Inca Princesses with Tanned Skin: Constructing the New Bolivian Entrepreneurs

This paper considers how the Christian microfinance organization Kiva and its “lending partners” in Bolivia have changed the way urban Altiplano women construct themselves as deserving entrepreneurial subjects. Drawing on both ethnographic accounts and visual and textual analysis, as well as the insights of Lamia Karim and other chroniclers of gender and microfinance, it engages the following questions: How do Kiva’s debtors mobilize stoic photos to convey their worthiness to potential creditors? Why (and whence) the ubiquitous claims that loan applicants are Inca or Aymara princesses, often with “tanned skin” and “juicy fruit lips”? What is the nature of the erotic and sentimental connections that inspire lenders, often men in the global North, to choose these Bolivian women over other borrowers? When do these lending mechanisms replace existing structures of communal mutual aid, and when do they sit uneasily alongside them? What do these women erase about their own histories and traditions of entrepreneurial activity in order to be seen as ancient princesses and naïve novice-businesswomen? This preliminary presentation will attempt to think through these performances by female Bolivian debtors-in-waiting, as well as Kiva’s exoticizing visual and textual claims, in relation to the postfeminist positioning of women and girls as high-return investments within global capitalism.