Gender, Class, Race, and Region in “Bilingual” Bolivia

Abstract

This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.