daily life and how it is understood and lived in these contexts. I am hoping to learn, and to lend a hand in any way I can. Working for this non profit is the best way I can imagine to try out this bridging of justice and aid, action and development. Fundacion Pro Habitat seems committed to this idea, prioritizing empowerment over construction or statistics. The struggle to combine activism and aid, and my ongoing struggle to understand if that is possible or even worthwhile, will hopefully be both illuminating and engaging.

I begin in ernest on Saturday, after a red eye flight tomorrow evening into La Paz followed by an 8 hour bus ride down the Andes into Cochabamba. Today the weather forcast in Cochabamba simply read: smoke. I have some misgivings. I am hoping for the best. Cheers