The election of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s president in 2005 made him
his nation's first indigenous head of state, a watershed victory for
social activists and Native peoples. El Movimiento Sin Tierra
(MST), or the Landless Peasant Movement, played a significant role in
bringing Morales to power. Following in the tradition of the
well-known Brazilian Landless movement, Bolivia’s MST activists
seized unproductive land and built farming collectives as a means of
resistance to large-scale export-oriented agriculture. In Mobilizing
Bolivia’s Displaced, Nicole Fabricant illustrates how landless
peasants politicized indigeneity to shape grassroots land politics,
reform the state, and secure human and cultural rights for Native
peoples.
Fabricant takes
readers into the personal spaces of home and work, on long bus rides,
and into meetings and newly built MST settlements to show how, in
response to displacement, Indigenous identity is becoming ever more
dynamic and adaptive. In addition to advancing this rich definition
of indigeneity, she explores the ways in which Morales has found
himself at odds with Indigenous activists and, in so doing, shows
that Indigenous people have a far more complex relationship to
Morales than is generally understood.
A project of
First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies