Of cebras and citizens: Kinesthetic politics in Bolivia’s transport cities

Abstract

Urban planners and foreign donors have long agonized over how politics, movement, and transportation infrastructure collide in the conjoined cities of El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. As displaced tin and silver miners migrated to El Alto in droves during the 1980s and 1990s, they banked on that transportation sector to remake their lives, investing their severance packages in the lumbering “Micro” buses and minibuses that now choke both cities’ streets. La Paz’s patchwork of neighborhoods reflects its own history—and present—of racialized class mobility. This article examines the governance politics of municipal efforts to reform pedestrian and driver behavior in cities—mundane habits of movement that are freighted with political significance. In these urban education campaigns, the ways that residents move through transportation infrastructure comprises an important dimension of what it means to be a good citizen. As youth dressed as Cebras (zebras) playfully instruct residents on responsible urban behavior, they expose the somatic and especially kinesthetic dimensions of urban governance and belonging in the city. This article argues for greater attention to the forms of bodily attunement promoted by urban education campaigns and mobilized by city residents during daily encounters with transportation infrastructure.