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Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the Patria: Building Bolivia with Military Labor, 1900–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2011

Elizabeth Shesko
Elizabeth Shesko
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Abstract

This article reveals the range of tasks performed by military laborers in twentieth-century Bolivia, distinguishing between martial and nonmartial labor to understand how productive tasks became central to the military's mission. The detailed exploration of soldiers' laboring lives shows that their work as strikebreakers, builders, agriculturalists, and domestic servants reinforced social hierarchies and supported private capital. Despite hopes that military service would unify a diverse populace, soldiers on the indigenous end of the spectrum disproportionally performed the more abject labors. The first section charts the development of nonmartial labor and shows how some soldiers objected to working conditions by invoking the dissonance between martial discourse and nonmartial experiences. The article then turns to the increasing legibility of nonmartial labor in the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935). The final section details the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement's efforts to fold the army into the 1952 Revolution by emphasizing soldiers' productive labor.

Type
Special Feature: Labor and the Military
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , Fall 2011 , pp. 6 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2011

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References

NOTES

I would like to thank John D. French, Jocelyn Olcott, Dirk Bonker, Orin Starn, Pete Sigal, Robert Smale, the members of the Latin American & Caribbean Graduate Student Workshop at Duke University, and the International Labor and Working-Class History reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

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