Acceso usuarios
Robert Smale
From the Mines to the Streets: A Bolivian Activist’s Life is a first-person narrative of Félix Muruchi Poma’s experiences from his birth to an indigenous Aymara family in the Bolivian department of Oruro in 1946 to his participation in Evo Morales Ayma’s symbolic ascension to the presidency in 2006. The book covers Muruchi’s rural childhood; his early move to the mining town of Siglo XX in the department of Potosí; his experiences as a labor leader under military dictatorship, which led to arrest, torture, and exile; and his work as an urban activist in El Alto in the department of La Paz after the restoration of democracy in the 1980s. This last section covers his participation in the anti-neoliberal movements that brought Evo Morales to power. The academics Benjamin Kohl and Linda C. Farthing, co-authors of the book Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance (London: Zed, 2006), edited and translated Muruchi’s story. They first met Muruchi in 1987, but the idea for a collaborative book did not take shape until 2006. Muruchi dictated his contribution on an audio recorder, which when transcribed ran to some 165,000 words. Using that corpus of material, Kohl and Farthing edited and translated the story of Muruchi’s life in close collaboration with the protagonist until the current, compact book emerged.
