In the first decades of the twentieth century, Bolivian intellectuals and politicians debated how the country's Indian population should be incorporated into social and political life as the nation became increasingly integrated internally and forged stronger links to the world market. Public health was central to this discussion because of elite fears of contagion due to greater contact between Indians and non-Indians and the realization that if Indians were to be productive members of society, then their physical well-being had to be considered. This study examines the proposals of two Bolivian doctors, Jaime Mendoza and Nestor Morales, for improving the health of the native population in the context of the larger national debate about ethnicity and citizenship.
Recently, a number of scholars have begun to piece together the economic and social history of Indian women in the Andes during the colonial period. It has not been an easy task: too often quantitative materials, such as tributary censuses, mention women only as wives and mothers and then may not provide even minimal demographic data on them. Moreover, although court and notarial records can be rich sources of information about Indian women, they generally deal with those who lived in cities or who were familiar enough with them to know how to use the colonial legal system. Consequently, it is no accident that most research has concentrated on native women in urban settings, certainly a small minority of the female indigenous population.
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