ABSTRACT
In the towns and cities of Bolivia, collective memories lurk in people's minds of the unpredictable violence of the Andean peasants when they take action against their oppressors. Everyone has anecdotes to tell - uprisings, the sieges of cities and towns, murders, cannibalism. Indians are stereotyped in the structure of everyday conversation as brutos, salvajes, at the same time as they are referred to more sentimentally by terms of endearment: indiecito, caserito, muy bueno. They are feared but also patronized. By contrast, in the Indian communities that I know it is not so much the physical force used by the townspeople, the traders, and the landowners that is recounted as the acts of flagrant injustice, often protected by the law, by which they have been cheated and robbed time and again of their land, their livestock, and produce.
