Download
Valeria Wilde looks beyond the signs and stickers to understand the unintentional urban aesthetic shaping Bolivia’s cities.
To make this exercise worthwhile, you must look with inquisitive eyes and suspend all judgements. When dealing with urban aesthetics, all manner of malapropisms, kitsch ornaments, pastiches of unknown origins and deliberate chaos intertwine. The line between the ugly and the beautiful is blurred to make room for the richness of the disharmony that defines La Paz’s cityscape.
It is advisable to begin this exercise in a minibus. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a sticker with that monstrously anthropomorphic cartoon bird, Condorito, stating that spitting is absolutely prohibited.
On the left of the bus driver you may well find the Oración del Chofer, set in a background of multicoloured gradients. You will see warning signs, from the prudential to the moralistic: ‘if you get out late, it is not the driver’s fault’,‘it is better to lose a minute in life than life in a minute’.
If you’re lucky enough to be sitting next to the driver at the front, you will be able to see a colourful fabric hanging in the windscreen; with ornaments and figures of saints or football teams — vestiges of the car’s challa in Copacabana and testaments to the driver’s devotion to the eponymous Virgin.
Keep your eyes open wide throughout this journey. Peer out of the window and read the messages on the backs of other minibuses or micros. The sayings captured on them come in varied colours, typographies and disastrously sublime spelling permutations. ‘Why don’t you tell me with a kiss’, ‘Your envy is my blessing’,‘Don’t follow me because I too am lost’ are some common messages. These phrases and their colours distill the fleeting essences of society.Should you be fortunate enough, you will encounter the historic Micro, ‘El Inmortal’, or the famous ‘Superman’; which literally (sic) flew several metres without major incident. You may also learn of the improbable stories captured by the so-called ‘logotipeados’, which capture a range of
beliefs
ranging
from
political
visions to the most banal of life’s problems. One driver comments that the face of Osama Bin Laden, painted alongside the Twin Towers and the face of Che Guevara on the back of his Micro, reminds us ‘how a hero went against imperialism’.
As Fernando Navia would say “This type of design -Gráfica Popular- is an extraordinary phenomenon that takes place from the individuality of each human being and, as such, is an inherent part of the human condition. It brings out various aspects of a culture by incorporating local elements and combining them with foreign –yet perfectly adopted– materials and references”. In its own way, design distills the spirit and worldviews of groups from all social segments. The identity and sense of belonging of a people finds its expression with visual eloquence.
The Neo-Andean Wave Sweeping El Alto
Gaudy and garish, the mini- mansions of El Alto stand as striking symbols of Bolivia’s new Aymara bourgeoisie. It is a phenomenon that has exploded so quickly on the polluted streets of La Paz’s sister city that there is still no accepted name for these architectural anomalies.
Labelled Kitsch, neo-Andean, cholo, cohetillo or any number of alternatives, there are roughly 120 such buildings across Bolivia. Most of them are in El Alto. Over 60 of them are the brainchildren of Freddy Mamani Silvestre — a mason who spent 18 years in construction work before a decade working in his current profession: architecture. These buildings, or ‘cholets’ –chalets cholos–, range from $250,000 to $600,000 and are invariably functional; with the lower floors housing the family business while the top floor provides a quasi-home for its owners.
According to Mamani, each building has its own distinct identity. ‘This is art,’ he says, ‘like music, and you get bored doing the same thing’. The buildings, though, are all stylistically similar. Mamani is the figurehead of this architectural movement that Gaston Gallardo, professor of architecture at the Universidad Mayor San Andreas of La Paz, describes as ‘baroque, popular, contemporary’. Its style is defined by the use of Andean symbols in tribute to Aymaran history; images of condors, vipers, pumas and –most prominently– the Andean cross have all become design staples. Mamani explains that the inspiration for his work stemmed from a visit to Tiwanaku, ‘I went [there] and began thinking that we should dis- play our culture through buildings with Aymaran flavours’. Edgar Patana, the mayor of El Alto, believes that Mamani has achieved this and that ‘his palette of colours is in harmony with the colourful weaving of the kallawaya culture, itself a descendent of Tiwanacotan culture’.
When Mamani first published a photo of one of his designs, it was labelled by one journalist as ‘chola’ architecture — per- haps with the initial view of dismissing it. The name stuck, however, and, rather than treating these buildings with the contempt that you might expect such loud architectural statements to provoke, people began to want their own, wearing it as a badge of Aymaran pride. Indeed, as Paola Flores explains, ‘the mini- mansions mesh modern and baroque architecture and flaunt, above all, two things: their owner’s wealth and their Aymaran heritage’. The harsh geography of the Altiplano has driven many Aymaran to the big cities to promote their individual businesses and this influx to El Alto has engendered a new social class — the nouveau-riche Aymara bourgeoisie. Rosario Leuca, a woman who began selling food in the streets and who has now built a second restaurant in her seven-storey Cholet, embodies this class and has a house to reflect it: ‘I am an Aymaran woman, proud of my culture, happy and full of colour. So why should my home not show who I am?’
Leuca is not unique in expressing this pride. In fact, Rafael Choque, 25, an agronomy student and citizen of El Alto says, ‘To me, it’s like a shout that says, “Here we are! This is what we are!”’; while Rim Safar, president of the Architectural College in Santa Crúz echoes this notion, explaining, ‘It is a way of saying: “I am a proud ‘cholo’; before I had no money, now I do, look at me!”’. The buildings certainly make a strong statement that Mamani believes ‘represents the modern Alteño because he is identified by his cutting-edge attitude: by his fight for economic, social, cultural, political, and now architectural identity’. However, while the buildings have taken on an Aymaran identity post-construction, they are not ostensibly proud statements of indigenous heritage. Rather, the movement seems to symbolise a reaction to traditional Western buildings: ‘I haven’t seen this style in any other place’, Elisabetta Andreoli says, who is an Italian architect and worked with Mamani on his recently published book. ‘I believe that many latin nations have tried to distance themselves from the modern and classical architecture of the northern countries.’
Outside the movement, though, the general consensus is that this architectural style stemmed from the arrival of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. This, however, is a ‘gross injustice’ to its designers, Bolivian artist Santos –the brains behind the transformers-esque alteña architecture– tells me. ‘Morales didn’t design this house’, he says, indicating the huge baroque chamber where we are standing, ‘and he should not get the credit for it’. While Santos makes a valid point, it would be incorrect to say that Morales is not involved by association. From a purely financial standpoint, his government has presided over an economic rise and, by extension, an architectural revival –the industry grew by 8.6% last year– that has rendered building for excess, rather than necessity, a possibility. Perhaps even more significant to this movement is the fact that Morales’s tenure has brought about a swell in so-called Aymaran pride.
Pride, that well-documented chestnut, comes before a fall and we may yet see a retraction of such gaudy architecture. When such buildings are exceptions, rather than the rule, they are revered as progressive and revolutionary; however, with 20 such buildings under Mamani’s construction alone, ‘arquitectura chola’ is well on its way to becoming the norm.
Since the social struggles of the early 2000s and the election of Evo Morales, Bolivian identity has taken on a new importance. For the first time, the State has sought to recognise and incorporate marginalised indigenous communities in the new Estado Plurinacional.
However, there’s a continuity with the old order, characterised as a period of multicultural neoliberalism. It’s comparable to the situation in post-apartheid South Africa; in both countries, an anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle preceded the election of the new ‘progressive’ governments. Yet, these were ultimately contained and transformed into a struggle of ‘stages’—a ‘cultural’ stage where a new bourgeoisie drawn from the oppressed racial groups emerges and existing power relations stay intact, and a separate stage of socialist transformation, promised some- time in the undefined future. An example of this, in the Bolivian context, is the notorious claim by Vice President Álvaro García Linera that socialism is not possible for 50 to 100 years and, instead, the task is to build ‘Andean-Amazonian’ capitalism.
What this arguably shows is that, while there is a discourse of indigenous liberation and rhetoric of constructing the ‘plurinational’ state on the basis of Bolivia’s many indigenous communities, this project is not seen as running parallel to a wider transformation of material relations. The key task is seen as building a capitalism of the indigenous, rather than locating the roots of indigenous oppression in capitalism itself. In short, there is a separation of liberation struggles with anti-systemic struggles.
This kind of identity politics has a history in Bolivia, especially since the end of General Hugo Banzer’s dictatorship in the 1980s. This
spawned
an
important
political tendency known as Katarismo — the brainchild of urban Aymara intellectuals who sought to grapple with a new neoliberal Bolivia of highly racialised capitalism, but in which the traditional agent of change –the organised working class– have suffered debilitating setbacks. These new intellectuals looked to ethnic nationalism over class-based struggle. But, like all forms of nationalism, it vacillates between playing a progressive role but also a potentially reactionary one.
For example, Victor Hugo Cardenas, Vice- president from 1993 to 1997 and the first indigenous politician to reach such heights, came from the katarista movement. However, he lined up behind the neoliberal right in enforcing the sweeping privatisations of that decade — measures that hit the indigenous poor the hardest. Even today, in the upcoming national elections, figures in the indigenous movement have sided with right-wing business interests and architects of 1980s neoliberalism. When the struggle against indigenous oppression is falsely separated from exploitation rooted in capitalism, reactionary distortions such as these take place.
To understand the multiculturalism of today, one has to look back both at the dynamics of the leftist indigenous movements before the electoral success of President Evo Morales’ MAS party, and at how the MAS then responded to the aspirations of those movements that swept them to power. Despite rhetorical commitment to both racial and economic liberation, separating the two into distinct ‘stages’made the realisation of either impossible and led to the continuation of the neoliberal multiculturalism that the leftist indigenous movements fought against.
Politically speaking, the early 2000s a period
of
indigenous
insurrection. The
period can firstly characterised as a bid to break with the old neoliberal multiculturalism. The period was, secondly, a bid for political power that would transform the indigenous communities from being me- rely recognised by the elite, to being real historical actors forging their own future. There were two main demands that came from these groups.
The first of these demands was for a Constituent Assembly, which was brought to centrestage after the ‘indigenous march for territory and dignity’ in 1990, led by movements in the department of Beni. The idea was to break from the liberal notion of representative democracy, in which power is kept in the hands of the elite political parties, and to create assemblies comprising social movements, indigenous organisations, trade unions, and the like. That way, power is not held by unaccountable political parties, but wielded directly by people.
The second was the demand for the nationalisation of the country’s hydrocarbon resources. This demand is characterised by recognising that empowerment and democracy require natural resources to be in the hands of the people rather than transnational companies and foreign imperialist states.
The synthesis of these two demands recognises two things: the need for those at the bottom to take political power rather than handing it to elites claiming to act in their name; and the inseparability of political/racial liberation and economic emancipation.
Despite supporting these demands while it was in opposition to previous governments, on coming to power the MAS failed to usher in this transformation. A Constituent Assembly was in fact created, but it was gutted of the revolutionary content the indigenous movements advocated. Instead of being an aggregation of the social movements, elections to the assembly had to be either through established parties or citizen groups. More worryingly, a clause about minority protection meant that any organisation achieving over 5 percent of the vote was entitled to a third of the seats in its district. This gave the far right, which in many areas would not have won representation, a disproportionate amount of seats. Furthermore, the ‘nationalisation’ of the hydrocarbon resources was anything but that, with virtually nothing expropriated and the issuing of new contracts to 12 foreign companies. All that changed was the level of tax revenue and tightened regulations. On both these counts, the government didn’t meet the movement’s demands for political and economic power as a means of emancipation; the indigenous remain onlookers to the state and foreign capital.
The MAS strategy of building ‘Andean-Amazonian’ capitalism is incompatible with the aspirations for a mass transformation of power relations. In reality, it has meant the emergence of a privileged layer within the indigenous communities, or as some say the new ‘chola’ bourgeoisie of El Alto and elsewhere that have grown rich through commerce. This doesn’t represent a new era for the indigenous or a new multiculturalism. The success of a few comerciantes cannot elevate the whole people to political and economic power. In El Alto (where over 80 percent self-identify as indigenous), where the new Aymara bourgeoisie is emerging, 90 percent of workers are in jobs described as ‘precarious’, a figure virtually unchanged since the 1990s.
There have undoubtedly been gains; an indigenous president has emboldened many and contributed to a cultural shift against racism. However, the power structures that replicate racial oppression remain intact and ‘multiculturalism’ is limited to its neoliberal form in which ‘diversity’ is celebrated but said communities remain powerless.
