From Proactive to Complacent Politics: Reproducing Spaces of Inequality in a Bolivian Marketplace

Abstract

During the early 1970s, a group of small-scale vendors in Challapata, Bolivia, fought for and won the right to sell in the marketplace. In doing so they undermined the power of a local group of elite shopkeepers and built the plaza that has become the centre of the town's marketplace activity. Although the original collective action sought to assert a disadvantaged group's right to gain a livelihood, the inequalities and practices of exclusion that vendors once fought against have been reproduced over the course of a generation. In this article I explore how and why this transition occurred and suggest that the case study provides a cautionary tale about the struggles of marginalized groups.