UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the role of train development and construction in

Bolivian state formation and social change at the start of the twentieth century during the

twenty years of Liberal Party governments. The study analyzes national planning for

liberal development and studies the impact of one particular railroad, the Arica – La Paz

line, in the province of Pacajes. Though development planning throughout this period was

exclusively the realm of politicians and businessmen, their plans often depended on the

participation of the same people and relationships that Liberal Party leadership wanted to

change. This study shows how a wide range of groups within the border province of

Pacajes responded, reacted, and developed alternative agendas to the advance of trains and

state reforms associated with them.

Though Liberal Party leaders depicted the unimpeded advance of their plans to

transform the nation into a liberal, modern, and centralized one, the details show a much

more fragmented and varied result. That result often emerged from tensions and conflicts

produced in those places and moments where the imagined project landed in a complex

local reality, and came to reflect and produce many of the same contradictions that had

been present for centuries. Because the Liberal Party’s approach to railroads understood

modernization and development as a way to force other changes within the nation,

including in social relations, power, and identity, this dissertation focuses on aspects of

everyday life directly impacted by their development reforms: work, markets, food

production and transport, taxes, and the financing of local governments. This study

engages in a dialogue with research on the history of indigenous and worker movements,

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the development of liberalism, and citizenship in Bolivia, by examining the profound

impact of expanding capitalism in the daily lives of residents of one region and its

implications for belonging and exclusion in the nation. I suggest that the years of Liberal

Party rule and their successful project to build trains and transform the economy shaped

the emergence of new movements and politics that would dominate discussions of the

nation’s future for many decades after.