A taste for ecology: class, coloniality, and the rise of a Bolivian urban environmental movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since at least the mid-20th century, social movements have been key actors in Bolivian society, causing governments to fall and redrawing the cartographies of power. Recently, a new movement emerged, a middle-class movement that articulated its demands in harsh opposition to the government of former President Evo Morales: an urban environmental movement. In its rhetoric, Morales was un burro (a donkey) and un ignorante (an ignorant man) steering the country towards ecological collapse. Subsequently, the movement played a key role in the social protests that led to Morales’s fall in November 2019. In this paper, I aim to understand why this movement emerged and mobilized during the Morales administration and how colonially conditioned relations of power and contradictory images of the indigenous Other are articulated in this process. I argue that the emergence and mobilization of the movement ought to be understood in relation to: (1) the politically conditioned forms for legitimate political opposition; and (2) the challenge to coloniality implied by the coming to power of subalternized subjects. When the borders of seemingly fixed categories and spaces are blurred, the privileged develop novel ways of making social distinctions. One such way, I argue, is to display a ‘taste for ecology.’