How to Respond to a Political Slur: Contestatory Identity Positioning in a Bolivian Meme Cycle

(By Anita Zandstra, guest author) | Lea la entrada de blog en español

“I am rubber and you are glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”

– American playground chant

Despite the glib tone of the mantra above, words can be extremely harmful. This is true not only on the schoolyard and playground, but also in politics. However, the very act of using this saying reveals a kernel of truth: there are ways to respond to an attack, insult, or slur—often using humor—that can deflect criticism from oneself while making the attacker look bad. This political strategy has been used countless times worldwide, but I focus my discussion here on a recent example from Bolivian right/left politics: the “Croaceños” memes, which circulated among Bolivian social media users in November 2022.

Above: Screenshot of a TikTok. The text reads, “You are Bolivian but were born in Santa Cruz, so you have double nationality. Let’s go Croatia, dammit!”

Above: In a photo posted to Facebook in late 2022, spectators are shown wearing “Croaceños” shirts at the World Cup in Qatar.

The viral rise of the “Croaceño”

In late 2022, amid anti-government protests that had immobilized Santa Cruz, Bolivia—the country’s most prosperous region and seat of the opposition to the Bolivian government—images and videos like the ones above flooded social media, gaining enough attention that they appeared in news media reports. The format of these humorous memes varied, but they were united by the fact that they announced a new hybrid identity: the “Croaceños,” a fusion of the Spanish words croatas (“Croatians”) and cruceños, or residents of Santa Cruz. But what does a Balkan nationality have to do with Bolivians from Santa Cruz.

This juxtaposition of an Eastern European nationality and a regional identifier from South America points to longstanding fractures in Bolivian society that run along political, regional, and ethnic lines. In this context, the Croaceños memes help to construct what I call a contestatory identity position that people from Santa Cruz mobilize in ongoing political debates. This identity position is “contestatory” in two senses:

• First, it responds to an opponent’s discourse (as in contestar, the Spanish verb for “to answer or respond”). 
• Second, it allows a social group to dispute, or contest, another group’s characterization of it.

You might be wondering: are the memes responding to the presence of actual Croatians in Bolivia generally and/or Santa Cruz specifically? The answer is: yes and no, and the dynamics are complicated.

Bolivians often explain regional contrasts between people from the Bolivian lowlands (where Santa Cruz is located) and the country’s Andean highlands (including La Paz, seat of the national government) in terms of racial or ethnic difference, as well as political affiliation. Bolivians commonly contrast these two regions, envisioning highlanders as Indigenous people who support the Movimiento al Socialismo (“Movement to Socialism,” or MAS) party, and lowlanders as white or of mixed European and Indigenous heritage and as members of the opposition. 

In recent decades, Santa Cruz has become Bolivia’s wealthiest department (a political unit similar to a state or province). It is also the seat of opposition to the MAS party, which has governed Bolivia since 2006 (with the exception of a brief transitional government led by the opposition in 2019–20). 

Meanwhile, tensions have grown between the Bolivian political left and right, partly crystallizing in the national government’s opposition to movements for Santa Cruz’s greater regional autonomy or its outright independence. The Bolivian political left, whose base of support is in the highlands, is associated with socialist policies and with highlands Indigenous identities. In contrast, supporters of the political right are assumed to be Bolivian lowlanders who favor neoliberal policies and who are white or of mixed European and lowlands Indigenous heritage. The result has been deep polarization, with political divisions frequently mapped onto regional and racial/ethnic differences.

The spark for the Croaceños memes was a statement made in November 2022 by Juan Carlos Huarachi, executive secretary of Bolivia’s chief trade union federation and a prominent supporter of the MAS party. In a press conference, surrounded by other union leaders, Huarachi expressed these leaders’ indignation at the “Croatians” and “Yugoslavians” who acted like they owned Santa Cruz and promoted separatism from the rest of Bolivia.

In his statement, Huarachi gave three Cruceño political leaders 72 hours to leave the country, calling them “sons of Croatians” and accusing them of seeking to divide Bolivia. Importantly, none of the men called out by Huarachi are known to be of Croatian descent. However, other prominent Santa Cruz residents are, including Branko Marinkovic, a former president of Santa Cruz’s Civic Committee. The families of some of these Bolivians of Croatian heritage had emigrated to Santa Cruz and other parts of Bolivia after World War II; some of them and their descendants became leaders of local industry and politics.

Starting with the 2005 presidential victory of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first president to claim Indigenous descent (Morales identifies as a member of the Aymara Indigenous nation), the MAS party has framed its own leadership as a victory for Indigenous Bolivians. Party leaders and sympathizers have reframed indigeneity as the legitimate basis for Bolivia identity, calling opponents on the political right “oligarchs” and “foreigners.”  Left-leaning media outlets in Bolivia and other Latin American countries have published editorials linking the presence of Croatians in Bolivia with the alleged operations of fascists and separatists, highlighting not only Croatian descendants’ elite status, but also their whiteness or Europeanness.

Against the backdrop of the Santa Cruz-based public protests of 2022, Huarachi’s statement takes up a longstanding discourse of foreignness in what appears to have been an effort to energize the MAS party’s base of support and to encourage others (perhaps including ordinary, non-elite residents of Santa Cruz) to see their civic leaders as foreigners who did not truly represent them. 

This backfired, however. By the next day, citizens of Santa Cruz were proudly appropriating Huarachi’s political slur for their own purposes, producing memes like those below, both of which circulated on Bolivian social media in late 2022. The top image—a text meme with white letters on a green background—connects Huarachi’s statement about Croatians in Santa Cruz to the FIFA World Cup, which was taking place at the same time. Since Bolivia’s national team had not qualified, this meme invites people from Santa Cruz to cheer for the Croatian team instead. 

Another type of meme, consisting of an edited photograph, appears second. Apparently inspired by the Croaceños memes, an enterprising taxi driver had placed a sign on his windshield with the words “Departing for Santa Croacia.” A green circle around the sign highlights this word play for the enjoyment of other social media users.

Above: An image with white text on a green background. Text reads, “The good think about being a Cruceño is that Santa Cruz [unlike the rest of Bolivia] will be represented at the World Cup. Go Croatia!”

Above: A Santa Cruz trufi, or shared taxi with a fixed route, lists its destination as “Santa Croacia.”

Other memes included guides to “updating” one’s last name by adding a Croatian suffix, as well as suggestions that anyone—even a dog—could become a Croaceño. Local entrepreneurs lost no time in producing “Croaceños” soccer jerseys that could be made to order, with a “Croatianized” version of the purchaser’s surname on the back.

Above left: A social media post lists a series of “updated Croatian last names,” consisting of Hispanic last names such as those commonly found among Santa Cruz residents, plus the Croatian patronymic suffix -ić or -vić.

Above right: A meme pictures a dog wearing a Croatian necktie. The caption, which includes a laughing emoji and a picture of the Croatian flag, reads: “Even Fido-vich is now feeling like a Croaceño, long live Santa Croacia.”

Through the creation and circulation of memes like these, Santa Cruz residents responded to a political attack by adopting an identity position that responded to a political provocation by contesting its logic. The Croaceños memes effectively deflected Huarachi’s criticism of “foreign influence” in Santa Cruz by framing it as a comic incongruity, aiming in turn to make Huarachi (and others who held similar beliefs) look ridiculous.

At the same time, by creating the identity category of “Croaceños,” the memes turned what had been a barb aimed at specific political leaders from Santa Cruz into an attack on all Cruceños, inviting social media users to align with the leaders that Huarachi had singled out for criticism and inviting broader sympathy for their political cause. The creation of a hashtag aided in online community-building, as social media users from Santa Cruz used #croaceños to express alignment and invoke what the linguists Michele Zappavigna and J.R. Martin call a “community of feeling” around a common stance on this political issue.

Above: Screenshot showing results for the hashtag #croaceños on TikTok in early 2023.

Together, individual social media posts, media reports on the Croaceños phenomenon, and quasi-branded merchandise coalesced into a larger narrative about social identity. The result was a horizontal, identity-based movement arising out of shared grievances and claims, not unlike the series of tweets about contesting the erasure of Black Muslim identities studied by linguistic anthropologist Mariam Durrani (2021).

Contestatory Identity Positioning from a Global Perspective

The dynamics that led to the creation of the Croaceños memes are specific to Bolivia in the early 21st century. However, contestatory identity positioning is a recurrent theme in politics worldwide—particularly in contexts characterized by polarization and where narratives of grievance are available for use by political parties or movements. 

One recent example comes from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Candidate Hillary Clinton made controversial statements about supporters of opponent Donald Trump belonging to a “basket of deplorables,” opposing them to other conservatives who, for her, did not align with Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic stances. Although intended as a divide-and-conquer strategy to break up the Republican vote, Clinton’s remarks were gleefully taken up by Trump and his supporters, who took them as evidence that Clinton—like other liberals—was out of touch with average Americans. “Proud deplorables” hats and t-shirts soon began appearing at Trump rallies, and the Trump campaign later celebrated his presidential victory by holding a “Deplora-Ball.”

More recently, U.S. progressives have tried the same tactic, responding to Trumpian accusations that liberals are delicate “snowflakes” by responding, “Damn right we’re snowflakes. And winter is coming!”

Of course, contestatory identity positioning is not limited to the 21st century. A similar but much earlier instance of contestatory identity positioning is American colonists’ proud adoption of the term “Yankee,” originally an insult applied to them by the British.

Nor has contestatory identity positioning served political purposes only in the Americas. In the late 1940s, after a Labour Party minister characterized Tory leaders as “lower than vermin,” young members of Britain’s Conservative Party founded the “Vermin Club,”  choosing a rat as its logo. Members of the Vermin Club could rise in rank from “vile” to “very vile” by recruiting ever-larger numbers of new party members. (An early member was Margaret Thatcher, who rose through the club’s ranks to become a “Chief Rat.”) 

As these examples show, one response to a political attack that has proven effective both over time and in a range of sociopolitical contexts is to deflect a political slur, often in humorous ways. The issuer of the slur is made to look ridiculous, while the insult itself becomes a matter of indifference (as in the old playground chant “I am rubber, you are glue”)—or even a badge of pride. 

Punching Down, Punching Up, or Mutual Punching?

In the Croaceños case specifically, humorous memes can be an effective way for publics to engage with serious political issues, including—as in the Croaceños case—the construction of a contestatory identity position in response to a political attack. It is no accident that humor is often involved in contestatory identity positioning. Humor can be used by marginalized groups to “punch up” (Nabea 2021) against hegemonic discourse, as well as for more powerful groups to “punch down” against groups who are socially marginalized. Memes fit themselves to this purpose particularly well given their status as both political artifacts and humorous artifacts, as linguistic anthropologist Wee Yang Soh (2020) has argued.

Some questions remain unanswered. One interesting aspect of the Croaceños case is that commentators who positioned themselves as aligning with both sides of the political spectrum—MAS party sympathizers on the one hand, and people from Santa Cruz who reject the party’s leadership on the other—claim status as the oppressed party, making it difficult to decide whether the memes constitute a case of punching up or punching down. This leads me to ask: how can the “punching up/down” dichotomy help us better understand some contexts, and what might it obscure or erase in the process?

The Croaceños case reminds us that identity is not fixed and predetermined but is socially constructed, contingent (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), and responsive to changing political conditions. This meme cycle also highlights the extent to which identification (the construction of “who I am/we are”) is carried out in tandem with differentiation (“who others are, and we are not”). Finally, in the Croaceños case, both the political left (in this case, the governing MAS party) and the right (opponents in Santa Cruz) mobilized narratives involving social identity to bolster their respective positions. As such, these memes serve as a reminder of the power of narratives in shaping political discourse, regardless of political affiliation.

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Anita Zandstra is a doctoral candidate in Spanish at Western Michigan University. Her research centers on humorous performances of social identities and social difference in Bolivian popular media.