Anchored in Bolivia’s highland Quechua-speaking region of Ayopaya, Winchell’s book offers a fascinating ethnography of local experiences, perceptions, and reactions to Bolivia’s heralded “plurinational” project under President Evo Morales (2006–2019). Indeed, the governing party, the Movement for Socialism (mas), often casts its project as one of revitalizing Bolivia’s heritage of indigeneity, while also dismantling the legacy of racism, labor oppression, and other forms of poverty and inequality. This utopian narrative has inevitably come under critical scrutiny, but until now, few scholars have grounded their critical analyses in the deep subsoil of rural everyday life in regional and ethnic zones beyond the radius of La Paz (the capital and regional epicenter of Aymara cultural politics, which framed the mas agenda in the early 2000s).
Once a stronghold of hacienda servitude and peasant rebellion, Ayopaya would seem to be the perfect laboratory for the mas noble experiment in decolonization. Yet,...