In this study Luis Sierra examines how Indigenous residents of La Paz, Bolivia, built and modernized the city and defended their rights as citizens at a time when the intellectual and political elite was mostly trying to keep them out of the city or to isolate them in strictly controlled Indigenous areas. Through mutual aid societies, lay confraternities, neighborhood organizations, and militant labor federations, Indigenous people and other working-class paceños demanded infrastructure for their neighborhoods and pushed for full social and political rights. In the process of telling this story, Sierra seconds other historians who contend that the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (1932–35) was a watershed that radicalized Bolivian political culture, but he also argues that many labor unions and other organizations had used earlier political openings to advance their rights.
Sierra begins his history of La Paz's Indigenous residents with a discussion of the elite's belief that all...
