The ‘good people’ of Cochabamba city: ethnicity and race in Bolivian middle-class food culture

Abstract

This paper argues that everyday food practices reproduce and negotiate power relations of coloniality. The argument developed brings together Quijano's notion of coloniality and Bourdieu's writings on distinction, habitus, and taste. Ethnographic data from fieldwork in the 'gastronomic capital of Bolivia,' Cochabamba city, brings out the workings of a 'habitus of coloniality' in everyday food practices. The author analyzes how the city's privileged middle class navigates ethnic and racial inequalities, which have deep colonial roots but are constantly being renewed and renegotiated. The members of an emerging middle class, many with indigenous roots, have been negotiating their participation in spaces of food consumption. This process is often met with disdain by the established middle class, thus reinforcing power relations of coloniality. The author puts forward the notion of a 'coloniality of taste,' which reflects the power relations at play in the expression of social distinctions through food tastes. The paper concludes that food practices in Cochabamba and elsewhere center around social inequalities modelled upon colonial patterns. KEYWORDS Mestizo valluno; white mestizo; gente bien; middleclass; habitus of coloniality; coloniality of taste Setting the scene It is a late afternoon in August 2016. Together with my friend Rosita, her youngest children and her mother, I visit the temple of the Virgen de Urkupiña, a holy virgin venerated by many Bolivians. We have arrived at the church after a one-hour ride in a packed minibus from the center of the city of Cochabamba to the satellite city Quillacollo. The temple stands a few blocks of dusty roads away from the main square. In one week, these roads will be filled with people dancing for several kilometers until they reach the sacred ground of the temple. To avoid the crowds, we have arrived early. We light candles for the virgin and pray. Then, we go to a nearby restaurant to eat a hearty Pique Macho, a dish of meat and fried potatoes arranged on top of each other. Rosita's children play in the backyard of the restaurant. We leave the restaurant and walk towards the main square where the buses depart. It is sugar cane season, and amongst the many street vendors, a woman squats besides a wheelbarrow filled with sticks of sugar cane. The children know how delicious it is to suck the sweet liquid out of the heart of the sugar cane. 'Can we have one,

Chicken for Everyone? A Cultural Political Economy of the Popularity of Chicken Meat in Bolivia

“…The poorer population is left with chicken meat that has been stored in the open, without any guarantee that the meat is still safe to consume. In addition, many people living close to chicken farms and slaughterhouses in peripheral areas are exposed to environmental impacts such as water pollution and odors (Kollnig 2019). These spatial inequalities in the accessibility of high-quality food echo findings from the United States, where the food justice movement has brought out similar patterns of food accessibility (Alkon and Agyeman 2011: 7).…”

“…Advertising sells the dream of a Western lifestyle, playing on the colonial notion that Western culture is superior to indigenous culture. I have argued elsewhere (Kollnig 2019b) that judgments of taste reproduce colonial power relations. This "coloniality of taste" works through the imposition of foreign products and taste and also through the appropriation of indigenous food products.…”

“…The loose sanitary regulations result in poor prevention and management of disease outbreaks. As a veterinarian at the SENASAG authority explained to me, farmers usually apply antibiotics in an uncontrolled fashion, which has led to the development of resistant bacterial strains (for more on animal health, see Kollnig 2019). The presence of Newcastle's disease limits the possibility of exporting Bolivian chicken meat due to sanitary restrictions.…”

A taste for ecology: class, coloniality, and the rise of a Bolivian urban environmental movement

“…Being able to appreciate a Brecht play at the theatre or a Bergman film at the cinema club, to enjoy certain genres of poetry and fiction, to understand and take pleasure in abstract art -these are all displays of a supposed refined taste that are used by the urban, non-indigenous, educated middle-class subject to distinguish itself as such in Bolivian society, not only in relation to the working class, but also to the emergent indigenous or cholo 11 middle class. This is the coloniality of taste, discussed by Sarah Kollnig (2018Kollnig ( , 2020 as a way of making racial and class distinctions based on taste.…”

“…Instead, I suggest, the emergence and mobilization of the movement ought to be understood in relation to: (1) the politically conditioned forms for legitimate political opposition (in other words, political opposition took the form of a social movement since this was the most legitimate form of political practice in the political context of a government that claimed to be a 'government of the social movements,' and an environmental discourse was used as a conduit for channeling a wide-ranging critique of governmental politics); and (2) the coloniality of power that has characterized Bolivian political life since 1825, and the reactions of the more privileged when faced with what some experienced as the inversion of colonially conditioned relations of power. Drawing on the work of Sarah Kollnig (2018Kollnig ( , 2020, I suggest that when the borders of seemingly fixed categories and spaces are blurred, when indios tread the halls of power and occupy new spaces, novel ways of making social distinctions emerge. One novel way for the more privileged to make social distinctions, I argue, is to display 'environmental awareness,' or, as it were, a 'taste for ecology.…”