Rebel Cities-David Harvey

RECLAI MING THE CITY FOR ANTI-CAPITALIST STRUGGLE 149threads that has enabled El Alto to overcome its political marginalizationat the national level and take center stage:'49 These were the sortsof bonds "that coalesce at particular moments, such as Cochabamba in2000, the peasant blockades of the altiplano of April and September 2000,February and October of2003 in El Alto and La Paz and January-March2005 in El Alto:'El Alto has become such an important focus for this new politics,Lazar maintains, largely because of the ways in which the sense of citizenshiphas been constituted in the city. This is an important issue because itpresages the possibility of class and indigenous rebellion being organizedthrough solidarities based in common citizenship. Historically, of course,this has always been a central feature of the French revolutionary tradition.In El Alto this sense of belonging and solidarity isconstituted as a mediated relationship between citizen and state that isshaped by the structure of collective civic organization parallel to the stateat zone, citywide and national levels. In 1999, the political party ... lostits hold over these organizations and over the city in general, enablinga more oppositional stance to emerge; this coincided with the fact thatalteiios have been radicalized by increasing economic hardship. The protestsof September and October 2003 and subsequent years derive theirstrength from the domination of these particular political circumstanceswith much more long-standing processes of identification with thecountryside and the construction of a collective sense of self.Lazar goes on to conclude thatcitizenship in the indigenous city of El Alto involves a mix of urban andrural, collectivism and individualism, egalitarianism and hierarchy. Thealternative visions of democracy that are being produced have reinvigoratednational and regional indigenous movements by the ways thatthey combine class-based and nationalist concerns with identity politics,through the contestation over the ownership of the means of socialreproduction and the nature of the state.The two communities that were most salient for her in all of this "arebased on residence at zonal and city levels, and on occupation at the citylevel:''0 It is through the idea of citizenship that agonistic relations in