The Limits of Revolution

The role of Bolivian mining families in revolution and politics.

In 1952, Bolivia’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) swept into power, promising collective prosperity through class-based nationalism. The heroic symbol of the movement was the worker citizen—the formerly indigenous miner who would fuel economic development in a nationalized mining economy.

The Limits of Revolution explores this history from the worker barrios of the copper mining city of Corocoro. As the state walked back its promises of worker political power at the national level, mining men and women in Corocoro struggled—through protests, court battles, and barfights—to maintain the benefits of worker citizenship locally. After the MNR fell to a military dictatorship in 1964, however, families retreated to defending the nationalized mining company against an increasingly hostile state. In this battle to keep the revolution alive, the expansive potential of worker citizenship disappeared and old racial exclusions resurfaced. Largely forgotten today, Bolivia’s experience of revolution exposes the contradictions of postcolonial nationalism and sheds light on Latin America’s transition from Cold War–era class politics to twenty-first-century Pink Tide politics.