At the End of Days

‘It’s been a historical dilemma for Andean cities’, said Bolivian architect Mijael Bumuller. ‘An increase in demographics causes thousands to move to, and build on, the side of mountains’. You see it in Rio de Janerio in the world famous favelas, you see it in Peru, in Chile and of course in the picturesque sky-high city of La Paz, Bolivia.

Photo: Amaru Villanueva Rance

Makeshift, unfinished, windowless and with enough stories to fit generations to come, homes litter the interior of La Paz’s crater valley and along the sides of the cloud-scraping mountainside. Many of them built illegally.

Technically, every new home or add-on requires an architect or geologist for consultation, but in reality, they are rarely hired. Building unsafely can earn the builder little more than a slap on the wrist from government regulators. Instead, Mother Nature provides her backlash. Annual landslides have swept hundreds of homes off the mountain-side, leaving only rubble in their wake. After the end of the world, expect La Paz to be reborn.

Photo: Mario Landivar

Post-Apocalyptic Dream Homes

Bright, tall, new, and uniquely Bolivian, the new style of homes in El Alto and La Paz are eccentric - to say the least.

Some 20 years ago, nouveaux riches started erecting colourful monstrosities right beside the decrepit homes of their neighbours. These aren’t your average modern day stock market young, urban professionals (YUPPies) or insurance moguls. Instead, these members of Bolivia’s middle or upper class mostly earned their money as merchants or traders.

Photo: Mario Landivar

As a chest-beating sign of status, these owners build their homes as large and as bright as possible. They also try to make the homes completely different from anything you have seen in Bolivia - or in the global West for that matter.

Upper levels are added simply for parties, family gatherings or as a legacy for future generations. Bottom floors are often used for businesses, restaurants or shops.
One theory is that the houses are based off of the miniature styrofoam toy homes found at Alasitas Market. The toys are traditionally used to represent what someone wants or dreams of. In this theory, some people realized their dreams and made their own Bolivian Barbie DreamHouse.
And they don’t come cheap. Some houses can be worth over a million USD, and many owners are forced into debt after making this enormous status statement. While many of these new homeowners use architects, some people cut costs by doing the architecture work themselves.

Photo: Mario Landivar

As we enter the End of the World, these homes represent a new gold sequin jacket for Bolivia’s mountain-capital region. Instead of building windowless, unsafe buildings there is now an attention to aesthetics (chapi or not) and a desire to be unique from both colonial past and Western influences.

If the end of the world arrives on December 21, as the Mayans predicted, two things will survive: cockroaches and the Feria de El Alto. Every Sunday and Thursday, thousands flock to one of South America’s largest flea markets and encounter everything: from pigs and ’80s retro American football jackets to snakes and minibuses, all for a fraction of the price that they’d be in the US or UK.

Photo: Joel Balsam

Walking down the streets of La Paz, the pasty white face of a gringo can turn more than a few heads. So, when we walked through Bolivia’s largest and most chaotic market, a place where many Pacenos themselves say they would never go, we felt like circus freaks.

The feria predates the formal founding of the city of El Alto, which was merely a suburb of La Paz until its incorporation in 1987. But in 1960, the feria was nothing more than a simple apple market, home to a handful of stalls in a quiet town on the altiplano. It has since expanded to an estimated 10,000 vendors across dozens of city blocks, covering a vast twenty-five square kilometres.

Thieves run rampant through the busy market, so hold on tight to your belongings, unless you want to involuntarily donate an iPod to the feria fund like we did. In fact, it is probably safer if you stay home and play ‘Guess Who’ Faces de El Alto—The Game. To play, simply read about five vendors we met on our recent outing and try to match them with their products. Stumped? Follow the trusty hints at the bottom of each vendor bio.

Happy El Alto Games! May the odds be ever in your favour!

a) b)  c) 

d)  e)  f) 

Photos: Joel Balsam

1) Eduardo

'I want to be a doctor', says the confident 11-year-old who is manning a stall alone. That ambition makes his parents proud. Every Sunday (and Thursdays, if he doesn’t have to go to school), Eduardo works at the feria while his parents sell the same products on the other side of the market. So you think 11 is too young to work in the feria? Well, Eduardo has worked there since he was 5. 

Hint: You’ll find his products, but you won’t find a shop like Eduardo’s anywhere in the global North. And, in such an impoverished city, most might find that Eduardo’s products are rather useless. Still, Eduardo claims he makes around 300 bolivianos a week, with his most popular product going for 25 bolivianos.

2) Tiffania

Even beneath her heavy hat, Tiffania’s face and piercing brown eyes are hypnotising. At just 16 years old, there is something about her innocence that makes us uneasy. Tiffania was one of very few vendors happy to talk to us. Six months working in the feria hasn’t depleted her enthusiasm, something can’t be said for many of the older vendors. Every single day, she and her mother trek to a different market—a job Tiffania sees herself doing for the rest of her life. Their products arrive in South America from Germany and China. Due to Bolivia’s landlocked status, their products are obtained from the Chilean port of Iquique—in addition to a monthly trip to the Peruvian-Bolivian border.

Hint: Tiffania’s products are probably the most practical and reliable of all.

3) The Cholita

In a muddy patch on the side of the feria, a stern and serious old cholita, reluctant to give her name, does not mince words for small talk or descriptions. 'How is the product?' we ask. 'Normal', she replies. 'Is it hard to work in the Feria?' 'Normal', she responds again while quickly ushering us away. Her hard-working suppliers are only employed for two or three years before she gets rid of them, but they don’t really seem to mind.

Hint: At 5 bolivianos a pop, her product boasts positive effects for many aspects of health and well-being, including curing pneumonia. You never know until you try it. We did.

4) The Salesgirls 

We stumble upon three young girls. One is small, quiet and afraid. The second is shy, but does the talking. The last is cheeky and mischievous. 'What is it for?' we ask while pointing at the product. Making a whistling sound and an explosion with their mouths, they said 'Jueguitos!’ Clearly, we weren’t going to buy the product for cooking like many of the cholita homemakers were. The girls immediately picked up on this and made the new sales pitch, just for us gringos. There is something scarily entrepreneurial about three young girls having a better marketing strategy than most adults. Embellishing on the quality of their product, the cheeky girl claimed that they personally travelled to Brazil to pick up the goods, even when the box clearly stated the product was not legal to sell in that country.

Hint: The product is used for cooking.

5) Guzman

A 70 year old man sits on a chair in front of a heap of . . . unusual antiques. You would be a miracle worker if you could get any of these products to work. Still, Guzman urged us to move on quickly to allow for more potential buyers—as if anybody was buying anything at Guzman’s stall. Guzman is rather new to the feria, having only worked there for five years. He used to be a construction worker, but too many years on the job ruined his back and forced him to change his occupation. The result? He now sits by the old abandoned railway line in El Alto with his dusty collection of..

Hint: Junk.

6) Cecilia

Cecilia has worked at the feria for thirty years, even before the city of El Alto existed. Back then the feria, she claims, was no more than ten stalls. Now look at it. Cecilia quickly fast-tracked to becoming our Bolivian mother. Instead of us asking her the questions, she was the interrogator: 'Where are you from?’ 'Did you arrive here by boat?’ 'Where have you been in Bolivia?' And on. Her questions came with a genuine sense of curiosity, accompanied by a nervous giggle. As if worried about our view of Bolivia from what we saw at the feria, she proclaimed, 'Bolivia is not like Africa, you know.’ That was her way of defending the country she loves.

Hint: Her products were some of the most popular in the market. And after doing some research, her stuff looked like it passed the quality—and affordability—test.

Answers: 1 - C; 2 - A; 3 - E; 4 - F; 5 - D; 6 - B

The Ch’askitas, named after the quechua word for star, are Sacaba’s latest girl-band export. Amaru Villanueva Rance went to meet these folk starlets to learn their story, and left with three goddaughters; three more than he had bargained for. 

Photo: Amaru Villanueva Rance

  

I first met the Ch'askitas and their entourage on a Sunday afternoon in the Plaza Murillo. Vigorously waving their sequined green polleras to the rhythm of a zapateo, the three girls sung, smiled and danced to a huayño rasping out of a tinny handheld speaker. The Palacio de Gobierno served as a curious backdrop, and the innumerable pigeons which overcrowd the plaza seemed characteristically unfazed - if anyone was paying attention, it certainly wasn't them. A crowd, which I soon discovered I was a part of, gathered around them with a certain uncertainty. This was no ordinary street performance. Camouflaged among the crowd, wearing a khaki utility vest, was a man holding a large video camera. Meet Jhonny, manager and padrino to the Ch'askitas.

I don’t remember how or why but my friend Esmeralda and I soon started talking to a lady with a big warm smile and gold crowns around her teeth (see p.6). ‘We’re filming the girls’ first music video. That is my daughter Araceli’, she said, pointing to the smallest one of the three. Meet Benita, an unmistakably Cochabambina chola.

The girls finished dancing and came over, ice-creams and juices in hand. Seemingly accustomed to media attention, they courteously introduced themselves to Esme and me. ‘Me sacas una foto?’ – ‘will you take my picture?’ Meet Araceli. It goes without saying she is not camera-shy.

The rest of the afternoon is somewhat of a blur. A pigeon stood on Jhonny’s head. We laughed. They asked us to recommend a place with a good view, and an hour later we found ourselves taking them to the mirador Killi Killi, which offers some of the most panoptic views the city has to offer. Bricks, clouds, erosion and chaos – the improbably majestic Illimani dominating the backdrop. Nothing out of the ordinary. All I know for certain is that by the end of the afternoon Esme and I had agreed to be godparents to the Ch’askitas.

Two weeks later I found myself some 400 kilometres south of La Paz, in their hometown of Sacaba, the second largest city in the department of Cochabamba and home to over 100,000 people. No sooner had I arrived, I was being served unfinishable amounts of food by Benita, and drinking beer with Jhonny, Dally and her husband Juan. Meet my new compadres and comadres.

Photo: Amaru Villanueva Rance

That was in August 2011. I returned to visit the girls a few weeks ago, and got a chance to catch up with them and learn a bit more about how they came into existence and where they’re heading.

Dally and her husband welcomed me into their home and sent their youngest daughter Danielita to the shop to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola, the Bolivian equivalent of putting the kettle on and offering their guests a cup of tea. To my surprise, out of the three girls I only found Liliana there. ‘The other girls are coming over soon, I just phoned Benita’, Dally told me. She then picked up the phone, dialed a number and said ‘Doña Cristina, can you please send Daniela over in her orange pollera?’ She hang up. ‘She’s coming right over’. Suddenly my phone rung. It was Doña Benita with some strange news: ‘Araceli doesn’t want to come and see you’.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘I’ll put her on the phone’. A quivering voice greeted me on the other end. ‘Padrino? I’m embarrassed’. I could hear her sniffling. It turns out that, taking advantage of the end of the school year, Benita had gotten Araceli’s hair shaved off. Last time I saw her she proudly posed her striking trenza. ‘Her hair was too thin and didn’t grow much’ she would later explain, ‘shaving it all off makes it grow back stronger and thicker’. Two things suddenly made a lot more sense. Firstly, the logic behind a seemingly unspeakable act of cruelty. Secondly, Araceli’s reluctance to come and meet me. Jhonny helped me to talk her over ‘don’t be embarrassed Chelita, we won’t think any less of you’. We went to pick her up at her house in Jhonny’s car. As a curious aside, while ch’aska means star in Quechua, it is also used in the Andean region to denote someone’s hair, especially if it’s ruffled. Ch’askosa is the kind of thing you’d say to a girl who had morning hair, with that non-deliberate just-woken-up look. Hardly what I encountered when Araceli came to greet us. She was wearing a cozy hand-knitted pink hat over her head, which her friends helped her use to conceal a pair of artificial trenzas. The Ch’askitas were primed for the cameras, and the three girls led me into one of the sets in Canal 31. ‘Can you take some pictures of us here?’ Liliana half-asked and half-ordered.

Jhonny tells me there used to be a group called Las Chismositas (the little gossip queens), originally conformed by two sisters. Liliana was invited to take part, but things quickly turned sour. ‘They made her feel bad. She sang better than the other two girls but they still turned the volume of her microphone down during performances’. Enough was enough. Doña Dally soon took her daughter Liliana out of the group and decided to start a new group from scratch. They considered calling them Las Estrellitas, the Spanish word for ‘starlets’, but soon learned the name had been already taken. So they called them Las Ch’askitas, instead, which is the Quechua expression.

She soon invited Araceli, Doña Benita’s daughter to the band. ‘But we couldn’t have a band with just two girls, we had to find one more’, Dally tells me. Conveniently, she and her husband own the local television channel, Canal 31, so they decided to call for a televised audition for the third Ch’askita. ‘Over 30 girls turned up but many of them left crying after they didn’t make it through the successive audition rounds’. In the end, Daniela was the one who shone through after three attempts.

Photo: Amaru Villanueva Rance

Weeks after forming they made their first public appearance at the festival of La Virgen de Amparo (Our Lady of Refuge), one of the largest cultural events in Cochabamba. They performed alongside the ‘Cholitos’, their male-character dancing counterparts. Interestingly, one of them was performed by Danielita, Liliana’s younger sister. Without a hint of embarrassment she tells me ‘when I wear a chullo I look like a little boy!’ The girls’ self-assuredness shines across, not through arrogance and boastfulness, but through a distinct lack of self-consciousness.

Like shooting starlets, their trajectory launched them to places far and wide, leaving behind them a trail of admirers and stolen hearts. One day, disaster struck.

Daniela remembers it as follows: ‘it was a Monday. I got home and left the house to go and look for my sister who was washing clothes down at the river. I was leaving the house and crossing the street, when a car hit me on the shoulder. To get away the driver then ran over my leg’. Daniela was hospitalized for over a month. ‘I cried a lot but the doctor told me “be thankful you still have a leg – you almost lost it”. After a while I was still sad, not because of my accident, but because I thought I would no longer be part of the Ch’askitas. That was the hardest part of it all’. The hit-and-run (and possibly drunken) driver was thankfully caught at the tranca further up the road. However, Daniela’s mum Cristina tells me that the man responsible barely paid $1000 ‘but the bills came to over $6000. I am now in debt, but what can I do. When your daughter is hurt, you do whatever it takes to find the money’.

While Daniela was in hospital the other Ch’askitas went to visit her in hospital. Even after she came out, she was still in the recovery process and could barely walk, let alone dance. The group had to carry on so they found two replacements. Dally tells me ‘I would speak to Daniela on the phone. She would ask “will I still be able to be part of Las Chaskitas?” and I would tell her that she would always be a part of the group, but the most important thing was for her leg to heal and for her to get better. Dally quickly points out that ‘none of the other girls we tried fitted in as well as Daniela. The three girls just get along. They’re there for each other when they’re going through a hard time’. She was out of action for a whole year, and in the past two months she recovered enough and was able to come back. Cristina states firmly that ‘because of her accident I wanted her to move forwards no matter what. I wanted to give her that support because it’s what my mother was never able to give me’.

Despite the difficulties the band have continued to work hard and move from strength to strength. Highlights over the past year include performing in front of a crowd of 2,500 people, as well as performing at a number of private venues and weddings across the country. Last Christmas they were also involved in Canal 31’s campaign to collect presents for Sacaba’s less fortunate children. Thousands came pouring in. The channel also asked local kids to write in saying what they wanted for Christmas. One boy wrote in ‘all I really want are the Ch’askitas’. Liliana has also broadened her artistic horizons by taking part in an action film about gangs and the drug trade in Sacaba’s neighbouring regions.

What lies ahead for the girls? They continue expanding their musical repertoire, though their parents and Jhonny (their manager/godfather), are adamant to keep the content of their songs relevant to their age group. ‘We don’t want them to sing the Chuculún or El Negro Está Rabioso. The Sirenitas [another folk girl band from Tarata] sing songs such as these. It’s not appropriate’. They’ve planned a music video for next year for the song Colesterol. Dally explains: ‘we want to relate the content of the video with what the songs lyrics are about. In this song a woman and a man sing to each other. He says he doesn’t want to get fat, yet she keeps offering him fattening foods’. I asked the girls to sing me some of the lyrics: ‘do you want me to prepare you a chicharrón, or a slice of ham, or do you prefer fried chicken my love?’ ‘None of that for now my dear’.

Photo: Amaru Villanueva Rance

Dally is aware of the tensions inherent in managing a girlband and raising a child. ‘We keep moving forward but we don’t demand too much from them because they’re still young and they are in school. But if they are still interested in this later down the line we’re going to support them to continue making music’. The girls have no shortage of artistic role models. Jhonny himself has played in several folk bands, and I later learn that Dally is the stage name of the girls’ mother, a compound formed by the first syllables of each of their names (Daniela and Liliana). Her real name is Margarita, and she is an occasional actress as well as a TV producer. Jhonny later adds: ‘We always tell them that what’s most important is humility. To greet politely, express themselves naturally in front of people, treat everyone with respect. The girls understand this’. After a short pause he adds: ‘I thank God because I’ve always wanted to have a daughter. He gave me three’.