The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government.The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia.At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim.These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city.Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics-as experiences and as tools-and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and pol