Strong in the belief that a university, in addition to fostering knowledge in the classroom, has the responsibility to encourage research and writing, the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz recently published a series of volumes commemorating the sesquicentennial of Bolivian independence. The work under consideration was the first volume produced and written by three students in the university’s department of history in collaboration with the distinguished Alberto Crespo R., a member of that department. According to the introduction to La vida cotidiana en La Paz, this is the premier Bolivian collective effort in the field of history; hopefully it will serve as the model for other such undertakings.
The author’s purpose is to explore the social and economic milieu out of which the political and military events developed between 1800 and 1825 insofar as La Paz was concerned. Their premise is that everyday affairs give a rhythm to the lives of a people and provide a pulse that can be read by the latter-day investigator; material that seems trivial to the untrained eye can prove valuable in helping to reconstruct the past, especially if one is interested in “people” as opposed to “events.”
In their search for the paceños of another era, the authors drew upon a wealth of hitherto unused primary sources, with the Archivo Histórico de la Universidad Mayor de San Andrés providing the greatest amount of documentation for the copious footnotes. La Paz in 1824 numbered an estimated 28,600 people whose median age appears to have been only twenty-three years. A marginal center, the city had never exercised important influence outside its immediate area. Moreover, during sixteen of the years covered by this book, it had to endure the going and coming of the royalist and patriot armies, a fact that disrupted the daily life of the paceños and wreaked havoc on public documents, many of which were destroyed and others of which were appropriated by private individuals. Only after painstakingly combing one archive after another were the authors able to provide illuminating answers to questions concerning, among other things, styles of clothing, forms of entertainment, house decorations, costs of dwellings and food, commercial practices, juridical proceedings, hygienic conditions, rates of illegitimacy, and the state of learning. They have pieced together an engrossing account of everyday life in La Paz during the independence movement, and their handiwork—scholarly, incisive, and seminal—is an admirable contribution not only to the Bolivian sesquicentennial, but to Bolivian historiography as well.
