The hidden side of the Gran Poder

June 21st marked the 5,519th annual celebration of Aymara New Year, and an estimated 50,000 participants migrated to the Tiwanaku ruins for a freezing all-nighter of fun and timeless tradition. People began arriving at the ruins that lie about two hours outside of La Paz around 6pm in the evening, but micros and taxis bused excited locals and tourists there well into the wee hours of the morning – no one wanted to miss the festivities and abundance of alcohol that the night promised. All down the normally quiet streets of the small town that surrounds Tiwanaku, vendors bartered the prices of api for the hungry, gloves for the unprepared, and soy burgers for the hippies.

While live Andean music and the occasional firework were present from the get-go, the real ceremony begins around one in the morning and builds and builds until the pinnacle of the Aymaran New Year - ‘Wilkakuti’ or ‘return of the sun’ in Aymara.

For those unfamiliar with the Aymara, they are an ancient, indigenous people previously conquered by the Incas. They have lived in Bolivia for the past 2,000 years and remain the country’s largest pre-Hispanic ethnic group. The Aymara are historically an agricultural people and, therefore, placed their New Year on the Winter Solstice (the coldest, darkest night of the year). Praying and giving offerings of coca, alcohol, and a llama to Pachamama until sunrise on the most miserably cold night of the year entices Tata Inti, the sun god, to give the farmers a good harvest that year.

While the traditions are still taken quite seriously, the modern day celebration is attended mainly by the younger population and is more of party than a night of sacrifice. One participant of Aymara descent said that she comes every year to dance through the whole night, not to see shamans do their thing. Nonetheless, right before first light, Yatiris, Aymara traditional healers, still pour their offerings of alcohol on the ground as they chant “Jallalla” (“cheers to mother earth”), and a llama is sacrificed, its blood splashing on those seeking luck. The folds of the llama’s heart are believed to tell the future for those who know how to read them, but most seem to be having too much fun to worry about what the bloody mess has to tell them. Maybe if someone had taken the time to see the future for the festival itself they would have seen the controversy it would face. When Aymara New Year was declared a national holiday in 2009 by President Evo Morales, it did two things: ballooned up the celebration and turned it into a hot-button issue. More and more vendors and entertainers come out and the crowds have quadrupled in size. One vendor said that she is glad it’s an official holiday because it spreads the Aymara culture to the rest of the country. However, there are two sides to absolutely everything and while it seems silly to protest a holiday, those who dispute the holiday have some good points.

One of their principle arguments comes from a feeling of misrepresentation of the non-Aymara citizens of Bolivia. President Evo is a former Aymara coca farmer, and since he has assumed his office he has taken many steps to forward the visibility of Bolivia’s indigenous people, namely the Aymara. While this is almost universally recognized as good thing, Bolivia’s constitution still clearly defines the country as “plurinational.” So imposing an Aymara holiday on non-Aymara citizens does not go down so well when there are 36 other indigenous groups with their own festivals that remain undeclared. Mostly people just do not like seeing their President play favorites, which some call discrimination.

There are also many arguments against the legitimacy of the holiday as a whole. Though this is supposed to the 5,519th time Aymara New Year has been celebrated, there is very little historical evidence about the event before the arrival of the Spanish a mere 450-odd years ago. Others explain the lack of evidence by suggesting that Aymara New Year was engendered from the Incan festival of Inti Raymi (the sun god). Incan Emperor Pachacutec imposed the celebration on all Incan and conquered people in the 16th century. Furthermore, when the Spanish arrived, they made no record of an Aymara New Year, but did write about Inti Raymi. Now there would be nothing wrong with celebrating Inti Raymi here in Bolivia, nothing wrong with calling it Aymara New Year, either. But if it is going to be declared a national holiday, it should at least be a genuine historical day. It’s a bit much to impose an Aymara holiday on non-Aymara if said holiday is only a celebrated because the Incas imposed it on the Aymara to begin with. Get all that?

The third and possibly most reasonable argument deals with the location of the celebration: the Tiwanaku ruins. They provide an amazing setting for the night’s mystic activities, but Tiwanaku had its own inhabitants once upon a time, and they weren’t Aymara. They are simply known as ’the people of Tiwanaku’. They had no written language and so very little is known about them, but most historians and anthropologists consider them quite separate from the Aymara. Despite this wellknown fact, the ruins are subject to vandalism and all of the unavoidable damage that the presence of 50,000 Aymara partiers inevitably leads to. The ruins are actually under threat of losing their status as a world heritage site because of amount of deterioration it’s under gone in the past decade.

Although these concerns where far from the minds of the masses as they gathered under the Winter Solstice stars, there appear to be some simple solutions to this great New Year debate. Change the location. Declare some more ethnic groups’ festivals as national holidays. Or take away the “national holiday” title altogether; Aymara New Year would surely survive without it. The cons of the celebration raise some serious problems, but take anyone out on the chilling night of June 21st, wrap them in a blanket and hand them a beer and they’ll soon see the magic of this holiday.

It took me a while to find the location, but after asking many people I made my way up to El Alto where I was told I could find a ch’alla. However, not knowing exactly what I was looking for, or what a ch’alla actually looked like, the search was a struggle. Soon after a short walk around one of the streets, the smell of in­cense and fire came alive. Stalls lined the street one after another, each housing a bench and a small fire. An elderly woman was sitting by one of the fires with a man holding a silver bowl over her head, performing the blessing in Aymara. A man called me over from a few stalls away. After I had squeezed myself onto his bench, he explained to me about the ritual being performed at the ad­jacent stall. The bowl contained coca leaves, fruits and confetti – a traditional mix of items which are used to perform a ch’alla. By lighting the bowl on fire the man was able to save her from El Tio and cure her physical health.

Generally speaking: to the faith­ful a ch’alla is seen as a blessing to the Pachamama, through which believers strengthen their relationship with her. Neverthe­less, beyond this common cause, practices vary so widely that it is near impossible for us to identify a single definition of a ch’alla. Ay­mara tradition dictates one rite, other cultures another, and prac­tices not only vary between town and countryside, but also among neighbourhoods. My informant explained the matter from his per­spective: an Aymara man from a neighbourhood in El Alto.

In this man’s neighbourhood many people receive a ch’alla every second weekend. How­ever, others believe it should only be practiced during important events such as Carnival. Essen­tialy, performing ch’alla usually involves spilling some liquid, usu­ally alcohol, on the ground as an offering to the Pachamama. The noun “ch’alla” is originally Aymara, although it has been hispanised to create the verb “challar”, “to bless”. This verbal blend of Spanish and Aymara well characterises the blurring of religious traditions in Bolivia: ch’alla is not a Christian ritual, nevertheless, many Christian Bolivians still practice this ancient Andean rite, emblematic of the syncretism that pervades this diverse country.

The sound of bells began to ring. I looked back over to the stall and saw the man holding a bell in his right hand jingling it first around the lady’s head, and then on her body. The man explained that this noise was to scare away the evil spirit. He continued to tell me that many Aymara people partake in this form of ch’alla as often as once every two weeks in order to keep them away from any dan­ger and to bring luck in their lives.

This ritual also varies from the city to the country-side. Within the city, ch’allas include decorating one’s property or car with col­oured streamers and sprinkling alcohol, golden grains, daisy petals and candies all around it. In the countryside however, the ch’allas could include covering the earth with flower petals and burying a pot with cooked pota­toes, cigarettes, coca leaves and alcohol to feed the Pachamama. Each ch’alla however has the same motive, a blessing to the Pachamama.

Whatever the cause for the ch’alla rites, they are more com­monly practiced in smaller com­munities than large urban centres. Potosi is an especially interesting example, because the ch’alla takes on a significance specific to the mining community’s environ­ment: it is performed to protect them from El Tio. The miners be­lieve they work under the guid­ance of this familiar devil, whom they both respect and fear. El Tio must be ‘fed’ and satisfied in order to ensure their working conditions are safe. Twice a year, on three consecutive Saturdays, each min­ing group sacrifices a llama – in hopes of feeding the hunger of El Tio. Within the mines, each of the 48 mining groups have built thousands of ‘Tios’ out of mud and rocks – and have decorated them with gloves, miners boots, coca leaves, streamers and confetti. They are seen as the ‘observers’ of the mines and are most significant during the ch’alla ritual and festiv­ity time. After the killing of the llama, a man who feels brave enough to face El Tio must nominate himself to run in and splatter llama blood over the statue. The ritual is completed with the celebrations involving wine drinking, coca leaf chewing, and swigging 96% strength alcohol.

The ch’alla ritual is indicative of Bolivian identity; it incorporates both Hispanic and Aymara traditions and through its varied forms of practice embodies a truly Bolivian diversity . But ultimately it is not the details of practice, but the act of blessing itself that generates the common relation­ship that believers have with the Pachamama.