Laura Gotkowitz’s book is a timely intervention in ongoing discussions among historians, ethnohistorians, political scientists, and anthropologists over the meaning and uses of the law for the consolidation of the modern nation-state, and for what we might now refer to as the evolution of multicultural or plurinational states in Latin America and in the Andes. She also fills in what has been a neglected chapter in recent Bolivian history, that is, the period between the turn of the nineteenth century up to the events of the 1952 Revolution.
Gotkowitz adds significant depth to conventional understandings of the 1952 Revolution as a rubicon of Bolivian history by connecting it to myriad ongoing campaigns undertaken by rural indigenous advocates throughout the 1910s – 1940s. In so doing she brings into focus the relationship between grassroots indigenous efforts and the military populism of this period, while linking the often mythologized events of 1952,...
