A Review of Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-economy

A cottage industry of academic research on Bolivia has flourished over the past twenty years. Unleashed by popular mobilizations and political transformation around the turn of the century, social scientists have dissected and debated Bolivia’s “plurinational” state-building project, which came to define President Evo Morales’s regime (2006-2019). Of course, Bolivia had long been the object of scholarly curiosity, thanks to its robust Indigenous movements, neoliberal experiments in multiculturalism, eruption of anti-global uprisings and the postcolonial turn in public discourse.

However, Morales’ 2005 landslide election and populist governing agenda lured a new generation of scholars, both local and foreign, to examine the country’s unfolding “cultural democratic revolution.” An early cycle of scholarship celebrated Bolivia’s ethno-populist coalition (the Movement towards Socialism, or MAS), born in the popular uprisings in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By now, that early triumphalist phase of scholarship has been eclipsed by more measured social analyses. Social scientists of all stripes have studied the government’s striking redistributive reforms, as well as the harsh realities and strategic compromises that challenged the Morales regime during its 14-year reign.

Cash, Clothes, and Construction. Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-economy by Kate Maclean (University of Minneapolis Press, 2023, 262 pages)

Kate Maclean’s friendly critique of Evo’s Bolivia refocuses attention on its heterogeneous, multifaceted “pluri-economy” in both theory and practice. In Cash, Clothes, and Construction, Maclean dissects MAS’s “post-neoliberal” economic order that purported to articulate the logics of capitalist, popular and Indigenous forms economic production, exchange, labor and consumption. According to the author, a professor at Western Washington University, the MAS’s ideal pluri-economy was a blend of global capitalism (the production and export of minerals, hydrocarbons and other resources on the world market) and the dense and sprawling informal sector, in which working-class people earned their living through everyday entrepreneurial and exchange activities, often based on community norms and organizations. In reckoning with the MAS’s model of pluri-economy, Maclean argues that the regime’s blend of Indianist and Marxist ideologies—elements of which were enshrined in Bolivia’s 2006 Constitution—produced a distorted picture of what was actually happening on the ground. Its conceptual premise tended to privilege the male domain of the export economy, reduce Indian women to the rural domain of subsistence agriculture, and erase whole subcategories of urban Indigenous women from the vital roles they performed in Bolivia’s richly layered popular economy. Thus, the author uses the first two chapters to build a discursive critique of MAS ideology (which, unfortunately tends towards abstraction and jargon) as a platform for her vivid ethnographic study of Indigenous and chola women in the pluri-economy. The heart of the book beats in the four chapters that focus on the lives and livelihoods of working women in various sectors of the urban market economy that permeate and surround La Paz and El Alto.

Maclean advances her gendered and class critique of the MAS position along two parallel lines. First, she argues that MAS’s Indianista trope both “associates indigenous with rurality” and conflates Indigenous femininity with the Andean ideal of “gender complementarity” (chachawarmi). This “pastoral vision” of the rural Indian, she argues, was summoned to extol MAS’s anti-Western ideal of “living well” (suma qamña) over the norms of capitalist accumulation. Second, she tests the MAS meme of the rural Indian and traditional economy against the ethnographic evidence, gathered over twelve years of fieldwork, interviews and economic analysis.

The book’s main contribution, then, lies in the author’s ethnographic exploration of this heterogeneous (or “motley”) gendered landscape of the pluri-economy. Chapter three shatters the racial and gendered stereotypes of Indian femininity by showcasing the variety and complexity of Indigenous women’s economic roles, ranging from the wealthy landowning campesina de pollera (in charge of organizing agricultural marketing) to the wealthy urban chola de pollera (exemplar of the upwardly mobile Aymara bourgeoisie). In both cases, the full-skirted pollera signifies a mark of urban working-class and ethnic identity. An Aymara woman working in the market “does not just wear a pollera, one IS de pollera,” notes Maclean (171; emphasis added).

Except for passing references to poverty or domestic violence, the author paints a rosy economic picture of women managing “complex livelihood portfolios” and “entrepreneurial power,” which operated in ways that tended to “erase boundaries between work and family, rural and urban, victim and agent” (110). Those composite pictures of urban women’s economic pursuits are punctuated by oral interviews with individual women, whose lives and livelihoods are chronicled in some detail. Much like other ethnographic studies of market women in the Andes, this vivid study of the urban informal economy repositions women at the center of Bolivia’s pluri-economy, which in turn disrupts such abstract economic concepts as value, exchange, scale, entrepreneurialism, investment capital and finance.

The final chapters examine the prevalent role of women entrepreneurs in three commodity markets. Chapter four examines the role of market women as petty capitalists, money lenders and financiers, who channeled their capital into such enterprises as clothing, durable goods, and real estate. Chapter five features women entrepreneurs who import cheap clothing from the United States and East Asia for resale in El Alto’s and La Paz’s sprawling outdoor markets. This clothing trade has enriched many Aymara merchants who, in turn, have invested in ethnic clothing, jewelry and other consumer items to signal their feminine status and prestige as wealthy Indigenous women de pollera. Both economically and symbolically, commerce in clothes signals the global reach of those women entrepreneurs, as well as the valorization of their own sartorial traditions.

The final chapter focuses on the dramatic ways El Alto’s built landscape has grown explosively over the past few decades, accelerated during the economic boom under the Morales administration. Maclean traces the shifting geo-cultural map of La Paz and El Alto, as those symbiotic cities have been transformed by rural migration, soaring real estate values, the sprawling informal economy, consumer markets, public transformation, popular culture and increased investment in land, housing and conspicuous consumption. As in clothing fashion, so too in urban markets and real estate: the reference for aesthetics, taste and propriety has become popularized or “decolonized” as MAS officials might say. El Alto’s colorful “cholets” is an unmistakable sign of Aymara wealth accumulation in the popular economy. And La Paz’s cable car network, the teleférico, which connects Indigenous barrios of El Alto to the rich neighborhood of the Zona Sur, is a dramatic symbol of the transgressive expansion of the popular economy into enclaves of white privilege. One can embark in cable car at the site of El Alto’s sprawling informal outdoor marketplace, the July 16th market, fly silently in the air over the cavernous city of downtown La Paz, to disembark at the site of the Megamarket, a huge shopping mall in the Zona Sur’s commercial hub.

That last image reminds us that stark geo-political and economic inequalities still prevail in La Paz and El Alto, and perhaps ever more so since the hydrocarbon boom ended, the Morales regime collapsed, and the pandemic swept through. This book does not carry the story into the present time; fieldwork was completed almost ten years ago. But Maclean closes her social analysis of the pluri-economy (as represented in official discourse and in practice) with an insightful retrospection on Indigenous women’s power, agency, and influence in Bolivia’s vibrant market economy—a topic that deserves more social science research if orthodox economic theories are to be critiqued, tested and revised. This book goes a long way toward that end.

Brooke Larson is a Professor Emerita of History at Stony Brook University and the author of The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia.  She was a 2010-11 Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

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