From the Mines to the Streets draws on the life of Felix Muruchi to depict the greater forces at play in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America during the last half of the twentieth century. It traces Felix from his birth in an indigenous family in 1946, just after the abolition of bonded labor, through the next sixty years of Bolivia's turbulent history. As a teenager, Felix followed his father into the tin mines before serving a compulsory year in the military, during which he witnessed the 1964 coup d'etat that plunged the country into eighteen years of military rule. He...