Colonial Specters: The Extramuro, History, Memory, and Urbanization in La Paz, Bolivia, 1900-1947

This essay examines the racialization of space and the role of memory in the twentieth-century urbanization of La Paz, Bolivia. Historical memory linked particular races to specific spaces; this in turn helped determine spending on infrastructure, hygiene, and other urban projects. The essay analyzes the ways in which the extramuro (outside the walls of the city) was marked as the place for undesirable, but necessary elements of the city, and as the point of origin for the filth and a whole host of diseases within the city. The relationship between La Paz and the discourses on indígenas in public space in the twentieth century takes center stage: these discourses marked indígenas as undesirable and yet redeemable. This essay analyzes the close connection between the construction of race and the urbanization of that same space. I conclude by reassessing the links between race, space, and memory in Bolivia.