Equal Footing: Interview with a vampire

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Interview with a vampire

Virtually every day, one or more of our interview subjects postpones or just doesn't show (despite the standard 2-3 confirmation phone calls that precede each interview). Usually, their excuses for bailing are lame, but today we had a good one. Our final interviewee was right where he was supposed to be at the appointed hour... but we couldn't get to him because the building was locked down in a three-way stand-off among riot police, our interviewee's allies who had barricaded themselves inside, and a garrot of striking sanitation workers encircling the building with placards denouncing our interview subject (by name, in 2,000-point font) as an "Enemigo de los Trabajadores, Traidor, Chupa Sangre" ("Enemy of the Workers, Traitor, and Blood Sucker").

Said Nicole: "Maybe this isn't the best day to interview him."

Hopefully we'll interview the vampire tomorrow, but aside from him we are basically done with our Bolivian interviews, and we head for Peru on Saturday.

Much to my delight, we are actually already done typing up our notes on all 35 interviews, thanks partly to Nicole's unnatural desire to always be caught up on everything, and also thanks to GoogleDocs, which has made the entire process efficient, allowing me, Nicole, and César to simultaneously work on the same unified document for each interview, even now that César is back in Peru.

Nicole also had her first completely solo interviews today, as we had (intentionally) double-booked each interview time slot so we could cover more ground. One of the premises of this project is that Nicole is here not principally to learn (though she does that too!), but rather to contribute. And sure enough, we are able to cover far more ground, far faster.

It's been great working with James Lerager (Jaime) this week. We knew it would be awkward bringing his mega-camera into suspicion-laden environments, but his engaging style (and his photo of him chilling with Evo Morales) won over basically everybody. Tonight Jaime had prints made of 30 or so of the portraits he took, and tomorrow we'll deliver these as parting gifts to most of the people we interviewed. The photos look great and we will try our best to get some of them posted tomorrow.

Buenas noches,
Pablo

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The Project

Women on the Frontlines:

Resource Wars, Popular Movements, and Gender Dynamics in Bolivia and Ecuador

During the last decade, Bolivia and Ecuador have been marked by “resource wars” in which mass mobilizations have challenged the neoliberal privatization of resources such as water, land, petroleum, and natural gas. In the past two years, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa have been critical of privatization, aligning themselves with the goals of popular movements. Increasingly, national political agendas are set by mobilized popular movements that aim to redirect control over resources from private multinational corporations to alternate forms of local control. For Bolivia and Ecuador, these resource wars thus mark fundamental shifts in concepts of national sovereignty and popular participation in democratic processes.

Yet the specific role of women leaders within these movements has been largely overlooked. How have women leaders shaped the struggles of these popular movements? Internally, does female leadership yield qualitatively distinct decisions about movement governance and strategy? And externally, does the gender of leaders shape interactions with government and the success of demands?

The research project, born out of a collaboration between Macalester College Political Science/Latin American Studies Professor Paul Dosh and student Nicole Kligerman ’10, intends to answer these questions to explore the changing role of women within the political sphere. Our research will primarily be conducted in La Paz/El Alto, Bolivia and Quito, Ecuador.