Migrants and Citizens: Hygiene Panic and Urban Space in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

Presentation Abstract

The presentation draws on a book chapter published in B. Gustafson and N. Fabricant (eds.) Remapping Bolivia: Territory, Rights, and Resources in a Plurinational State. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press (pp. 96-115), 2011. The paper examines contests over urban public space as a window into deeper understandings of demographic change, informalization, and struggles for social integration in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is a central—and highly contested—urban space that reflects the wider shifts in power, identity, and control of resources underway in contemporary Bolivia. Santa Cruz has in the past half century transformed from a remote frontier town to the center of the country’s major production zone. It has overtaken La Paz as Bolivia’s financial capital and most important economic pole, and its political influence is growing. Santa Cruz is also the flashpoint of a regionalist movement, supported by the recent intensification of a strong place-based identity politics. These dynamics make it a productive setting for research into social and institutional responses to migration, demographic change, and intercultural integration.

This paper considers how migrant insertion into the local economy, in particular the informal economy, has led to conflicts over public space in Santa Cruz. Recent shifts in the local economy stemming from in-migration and informalization are producing specific patterns of urban growth and altering the built landscape. After examining these dynamics, the author turns to growing conflicts over public space and, in reaction, local planning policies to reorganize market networks. His aim is to explore how competing understandings of public space reflect unresolved tensions over urban expansion and demographic change. He suggests that the ongoing relations between internal migrants and their hosts serve to circulate ideas about ethnicity, region, and “us” versus “them” in Bolivia. Urban space in this context is more than a neutral background but rather plays a central role in the interaction, integration and segregation of urban society.

Biographical note

Joshua Kirshner is a lecturer in Human Geography at Rhodes University. He grew up in Nashville, TN (USA) and received a PhD in city and regional planning from Cornell University in 2009. His doctoral research focused on internal migration, social integration, and regional politics in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. Joshua Kirshner has conducted research on various aspects of migration and migrant communities, including community responses to xenophobia in South Africa and Latin American immigrant workers, labour relations and trade unions in Los Angeles, CA and Boston, MA.