Emerging Urban Indigenous Spaces in Bolivia: A Combined Planetary and Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

This chapter draws attention to processes that have, in recent decades, contributed to the almost complete urbanisation of previously isolated, rural indigenous peoples. Indigenous urbanisation trends are illustrated through the case study of Bolivia. Here, indigenous peoples inhabit diverse territories of concentrated and extended urbanisation where they are often affected by patterns of social exclusion and ethno-racial discrimination. Urban indigenous peoples are, however, by no means passive victims of exclusion and discrimination but, in Bolivia at least, they are active agents of political change who contest for specific rights within the urban environments in which they live. To analyse complex indigenous urbanisation processes and associated everyday urban indigenous politics, this chapter deploys a pluralist perspective and combines planetary urbanisation theory—which allows for an understanding of patterns of socio-capitalist restructuring of indigenous territories and associated anti-capitalist urban indigenous resistance—with postcolonial approaches—which allow understanding ongoing tendencies of ethno-spatial segregation and associated decolonial indigenous responses. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to lessons from this case study for future theoretically informed and empirically grounded research on indigenous urbanisation in Bolivia and elsewhere.