This dissertation examines the extension of public health programs into the countryside following the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution, which put the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement, MNR) into power. Historical studies of the Bolivian Revolution have focused on its political and economic agenda, mainly agrarian reform, nationalization of the mining industry, and granting of universal suffrage to formerly disenfranchised populations. However, public health was as important to the revolutionary government's plan for political, economic, and cultural consolidation as these well-explored topics. Though public health programs focused on maternal and infant health, vaccinations, and disease control projects, I argue they were designed to consolidate and institutionalize the revolution, boost a faltering economy, and foster revolutionary nationalism. Public health provides a lens for a cultural analysis of the MNR's political, economic, and social agenda and reveals the gender and racial dynamics of the revolutionary state formation process. Health campaigns in Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s were linked to hierarchies of gender, race, and citizenship; the MNR thought public health programs would eradicate a perceived impediment to Bolivia's progress by transforming rural living conditions, linking indigenous communities to the national government, and producing a healthy citizenry and workforce.

Local, national, and international levels of analysis provide a multifaceted understanding of the negotiation of health, citizenship, and identity during the revolutionary period and show that health campaigns were created and contested in multiple political and cultural arenas. Internationally, the MNR relied on funding and personnel from the United States and incorporated international public health rhetoric into its own campaigns. At the national level, government officials and doctors conjoined revolutionary rhetoric and public health programs. Local communities articulated their own version of this rhetoric to demand the government fulfill its revolutionary promises by providing health services. Therefore, public health provides a framework for examining social relations, identity formation, and the contestation of power in modern Bolivia.