Rasmussen, Nika. Embodied citizenship in the making: Bolivian urban youth at the crossroads of social hierarchies. 243 pp., bibliogr. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2021

Nika Rasmussen's book explores how changing regimes of citizenship have been experienced by young people in the private and public spaces of urban Bolivian life during the government of Evo Morales (2006-19). Rasmussen conveys how the proceso de cambio (the slogan Morales's government used to describe their programme for government which put decolonization at the forefront) was embodied by teenagers in their daily lives. The book attempts to make comparisons between the experiences of plurinational citizenship for young people in the cities of La Paz and neighbouring El Alto, but is overwhelmingly written through the lens of ethnographic data that Rasmussen collected through fieldwork research (participant observation and interviews) with teenagers (mostly aged 16+) in a youth centre in El Alto. Rasmussen states that she was interested in how political changes which have sought directly to challenge racism and discrimination might impinge on young people's relationship to their own bodies. In exploring the relationship between national political changes and their effect on individual Bolivians, she captures many of the contradictions in the polices and rhetoric of Morales's government. Rhetorically, Evo Morales and his government claimed to represent el pueblo (the people), and the refunding of the state through its 2009 constitution as a plurinational state acknowledged the heterogeneity of the Bolivian people. Through his brown skin and humble origins, Morales himself embodied the proceso de cambio. However, as Rasmussen discusses in the book, despite decolonization supposedly including depatriarcalization, national-level politicians, including Morales himself, reinforced a masculine vision of citizenship and political participation through the public displays of machismo. She finds the young men and women in the youth centre rejecting and attempting to change rigid gender norms and dynamics but being met with resistance at home and school. She argues that these changing attitudes are citizenship practices because they influence how young people feel they belong in society. The book demonstrates a clear nexus between class, race, and geography in Bolivia. Meaning-making and belonging, Rasmussen argues, are shaped in relation to place. The brown-skinned, working-class Alteños are constructed as further away from embodied whiteness (and the connotations of attractiveness, and higher wealth and class) than youngsters living in La Paz, the city connected to El Alto by cable car. Family names typical in El Alto are regarded as less prestigious than those of the families in La Paz, and Rasmussen finds that this feeds through to young people's self-esteem and their ideas (which they acquire from their parents), or who they should aspire to date and marry. While she describes the proceso de cambio coming to be embodied in the cholita, an urban-based woman with indigenous roots identifiable through her pollera (a layered, pleated skirt), young people still associated female beauty with the white woman around which the nation-building project had been constructed in twentieth-century Bolivia. This is highlighted when an Alteño boy is laughed at by his peers for describing his ideal partner as a cholita. Embodied citizenship successfully conveys the practical difficulties of real decolonization. Bolivians were promised change, but structures don't change overnight. The young people with whom Rasmussen conducted research are growing up at a time of flux in the meaning of Bolivian nationhood and citizenship, and find their own subjectivities being forged by struggles against the norms of their parents regarding how their children should behave to fit in with perceived expectations around gender and sexuality and their racial-class position in society. The book also highlights the difficulties individual young people face in forging a path for themselves within these social structures. For example, one boy studying for a prestigious career describes how he feels he is in the wrong body to achieve his career aims. In showing how the macro politics of society are reproduced in the micro spaces of the home, school, and in everyday social relations, the book achieves its aim of showing how nation-making processes are bodily reproduced. As an ethnographic monograph describing how belonging is experienced and negotiated in the intimate spaces of everyday life, it could be read alongside Andew Canessa's Intimate Indigeneities: race, sex, and history in the small spaces of Andean life (Duke University Press, 2012), which focuses on rural life in the plurinational state. It is a worthwhile contribution to studies of twenty-first-century Bolivia, and will be of interest to researchers studying belonging, nation-making, and racial geographies.