Two Hundred Years of Gendered Nation-Making in Bolivia

One morning in September 2009, looking for female municipal councilors to interview for a project about the constraints of political participation in terms of gender, I and a fellow researcher were waiting for the vice mayor of El Alto in Bolivia to give us an interview. The ordinary mayor was out of town. Since the vice mayor was difficult to catch we waited for „La Honorable‟ (the honorable), as she was called by her colleagues, in her office at the municipality. We wondered who she was, as none of us had met her before. We imagined that she would be a typical middle-aged well-educated mestizo woman, but Antonia Rodriguez turned out to be a woman of Aymara background with experience from Bolivian social movements who lived in one of El Alto‟s more established barrios called 10 de Mayo. When she finally turned up, in order to accommodate us to her strict schedule, she invited us to go with her in her car to a meeting at the headquarter of the Bolivian Air Force in El Alto, to interview her in the car and possibly later on be able to get back to the mayor‟s office for eventually continuing our interview. When we arrived at the meeting it had already started.