The Hour of Vindication: Rural Literacy and Schooling in the Age of Revolution

Chapter 7 plants the battles over rural school reform at the axis of peasant mobilizations for lands, literacy, and schools, and the MNR's revolutionary mandate to forge a patriotic citizenry, pacify the countryside, and modernize the agricultural workforce after the 1952 insurrection. It shows how Bolivia's ideal of “Indian education” became a vector for contradictory revolutionary aspirations, intergenerational tensions, and unforeseen social consequences during the 1950s and early 1960s. Despite the MNR's hollow educational rhetoric, strict program of Indian assimilation, and deep discrimination toward the rural sector, Bolivia's democratic embrace of citizenship politics and the agrarian sea change over the early 1950s unleashed an unquiet cultural revolution in popular literacy and rural schooling. At its base, the postrevolutionary profusion of rural schools and popular literacy reflected the underground work of Aymara activists who had struggled for literacy and schooling, land and justice, voice and vote, over the previous half century.