Women Loan Makers in Early 20th-Century Bolivia: Capital, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Liberal Marketplace of La Paz

This paper examines how debt relationships in the expanding liberal economy of early twentieth century Bolivia shaped ethnic relations, gender relations, and emerging collectives like urban artisans. Far from an activity relegated to the legal shadows or to informality, loan making between individuals, including women, fit clearly within Bolivian civil codes and formed part of a centuries-old set of practices in the region. However, the pressures of the emerging liberal economy and legal changes that facilitated the commodification of indigenous community lands altered these historical dynamics. The changes at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth increased both the demand for cash and credit and the number of men and women able to provide both, while they also took legalized debt relations into sub-urban indigenous communities in ways that appear to have been new. I examine court cases from La Paz related to debts in order to identify both the kinds of relationships that developed in the Bolivian liberal marketplace, and the tensions and conflicts created by the expansion of loan making. While these practices appear to have been common among nearly all classes and genders, female merchants emerged at the start of the twentieth century as particularly important ‘popular banks’ for working class and indigenous migrants to the cities of the altiplano. Their roles as increasingly important gate-keepers to the market not only redefined their own positions within Paceño society, but also placed them at the center of important social and political changes and conflicts in early twentieth century Bolivia.