Notes for a History of Miscegenation in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia

Abstract

The article aims to understand the debates that took place on miscegenation on Santa Cruz. Attempt to relate them with the political context, trying to understand the power that history and racial ideas could have at the time of legitimizing or reviling political positions, own and others, as part of the regionalist struggle with the central state. It focus in two periods, one during the first half of the 20th Century when Santa Cruz intellectuals claim the Hispanic blood purity of the city population, and the other, on the second half, when they began to recognize positive qualities of the mixture of Spanish descendants and Eastern Bolivian lowland indigenous.