Creating Madres Campesinas: Revolutionary Motherhood and the Gendered Politics of Nation Building in 1950s Bolivia

Abstract

Addressing the nation’s high infant and maternal mortality rate became a paramount priority following the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution. High infant mortality jeopardized the literal reproduction of the nation, therefore motherhood had to be reformed, sanitized, and modernized to fit new revolutionary ideals. Reproduction and women’s bodies were consequently at the heart of the revolutionary project. Attempts to improve child welfare drew women out of their homes and into health clinics where employees oversaw their nutrition, hygiene, and childcare regimens. They also fostered female solidarity linked specifically to maternal responsibilities, thereby inventing a notion of revolutionary motherhood inextricably linked to revolutionary goals. This process of expanding and modernizing maternal and infant health services reveal the gendered politics of nation building under the National Revolutionary Movement whose program for political change, economic development, and cultural transformation depended on a healthy and productive populace.

Revisiting Bolivian Studies: Reflections on Theory, Scholarship, and Activism since 1980

“…31 as viewed through the lenses of cruceño regionalism and official MNR political and public culture, respectively: Pruden (2012) and Gildner (2012). See also Pacino (2015Pacino ( , 2017 on the MNR's gendered politics of public health programs, as well as various chapters in Grindle and Domingo (2003) and Crabtree and Whitehead (2008). In 2012, Rossana Barragán, in charge of the Latin American program of the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam), initiated an ambitious program to digitalize the oral history of Bolivia's labor and indigenous movements, preserved in taped recordings between 1982 and 1997 in the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF, La Paz).…”

There Is No Place Like Home: Imitation and the Politics of Recognition in Bolivian Obstetric Care

“…Officials argued that the clinical spaces of rural health centers, sanitary posts, and maternal–infant health dispensaries would instill women with a “sanitary consciousness” and encourage them to reject dangerous “customs” like giving birth at home. This aspiration was racial, centered on erasing indigenous difference, and reproductive, geared toward stemming Bolivia's high maternal–infant mortality rates and thereby ensuring the future of the nation (Gallien ; Pacino , ). As Lisa Stevenson has eloquently argued, indigenous targets of settler colonial health interventions are often “expected to cooperate not only by desiring the trappings of civilization, but also by desiring life” (, 67).…”

“…The Bolivian state embraced a national narrative of mestizaje later than many of its neighbors, after the 1952 Agrarian Revolution ended the hacienda system of land tenure (Larson ). For a more detailed discussion of rural health centers and women's expected role in reproducing the nation during this time period, see Pacino () and Gallien ().…”

Tackling child malnutrition in Jamaica, 1962–2020

“…And some scholars have also used anthropometric data to assess the nutritional status of populations in order to make claims about living standards, especially in colonial contexts, or have studied nutrition as part of campaigns to improve child welfare (e.g. Austin et al, 2012 ; Pacino, 2015 ). Only more recently have scholars (e.g.…”