15 Gender Orders and Technologies in the Context of Totora Marka’s Autonomous Project (Bolivia)

Ana Cecilia Arteaga Böhrt¹

Introduction

On 6 August 2006, a Constituent Assembly was established in Bolivia as a result of a long struggle on the part of both Indigenous organizations and organized civil society, who had been challenging the nation-state model and privatization policies in place since 1985. The outcome of this national meeting of representatives from all departments and sectors was a constitutional text, approved on 25 January 2009, which established a Plurinational State with the basic principles of Indigenous autonomies, decolonization, depatriarchalization and suma qamaña (“good living”). This has led to radical changes in the way the State and Bolivian society are perceived. It was within the framework of these important transformations that I documented the challenges of implementing this great commitment to self-determination from the perspective of Indigenous women, analyzing their efforts to get their voices recognized in collective decision-making bodies and to reflect their gendered perspectives and demands.

I investigated the role played by Indigenous women in constructing Bolivian autonomies on a subnational or “local” scale, starting with the case study of Totora Marka (Oruro department).² This is one of 11 municipalities — out of a total of 339 — that voted “Yes” to self-determination (with more than 74.5% of the vote) in the municipal referendum of 6 December 2009, held to adopt the status of Indigenous autonomy. I had the opportunity to accompany Indigenous community members between 2010 and 2015 through an ethnographic, collaborative³ and longitudinal study that allowed me to document this experience. This particular case was noteworthy among other autonomy conversion projects because it was one of the forerunners in this process for several years, making it a unique event by which to analyze the institutional structure of the Plurinational State.⁴

Throughout this chapter I will demonstrate how, in the fight for autonomy as a constitutional right, the women of Totora Marka opened up a space in which to discuss the structural principles of their social organization and cosmovision, and thus challenge gender orders and gender ideologies on the basis of their particular cultural significance.⁵ By questioning this system and the disciplinary mechanisms that sustain it, the Totoreño women presented a series of transformative proposals that would result in changes in the rules and customs guiding the social practices of the marka.

Based on the women’s proposals for local transformation, I also undertake a broader analysis of the progress and challenges facing Indigenous Peoples in obtaining their own institutional structures within the framework of the Bolivian Plurinational State. I focus on the important regulatory and institutional changes that have favoured decentralization and Indigenous autonomies, and the centralist government model that has hindered them. In this sense, from the experience of Totoreño women, I show the important transformative momentum that resulted from the constitutional reform and, at the same time, the technologies of governmental power.

Regulatory and Institutional Changes: Women’s Struggles and Indigenous Autonomies

In the presidential elections of December 2005, Evo Morales Ayma of the Movement for Socialism-Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP) triumphed with 54% of the vote, becoming the first Indigenous president in Bolivia and South America. Within months of his election, and in response to social demands, a Constituent Assembly was established (in 2006), presided over by Silvia Lazarte, a Quechua woman who led the work to draft a new Constitution in a decision-making space that enjoyed 34% female representation (Coordinadora de la Mujer, 2011).

Within the framework of the constitutional process, Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s organizations used a policy of alliances to join forces and produce a joint program with specific demands entitled “Consensus of the country’s women for the Constituent Assembly.” This consensus took up a key issue historically demanded by their parent organizations and social movements: decolonization and depatriarchalization as linked processes.⁶ Such a link implies viewing the latter category as a two-way process that proposes the notion of decolonization on the basis of the need for depatriarchalization (Chávez et al., 2011). This and other proposals faced different forms of resistance from a racist, sexist and conservative society that felt its class and privileged interests were being harmed by “feminists’’ attacking good manners and by “cholas”⁷ who had nothing to contribute to Western society.

Because of this resistance, Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s movements were excluded from participating in the final negotiations of the so-called “Congressional Agreement” of 5 October 2008, resulting in a weakening of the depatriarchalizing message of the original text. This may be the reason why there is no explicit regulatory framework of reference for depatriarchalization in the Constitution.⁸ The result is that the Bolivian constitutional mandate, and thus the programmatic leitmotif of the Plurinational State, is that of decolonization, with depatriarchalization addressed more timidly within this.

Despite this setback, the Constituent Assembly still marked a before and an after as regards several issues related to Indigenous women:

• A gender approach was mainstreamed throughout the constitutional text and, particularly, in its catalogue of human rights, via the elimination of multiple forms of discrimination existing in the country, particularly gender discrimination.
• The political participation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women has increased; for example, since 2010, 50% of ministerial portfolios have been held by women, many of them from the popular sectors (INSTRAW, 2006).
• The Constituent Assembly also generated a transformative scenario for ethno-political organizations, thus initiating a debate around demands for specific rights and around lived experiences marked by inequality and subordination within ethnic communities (Ströbele, 2013).

In addition to the gender issue, another major advance established by the constitutional process was the legalization of Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination, understood as the exercise of self-government, the election of authorities by habit and custom, the administration of economic resources and the exercise of legislative, supervisory and executive powers (Plurinational State of Bolivia, 2009, Art. 272; Plurinational Legislative Assembly, 2010, No. 031).

In accordance with the Bolivian constitutional mandate, the corresponding administrative structures were put in place from 2006 on. In terms of the above topics, particularly noteworthy are the creation of the Vice-Ministry of Indigenous First Peoples Peasant Autonomy (within the then Ministry of Autonomies) and the Vice-Ministry of Decolonization (within the then Ministry of Culture), in which the Depatriarchalization Unit was created. The Unit took up this proposed interrelationship between depatriarchalization and decolonization, promoting a broad theoretical debate in the country on the relationship between colonialism and patriarchy, even though in practice there was little evidence of any clear public gender policy from a perspective of cultural diversity.

With this brief review of the regulatory and institutional transformations, I have shown that the Constituent Assembly formed a new juncture that supported full recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples, with the constitutionalization of Indigenous autonomies being crucial as a fundamental basis on which to achieve a Plurinational State. In relation to gender, this space enabled patriarchal customs to be challenged and even replaced, at least in theory, with “new” values supporting the decolonization process in favor of Indigenous women’s rights, both at the national level and in the communities to which they belong. Next, I describe the concrete forms taken by the State in the Indigenous regions of Bolivia and show how Aymara women took advantage of the spaces opened up by this new institutional framework, which they took up as their own and through which they disputed their rights.

The Long History of the Struggle for Indigenous Autonomy of the Ayllus and Complementarity

For Totora Marka, the consolidation of Indigenous autonomy implies official recognition of their territorial and organizational structures and ancestral regulatory systems. This demand has a long history in the country, with multiple struggles for the reconstitution of the Andean ayllus and the restitution of the rights of traditional authorities.

The ancestral organization of Totora Marka (see Figure 15.1) is based on the suyu-marka-ayllu-community logic:⁹ at the national level, it forms part of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ);¹⁰ at the regional level, it is part of the Suyu Jach’a Karangas, made up of 12 markas (current canton-level municipalities).¹¹ The marka is made up of nine ayllus, and each ayllu has two to five communities; each community has around 40 to 80 sayañas (plots belonging to a family). The marka in turn is subdivided into two sections under the duality of the aransaya (the parcialidad or set of community holdings on the south side of the marka) and urinsaya (parcialidad on the north side). The ancestral structure of Totora Marka, similar to the rest of the peoples of the Bolivian altiplano (highlands), is characterized by its complexity and a dense web of social relations, each with its particular variations.

According to the administrative division of the State, this territory is called the Province of San Pedro de Totora and comprises a single municipality of the same name. Since the ancestral structure is consistent with the political division of the State, establishing their Indigenous autonomy was expected to be quite simple. Because of this convergence, the municipal government (consisting of a municipal council and an executive body presided over by a mayor or mayoress), would become an Indigenous government following the norms, institutions, authorities and procedures of the Aymara communities. This concordance of territorial structures is not always the case in other markas around the country. In this scenario, the statute of autonomy would enter into force immediately.

Totora Marka is governed by two central principles that are fundamental for self-government and women’s participation:

• That of sarathakhi-muyu, or the rotation of positions around the sayañas, involving the sequential holding of different posts within the system of authorities.
• The principle of complementarity, translated as chachawarmi (chacha = man and warmi = woman), which is an Aymara principle linked to the idea of equality, duality and parity between the feminine and the masculine, present in all dimensions of life in the marka communities. In this sense, the deities are gendered, as are the sacred places, the spatial and territorial arrangement (aransaya parcialidad = associated with the masculine, urinsaya parcialidad = linked to the feminine). A series of explanatory pairings are thus established that are not antagonistic but complementary, i.e., neither exists without the other (Gutiérrez, 2009; Choque & Mendizábal, 2010).

The system of authorities (see Figure 15.1) is governed by the ancestral territorial organization of the marka: suyu-marka-ayllu-community and is structured around these two principles, such that the holding of positions falls to the “chachawarmi” couple. Most communities have four authorities: the Tamanis couple, the Corregidor (“Mayor”), the Cacique (“Chief”) and the School Board. The highest authority at the communal level is the Tamanis couple (Tata Tamani: male authority; and Mama Tamini: female authority), also known as Awatiris (shepherds of the grassroots community). All marka authorities are led by two Mallkus (male authority) and T’allas (female authority) couples from the council, and two Mallkus and T’allas couples from the marka.¹² All the Indigenous positions are exercised in chachawarmi complementarity, while the community’s political positions, such as Corregidor, Cacique and School Board, may or may not be held by couples. This system of authorities coexists alongside the State (present mainly in the municipal capital), so there is an entwining of different government structures superimposed one on top of the other, which often generates tensions between the ancestral system and the State.

The population of Totora Marka has strong identitary-territorial roots and a strong link with this system of Indigenous authorities, as well as with the territory’s customary rules. At the same time, this population is distinguished by its great mobility between the rural and urban worlds, the result of constant temporary or permanent migration to the biggest cities of the country and even abroad; this process is in response to the growing number of small family farms. Because of this mobility, people who live in the marka are called “sayañeros” and permanent migrants to the city are known as “residents”. The heterogeneity of the Totoreño population is also a result of the presence of several established churches in the communities. As will be seen from the following, the resident population and the members of the different churches were those sectors most opposed to the marka’s self-government.

There has been an historical struggle for the self-determination of the Indigenous peoples and, in general, for the autonomy of the ayllus of the Bolivian altiplano. The ayllus are the basic organizational units of the ancient and current Andean community, and they determine its political, economic, religious and social form (Coaguila, 2013, p. 26). This institutional set-up is contrary to the model of Bolivian agrarian unions, characterized as being the free union of peasant farmers permanently established for the purposes of defending their interests.¹³ Women participate differently in these two forms of organization: in the ayllu, their participation is dual, while union positions are held individually, either by a man or a woman.

To understand the historical struggle for self-determination, Table 15.1 summarizes the reconstitution and ethnogenesis of the ayllu (López-Ocón, 1985; Abercrombie, 1991),¹⁴ and the gradual strengthening of complementarity.

The last 30 years have been characterized by important social movements led by the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia — CIDOB) in the lowlands, and CONAMAQ in the highlands, resulting in notable uprisings that have been the basis for continuing the reconstitution of the ayllus. In addition to social movements, the inhabitants of Totora Marka feel that the legislative and symbolic changes that took place under the MAS-IPSP government resulted in a strengthening of their organizational structures, of complementarity (which is now a rule that must be respected in the exercise of Indigenous positions), of rituals,¹⁵ festivities,¹⁶ traditional dress and of their identities as Indigenous Peoples.

This brief reference to ethnogenesis and the reconstitution of the ayllu shows that, beginning with its relationship with the State, Totora Marka has had a history marked by disruption, tensions, subordination and resistance. It is a non-linear process which, despite multiple transformations and readjustments, has been maintained and strengthened in recent decades, becoming the banner of the struggle for the autonomy of the Andean markas. This dynamic and highly adaptive institution was further invigorated by the transformations brought about by the Plurinational State. Complementarity is based on this communal socio-political organization, being defined as an organizing principle of the identity of the ayllus.

The Participation of Totoreño Women in the Process of Conversion to Indigenous Autonomy

The process of conversion to Indigenous autonomy in Totora Marka had two distinct stages with marked differences in women’s participation, as well as different areas of progress in the self-determination project. The first stage — from 2009 to 2011 —, corresponding with the new constitutionalism in Bolivia, was characterized by the Totoreño population’s sustained support for self-government, with a majority “Yes” vote, a commitment to producing a statute of autonomy and the active participation of women. The second stage — from 2012 to 2015 — reveals the long road that this marka had to travel to obtain approval for a referendum date for its statute. The protracted nature of this process demonstrates the swings and contradictions in the Plurinational State and the technologies of hegemonic power, which created local divisions around the autonomy project, a context in which women’s proposals were abandoned.

From “Chachawarmi” to “Chachawarmi-warmichacha”: Giving New Meaning to the Complementarity and Vernacularization of Rights (2009 to 2011)

The first stage followed several processes that revealed support for the autonomous project (see Figure 15.2). Several factors explain this majority support, despite a general ignorance of the recently approved Constitution and its implications for autonomy: the referendum took place in the context of a national political moment that was governed by the idea of a State transformation. This generated a strong process of self-identification with a reassessment of Indigenous rights (Molina-Barrios, 2018). The territorial reconstitution of the marka took place through the acquisition of Community Lands of Origin (TCO),¹⁷ and it was this that was to motivate the search for Indigenous autonomy. This territory is characterized by a strong Indigenous identity and great rootedness in the traditional. There was also marked discontent and distrust in the administrative and financial management of the municipal government (Funaki, 2017).

After the referendum, the next step was to produce their statute of autonomy. During the drafting process, there was a collective interest in consulting the different sectors of the marka’s population on the content of this document. Despite these efforts, the scant participation of women in several of the processes described in the previous figure was evident, in addition to the constant omission of any of their proposals. Faced with this fact, a group of women demanded that a meeting be organized only for mamas, and this was held on 11 August 2011 and called a “Totoreño Women’s Meeting.” Representatives from different communities, grassroots women and mama tamanis participated in this event and came to an agreement to include their demands in the statute.

The participants in the meeting looked mainly at the practice of chachawarmi complementarity, concluding that it was a principle respected above all in the regional spaces of the marka where the authorities of the different territorial levels of Totora (community/ayllu/marka) converge. These spaces are public, collective and central to the reproduction of communal life, and notable among them are the marka assemblies, rituals and festivities,¹⁸ characterized by discipline, surveillance and forms of complementarity. In contrast, women felt there was a lack of compliance with the chachawarmi in the community space, with social control relapsing to “this is just how things are” in terms of gender ideologies. This does not mean that women do not face discrimination at the regional level, nor that complementarity is not fully complied with at the communal level; in reality there is a combination of the two dimensions at both levels, albeit with notable differences.

Succinctly, and for reasons of length, in this chapter I shall only consider the marka assemblies as an example of regional spaces in which complementarity is fulfilled. These assemblies (called Jach’a Mara Tantachawis) are attended by the 32 Tamanis couples representing each community and there is strict monitoring of the fulfillment of chachawarmi. For example, it is mandatory for Tamanis couples to sit together to ensure this principle, and couples in authority are required to be married by the civil registry with evidence of a marriage certificate. This rigor means that increasing numbers of women are attending these assemblies (49% of the authorities present at the 2015 marka meetings were women). In this kind of space, the mama tamanis and the t’allas play an important role as agents of discipline; for example, the t’allas of the marka are in charge of checking the clothing of the Tamanis couples. Because of this important role, women feel they are listened to in the marka assemblies and considered in the decision-making process.

Despite this high female participation in the regional meetings, however, the Totoreño women themselves identified the following problems:

• These assemblies are chaired by the Mallkus, which means the role of the mama tamanis is reduced to collecting money and organizing food for the events.
• Although complementarity in theory implies the non-hierarchical exercise of positions, in practice the men generally dominate. This is linked to the patrilineal inheritance of the land, which means that men are the representatives of the sayañas and families in the community, so they hold the main positions. Women are then left simply as “companions.” Despite this, they are constantly negotiating their place with the aim of obtaining greater participation in communal affairs, resulting in ever more instances of women holding the main positions.¹⁹

It was in the domestic and community space that women identified a series of oppressions that demonstrate the distance between chachawarmi in principle and in practice, interwoven with different systems of oppression such as class, race and gender. This intersectionality of violations is in response to a structural context marked by poverty — Totora Marka has one of the highest rates of unmet basic needs in Bolivia — resulting in constant spatial mobility, growing atomization of the land, poor access to education and health and, in the city, discrimination and racism.

On the basis of these elements, Totoreño women identified the inequalities they face within their own communities and families, and these can be understood on the basis of two cultural categories that are used in the marka to establish the differences between men and women, and which continue to mark gender relations: 1) being pampa chhuxuñaw (urinating sitting down), a term used pejoratively to indicate that women are “like animals that do not even know how to urinate”²⁰ and to maintain a series of discriminatory attitudes; and, 2) being mayt’ata (borrowed), a category widely developed by Choque (2009, p. 10) and which, in the domestic sphere, turns the woman into someone external, one who is not of the family, such that any investment in her upbringing should be minimal.

Totoreño women attribute this discrimination to patri-virilocal post-marital residence, whereby newly married couples take up residence in the husband’s paternal home. Both categories are linked to different forms of gender oppression within the national and local histories of the marka, related to racialized violence against men and particularly against Indigenous women in the hacienda system (as I mentioned in summarizing the ethnogenesis of the ayllu in Table 15.1). In relation to these categories, the Totoreño women listed different forms of violence that run counter to the principle of complementarity, and which I summarize in Table 15.2.

The plethora of local inequalities that directly affect women on the basis of gender ideologies (such as “mayt’atas” and “pampa chhuxuñaw”), along with other customs (such as patrilineal inheritance of land and patri-virilocal post-marital residence), impose a feminine and masculine raison d’être that preserves these different oppressions.²¹ These violations place Totoreño women in the most subordinate position in asymmetrical power relations within the marka. For these reasons, the dynamics within the territory need to be viewed not only through colonial binarisms and hierarchies of “Indians” and “mestizos,” as Marisol de la Cadena (2008) warns, but also through the gender hierarchies that are internalized within Indigenous families and communities, and which often place women on the bottom rung of a racialized system of subordination (Weismantel, 1989; De la Cadena, 2008; Radcliffe, 2015; Sierra, 2017).

The family, community and structural violence that Totoreño women face as a result of their class, ethnicity and gender cannot be separated out from the long history of racism and colonial oppression linked to the construction of the nation-state, which has constantly subordinated Indigenous Peoples. Based on these identified violations, the participants of the “Meeting of Totoreño Women” proposed a reformulation of complementarity, suggesting that instead of chachawarmi, we should speak of “chachawarmi-warmichacha” (see Table 15.3).

The proposal summarized above reveals the great creativity of Totoreño women in using the same concept of complementarity to expand its meaning and redefine the autonomous project of their people, from their female language, needs, directions and visions and with a perspective that allows them to link their cultural forms and references and collective identities with the demands of gender equality. Complementarity was thus the focus of the women’s proposals insofar as it referred to a fundamental principle of communal organization based on practices within their own materiality.

These women’s demands were also made using a rights-based language since they were generally demanding protection from the different situations of subordination they face at certain times in their lives, as well as equal access to education, health, land and justice. These actions demonstrate a process of vernacularization of human rights discourse which, according to Merry (2009), implies the adoption of a global discourse and values (such as human rights) in order to reappropriate it on the basis of the ideological and social attributes of the area (Levitt & Merry, 2009, p. 446). In this sense, although rights come from a more liberal register, they are a symbolic weapon to which Totoreño women were appealing in order to question subordination and gender violence, and to dispute their space both in the public sphere of their organizations and in their own domestic relations.

The women also discussed the rights of chachas (men), yocallwawas and imillwawas (boys and girls), jaju and majta (youth), awichas and achachilas (elders) and people with disabilities. In this way, Totoreño women showed that they are at all times part of the wider community of the marka. Herein lies the importance of overcoming the dichotomy between Indigenous rights, human rights and women’s rights, proposing them in intersection and interrelation (FIMI, 2006), since the women’s proposals for the reformulation of complementarity cannot be separated from the collective demands for the self-determination of the marka.

The male authorities reacted in two different ways to the women’s proposals:

• Some described their demands as contrary to complementarity, arguing that the rights claimed “would divide and fragment the collective.” The contradiction between collective rights and individual rights is often also presented, at the local level, as a strategy for ignoring gender demands and continuing to naturalize the subordination identified by the women themselves. This position shows that there is disagreement over the meaning of chachawarmi, since some men use the principle of complementarity as an essentialist and static concept, a strategy by which to ignore the women’s specific demands (Sanabria, 2006). This contrasts with the Totoreño women’s vision, who see chachawarmi as a flexible principle that can change over time.
• Other men supported the women’s demands, arguing that the path to self-government required a debate on gender subordination; to these men, a change in the meaning of complementarity was a call for them to be consistent in their discourse, and something that invited them to put into practice the principles and values they were proclaiming (Hernández, 2001; Macleod, 2011).

The statute document approved by the deliberative body (18 December 2011) did not include the term chachawarmi-warmichacha proposed by the Totoreño women, nor did it include the creation of a Totoreño women’s organization to support the Indigenous autonomous government. It did, however, incorporate a sense of some of the women’s other proposals: it established that chachawarmi should be the basis of autonomous government; it instituted equal rights, duties, obligations and opportunities for men and women; it established that the election of representatives should be carried out with equity, expressed in parity and gender alternation, in accordance with the marka’s own norms; it eliminated educational levels as a requirement for holding different positions; and it proposed mechanisms for the prevention and protection of women victims of gender violence, among other things.

A central element that contributed to the men’s consideration of the women’s demands was the fact that these visions and claims were made within the context of a broader process of reinventing the Indigenous government, this being a particular juncture that led to a debate on the relationship between the collective rights they have as Indigenous Peoples and the rights of Totoreño women.

The Long and Difficult Struggle for Autonomy in Totora from a Gender Perspective (2012 to 2015)

According to several Indigenous authorities of Totora Marka, during this second stage, the MAS-IPSP government “abandoned the Indigenous autonomies to their fate.” This abandonment generated different tensions between the State and the Indigenous Peoples, who were focusing all their efforts on their self-determination, and these tensions revolved around two technologies of power (Foucault, 2006, p. 136) deployed by the Plurinational State:²² 1) the loopholes and limits of the legal order; and 2) time delays and State bureaucracy.

In relation to the former, it is important to note that the Framework Law on Autonomies set out a series of requirements²³ and more than 14 procedural steps for Indigenous Peoples wanting to access self-determination. This marked the beginning of an extensive and exhausting path for the territories to convert to Indigenous autonomy, as set out in Figure 4.

In relation to the latter (time delays and State bureaucracy), Figure 4 shows that Totora Marka took around one month to prepare each request and response to the State institutions and agencies. In contrast, the State took between four months and one year. This meant that it took between two and six and a half years to establish the autonomies.

Alongside the counter-routes of the Plurinational State, differences in power relations, divisions and political factionalism, resulting from old local disputes, were exacerbated at the local level. As of 2010, the municipal authorities were mostly MAS-IPSP, this being on an interim or transitory basis until the process of conversion to autonomy could be consolidated. This meant reducing their mandate from five years to two. To avoid this shortening of their mandate and their subordination to the Indigenous autonomy, the municipal government thus became the main opponent of this project.

As mentioned above, the peoples who were converting requested that the referendum for approval of their statutes of autonomy be held prior to the election of new municipal authorities; however, this request was ignored by the State. Faced with this adverse context, and with the aim of obtaining a municipal council that would support self-determination, a majority of the population voted for the Popular Participation (PP) candidate in the March 2015 local elections. At the same time, two statutory post holders began working for this institution, one as a senior officer, the other as an adviser. The strategy of the Indigenous authorities did not bear fruit, however, since the mayoress, the municipal council and the statutory officers all continued the campaign to oppose the self-determination of the marka.

The counter-campaign of the municipal government was joined by other actors such as the provincial structure of MAS-IPSP and the departmental government of Oruro, in which this same political party also had a majority representation, again highlighting the contradictions of the Plurinational State. Alongside these bodies, a united Indigenous front was formed of young people, residents, members of Christian religious groups and teachers all putting forward different arguments to oppose Totora Marka’s Indigenous autonomy.²⁴ At the same time, there was a turnaround in the positions of several Indigenous authorities, who also ended up opposing self-government. Faced with fatigue caused by the protracted process for autonomy, the municipal government ended up being the safest option by which to access positions of power and decision-making, as was the case before the option of autonomy became enshrined in the Constitution.

As a way of resisting State technologies of power, and despite local political divisions and factionalism, Totora Marka participated in several mobilizations of peoples for conversion to Indigenous autonomy. During these actions, the Indigenous authorities appealed to the legal order as well as to the language of contention, in Roseberry’s terms (2007), to the extent that they disputed the very meanings of the Plurinational State’s rhetoric on constitutional autonomy.²⁵ To avoid cementing a “top-down” autonomy, which imprints relationships of power, bureaucracy and control over the top of community forms of organizing, the converting peoples demanded:

• The elimination of the State’s requirement for the production of statutes of autonomy, for which they appealed to the Law on the Electoral System (Official Gazette of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, 30 June 2010, No. 026), which establishes that community democracy does not require written rules, statutes or compendiums of procedures for its exercise, unless by decision of the Indigenous nations or peoples themselves.
• That these statutes should not have to pass through the constitutional scrutiny of the Plurinational Constitutional Court (TCP), instead recognizing their autonomy in accordance with national and international regulations.
• The elimination of the double referendum, given that the Constitution only provides for one consultation in which the population expresses its will to become an Indigenous autonomy.

The demands show that the Indigenous Peoples were defending the legal reforms undertaken by the Plurinational State insofar as they were the result of the constitutional process and thus of the peoples’ long struggle for their recognition. This explains why the Law makes sense as a language of contention and how difficult it is for the Plurinational State to control the direction of the common framework of discourse, evidencing the “fragility” of this system of domination, which has overturned the very foundations that gave it legitimacy, as in the issue of Indigenous autonomies.

The marked prolongation of the process meant that the same referendum in Totora Marka was used to vote on both the statute for Oruro department and the statute for the territory’s Indigenous autonomy.²⁶ The departmental statutes put out for consultation in 2015 were severely criticized nationally for being recent regulations and, consequently, unknown to the majority of the population. A “No” vote thus occurred across all departments, with more than 70% in the case of Oruro. The departmental statute of Oruro was also criticized by the Jacha Karangas Western Council of Ayllus and Markas, such that an organic resolution was taken for its markas to vote “No” to this law. The decision to conduct a joint consultation of the Indigenous and departmental regulations caused confusion in Totora Marka; consequently, many people thought that Jacha Karangas’ opposition to the departmental statute also applied to the Indigenous autonomy statute.²⁷

In this complex context, the referendum to approve the statute was held on 20 September 2015 and 70% of the Totora Marka population voted “No” to the basic law; this contrasts with the 74 % support for autonomy in the 2009 referendum. This result meant that the municipal government would remain the central institution of the marka and, at the same time, the system of Indigenous authorities would continue to have a presence. Should the authorities choose to resume the conversion process once more, they will need to rewrite the statute, and go through the whole procedure described in Figure 15.3 again.

Many Indigenous authorities believe that the delays in the process, by means of the technologies of power described above, was a political maneuver. Others consider that since Totora Marka was the first Indigenous peoples nationally to obtain constitutional compatibility from the TCP,²⁸ it was the first territory to face a deficient State institutional framework that did not know how to proceed in the face of the new regulations, and this ended up hindering the autonomy project.

Despite these counter-routes and technologies of power deployed by the Plurinational State, it is important to distinguish differences of opinion within the MAS-IPSP government. For example, the Vice-Ministry of Indigenous First Peoples Peasant Autonomy was the State agency that provided most support and accompaniment to the conversion processes, despite facing the withdrawal of some non-governmental organizations that were assisting with these projects, constant budget cuts and a lack of political will on the part of the central government.²⁹

In terms of gender, given the context, the proposals around “chachawarmi-warmichacha” resulting from the Totoreño Women’s Event in 2011 were not taken up. Despite abandoning these women’s demands, fundamental changes have taken place in recent years in relation to opening up participatory spaces for Indigenous women.³⁰ Among the most outstanding transformations is the election, for the first time, of a female mayor and three female councillors (out of the five members of the municipal council) in the municipal government. This is an historic result since the female participation rate increased from 16% between 2004 and 2010 to 66% in 2015. The second change was the establishment of the “Bartolina Sisa” women’s organization in Totora Marka,³¹ showing there is greater flexibility with regard to the possibility of having a women-only organization in the territory (this was one of the women’s central proposals made in the context of giving new meaning to chachawarmi).

Totoreño women attribute these transformations to several factors, notably: the awareness generated by the production of the statute of autonomy in relation to gender rights; the national and regional opening up of political positions, which helped mobilize traditional gender ideologies at the local level; and the national struggles of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women for inclusion in formal politics, which promoted enactment of the Law on the Electoral System. This law establishes gender parity and alternation between women and men as candidates for various public positions.

Despite these important changes in the political action of Totoreño women, it is noteworthy that both stand in tension with the autonomy of the territory and the main issues surrounding this project since they imply, on the one hand, a strengthening of the municipal government and the permanence of political parties and, on the other, the establishment of a union model in a marka governed by the Indigenous system of the ayllu. In other words, the State itself has promoted a more liberal perspective on gender rights at the local level. I note this in order to highlight the contradictions of the Plurinational State, and not with the intention of detracting from the important participatory spaces that have opened up for Totoreño women in recent years, who have pursued an historical struggle to increase their presence in different community areas as key players in political processes.

Conclusions

The transformative proposals brought about by the rewriting of the Bolivian Constitution overturned what were the foundations of the nation-state across most of Latin America and opened up new horizons and expectations of a re-founded Plurinational State on new bases. In this constitutional and legislative context, I have demonstrated the capacity of the Andean ayllus to exercise their autonomy in practice and to recognize in their institutions and cosmovision the legitimate language with which to enter into dialogue with the State and, on this basis, advance their proposals. The constitutionalization of Indigenous autonomies in Bolivia opened up a space in which to discuss gender ideologies and gender orders in Totora Marka. This enabled the Aymara women to build a gender agenda, focusing on the structural principles of their social organization and cosmovision in relation to chachawarmi, the redefinition of which was one of their main proposals. This process enabled them to connect with global discourse on gender rights and self-determination. The women thus took advantage of the momentum provided by the marka’s collective action aimed at defending self-determination to confront male resistance, get their proposals incorporated into the final version of the statute of autonomy and, subsequently, gain access to spaces for political participation in areas that were previously closed to them.

To analyze the women’s demands in the context of this marka’s self-determination project, I took my starting point in a culturally based gender approach that views culture as an area of dispute in which symbols, principles and norms are constantly negotiated (Macleod, 2007, 2011; Hernández & Sierra, 2005). In analytical terms, I looked at the approaches of community feminism and decolonial feminism,³² given the importance of gaining an appreciation of the complex realities of Totoreño women and the need to understand their worldviews and proposals, and the need to identify aspects of their subordination that are marked by class and ethnicity. Some clear results emerged from within the framework of these two feminist perspectives:

• The strong entwining of the specific rights of Indigenous women and the collective rights of this marka to self-determination.
• The dynamic nature and realignment of complementarity, which shows the possibilities that Totoreño women have to disrupt apparently immutable gender orders and their ability to move the boundaries of chachawarmi and redefine them from within to generate new directions.
• The complexity of the practices of complementarity which, while revealing the entwined oppressions that burden Indigenous women in particular, also results in the implementation of norms focused on chachawarmi in order to ensure a central role for women authorities and political participation with equality.
• The way in which Indigenous women view their problems and the identification of the gender oppressions they face due to the customs and cultural context in which they lead their lives and the contexts of structural exclusion, cyclical histories of indignities and economic marginalization.

The findings overall bear witness to the difficult nature of the process aimed at enforcing the constitutional right to convert to Indigenous autonomy and highlight the barriers and contradictions of the Bolivian Plurinational State, which alternated between a transformative momentum and counter-transformative processes, revealing a centralist and regulatory State that was failing to comply with its own mandate. Centralist interests were bolstered by local fragmentation due to disputes within the municipal and regional political arena. Confrontational scenarios thus arose that reflect a constant entwining of national and local dynamics and powers.

Within the context of these processes and disputes, the Law became the language of contention in its regulatory and emancipatory dimensions (Santos, 1998). In the regulatory context, the State hindered the process of autonomy by means of bureaucracy, regulations and time management. In its emancipatory dimension, it opened up a path by which to oppose and resist the regulations imposed by the dominant order, thus decentralizing power and establishing areas of rupture with the hegemonic process. To understand this emancipatory dimension, it is essential to consider that the discourse of the Plurinational State was the result of mobilization and agreement reached by various sectors fighting for historical demands.

In addition to these two dimensions of the Law, by highlighting the constitutional and legislative progress, the consequent strengthening of Indigenous identities and, at the same time, the government’s contradictions and paradoxes, the case of Totora Marka clearly exemplifies the need to overcome binarisms in any analysis of the Plurinational State. In other words, the findings of this self-determination project, summarized in this chapter, invite us to contemplate the grey area of the political crisis that Bolivia has been going through since October 2019.

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