Indigenous Politics in El Alto: Rethinking Decolonial State Transformation in Bolivia

Latin America's Pink Tide governments promised to decolonise the state. In Bolivia, the 2009 Constitution reconstituted the republic as a Plurinational State, committing it to Indigenous self-government and to dismantling the colonial relations embedded in the neoliberal orders. A decade later, the crisis of 2019 exposed how partial that commitment had been.

This dissertation asks what the divergence between two decolonial frameworks, Arturo Escobar's pluriverse and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's ch'ixi, reveals about Bolivia's plurinational transformation between 2009 and 2019. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, this study traces the reorganisation of local political authority from the neoliberal period all the way through the 2019 crisis.

The analysis shows that plurinational reform replicates neoliberal gatekeeping where El Alto’s social organisations wield informal municipality power without formal legal authority. Furthermore, decolonisation advances nonlinearly through the cyclical daily and embodied practices of resistance. Lastly, by applying two decolonial frameworks in dialogue, the study demonstrates their object-dependency. Ultimately, the research treats their divergences as a productive analytical tool.