Reverberations of insurgency: Indian communities, the federal war of 1899, and the regeneration of Bolivia

This dissertation is about a contest for political representation and territorial sovereignty, for the right to rule, which unfolded locally in the context of a civil war over the consolidation of oligarchic politics and export capitalism in republican Bolivia. It explores the modes, methods, sources, and allies of insurgent Indian peasant communities in 1899 in Coro Coro, Penas, and Mohoza, and builds as much on intellectual debates and traditions from Bolivia as it does on debates in English-language scholarship. As I show, Liberals united with former Conservative rivals, turned on their erstwhile indigenous community allies, charged insurgents with waging "race war," and put them on trial. The new administration centralized power, abandoned its promise of federalism, and re-built the republic in order to forestall the political possibilities the insurgencies opened up, crushing them through a combination of counterinsurgent "pacification" campaigns and lengthy trials. The point is not to prioritize class over race-ethnicity in explaining political conflict and insurgent confederation in Bolivia, of course, but to track the intersection of each with state formation in order to help us think in more process-oriented ways about all three. Relatively fluid racial categories hardened after the Liberal victory in response to the threat posed by indigenous insurgency, the aims of which were different from those of the Liberal high command and notables.;Without being nationalists, insurgents re-created themselves politically, socially, and geographically as a community, and pointed toward new, as yet unimagined modes of sovereignty in a "regenerated" Bolivian republic. Forged in the eighteenth-century crucible of anti-colonialism, they renewed these traditions during the consolidation of an oligarchic democracy in the late nineteenth century, only to be suppressed by counter-insurgent trials and military campaigns. The 1899 insurgencies threatened to overturn racial-ethnic and class hierarchies upon which the ruling order in Bolivia was based until the national revolution of 1952. The issues they raised, though addressed in the constitutional assembly leading to the constitution of 2009, are far from resolved. As I argue in the conclusion, the consequences of 1899 are very much with us today.