This dissertation explores, through one case study of the Bolivian El Movimiento Sin Tierra (Landless Peasant Movement-MST), the specific cultural strategies—the discourses, oral tales of Incan ancestors, and Andean customs—that have proved critical to movement building at the regional, national, and international level. The main theoretical thrust of this work is to challenge new social movement theory, which focuses solely on identity-based politics, and thus to complicate reductionist economistic approaches to peasant politics. An identity-based approach fails to see cultural struggles in dynamic relationship to larger political and economic transitions, while a deterministic political-economic analysis often obfuscates the subtle, everyday social interactions critical to shaping oppositional politics at local and regional levels.

Instead, this study emphasizes the concrete historical processes of uneven geographic development that gave rise to new social movements of displaced farmers who rely upon a rich highland indigenous identity as a critical cultural and political resource. Performative oral tales of ancient Andean mythical heroes and their ayllu communities motivate the landless to take part in land occupations and serve as a blueprint or creative cartography for the remapping of communal and productive relations. The transport of oral tales from the local to the regional level defines horizontal, participatory, and democratic spaces of governance. Cultural-political framings such as the ayllu are no longer confined to a particular locale, but over time have become transportable and elastic discourses used to negotiate national-level land policies and redistributive reforms. Finally, this dissertation documents the spectacular backlash to such progressive movements and maps new forms of right-wing resistance in the region. I return to performative politics as an analytic construct and present some of the murky terrain as cultural strategies move from localized movement building to national and international arenas. I end, however, not in focusing on the contradictions of performative politics, but rather on the possibility of globalizing the agrarian struggle.