This dissertation examines the role of peasants, the state, and military actors in negotiating rule amidst rural transformations wrought by revolution and agrarian reform in the aftermath of Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution. The Revolution introduced three key reforms: universal suffrage, nationalization of mining enterprises, and agrarian reform. Through agrarian reform, unionized peasants became essential to the negotiation of rule and remained so for two decades. State agents sought to subordinate and control peasant actors through patron-client linkages that stretched from the level of the national government into local provinces. In the important test case of the Valle Alto of Cochabamba, however, peasants’ actions demonstrated that subordination to the state was, at best, incomplete. Led by charismatic and ambitious dirigentes, peasants vacillated between autonomous action and acquiescence to state agents, retaining significant control over the Valle Alto’s geography of power, in part through the local use of political violence. Indeed, violent conflict among peasants—best exemplified by a five-year civil war in the early 1960s—illustrated the limits of state power. The revolutionary state’s impotence manifested in the 1964 transition to military rule, which garnered broad popular support from the Valle Alto peasants. Scholars have long described the Bolivian revolutionary project as a homogenizing and subordinating force, particularly for peasant communities. This dissertation, however, positions the Valle Alto region—crucial precisely because state networks were reputed to have been so powerful and developed there—more subtly. Known as a stronghold of state cooptation of peasants but also as the cradle of revolutionary peasant politics, the paradox of the Valle Alto was that state power fell far short of a directive role, even as local relationships with state actors proved important to negotiating rule and legitimacy successfully at both the local and national levels. Peasants retained degrees of autonomy in their relationship with the state, carving out space for local power even as state actors sought to coopt their politics. Peasants and their leaders sought to link their political project with the revolutionary state, and consciously engaged subsequent military states, despite clear signs that state agents sought to control their politics.