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.