1 - Common Ground

Summary

On the afternoon of July 25, 1927, a young shepherdess set fire to a hillside on Florentino Serrudo’s estate, launching the greatest insurrection of indigenous peasants since the Federal War of 1899 – and the first in Bolivia to be labeled “communist.” This chapter takes seriously the fears that the Chayanta (Bolivia) rebellion of 1927 generated among landlords, state officials, and the press, and examines the dynamics of mobilization, the formation of alliances among indigenous caciques, artisans, and intellectuals, and the state response. It shows that in the years before the Chayanta uprising, rural caciques from indigenous communities and radical artisans and intellectuals in the cities of Sucre and Potosí formed a political alliance based on a shared commitment to rural education, communal land ownership, and redistribution of wealth and power. This incipient alliance sought to erase ethnic and class hierarchies in order to build a more democratic society, and largely succeeded in blocking further landlord advance in the southern Bolivian countryside.