The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia

by Daniel M. Goldstein

Since the Bolivian revolution in 1952, migrants have come to the city of Cochabamba, seeking opportunity and relief from rural poverty. They have settled in barrios on the city’s outskirts only to find that the rights of citizens—basic rights of property and security, especially protection from crime—are not available to them. In this ethnography, Daniel M. Goldstein considers the significance of and similarities between two kinds of spectacles—street festivals and the vigilante lynching of criminals—as they are performed in the Cochabamba barrio of Villa Pagador. By examining folkloric festivals and vigilante violence within the same analytical framework, Goldstein shows how marginalized urban migrants, shut out of the city and neglected by the state, use performance to assert their national belonging and to express their grievances against the inadequacies of the state’s official legal order. During the period of Goldstein’s fieldwork in Villa Pagador in the mid-1990s, residents attempted to lynch several thieves and attacked the police who tried to intervene. Since that time, there have been hundreds of lynchings in the poor barrios surrounding Cochabamba. Goldstein presents the lynchings of thieves as a form of horrific performance, with elements of critique and political action that echo those of local festivals. He explores the consequences and implications of extralegal violence for human rights and the rule of law in the contemporary Andes. In rich detail, he provides an in-depth look at the development of Villa Pagador and of the larger metropolitan area of Cochabamba, illuminating a contemporary Andean city from both microethnographic and macrohistorical perspectives. Focusing on indigenous peoples’ experiences of urban life and their attempts to manage their sociopolitical status within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and political decentralization, The Spectacular City highlights the deep connections between performance, law, violence, and the state.

Genres: Anthropology, Bolivia

296 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

Reviews

[Teddy Driscoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goldstein opens The Spectacular City with two highly emotional and action-packed scenes, both presenting conflicting moral statements. The first, is the Fiesta de San Miguel in Valle Hermoso which is one of the most culturally significant of events in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Goldstein’s city of study. The fiesta, which has been heralded by UNESCO as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”, is a cite of violence in this anecdote. Performers from different sectors of the parade bully their way to the front with fists and over-powering numbers. The positivity associated with “fiesta” is lost as bodies crash into one another in a fight for attention. This is paralleled by the vignette that immediately follows. A scene among the same community in Cochabamba, where a mob stands under the hanged body of a dead young man. The lynchers threaten to assault the police who have come as respondents to the situation. The crowds cheers to the authorities are emblematic of any marginalized group searching for agency beneath an oppressive regime. Calls such as “we will make justice with our own hands” and “we are all responsible” resonate throughout the crowd (Goldstein 2004, 2). Immediately the reader is greeted by situations of ever-greying morality. Festivities with abuse-lynching with revolution. These set the stage for the rest of Goldstein’s work, where he discusses the parallels between the different forms of of spectacles present in the migrant Oruro community in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Villa Sebastián Pagador is home to a community of Oruro immigrants to Cochabamba. As an indigenous group in Bolivia, they face marginalization that has been perpetuated since early Spanish colonization in the area. Goldstein outlines how the power that the Spanish descendants have over the native Bolivians is manifested through their geographic location in the city center, while those such as the Oruro are pushed to the outskirts. His rendition of Cochambombino history continues with descriptions of city planning and the influence of Spanish supremacy. This historic information provides context for the poor conditions that the Oruro immigrants live in. Cochabamba had metamorphosed from an agricultural center to a continually growing and urbanizing organism. The plans laid in reference to managing the city’s expanding population ignored the possibility of an indigenous influx into the city from the Oruro, Potosí, and La Paz regions. Now, as they are deemed “unacceptable” in a modernizing city by the Cochabamba hierarchy, the indigenous population faces discrimination in bureaucratic and governmental processes. The text concerns itself largely with the response to this marginalization.
Goldstein goes on to describe the administrative systems that those in Villa Pagador must go through, and how specifically they oppress Oruro immigrants. While Goldstein’s description is important for understanding the methodology of oppression, the meat of the subject is lost to the reader in the too often dry language. One gains a full understanding of just how the Bolivian government has rigged the game against the indigenous migrants, but it doesn’t fully sink in until later in the text, when action is taken by the subjects of the ethnography. The text gives us small opportunities to see Goldstein’s engagement with the community he studies. Rare interactions give insight into the local perception of the policies placed upon them. In most other instances, it seems that the narrative voice is simply lecturing at us about the state of Villa Pagador, rather than letting those who lived it say what they have to say. The way in which the narrative voice addresses members of the community estranges them from their own story. Snippets of dialogue presented in the first three chapters fall short of giving the city a human face. It is almost as if Goldstein shys from portraying real action. The final two chapters are what give the book its purpose. The first discusses the fiesta, the other discusses the lynchings. These two orbit one another just as the small introductory scenes did. They provide the examples for Goldstein’s point on spectacle, and truly get to the heart of his research. These chapters allow the reader to finally be fully impacted by the human soul that make these performances so striking to the outside.
Goldstein’s thesis about how the residents of Villa Pagador leverage their performance for social gain speaks true to the acts committed in this Bolivian barrio. The leaders in Villa Pagador have been very careful as to how they convey their image to the public. They have manipulated what is communicated to the outside so that foreign entities perceive them as a culturally rich and highly organized community. The lynchings are perceived by foreigners as the oppressed taking the law into their own hands. The exaggerated festivities of the Fiesta de San Miguel in Villa Pagador are classified as an emblem of human art and culture by UNESCO. Through these means of grabbing attention in the media, the Villa Pagadorans can claim agency within their marginalization. Goldstein’s ability to properly identify this aspect of the culture is what makes The Spectacular City an incredibly insightful ethnography. His writing opens the door to apply similar concepts to other communities facing oppression and globalization. It is a comprehensive and well-thought out text around the subject of spectacle. His downfall is that he fails to make a compelling performance from his own writing. The people living these stories often feel like blank faces that Goldstein has ascribed certain roles to. The lack of description concerning interpersonal relationships and physical features makes it easy for the reader to lose the subject of a story. Without visual and emotional aids concerning the characters in Villa Pagador, the reader can hardly tell one person from the other. Through a lack of description, the narrative voice is lost. The content itself is spectacular, the way it is conveyed is not always.