The Indigenous Demand for the Right to an Education in Bolivia: Production and Participation, 1931-2010

Abstract

In the 1930s the paradigmatic Ayllu school of Warisata, founded on fragile cooperation bonds built between Indians and the State, managed to materialize practices and discourses regarding the right to an education that indigenous people had started to install since the dawn of the century in Bolivia. In spite of the fact that the project was abruptly interrupted in 1940, images of the experience still persist in the collective memory, part of which have been updated in the “Avelino Siñani-Elizardo Pérez” Education Law, enacted in 2010 by the Plurinational State, in the frame of what is known as the Educational Revolution. After examining discourses from Elizardo Pérez’s book “Warisata, la escuela ayllu” and the Education Law, two significant topics that the indigenous school installed in the legislation are identified and analyzed: their unique way of understanding material production, closely related to the sustenance of life and the survival of the community and, on the other hand, the main status acquired by participation in the making of education-related decisions, understood as public matters. All the above relies on the hypothesis that these specificities have influenced the scenarios of discourse construction on the issue to move from the State to the indians and the consolidation of the association between indigenous resistance and the right to an education.