Embodied Matters: Bolivian Fantasy
and Indigenismo
By
Michelle Bigenho
HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE
RESUMEN
Presento un nuevo anAilisis del indigenismo boliviano, basado en una investigaci6n de
la revista musical "Fantasia Boliviana" de los afios 5o. Trabajando a partir de historias
orales de quienes participaban en esta producci6n musical, el articulo plantea una
visi6n compleja de c6mo funcionaba el discurso del indigenismo en la ciudad de La Paz
durante la 6poca del gobierno Revolucionario. A diferencia de la literatura o pintura
indigenista, en esta producci6n los participantes representaban lo indigena a trav6s de
sus propios cuerpos. Fantasia Boliviana atraia a participantes de clases sociales distintas
y de subjetividades 6tnicas que no cabian fdcilmente en las clasificaciones de "indio" y
"mestizo." Varios participantes desarrollaban un discurso que alababa las representaciones indigenas de esta producci6n, tomAndolas como expresi6n mixima de la naci6n.
A la vez, participantes hablaban de su trabajo en t6rminos del "Arte," respondiendo en
parte a un r6gimen de valor que venia del mundo occidental. Fantasia Boliviana
demuestra un indigenismo que servia no solamente para transformar las actitudes de
mestizos-criollos hacia los indigenas, sino tambi6n Oara influir en las opiniones sobre
Bolivia que podrian tener los extranjeros.
PALABRAS CLAVEs: nacionalismo, la folklorizaci6n, el Arte, la m6sica, el cuerpo.
KEYWORDS: nationalism, folklorization, Art, music, the body.
7NDIGENISMO GENERALLY REFERS TO EARLY
20th century cultural discourses
through which Latin American Creoles and mestizos reflected on the position of
indigenous populations in their respective countries. These reflections often
became part of regional identity claims and nation-building projects. If
indigenismo is said to speak for indigenous subjects without including them,
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 11,No.2, pp. 267-293. ISSN 1085-7025, online ISSN 1548-7180. ©2006 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy
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Embodied Matters 267
indianismo, emerging in the second half of the 20th century, is said to critique the
exclusionary cultural politics of the former, and to promise a project in which flesh
and blood indigenous subjects reclaim their positions as agents of their own history
(Favre 1998:11). According to Henri Favre, contemporary processes of globalization
and "tribalization" leave indigenismo in the dustbin of history as a new Indian-ness
emerges through indianismo (1998:149-150).
Favre's discussion of indianismo seems to fit the Bolivian context of the late 2oth
and early 21st centuries. A contemporary indigenous leader, Felipe Quispe, also
known as El Mallku, who emerged from the 1970s' radical indigenous Aymara politics of the Kataristas, has been demanding public attention with statements like:
"Q'araswho think with foreign heads must be Indianized" (Sanjin6s 2002:52-53).
"Q'ara" literally means peeled or skinned, but is used by Aymaras to refer to nonIndians (mestizos or whites). El Mallku insists' that Indians need "a pedagogy in
reverse,' that they need to "unthink" mestizo ways (see Sanjin6s 2002:53). The "October
agenda" of 2003-dramatically expressed through the popular ousting of President
Gonzalo Sdinchez de Lozada-brought into high profile Bolivia's management of
hydrocarbon resources, the cry for a constituent assembly to reconstitute the Bolivian nation-state, and the 2005 special electoral process through which Evo Morales
won the presidency with a record percentage of the vote. Morales' indigenous
roots-something that has already come under scrutiny as a more recently elaborated personal narrative-have been centr6l to framing the moment in which it is felt
that an indigenous majority is finally represented in the highest office of the land.
It may seem untimely to reconsider indigenismo when indigenous actors finally
seem to be taking center stage within the state-that is when indianismo seems to
rule the day. But I argue that over-simplified readings of indigenismo need to be reexamined, and that a more complex understanding of this discourse of the past can
shed light on current cultural politics, which some scholars are already tentatively
calling revolutionary (Thomson 20o6). The discourse of indigenismo has often been
coupled with its fraternal twin, the discourse of mestizaje: an ideology of cultural/
racial mixing that supposedly shapes homogeneous citizens for the nation-state. In
the zeal to underscore the problems of the mestizaje/indigenismo project and its
tyranny as experienced by indigenous peoples-for example, the erasure of indigenous subjects and the appropriation of indigenous expressions by non-indigenous
peoples-analyses have skirted a careful consideration of how these discourses operated more broadly. Elsewhere, I more closely re-examine the discourse of mestizaje
(Bigenho 20o6). In this article, I look specifically at indigenismo through the lens of
stories about a 1955 staged musical review called FantasiaBoliviana(Bolivian Fantasy).1
Supported through the government-backed Instituto CinematogrdficoBoliviano
(Bolivian Motion Picture Institute), the staged production of Bolivian Fantasyincorporated about 60 people who performed two and three performances a day to
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sold-out theaters for month-long seasons. Participants included symphony orchestra musicians, comedians, classically trained ballet dancers and choreographers, folklore musicians who had been taking the stage since the 193os, musicians who played
indigenous pan pipes in troupe style, an artist who painted 18 different changes of
scenery, a "company pianist," and a producer who initiated the endeavor and brought
it to fruition on a grand scale. The company performed in the Bolivian cities of La
Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, and Sucre. The show then toured the Latin American capital cities of Asunci6n, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires.
Bolivian Fantasy was squarely located within the cultural politics of the 1952
Revolution. The generally accepted academic narrative of the Revolution goes
something like this: as a consolidation of political processes put in motion after the
Chaco War (1932-1935), the 1952 Revolution not only moved marginalized Indian
expressions to the center of a nationalist cultural project, but also brought universal suffrage, universal education, the abolition of the hacienda system (Agrarian
Reform of 1953), the nationalization of mines, and the unionization of peasants. The
liberal model of citizenship embodied in these policies explicitly sought to create an
"imagined community" (Anderson 1991) of mestizos out of the different Bolivian
ethnicities and classes. It sought to construct uniform and productive Bolivians,
even though it simultaneously reinforced existing social hierarchies (see Rivera
Cusicanqui 1993:62-89). The marginalized flesh and blood "Indians" were incorporated into relatively recently formed political parties as they also came under the
new class-driven label of "peasants" (Alb6 1987:381). Meanwhile, the symbolic world
of Indian-ness was corralled into the heart of the national body politic. Class identifications were promoted as legitimate means of organizing for social change, while
ethnic identifications were symbolically made to serve Bolivian nationalism.
Indigenista productions became the cultural politics of the Bolivian State (Rossells
2004:307).
While the extravagant production of Bolivian Fantasycan be interpreted as part
of an indigenista mestizo-Creole national project, its participants came from a wide
range of Bolivian social classes, and expressed varied perspectives about what they
were up to in this staged production. Through oral histories of people who were
involved in this production, I explore Bolivian Fantasy'soperatic nature and its fantasy work that made box office successes out of staged and choreographed representations of indigenous things. 2 This interpretation of a 1950s indigenismo in La
Paz provides insights into shifting cultural politics and reconfigurations of Bolivia's
shared urban spaces. The indigenismo that emerges from participants' memories of
these embodied experiences, I argue, reflects an over-arching concern with drawing
associations between indigenous expressions and a powerfully construed edifice of
"Art." This production can be located in relation to broader 19th and 20th century
Latin American and world trends in cultural politics, in which "vernacular,"
Embodied Matters
269
"cultural," or "folk" forms were put at the service of ideologies of nationalism, heritage, Art, and the modern (Herzfeld 1982; Handler 1985; Clifford 1988; KirshenblattGimblett 1998; De la Cadena 2000; Guss 200o; Hagedorn 2001; Holton 2005;
R. L6pez 2006). In Bolivian Fantasy, the references to Art revealed participants'
desires to locate Bolivian Fantasy not only as a nationalist undertaking, but also as
a modern project that would be viewed as such on an international stage. I also
argue that the embodied practices of staging indigenous representations in Bolivian
Fantasyplayed a crucial role in transforming how different urban residents viewed
their nation. A critique of Bolivian indigenismo could focus on the exclusion of
indigenous subjects from this mestizo-Creole project, but such a narrow interpretation is problematic because it remains within the essentializing binaries of Indian
and non-Indian, and because it tends to overlook the social changes that did mark
the period. The Revolution has been called an "uncompleted" project (Malloy 1970),
and it was without a doubt a bourgeois revolution that has been interpreted by some
indigenous groups as a threat against their ethnic organizations (Rivera Cusicanqui
1993). But the Revolution's cultural politics were also about changing the attitudes
of those who held power, and about the breaking down of their racialized views
about who "belonged" in what spaces. As I focus on the memories of those who
embodied Indian-ness on stage, the boundaries between indigenous and. mestizoCreole categories begin to blur. While it is not the main focus of this article, my
interpretive emphasis on embodiment suggests that analyses of Bolivian
indigensimo-and for that matter Bolivian indianismo-could benefit from feminist theoretical attempts to bring back the body to discursive analysis; feminist theory does not completely get beyond binaries-like Indian versus mestizo-but it
productively disrupts them.
Embodied Indigenismo
Bolivian indigenismo originally grew out of mestizo-Creole fears following the
indigenous rebellions at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th
(Garcia Pab6n 1998:126; Paz Solddn 2003:13; Rossells 2004:311; Salm6n 1997:21; Sanjin6s
2004:71-78). Land appropriations led to numerous indigenous uprisings and these
movements momentarily converged when the indigenous caudillo, Zdrate Willka,
came to fight on the Federalist side of the 1899 Revolution (see Rivera Cusicanqui'
2003 [1984]; Zavaleta Mercado 1986). Images of El Temible Willka ("The Dreaded
Willka"), as he was called, and memories of the massacre that occurred in Mohoza
led to mestizo-Creole nightmares of "a race war" and the fear of a separate "patria
india" (Indian nation) (Zavaleta Mercado 1986:155). In a desire to control indigenous populations, mestizo-Creole elites began to re-think what they called "the
Indian problem."
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Many interpretations of Bolivian indigenismo focus on how the image of the
Indian entered new creative spaces of mestizo-Creoles in writings, paintings, and
films of the period (Garcia Pab6n 1998; Paz Soldin 2003; Rossells 2004; Salm6n 1997;
Sanjin6s 2004). The letrados (learned, of letters, of writing) wrote melodramatic
novels through which the Indian was seen to contain a telluric connection to the
environment, while the mestizo was seen either as the obstacle to, or the hope for,
the future. For example, Alcides Arguedas in Pueblo enfermo (19o9), through what
Edmundo Paz Solddn calls "a discourse of degeneration," exalts an imagined pure
Indian but considers the mestizo as a negative element for the formation of the
Bolivian nation (Paz SoldAn 2003:19). In his analysis of the work of Franz Tamayo,
author of Creaci6n de una pedagogia nacional (191o), Javier Sanjin6s coins the term
"discourse on the autochthonous" to refer to the liberals' "ambivalent racial sentiments of pride, nostalgia, and fascination with the Indian"; the Indian was to be
studied, exalted, disciplined, and enlightened (2004:35). As a program to stop the
indigenous threat from below, the discourse on the autochthonous emerged
through mestizo elites' observation, representation, and distortion of indigenous
difference (Sanjin6s 2004:37-47). For example, paintings of Cecilio GuzmAn de
Rojas represented Indians with positive attributes: the noble, serene savage who was
never located within social contradictions or conflict (Sanjin6s 2004:69-75).
In 1952, the Revolutionary government took up indigenismo as an accompaniment to the discourse of mestizaje. How did that discourse of indigenismo work?
And how did it spar with mestizaje, its discursive twin ? As ideological discourses,
mestizaje and indigenismo are-following Michel Foucault's definition-sets of
"limits and forms of the sayable" within a particular historical moment
(1991:59-6o). Foucault called for an analytical focus, not on the laws that emanate
from a discourse, but on the "conditions of its existence," and not on the minds of
those who engendered it, but on "the practical field in which it is deployed"
(Foucault 1991:6o-61). The practical fields of mestizaje and indigenismo included
those related to language, literature, and the lettered, but also those related to bod3
ily practices, hygiene, sonorous landscapes, and kinesthetic experiences. As mentioned above, many discussions of Bolivian mestizaje and indigenismo focus on
novels, film, and plastic arts-all expressions that privilege sight and vision as ways
to interact with and know the world. But how did these discourses work through
embodiment, through the actual practices of the socio-cultural agents involved in
the body politics of the time? And more specifically, how did mestizaje and indigenismo, as nationalist discourses, work through all bodies involved in the body
politic? A focus on embodied practices takes the analysis closer to the lived experiences of those who created and performed the representations. Painting pictures of
stoic Indians who were then contemplated from an observational distance was quite
different from dressing, dancing, and singing like Indians.
Embodied Matters
271
While I agree with many arguments presented about indigenismo, my work on
Bolivian Fantasycalls for a re-examination of certain assumptions that often remain
implicit in these analyses. First, I share with Josefa Salm6n (1997:18) a skepticism
about the instrumental top-down model of indigenismo whereby clear connections
are assumed between'mestizo-Creole artistic productions, the Bolivian State, and
corresponding assumed effects of such projects. In moving beyond a model of the
monolithic elite state, I echo N6stor Garcia Canlini's claim that "interpretations of
history that place all the weight on conspiratorial intentions and Machiavellian
alliances of the dominant powers impoverish the complexity and the conflicts of
modernization (1995:6o). Such interpretations flatten the complexities of social life
and the place of art within it. In moving away from a functionalist interpretation of
art and adopting instead a semiotic perspective, Clifford Geertz wrote: "Anything
may, of course, play a role in helping society work, painting and sculpting included;
just as anything may help it tear itself apart. But the central connection between art
and collective life does not lie on such an instrumental plane, it lies on a semiotic
one" (1983:99). A view of indigenismo that only interprets the discourse as a monolithic expression of elite political processes falls into this kind of functionalist flatness.
Through a quite different line of argument, Sherry Ortner (1995) has used the term
"ethnographic refusal" to refer to resistance literature that dissolves subjects and
refuses to thickly describe processes that do not fit a model of easily separable spaces
of resistance and domination. When analyses read indigenismo as a direct and functional expression of elite artistic sensibilities, they engage in similar processes of dissolving subjects and ethnographic refusal. The challenge is to move beyond
instrumentality and ethnographic refusal without losing sight of the issues of power
and inequality that structure indigenismo.
My second concern, related to the first, is tha?t analyses of indigenismo seem to
be constrained by a binary framework in which mestizo-Creoles and indigenous
peoples are easily distinguished, equally essentialized, and located within clearly
bounded positions of the dominators and the dominated. I suggest that these essentialized binaries are occasionally reappearing in the indianismo of the contemporary moment. Judith Butler provides a framework that disrupts such binaries by
positing alternatives to the essentialist-constructivist conundrum of identities, and
by bringing the body back into discourse analysis, but not as a "natural" prelinguistic entity (1993). Butler proposes a discussion of subject formation through a
recognition of what must be'excluded through abjection in order for the subject to
tenuously exist (1993:3). But at the same time Butler wants to avoid the discussion
of subject formation that easily falls into either (I) radical constructivism where
bodies and matter fall out and everything is simply discourse and language; and
(2) essentialism where bodies are present but the process of exclusion and abjection
is erased (1993:8). Butler wants to keep in sight the relational understanding of subject
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formation-what has been excluded-at the same time as she brings bodies and
matter back into poststructuralist analysis (1993:9-10). Citing Luce Irigary, Butler
suggests that "binary oppositions are formulated through the exclusion of a field of
disruptive possibilities" (1993:35). If it is impossible to avoid the Indian-mestizo
binary, I at least want to consider the disruptive possibilities that buzz around this
construct, and these disruptions emerge prominently within a focus on embodied
experience.
While clear binaries reveal how power relations are colonially structured and
thus make obvious the on-going racism of Bolivian society, they prove limiting
because they overestimate indigenismo's restraining effects on people who may selfidentify as indigenous, at the same time as they underestimate indigenismo's effects
on those who may self-identify as mestizo-Creoles. Given the sustained trajectory
of indigenous organizing and uprisings in the 20th and 21st centuries (see Patzi Paco
2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2003 [19841; Ari 2005), the discourse of indigenismo hardly
seems to have limited indigenous subjects' space of action, even if those actions have
not always succeeded in bringing significant changes. Indigenismo's effects are perhaps more evident in the shifting attitudes of mestizo-Creoles. For example, indigenista paintings reflect an ideology that is aimed at the very classes that produced
these works (Rossells 2004:306). And Leonardo Garcia Pab6n claims that even as
Tamayo's work is about how "the Indian can and should be integrated in the
national project," the principal interlocutor of Tamayo's text is not the indigenous
person (1998:140). My interpretation of Bolivian Fantasy calls for a closer look at
these sometimes overlooked effects of embodied indigenismo.
Embodied indigenismo includes the folklorization of Bolivian indigenous
music and dance forms, a process that began around the 193os. At that time, mestizo women singers played a crucial role in bringing stylized indigenous songs to
urban stages where otherwise such genres would never have been accepted
(Bigenho 2005). Rather than falling into the easy dichotomy of the written word as
belonging to the powerful and the embodied performance belonging to the weak,
I follow Diana Taylor's lead as she states that: "Performance belongs to the strong
as well as the weak" (2003:22). If Sanjin6s refers to "viscerality" as a bodily
metaphor "that helps explain how indigenous subalternity has resisted giving up
its identity to rationalist Western discourse" (2004:4), I want to invoke viscerality
for all subjects in that such a move may help disrupt-although I can never get
beyond them-the binary analytical straight-jackets that seem to limit analyses.
Bolivian Fantasyis about the viscerality of a represented indigenous world, about
mestizos and others who stage indigeneity through their own bodily actions. Many,
although not all, of those who embodied folklorized representations of the indigenous world did not consider themselyes indigenous subjects. Part of the ideological work of mestizaje and indigenismo was precisely the transformation of
Embodied Matters
273
attitudes about Indians and mestizos, in all sectors of Bolivian society. The 20th
century began with a rather negative reading of mestizaje. 4 But with Bolivia's
defeat in the Chaco War (1932-1935), Bolivians began to rethink this category as
they reconceptualized the nation through mestizaje (BarragAn 1992:18-21). How
did this despised category become, in 50 years, the core of a national project? I contend that folklorization, the staged embodiment of indigenous expressions contributed greatly to this transformation.
As the stories from Bolivian Fantasyshow, many participants in this production
were not so easily categorized as either Indians or mestizos. By 1955, the very
processes of rural to urban migration began to reshape Bolivia's urban social landscapes, and to make it impossible-if indeed it ever was possible-to delineate such
a facile social dichotomy. Much as Garcia Canclini calls for a deconstruction of "the
scientific and political operations that staged the popular" (1995:146), an under-
standing of indigenismo needs to deconstruct the oppositional categories of q'aras
and Indians. My intention is not to erase the contradictions that certainly played
out-and continue to play out-between subjects who may identify as indigenous
or as mestizo-Creole. My intent instead is to dislodge the analytical complacency
that accompanies the implicit acceptance of these categories.
Let, now, the curtain open on Bolivian Fantasy.
Ballerinas and Movie Stars
The lights dimmed. Music began to emerge from the orchestra pit of La Paz's
Municipal Theater. The Municipal Theater, although refurbished at least once since
the 1950s, is today a regal structure that seems to denote the desire of La Paz's elite
to have a small European opera house. Seats are offered at orchestra level, in balcony
boxes, and in the gallery for the more popular classes. Red velvet curtains frame the
main stage and cover the doors that access the orchestra seats. While an artist today
might opt for La P4z's amphitheater because of its ample seating capacity, the
Municipal Theater still carries the greatest prestige as a performance venue. Bolivian
Fantasy was presented through scenes like "Joy of the Countryside," "Eastern,
Romance," "Cochabamba of My Dreams" "Indian Song," "Chapaco Love," "On the
Beaches of the Beni," "Carnival of the Devil," and so on.5 The scenes were not integrated within any narrative plot. Instead, individual scenes profiled comic skits and
vignettes like a drunken man's dreams, a representation of "the seven sins" the
Archangel Michael, and the diablada(devil's dance). The different scenes of this
two-and-a-quarter-hour musical review were held together through the positing of
an imagined national community that celebrated this staged cultural diversity in
spite of the hierarchical and dependent relations that still characterized Bolivian
society (see Lomnitz 2001).6 Bolivian Fantasy was intended to reach a broad
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audience, and from participants' memories, the show seemed quite successful on
this level. Participants said that Bolivian Fantasybroke with the defacto segregation
of the city, bringing under the same theater roof, mestizo elites and urban Indians.
Participants specifically recalled the presence of women who were wearing the
polleras (wide gathered skirts) and boler hats that mark the urban Aymara women,
"indigenous mestizos" or cholitas in La Paz.
The man who claimed authorship of this show was Waldo Cerruto, a militant
of the party that came to power in 1952, the MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario,National Revolutionary Movement). In 2002, I interviewed an elderly and
ailing Cerruto in his ornately decorated home, in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Sopocachi. Cerruto proudly spoke of his role in the creation of Bolivian
Fantasy.When I pressed him for certain details, he assured me that everything I
would want to know was in a book his daughter had published about his political
work (Cerruto Moravek 1996). Throughout his life, Cerruto remained wellconnected to the upper echelons of Bolivian political society. He moved through
different political persuasions, working with the MNR during the Revolution and,
as he told me several times, working in the diplomatic corps under Hugo Banzer
Suirez. When discussing the origins of Bolivian Fantasy,he remembered a conversation he had with President Victor Paz Estenssoro (also of the MNR) shortly after
the 1952 Revolution. Cerruto's sister was Paz Estenssoro's wife. Politics and family
were tightly knit. According to Cerruto, Paz Estenssoro was looking for a way to
teach people about the Revolution and movies were seen as a particularly effective
Way to reach the masses of Bolivian society. With Paz Estenssoro's support, Cerruto
founded the Bolivian Motion Picture Institute which, in 1952, began to produce
documentaries about the Revolution, the different regions of Bolivia, and the
Agrarian Reform. During the interview with me, Cerruto claimed to have drawn
from his own resources to sponsor many of these activities. Other participants simply remembered that the MNR backed all these activities, including the production
of Bolivian Fantasy. In 1953, Cerruto placed an advertisement in the newspaper,
inviting people to join the Bolivian Movie Club that would have a technical wing to
learn film-making and an artistic wing to promote activities in radio, theater, music,
dance, drawing, make-up, and stage sets (Cerruto Moravek 1996:64-66). The artistic wing was supposed to mould future Bolivian movie stars. As Cerruto said in a
published interview:
[The Institute] needs artists and young people . .. the possibility is open to all
because we all have something of an artist in some part of our spirit. Who has not at
one time had the illusion of turning into a Greta Garbo or an Elizabeth Taylor or to
play well the part of a Novarro or a Tyrone Power? (Cerruto Moravek 1996:71)
Embodied Matters
275
Garbo, Taylor, Novarro, and Power were all Hollywood movie icons at the time. 7
The Movie Club advertisement did not even hint that the artistic wing would be
involved in "national," "indigenous," or "folkloric" activities, but it did call on young
people to make "sacrifices" for "all that is related to art" (Cerruto Moravek 1996:64).
Cerruto was appealing to young people's supposed longings to be on the silver
screen. At the time, La Paz's movie houses were filled with films from the United
States. Throughout Latin American countries, the arrival of sound films opened the
door for Hollywood productions, and in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, sound cinema
"would become the principal interlocutor of Latin American modernity-as Carlos
Monsivdis says, where Latin Americans went not to dream but to learn to be modern" (A. L6pez 2000:72). Cerruto's overall project, with its heavily patronizing tone,
aimed to turn this powerful medium towards a pedagogical project of nationalism,
to teach "our people who until now have lived in ignorance" (Cerruto Moravek
1996:69). In 1954, the Movie Club presented a first attempt at a musical review. It was
titled Viajando por nuestra tierra (Traveling Through Our Country) and was,
according to the press reports and other participants' interviews, not well received
by the public. While Bolivian Fantasy's successful national and international presence in theaters, beginning in 1955, did not last more than a couple of years, it competed with and inspired other choreographed folkloric presentations.
Before placing the advertisement for the Movie Club, Cerruto had contacted
Chela Urquidi, a dancer who had studied ballet in Buenos Aires when her husband
was there.on a fellowship. Cerruto shared an Argentine connection, having studied
agronomy in the 194os at the Universidad de la Plata. While Cerruto was away from
Bolivia he also edited Horizonte, a magazine of Argentine-Bolivian intercultural
exchange (Cerruto Moravek 1996:13). Cerruto told me:
I looked to Chela Urquidi as the first ballerina and I made an agreement ... Could
she collect dances from here as well as from the interior, Beni, Pando, etc? And could
she teach [these dances] to young people? And she said to me "Where am Igoing to
find the young people?" "Don't worry. Tomorrow an ad will come out announcing
the opening of the Movie Club."
Urquidi accepted the contract and began a paid research trip through different areas
of Bolivia.
Yolanda Pol, one of the Fantasy's participants, was 06 years old when she
responded to the call for Movie Club members. What caught her attention was the
advertisement's mention of possible international travel. She was already studying
ballet with "a Russian teacher" because she "wanted to be a classical ballerina." She
described arriving at Chela Urquidi's dance studio not knowing what to expect. "No
one told us we would be dancing folkloric dances." She described the awkwardness
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with which she first danced a cueca (a Bolivian dance): "We were more classical in
the way we moved the handkerchief... We were more formal in the choreography:'
Pol told me that as she became more involved in these activities, even teaching other
students what she herself had only recently learned, other people chided her: "How
are you classical dancers going to go dance those cholo dances?" While the term
"cholo" has multiple meanings, it is here used as an insult and a racial slur. Pol
claimed she and other performers ignored these taunts, responding that: "We
should have been doing this a long time ago."
But the ballet shoes were not deposited at the door before entering Bolivian
Fantasy.Chela Urquidi choreographed a sequence where a drunken man dreamed
of cholitas dancing the cueca in tutus and toe shoes. Just about all my interviewees
mentioned this sequence and the harsh critique it received from the national and
foreign press. A critic in Bolivia called the stylized cueca "an adulteration of folkloric sensibilities" (Cerruto Moravek 1996:114). And a critic in Argentina claimed
that "the stylized 'cholitas' defraud the public that seeks the authentic" (Cerruto
Moravek 1996:154). In a published interview, Cerruto defended the heavily stylized
cueca: "Why do we Bolivians always feel humiliated by our things? Because these
things always have been presented in the primitive state they are in" (Cerruto
Moravek 1996:118). His comment located such un-stylized expressions as "primi-
tive" but salvageable through associations with a world of art, and he rejected the
critiques that were based on a notion of unadulterated indigeneity. Cerruto saw
Urquidi's dream sequence of toe-shoe-clad chola dancers as an admirable artistic
decision that raised a notch the level of Bolivian folklore. Thus, BolivianFantasywas
born out of the ideas of a well-connected MNR militant who founded the Motion
Picture Institute, and pitched the project to young people by appealing to an
assumed universal desire to become movie stars.
A Symphony Orchestra, Opera Voices, and Pan Pipes
Bolivian Fantasycalled upon the musical talents of symphony orchestra musicians,
pan pipe troupes, and artists who were already calling themselves "folklore singers"
or "folklore musicians." The orchestra members, who had a more formal musical
training and who claimed to have music "literacy" came from middle and upper
classes. "Folklore musicians"-a rather recent category in Bolivia, emerging in the
193os around the urban performance of rural and indigenous genres-included
performers from interstitial categories that defy an easy mestizo-Indian divide.
Some of them were self-taught and did not claim to read music, while others were
connected to music teachers and benefited from the prestige implied by a studied
approach to music. Today, pan pipe troupe music perfotmance-the practice of 12
to 20 musicians playing the same wind instrument-is highly valued as a
EmbodiedMatters
277
contemporary marker of indigenous "authenticity" within an urban performance
of Bolivian music (Bigenho 2002:109-113), but in La Paz of the 195os, pan pipe
troupe members were self-taught, generally came from the lower working classes,
often maintained connections to an Aymara world, and did not necessarily call their
work "folklore." The heterogeneity of the social sectors represented by this array of
musical talents was part of what made this musical review so operatic. Here, I am
thinking along the lines of Herbert Lindenberger's characterizations of opera:
monstrous translatable productions that have wealthy sponsors, hyperbolic representations, expressions of "comic overdrive,' and a hybrid mixing of"high-lifes and
vernaculars" (Boon 1999:9-13). The inclusion of different musical traditions,
embodied by distinctly trained musicians, certainly fit the 1952 Revolutionary lib-
eral model of citizenship that emphasized mestizaje and universal inclusion.
Cerruto expressed his own ambivalences about the mixing of different aesthetic
projects. He talked about the importance of bringing on board the director of Bolivia's
Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Montes Calder6n. 8 But then Cerruto complained
because the orchestra sounded too much like a "symphony orchestra." "This isn't what
I want,' he had told Montes Calder6n. "I want it to sound like chicha [a corn beer associated with indigenous or peasant contexts], like beer, not like champagne:" When
Montes Calder6n explained the instrument ratios of the symphony orchestra-about
seven stringed instruments for every wind instrument-Cerruto, in his admittedly
exaggerated response, demanded an inversion. "Put seven wind instruments for every
one violin!" While Cerruto may have said that he wanted the music to sound like
chicha-that is rustic, country, and therefore folkloric-the inclusion of the symphony orchestra brought an elite cachet and a perceived possibility of "universal"
translation in the international performance of the work. When Bolivian Fantasytraveled to Asunci6n, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, Montes Calder6n was the only
orchestra musician who toured with "The Company." Upon arriving at the neighboring Latin American capitals, he approached the local symphony orchestra directors
with scores, musical parts, and the authority to contract the individual orchestra
musicians needed to put on the show. Cerruto emphasized that these were paid professional musicians who performed with them in these other Latin American spheres.
While some singers in Bolivian Fantasy sang folklore, they framed the tales of
their experiences with references to opera and classical music traditions. The
Camacho sisters, for example, had made their name through governmentsponsored folklore festivals during which they performed with their father, a local
teacher from Quillacollo, a city just outside of Cochabamba. Work in folklore eventually brought the Camachos to the city of La Paz.9 "My father was from the school
of opera' Norah Camacho insisted when I interviewed her and her sister in 2002 in
the middle class La Paz neighborhood of Miraflores. The Camacho sisters attributed
their success in folklore to their father's ability to arrange their folkloric music in "five part
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harmonies that didn't go outside of the authentic." In telling their stories, the
Camacho sisters emphasized performances in the Sodre Theater of Montevideo.
Norah Camacho claimed that the Sodre was "a special theater for opera, where
opera companies arrived from Europe." When I was interviewing her, she insisted
on finding among her mementos a glossy brochure that showed the modern plan
of this theater. The Camacho sisters emphasized the fact that they sang without any
microphones: "Not like today where singers use a microphone even when they sing
in a tiny room." They talked about having to develop "operatic voices" and described
one of their musical interventions as ending in "one of those majestic finales, an
operatic-type ending." During our interviews the Camacho sisters would often
break into song and their vocal style, with an exaggerated vibrato, seemed to imitate
an aesthetic of opera singing. While James Boon references "the operatic" as being
about the mixing of different social aesthetics in a single huge production
(1999:9-13)-something that rings sympathetically with an overall view of the stories about Bolivian Fantasy-thesewomen reference opera in an appeal to what
they perceive as a high art form, one that places their Bolivian folklore songs on a
par with their own high perception of this foreign model of staged musical representation. Through referencing elaborate harmonic arrangements, operatic vocal
style, and the prestige of the theater where they performed, these singers sought to
increase the value of Bolivian musical expressions that previously had been despised
by their own social class. The associations with the art world of opera were about
both proving value for a Latin American audience and making indigenous representations acceptable to Bolivian national elites.
Other folklore musicians who joined Bolivian Fantasycontinued to frame their
work with a European point of reference. Cerruto approached Tito Yupanqui
(stage name) and told him that he needed someone in Bolivian Fantasywho could
represent "the Aymara man." As Yupanqui remembered it, Cerruto told him that
he needed "a man who expressed the solitude of the highland plain, who expressed
the feeling of these unique surroundings that we have in the Andean mountain
peaks." Cerruto's words, as recalled by Yupanqui, sound like the previously mentioned mestizo-Creole distanced view of an indigenous world-a perspective on
an imagined world that was viewed as naturally connected to a specific Andean
environment. But Yupanqui's own subject position complicates the picture.
Yupanqui was born to peasant parents, an Aymara father and a Quechua mother.
His parents moved to Copacabana and then to the city of La Paz. As Yupanqui
stated of his parents in a 2002 interview: "They wanted to improve their standard
of living. They came to the city and they worked in whatever they could." From a
young age, Yupanqui's life took a rather cosmopolitan turn. With a fellowship from
the Eva Per6n Foundation, he studied art at the Buenos Aires' Escuela Superior de
Bellas Artes (Superior School of Fine Arts).
Embodied Matters
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Yupanqui's life story perhaps exemplifies Garcia Canclini's discussion of Latin
American modernisms and their contradictions: in the first half of the 2oth century,
paths of social access opened up, shaking up clear distinctions between high and
popular classes. As he put it "Cosmopolitanism [was] democratized" (Garcia Canclini
1995:41-58). When the scars of a childhood accident made Yupanqui blind, he
turned to music as a way to express his artistic side. When I pressed him to name his
preferred instrument, he responded: "Art is something born inside of you, and when
there is something here inside, the other questions are just mechanical." Yupanqui's
statements point to similarities with Deborah Poole's findings on the early 2oth century Cusquefho artists who emphasized the individual as a source of artistic talents,
a construct in which sentiment was valued over skill (1997:176). Upon returning
from Argentina, Yupanqui sold all his works to a representative from the U.S.
embassy who had seen his art exhibit. With his earnings, he began to tour Bolivia,
studying and collecting the music and typical clothes of different regions, extending his artistic sensibilities in areas of both texture and sound. Back in La Paz, he
began performing this music in theaters. By performing Indian-ness on principal
stages of La Paz, Yupanqui was pushing against the racist social barriers that segregated the city and determined where Indians and Indian things could and could
not be. Under these conditions, his initial performances were far from raving successes, and he remembered a performance in the Municipal Theater in which the
audience initially hissed at him.
To fill the cultural niche of "the highland Aymara man"Yupanqui's research, costumes, and music were incorporated into Bolivian Fantasy.Yupanqui also drew associations with a world of "high culture," talking about his indigenous dress as his
"tuxedo" at a European guitar festival in Alsace, and talking about the importance of
playing Mozart on Bolivian musical instruments in order to prove their cultural
worth. Playing folklore in a theater was particularly significant to Yupanqui. He mentioned the cultural richness of Bolivian entradas--folkloreentrance parades that are
often organized around ritual celebrations, and that feature dance and music troupes
that perform through the city streets. Yupanqui claimed that Bolivian Fantasywas
something else all together. "It's something else when it's a spectacle in a theater. I
think this is why the Moulin Rouge exists in Paris. This.is eternal. It's never going to
disappear because renewal is constant. A spectacle is constantly being changed." Of
course, entrance parades were also constantly undergoing change and renewal and
were, at the time, beginning to take on the popular forms that they have today, for
example, in the Fiesta del Gran Poder(see Guss, this issue). But I want to emphasize
Yupanqui's perspective on the theater venue as a unique space of artistic innovation,
his point of comparison to a French cabaret, and the tacit placement of entrance
parades in a contrastingly static and unchanging space. His moves placed Bolivian
Fantasy in a discursive field located somewhere between "folklore" and "art.'
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Troupes of pan pipe musicians completed the array of musical talent presented
in Bolivian Fantasy. These groups carried names like Los cebollitas'° (The Little
Onions), Los choclos (The Ears of Corn), and Los sicuris del altiplano (The Pan Pipes
of the HighlandPlain).Los cebollitas received second prize in a 1953 folklore competition sponsored by the Motion Picture Department of the MNR government, and
their notoriety in the contest won them an invitation to join "the Company" that
would eventually perform Bolivian Fantasy (Cerruto Moravek 1996:77-78).
Members of these pan pipe troupes were usually canillitas,a term that refers to people who sell newspapers and shine shoes. While I have not been able to interview
any canillitas who participated in this production, I interviewed Fausto L6pez, a
shoemaker who performed in Bolivian Fantasywith Los sicuris del altiplano.L6pez
was born in the lower middle class neighborhood of San Pedro, in La Paz. When I
interviewed him in 2002, he told me the story of how as a baby he was lost, picked
up by Aymara Indians, and raised in the countryside of La Paz. He told me that
through his childhood he learned to speak Aymara and began to play Aymara
instruments like the pifano (cane flute) and the sikus (pan pipes). After completing
his military service he became more involved in musical activities in the city. Lopez,
unlike the others I interviewed, did not feel the same connection to Bolivian Fantasy.
Others talked about being invited to join "the Company"while L6pez seemed to talk
about Bolivian Fantasy as just one more gig out of many. The kinds of music being
played were clearly separate in his mind: "Since they had their own musicians and
a piano player too, they only used us for the indigenous dances. For the ballet, there
was another kind of music ... They told me to play national music because they
[were] going to enter dancing as little Indians."
What emerges prominently in L6pez's account is not the location of indigenous
music on an equal footing with art, but rather, the concerns of people around him
that he was associating with "those people," the canillitas. He told me that one friend
said to him: "How are you going to play with those crooks? ... They are canillitas...
You are a maestro. How are you going to get involved with people like that? You're
no longer of that class. You belong to another class of people." L6pez ignored his
friend and joined the pan pipe group, but his own feelings seemed rather ambivalent with respect to this group and its presence in Bolivian Fantasy.L6pez's story
places him in an interstitial space that defies easy categorizations. His narrative
reveals an adoption of Aymara cultural ways, and his coming-of-age story that
emphasizes his military service resonates with Lesley Gill's contemporary ethnography about the intersection of Aymara masculinity and Bolivian citizenship (1997).
To interpret L6pez's position in relation to the canillitas, it is useful to return to
Zulema Lehm and Silvia Rivera's study of artisans and anarchism in the first half of
the 20th century (1988). The authors described the conflicts that emerged when
Aymara migrant labor to La Paz displaced existing artisans, a process that accelerated
Embodied Matters
281
after the Agrarian Reform of 1953 (1988:267). L6pez's story profiles these complex
ways in which class and ethnicity have intersected in the everyday interactions of La
Paz's residents.
L6pez was one of the few people I interviewed who did not invoke a personal
relationship to Art. But he did draw direct associations with other Latin American
musical forms that were popular among La Paz's residents: mambos, tangos, and
boleros. He told me that on the trip between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, the pan
pipe troupe informally entertained all travelers on board, playing P6rez Prado's
mambos and tangos like "La Comparsita." A pan pipe troupe that brought these
Latin American popular genres into its repertoire crossed another social symbolic
boundary in the process, showing that these indigenous instruments could interpret any kind of music. Even if L6pez did not invoke Art, his story, like the others
cited here, faced outward towards a foreign aesthetic, one marked by the increased
circulation of internationally recorded Latin American genres. Members of these
pan pipe troupes shared a stage with classically trained musicians, but pan pipe
musicians came from a different social class, one connected to specific labor organizations that were populated by rural migrants to La Paz or sons and daughters of
these migrants.'
The musical projects within Bolivian Fantasyfeatured distinct social classes and
styles of musical formation, and these groups remained rather separate within the
overall production. But the participants' references to opera, classical music, and
mass-produced genres that circulated through a burgeoning Latin American
recording industry all reflected a shared concern with positioning themselves as citizens of a modern nation.
Making it Art, Modern, and National
Many of Bolivian Fantasy'sparticipants talked about their work in terms of "Art'
drawing on the power that this term evokes. But, with the exception of Cerruto's
previously mentioned advertisement that called for "sacrifices" in the name of Art,
the usual suspects in an art system ideology seemed absent. These usual suspects of
an art system ideology might include-and here I have in mind Pierre Bourdieu's
work on the field of cultural production (1993)-the belief in art's internal value
within an autonomous field; that is a belief in art's value because it does not sell to-,
the masses
what Bourdieu calls the "anti-economy" of art (1993:36, 40, 50-51).
Such an art ideology system, which is often associated with Western contexts, works
to create the illusion that any artistic production is independent of worldly concerns
and social contexts. BolivianFantasyparticipants may have drawn associations with
an art world, but no one seemed to claim art as autonomous from a social context;
in fact, they seemed to claim quite the opposite-the very rooted-ness of these
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indigenous representations, and therefore their rightful position as "national"
expressions. They claimed their work was art, but did not locate art in an
autonomous sphere, what would have been a common move within ideologies of
modernity and modernism. As other authors have already signaled for Latin America
in general, modernisms cannot be grasped through a model that assumes a uniform
application and interpretation of a Western-centered modernity (Garcia Canclini
1995; A. L6pez 2ooo; Pratt 1999; Wade 2000). 12
13
Bolivian Fantasy did not express an artistic vanguard in the European sense.
But within the Bolivian context, its production included radical boundary7
crossings between social classes, ethnic groups, and musical learning styles. Most
interviewees commented with pride about Bolivian Fantasy's popularity across different social classes. When Bolivian Fantasywas running a second season, another
government body, the Sub-Secretary of Press, Information, and Culture, sponsored
a competing musical folkloric production headed up by Celso Pefiaranda and titled
Embrujo (literally, "charm" or "spell"). When these productions ran competing performances, with Bolivian Fantasy in the Monje Campero Theater and Embrujo in
the Municipal Theater, typical newspaper advertisements for these productions
would pitch the shows by claiming how long a successful season had been running
to full audiences, by listing the numbers of spectators who had seen the shows, and
even by printing the specific amount of money made to date on the sale of tickets
for these productions. The popularity of Bolivian Fantasywas a selling point for
organizers, a point of pride for participants, and hardly something to be buried
behind participants' parallel claims to participate in a respectable art world.
These combined expressions of popularity and claims to Art point to the multiple meanings of Bolivian Fantasy.For Bolivians who could not stand the thought
of Indians moving into their urban spaces, Bolivian Fantasyshifted the panorama.
Although racism did not vanish from the equation, urban residents began to
reassess indigenous expressions not as objects of national embarrassment, but
rather as sources of national pride-a transformation that should not be underestimated in its symbolic significance. One participant told me a story about how the
audiences who previously rejected his performances turned to a position of acceptance. Humor was the catalyst in the transformation he described. The musician was
performing in La Paz's outdoor theater and he had incorporated a llama in his act,
borrowing the animal from the neighboring zoo and decorating her for his staged
performance. Just as they called him to the stage, one of the other artists jabbed the
llama with a needle. The musician said: "The llama came out running and I was
dragged out by her, with my hat over here and my instruments over there. .. For me
it was a disaster. But for the public... That was when the real interest was born for
what we were doing." Somehow humor, involving an animal and representations of
4
Indian things cut through discrimination, but without eliminating it.1 This artist
Embodied Matters
283
who performed folklore clearly expressed the challenges of getting beyond the racist
attitudes of the time. He saw his own work as important in this anti-racist agenda.
But national acceptance came through slapstick humor in which there was still a
separation between "real Art" and what was not to be taken seriously as such.
Acceptance of indigenous representations in the Pacefio urban space of the
1950s moved the image of Indian from one problematic model to another: the stoic
noble savage was temporarily replaced by a clown. The beautiful Indian was put on
the nationalist face that turned outward to the international context, but the comic
Indian was what facilitated acceptance at home.15 Comic skits were an integral part
of BolivianFantasy,with comic actors like Tito Landa and Lucho Espinoza featured
prominently on the printed programs. But-their humor was also critiqued in the
foreign press. One Bolivian Fantasyparticipant, giving an example of the kind of
humor used in Bolivian Fantasy,told me that he played a part in the comic group
Trio Verndculo (Vernacular Trio). One person introduced the three of them as Ver
(to see), Na, (no meaning), and Culo (anus). One critic in Argentina wrote, "The
only thing that took away from this spectacle was the inclusion of some unnecessary comic sketches of poor taste and crude humor" (Cerruto Moravek 1996:154).
The comic skits may have worked in Bolivia, but they were poorly received by international audiences. The Argentines wanted to see pure (read serious) Bolivian folklore, while within Bolivia, the humor was necessary to the fantasy work of this
staged production. With "fantasy work" I am playing with the telling title of the
work itself that evokes a national imagining. But I am also suggesting a reference to
"fantasy" as the Lacanian reality prop that masks desires of the Other (Ziiek 1989:47,
118). When an artist like Tito Yupanqui entered the stages of La Paz theaters in the
195os, he was transgressing a social boundary."
...
[I]t was really bad. You couldn't
even play a piece [of indigenous music] without people looking at you like a strange
insect." Humor played a key role in crossing that boundary in the Bolivian context;
it dressed up the fears that accompanied these transgressions.1 6 Bolivian Fantasy's
participants had to balance their acts between satisfying both national and international audiences, and I suggest that the musical review, as a genre, was helpful for
this double agenda. Bolivian Fantasy may have contained comic skits, but in general, it did not follow a narrative plot; unlike indigenista literature, it presented no
inter-ethnic love stories with melodramatic characters standing in for the epitome
of good and evil (see Paz Soldcin 2003:16-17). These morality plays, with Indian-
mestizo relations at their center, might appeal to Bolivian audiences, but not necessarily to Argentines, Paraguayans, and Uruguayans. Comic skits made nationally
internal boundary-crossings acceptable, but the international audience, in their
press reviews, focused on Bolivia's staged indigenous other-ness.
Bolivian Fantasy took the stage when various mass media were just beginning
to enter circulation in Bolivia in a significant way. Radio was becoming more
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popular as Radio Illimani became an important cultural voice of the Revolutionary
government. Various folklore singers gained national notoriety as they worked
under on-going contracts with Radio Illimani. Cerruto's appeal to everyone's inner
aspiration to become a movie star and his recognition of film's pedagogical potential took shape within an urban environment in which Hollywood and Mexican
films continually arrived at the movie houses. While Bolivian musicians had for
some time been traveling to Argentina to make their recordings, a local recording
industry began to develop.17 Although Bolivian Fantasywas a staged live performance, the potentialities of mass media set the scene for its production.
During this period, nationalist forms dominated stages all over the world. Since
the end of the 19th century, Europe began staging world fairs that were driven by
developing industry's search for new markets and the curious ideal that world peace
and world trade went hand-in-hand (Mattie 1998). Representations of picturesque
towns called "a Spanish village" or "Old Belgium" were popular displays at these fairs
(Mattie 1998). Blanca Muratorio studied the Ecuadorian presence at some of these
fairs, arguing that the indigenous Other was not presented there as a historical subject, but rather as a remnant of a "pre-modern" past that was useful to the expression
of European and "white mestizo" Ecuadorian imaginings of national identity and
modernity (1994). The Portuguese folklore projects and state-sponsored folklore
competitions between the 193os and 195os also bear an uncanny resemblance to the
Bolivian processes of the same period (see Holton 2005:26-38). Garcia Canclini jus-
tified writing about European fascination with folklore "because the motivations of
their interest in the popular, its uses and its contradictions, are being repeated in Latin
America (1995:149). Bolivia was one of many Latin American countries involved in
these artistic nationalist stagings. A "Mexican Fantasy" was performed in 1919 in
Mexico City. The composition supposedly featured Anna Pavlova's participation as a
dancer and the music was composed around a popular Mexican genre that had been
stylized for elite acceptance and consumption.18 Bolivian Fantasy recalls the unique
modernism encountered in Poole's reading of 1920s' Cuzquefio indigenismo whose
modernism only partially imitated European ideas (1997:185). One can see clear par-
allels between Bolivian Fantasy and the Misi6n Peruanade Arte Incaico (Peruvian
Mission of Inca Art), a theatrical, musical, and dance production that emerged out of
Cusco, Peru in the 1920S (see Mendoza 2004). Although Bolivian Fantasy was produced 30 years later, and makes no reference to Incas, it shares with La Misi6n interesting Argentine connections, an inclusion of multiple social classes in its cast, and a
connection to cosmopolitan and indigenous artistic ideas.' 9 In contrast with La Misi6n,
however, Bolivian Fantasywas sponsored, at least in part, by the Bolivian government.
But even here, Cerruto's entrepreneurial approach and Yupanqui's personal artistic
mission against racism would hardly appear within an interpretation that assumes a
top-down monolithic State and its dominant imposing politics.
Embodied Matters
285
Conclusion: Rethinking Indigenismo
Indigenismo discourses abound in ambivalences about self-other boundary crossings. Diana Fuss understands identification as the "detour through the Other that
defines the self" (1995:2). In part, indigenismo was a discourse in which powerful
non-indigenous subjects took a detour through the indigenous Other in order to
define a national self When a ballet-trained dancer interpreted the cueca on toe
shoes and when an orchestra director made his musicians sound like beer, each situation was about a mimetic process of relating to and drawing power from that
symbolic world of difference by embodying that Other (Taussig 1993). But this
relational framework as applied in the Bolivian context depends heavily on the
Indian-mestizo binary. Unlike many Bolivian indigenista productions in writing
or painting, Bolivian Fantasy involved the staged embodiment of an indigenous
world. Indigenous things were not just the topic of literary fictions or the subject
of distanced contemplation. Bolivian Fantasy required that its participants temporarily dress, dance, and sound like Indians. But when a son of indigenous
migrants to the city returned to the countryside, studied indigenous music, and
staged it as folklore and Art, embodied participation defied simplistic ethnic categorizations.
Bolivian Fantasy was also located within the particular historical moment of
Bolivia's 1952 Revolution. While the Revolution failed in many ways, and Bolivians
today are re-negotiating the terms of state-society relations so as to account for
the country's indigenous majority, listening to different stories of Bolivian Fantasy's participants provides a glimpse of the changes that did occur during the
Revolution, no matter how circumscribed they may seem from today's perspective. When I emphasize the social diversity of this staged production, I do not
mean to suggest that it represents the successful application of the Revolution's
ideology of mestizaje. Nor do I read into this diversity an emancipatory promise;
the case may ultimately express the all-encompassing effectiveness of "discourse"
in Foucauldian terms. Rather, my point is that while the critiques of mestizaje and
indigenismo often depend on the reification of a cultural binary, the subjective
positionings of those involved in Bolivian Fantasydisrupt this binary in productive ways. For example, the stories of L6pez and Yupanqui reflect different personal investments in the Revolutionary project that cannot be easily labeled as
either "Indian" or "mestizo." While an analysis that disrupts the Indian-mestizo
binary also risks losing sight of how colonialism has shaped relations of power
and difference, an emphasis on how people talk about their art (see Geertz
1983:102) keeps in focus the on-going racism and power-laden relations of the
context. Cerruto's paternalistic tone and Yupanqui's personal struggles against
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racism keep power very much at the center of these stories, but without completely working within the model of the dominant elite state that uniformly
imposes its will on subordinate subjects.
While Bolivian indigenismo was about forging nationalist ideologies, Bolivian
Fantasy demonstrated that indigenismo was also about locating Bolivia as a modern
nation, as one that could develop its own native-inspired art forms. When Bolivian
Fantasy'sparticipants talked about their work, they made connections between folk
songs and opera, folk dances and classical ballet, and indigenous costumes and tuxedos. These associations often appeared in tension with what international critics,
like those in Argentina, expected of a Bolivian "folk" spectacle. Participants were
partially inspired by European art models, but in their creations, they were never
completely encompassed by them, as they sought the international status associated
with an art world while they also built a sense of nationalism that remained rooted
in indigenous expressions. But throughout the world, countries were finding "the
nation" in "the folk." The complexity of Bolivian Fantasy ultimately calls for an
analysis that blurs several boundaries-those between mestizos and Indians,
between folklore and Art, and between the Bolivian nation and the world. After rethinking indigenismo, I close with a suggestion that it would be productive to reflect
on the embodied practices of contemporary indianismo, and on the boundaries
that are blurred within this now more fashionable discourse.
Acknowledgments
Research for this project has been supported by Hampshire College Summer Faculty Development grants from 1999 to 2005. For sharing their stories with me, I am
indebted to Norah and Maria Luisa Camacho, Waldo Cerruto, Jaime Gallardo,
Fausto L6pez, Eduardo Mazuelos, Yolanda Pol, Chela Urquidi and Tito Yupanqui.
These individuals are, or have been, well-known artists within the Bolivian context
and they all wanted to be named in reference to their stories. In most cases I have
respected this request; but I have given them some anonymity where privacy might
be an issue. In various forms, this article has been presented at the meetings of the
Latin American Studies Association in 2004 and 2oo6 and at a conference on
Mestizajes held at the University of Cambridge in 2005. Within these contexts and
others, this piece reflects intellectual exchanges with Rossana BarragAn, Pamela
Calla, Julie Hemment, Brooke Larson, Rick L6pez, Zoila Mendoza, Beth Notar, and
Joshua Roth. I also appreciate the comments I received from two anonymous
reviewers for the journal of Latin American Anthropology. Of course, I alone am
responsible for any shortcomings in the analysis.
Embodied Matters
287
Notes
'This article is part of a larger project that examines the lives of folklore workers and musicians who
were active between 193o and 1964.
2
Contacts with these artists have been facilitated by my own work as a musician in La Paz since 1994.
In fact, some of the people interviewed for this project are parents of musicians and dancers who are
today at the center of Bolivia's staged folkloric projects.
3
For example, Marcia Stephenson's work (1999) examines bodily education and hygiene as state
practices aimed at indigenous assimilation through pedagogies of cleanliness. Brooke Larson also
analyzes how colonial and national subjects are formed through the organization of bodily practices
(2005).
4
Alcides Arguedas' Pueblo enfermo (19o9) marks this moment of negativity while Franz Tamayo's
celebration of mestizaje, published in 191o, is revisited in the 1952 Revolutionary politics.
"Other scenes had titles like "Highland Wedding" "The Alacitas Fair" (Alacitas is a January fair at
which people in La Paz purchase in miniature the things they hope to acquire or achieve during the coming year), "Country Serenade'"'Chant to the Sun," "The Llama Herders' Dance:' "Chants from the Backlands," and "Hellish Invasion."
6Claudio Lomnitz reorients Benedict Anderson's take on nationalism: Lomnitz places the roots of
Latin American nationalisms, not in the i8th or 19th centuries, but in Spanish colonization and even in
the Spanish Reconquista.This historical reading leads to an interpretation of nationalism, not as a process
of secularization, but as "an offshoot of religious expansionism." This view also privileges systems of
descent over the imperative of sovereign territories, the historical imprint of the Spanish and Indian
republics. Furthermore, Lommitz's view of nationalism gives equal weight to the vertical bonds of
dependence that have been just as central to Latin American nationalisms as the horizontal fraternal
bonds that Anderson emphasized (Lomnitz 2001:3-34).
7
The reference to Ram6n Novarro is significant in that he was known as one of the first Latin
Americans to become a Hollywood star; he was from Mexico.
"8A1955 published interview with Cerruto revealed that Jaime Gallardo was Cerruto's first choice as
musical director of Bolivian Fantasy (Cerruto Moravek 1996:m9).
9In another related piece, I examine the gendered significance of middle class mestiza women
singers as "pioneers" in the staging of indigenous music as folklore (see-Bigenho 2005).
"'0in interviews, published programs, and newspaper articles, this group's name always appeared in
masculine form. The re-gendering of"cebolla" does not seem unusual since the members of this ensemble were mostly, if not all, men.
"'Asimilar demographic is emerging within my related work on PaceFloestudiantinasof this period
(interviews with Julio Cuevas, 2005, 20o6).
12Thomas Turino purposefully avoids referencing "modernity" and "globalization" and instead
writes about how "cosmopolitanism" shaped ideas of nationalism and music in Zimbabwe (2ooo).
While the terms "modernity" and "modern" indeed have their baggage, I continue to use them in this
analysis because of the prominent roles they play in the imaginings of Latin American nationalisms.
131n his analysis of the 192os' and 193os' Bolivian indigenismo, Javier Sanjin6s mentions the apparent lack of a political vanguard "that might interact with both local premodernity and cosmopolitan
modernity"; he sees Jose Carlos Mariategui, in Peruvian indigenismo, as representative of precisely this
kind of political vanguard (2004:15, 72). He adds that "Artistic production in Bolivia was simply not prepared to enter the stage of self-reflection and criticism" (2004:73).
'4The presence of the animal and the representation of the Other is evocative of Taussig's ideas on
mimesis and alterity (1993).
288
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5
" Michael Herzfeld's study indicates a similar double vision of Greek folklore projects that looked
both inward to internal concerns and outward to the expectations that Europeans had for the heavily
weighted concept of "Greece" (1982).
16
Diane Nelson (1999) develops a thorough discussion of Rigoberta Menchoi jokes in relation to
Guatemalans' fears of Menchui's boundary transgressions.
I7See Peter Wade's discussion of Colombia's recording industry and its importance in the development of a "national" music at the beginning of the 2oth century (2000).
'S"Fantasia mexicana" also references a composition by Aaron Copeland called"El sal6n de M6xico"
that was then adapted and orchestrated by Johnny Green, a Hollywood movie composer.
' 91f one begins with Deborah Poole's discussion of the Inca operatic of 18th century Paris (1997:38),
and the Inca operas in early 2oth century Cusco (De la Cadena 2ooo; Poole 1997), in Bolivian Fantasy one
can see the cosmopolitan chains of mimesis coming full circle (see Taussig 1993).
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