By Roger Hamilton

Between the countryside and the city, the urban center of El Alto, Bolivia, exemplifies the opportunities and dilemmas indigenous peoples face today

The toll road will eventually lead out into the sweeping panorama of the Altiplano, dotted with adobe-enclosed communities of Aymara-speaking people, small herds of sheep and llamas, and fields of potatoes and other crops, seemingly lost in time, ageless.

But before encountering the countryside, the traveler first must pass through El Alto. More than a suburb, somehow not quite a city, this busy piece of urban landscape is not a pretty nor even a safe place. But walking its broken sidewalks, meeting its people, hearing the mix of languages and accents, one begins to understand what it is to be a native American in the Andes at the close of the 20th century. In these rough-edged neighborhoods of raw masonry buildings and potholed streets two worlds meet—the metropolitan and the traditional. From Lake Titicaca in the north to Tarija in the south, from the lowlands to the mountains, indigenous people from all over Bolivia come here to seek opportunities and a better life.

Just 20 years ago, El Alto consisted of little more than a few businesses clustered around the airport. In just 10 years, the upstart city’s population had swelled to 200,000, and today it stands at 700,000. It continues to grow at an annual rate of 12 percent.

El Alto is a vibrant urban phenomenon. It’s all here: crime and contraband, opportunity and enterprise. From behind the high walls lining the sidewalks, one hears the hiss of the welding torch, the hum of a sewing machine, the clanging of metal against metal. Nearly 70 percent of El Alto’s population consists of rural migrants. Some 80 percent of the people are bilingual (Spanish and an indigenous language). Although they are poor, they are busy, many running their own enterprises.

Many El Alto residents remain in touch with their ancestral communities. Street vendor Tomasita Apaza, who receives small loans through an IDB-financed credit program, periodically visits her old community for important celebrations, to catch up on family gossip and to stock up on freshly dug potatoes. But El Alto is her home, where she hopes her children will someday own bigger businesses than hers and make more money.

What is the meaning of El Alto? Is it an outpost of globalization, where people check their cultures at the door in exchange for a new, homogenous identity? Or is it a laboratory for change, where people forge new models for economic and social development out of still vibrant cultures and traditions?

In former times, the answer would most certainly have been assimilation. But in the Bolivia of today, people have a choice. The country’s new constitution recognizes its society as intercultural and multiethnic, one in which indigenous people have specific cultural and linguistic rights. In essence, Bolivia has concluded that nationhood and development are compatible with the preservation of ethnic and cultural diversity.

Turning lofty ideals into concrete action is the job of the laws and reforms the country has implemented in recent years. Chief among them is the sweeping educational reform described in the following pages. Among other things, it calls for bilingual and multicultural education, reversing centuries-old policies that suppressed indigenous languages and forbid their use in schools. The reforms also place much of the responsibility for running the schools in the hands of local communities.

Bolivia has taken steps to decentralize governmental operations. Its mayors are elected by local communities, not appointed by the central government, and local officials set priorities and make spending decisions. Indigenous and other rural people manage more than a third of Bolivia’s 311 municipalities. Over a three-year period, these municipalities carried out some 20,000 projects, including providing medicines and educational materials, and building roads and other basic infrastructure. In 1997, about 75 percent of Bolivia’s public investments were managed at the municipal level.

Bolivia also has put in place new legislation on land ownership to slow down the process of dividing parcels into smaller and smaller holdings. Indigenous communities are receiving titles to land held collectively.

In the past, critics have argued that granting specific rights to indigenous peoples threatens the state and tears at the social fabric. But former Bolivian vice president Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, himself a native Aymara, says the great majority of indigenous people aspire simply to what he calls “harmonic coexistence.” They wish to participate in the development of their nations, he says. “Except for some radical elements, indigenous peoples see their development as a part of national development.”