René Zavaleta Mercado. Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879–1980

René Zavaleta Mercado’s classic study of the struggle for national identity in Bolivia is now available in English, with a translation by Anne Freeland. In Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879–1980, the author argues that a pivotal moment in Bolivian history was the 1952 Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), which created a “generalized hegemonic contestation of the state, unanimous at least among veterans of the Chaco War” (283). It is this enigmatic statement—his penultimate sentence—that ends the text. When Zavaleta died in 1984, his work was unfinished. The reader is left to wonder about Zavaleta’s exact thoughts on veterans of the Chaco War and their contribution to Bolivian identity and state building. Nevertheless, the text does offer insight into a theoretical model for understanding Bolivia’s bloody past. This model appears to be based on Gramscian ideas of cohesive culture and identity or, more precisely, the lack of those conditions.

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