"Cebritas" Educadores Urbanos: How Bolivia's Zebra Traffic Directors are Shaping Infrastructural Citizenship

The Bolivian Educadores Urbanos Cebras, characterized by its volunteers dressing up in felt Zebra suits and taking to the streets to conduct traffic, reveals the importance of positive values in responding to urban issues and provides insight into the ground level interpersonal interactions that create a sense of citizenship and community. The program, which exists in its origin city in La Paz and has expanded to Sucre and Tarija, originated as a response to the population’s disregard for clearing crosswalks and respecting pedestrians. In its approach to addressing street-level mobility issues through human to human (or cebra) non-fear-based and non-punitive methodology, the program reveals the role of teaching empathy and citizenship in creating order in the cities’ urban centers. Through this, the program ends up defining what issues are pertinent to a proper citizenship and relationship with the urban environment. Furthermore, they shape people’s relationship to the urban environment through support members of their cohorts. Using archival sources and semi-structured interviews with Cebras, program organizers, and related officials, this project aims to answer the question: How do the methods of the Educadores Urbanos differ from those typically associated with norm enforcement, particularly traffic enforcement, and how do these methods reflect the perceived disorder of the city and the municipal government’s vision of order in public spaces? How in turn do they affect definitions of and approaches to citizenship through day to day interactions with citizens and support of their volunteers?