The United States has been a preferred destination for Bolivian since the 1960s, with a spike in Bolivian in-migration in the mid-1980s, in response to that country’s hyperinflation crisis. The U.S. now hosts the largest Bolivian diaspora outside of Argentina. The community of Bolivian residents is dispersed across several primary locations, including New York, NY; Chicago, IL; Providence, RI; Ontario, CA. However, the largest of these is located in the Washington D.C.-metro region. This makes Bolivians a prominent contributor to the constitution of Latino identity for area residents. 

We might assume that members of a diaspora live in the same communities or neighborhoods. This is not the case, however, for Bolivians in the DMV. For a variety of reasons, including housing costs and employment, Bolivians in our region are widely geographically dispersed across Northern Virginia, D.C., and the Maryland suburbs. As is true of other diasporas, Bolivians have brought with them their cultural heritage and forms of cultural expression, which have become critical dimensions of self-identification. Given the absence of a specific location for this community, the social spaces, cultural activities, and institutions in which Bolivians participate have become particularly crucial for the maintenance of this now well-established diaspora.

This project engages the Bolivian diaspora in the Washington DC-Metro region, using the mobility and multimedia opportunities afforded by American University’s Humanities Truck. In close collaboration with Bolivian counterparts, it explores the several ways “community” is produced for this geographically dispersed, socioeconomically and ethnically diverse group. The Truck will be used as a mobile tool to navigate social networks, organizations, and locations, composing this diaspora, and to collect and curate expressions, representations, performances, and narrations of it by its diverse members, including different generations of Bolivians and Bolivian Americans. In addition, the Truck will be present at multiple annual public events organized by diaspora members to offer an opportunity for them to interact with and to comment upon the project’s multimedia and curated content in ways informing future versions of it. 

With this project, we hope to advance knowledge of how otherwise dispersed diasporic communities are created and maintained, to provide the Bolivian diaspora in the DMV with opportunities to both develop and interrogate its own cultural expression and self-narration as a community, and to promote public awareness of a prominent Latino diasporas in this region, but which has received relatively little attention to date.

This project is led by Principal Investigator Rob Albro, with the support of a year-long fellowship from American University’s Humanities Truck program.