So it goes.

Uyuni, Potosí, and on to Sucre – this was my weekend, seeing the natural wonders, outdated colonial power, and the way memories of wealth and influence are situated in the crevices of modern-day Bolivia.

It is hard, especially after the last days of travel, to look at Bolivia today without remembering the Bolivia of the past: Casa Nacional de la Moneda, Casa de la Liberdad, and the mountain of Potosí lingering over the city like a fondly remembered friend, all reminders of what Bolivia was, or maybe, what Bolivia should have been.

What should have Bolivia been?

This question has stayed with me since our tour of Casa Nacional de la Moneda in Potosí – my, what incredible and unimaginable wealth. Silver that could have built a bridge from here to Madrid. Silver that, maybe, was stolen by the Spanish. Silver that could have been.

Like Thomas, I want to write about colonialism because how do I even begin to unravel Bolivia’s history and its today without wrestling with the Spanish conquest, its remnants, and its consequences? Just open Cambio and you will see it: Bolivia suffering from the defects of colonialism, like a broken leg that never fully healed or open sores that keep oozing, never to fully recover.

I stood in front of golden monuments, wealth like I have never seen before, and then I walked outside, looking down the street to the half-built brick shanty houses leading the way toward the mountain of Potosí, where generation-after-generation enter the mines to toil away until their inevitable death sentences. They mine the same mountain that supported the Spanish empire; however, they will never construct gold-leafed shrines to the Virgin Mary.

It is impossible to separate the past from the present, and this brings so many questions:

How do you move forward when what should have brought you prosperity was exploited? How do you move forward when it was your people who were exploited?

How do you construct a national identity with so many competing factors? How do you welcome the Amaryan woman alongside the distant granddaughter of an ancient Bolivian elite?

How do you continue to sell your natural riches for so cheap, bringing wealth to the West while only depleting your own country of all it has to offer?

It seems so simple to prescribe solutions from inside a university classroom, but development is so difficult. It is messy and complex, tainted by the woes of history and the struggles of today. And I still have not figured out any answers, only that it is impossible to separate progress and community/economic/social development from the injustices of the past. In Bolivia, today, this looks a lot like kicking out imperialist powers and investing in technology, but is that all, or even what should be done? 

Bolivia's distaste and distrust for the West and modern-day colonialism is easily justifiable and understandably so; however, development is difficult without a team. Finding a middle ground between desire to move forward and mourning the past, as well as continued forging of paths toward development without succumbing to an unattainable and look-a-like replica of the West, is necessary. Additionally, in a globalized world, both winners and losers exist -- is it fair to think that Bolivia could ever even begin to scrape their fingers along the bottom rung of the ladder, much less begin to climb?  

I do not know, but so it goes. And so we will see.