Scenes from El Alto: indigenous youth visions for urban Bolivia

This article contributes to debates on Indigenous planning from the perspective of Latin American urban Indigenous youth. It focuses particularly on Bolivia, a country renowned internationally for promoting indigenous rights, post-neoliberal development, and decolonization in its 2009 constitution. Research to date, however, highlights the gaps between legal rhetoric and planning practice, emphasizing how government authorities continue to reproduce Spanish colonial imaginaries, for example, by considering cities—albeit home to a predominantly young self-identified Indigenous population—as non-Indigenous spaces. In addition to being denied Indigenous rights and experiencing discrimination, urban Indigenous youth currently confront a domestic crisis exacerbated by the global pandemic. They lack socioeconomic opportunities despite high levels of education. Young Indigenous women are also disproportionately affected by intrafamilial violence and sexual harassment. Yet, urban Indigenous youth have not lost hope. Mobilizing “capacity to aspire,” we argue that Indigenous youth represent planners of their own lives who confront hardships with their own future imaginations. We draw on collaborative research with four young Aymara women belonging to distinct Indigenous movements and collective organizations in the city of El Alto, with whom we deployed participatory video-making—a methodology that combines insights from popular education, docu-fiction, and visual anthropology. We demonstrate how Indigenous youth enact their problems and visions by deploying a particular urban Aymara filmmaking aesthetic that, aligning with conceptual work on ch’ixi by Aymara scholar , combines insights from Indigenous and modern urban worlds without ever fully mixing them. Based on a discussion of film scenes, we reflect on how urban youth articulate dreams for antiracist forms of urban cohabitation and challenge inequalities and racialization under urban coloniality. We conclude by exploring how participatory video-making can open possibilities for alternative planning approaches grounded in Indigenous youth visions for more just urban futures.