Joining 'the Cordillera with the Pampa, the Aymara with the Guarayo': Constructing the Bolivian transportation network and national identities, 1880-1935.

摘要

The Creole nationalist literature of the late nineteenth century in Bolivia is replete with references to plans of consolidating and linking Bolivian national territory by rail, highway, and waterway in order to more effectively exploit and export the country's mineral and agricultural resources. Caudillos and politicians ceded national territory by conflict and treaty as a consequence of failed efforts to gain access to important seaports and to build a modern export economy with fluid transportation and communication links. Yet as late as 1935, the influential writer, physician, university administrator, and politician, Jaime Mendoza, wrote of the unfulfilled need to build a modern transportation network to connect the "Cordillera with the Pampa, the Aymara with the Guarayo" in a project that was apparently still necessary to "consolidate true nationality.";How did these infrastructure projects simultaneously promote consolidation of the nation-state as a prerequisite for nationalist integration while excluding some populations from the national project? In what ways were people in the diverse regions of Bolivia either seen as assets to be exploited for labor for these projects, or as backward savages to be civilized or exterminated to make way for progress? In what ways did subaltern communities collaborate with these projects, and how did they relate to their position vis-a-vis the state and the national imagination of the Creole elites? This thesis explores the role that national transportation projects played as a catalyst for creating imagined national identities in Bolivia.