Bolivian dress is having its widest international run in decades, from a Paris art foundation to a skate collective in Cochabamba. Bolivia’s own statistics office says the share of the population claiming an indigenous identity has fallen to 38.7 percent, the lowest any census has recorded. Both statements are accurate, and the reason they can hold at the same time sits in the fine print of how the question was asked.
On 28 August 2025, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística released the self-identification results of Bolivia’s 2024 census. Of 11,365,333 inhabitants, 4,302,484 declared themselves part of an indigenous, originary or campesino nation or people, or Afro-Bolivian. INE put that at 38.7 percent, against 41 percent in 2012 and 62 percent in 2001. The coverage that followed, in Bolivia and abroad, read it as a long decline.
