UC San Diego

This thesis examines the literary works of Fausto Reinaga and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, two prominent Indigenous writers, intellectuals and political activists from Bolivia, and their critiques of Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution. Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui argue that the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) political party, which held office during the Bolivian post-revolutionary era, sought to assimilate Bolivia’s mostly Indigenous population in order to create a new, homogeneous Bolivia of campesinos estranged from their cultural Indigenous identities. Based on Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui’s findings, I argue that the 1952 revolution extended Bolivia’s colonial legacy through new codes that marketed the revolution as a “radical” break from the previous political order and as “liberatory” for the exploited Bolivian working-class. I identify three of these codes as the following government-led policies: the universal suffrage reform, agrarian reform and unionization. Ultimately, these three policies formed a part of the Bolivian state’s attempt to campesinizar and de-indigenize Indigenous groups. Through my discursive analysis, I find that Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui differ in their theorization of the racialization processes that occurred after the 1952 revolution. Nonetheless, Reinaga’s framework of indianismo and Rivera Cusicanqui’s conceptualization of the ch’ixi provide a critical analysis on the implementation of what they both interpret as a Westernizing political agenda in Bolivia following the 1952 revolution.