CRASSH

In 2006 Evo Morales, the first indigenous President of Bolivia, took office and quickly began a major series of constitutional reforms. One of those was a thoroughgoing attempt at educational reform, acknowledging the fundamental role of schooling in inducting young people into Bolivian citizenship. While schooling is of course not the only place for the political and civic socialization of young people, I focus on it in this paper because the school is a central arena for the promotion and contestation of different state-led citizenship projects. I examine this through an analysis of two aspects of schooling in the city of El Alto since the late 1990s: first, pedagogical practices in the classroom and second, participation in civic parades and demonstrations outside. The presence of indigenous people as critical agents in Bolivian politics with increasing power to shape the country's government has been a particularly notable feature of the last decade. Much of this is articulated through a different kind of presence – that of bodies on the streets, principally in the forms of civic parades and demonstrations. This paper looks at schooling as a space where these relationships between citizenship and presence are shaped on an everyday basis. As such, this paper seeks to contribute to a growing body of ethnographic work that examines citizenship as social practice, as opposed to purely a legal status (e.g. Holston 2008, Lazar 2008, Sørensen 2008, Ong 2006, Postero 2006).

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