Photo: Alexandra Meleán Anzoleaga

The Campaign that Turned La Paz into a wonderful City

When Raúl Pérez first heard of the New Seven Wonders Cities contest, he figured nominating his city was quite a long shot. ‘I believed La Paz was wonderful and deserved to be named,’ he said, ‘but there were so many cities, I didn’t expect to win.’

With his co-worker Patricia Grossman, who at the time was the Communications Department director of the Municipal Government of La Paz, Pérez presented the idea to the Mayor of the city, Luis Revilla.

‘I thought it was a great opportunity,’ the Mayor said. ‘La Paz has all the necessary conditions to be nominated. Visitors are always fascinated by our topography, the culture, and the way of life of the paceños. Being nominated was the great opportunity that we needed so that La Paz could be known across the world.’

With the Mayor’s approval, Grossman and Pérez began to communicate with the 7 Wonders Foundation in 2012 to go through the nomination process. They formed a team with Revilla, planned a strategy, and fit the new proposal into a budget for two years.  They named the campaign, “La Paz is Maravillosa”.

‘If the people of La Paz didn’t believe, then the world wouldn’t,’ said Grossman. ‘We needed to show them the beautiful things of the city, such as our gastronomy, heritage, unique geography, nature and diversity.’ In order to get from the first stage of 1,200 cities to second stage of 77, the people of La Paz needed to vote in favor of the campaign, a task that was at first quite challenging.

‘It was very hard to convince people,’ said Pérez. ‘People who have lived here their whole life normally don’t see how incredible their city, nature and culture are. People would say, “we have so many problems? How can we be marvelous?”’

According to Mayor Revilla, the Seven Wonders campaign wasn’t about finding the most beautiful or perfect city. ‘There are so many cities, so many aesthetically pleasing places in the world, it is too difficult to compare them,’ he said. ‘That was not the objective of the contest. The point was to find a city that is very special, very different, unique.’

The initial campaign was carried out by the media, mostly local channels and radio programmes. It featured short videos on unique aspects of La Paz, highlighting how these elements made the city marvellous and explaining how to participate in the voting process.  As part of the campaign, a popular Bolivian band, Octavia, released a special song and music video, “La Paz Maravillosa”.

The media campaign worked and La Paz made it to the round of 77 cities. In the next stage, a panel of international experts would choose 28.

Jean-Paul de la Fuente, the director of the New7Wonders Foundation, said that the panel looked for a geographic distribution of famous and not so famous cities and people who were enthusiastic about the campaign. ‘It is extraordinary that such a relatively big city exists in what objectively seems like very difficult terrain,’  de la Fuente said. ‘Then you have the mythical aspect of Illimani and the diverse cultural traditions.’

After La Paz made it to the final 28, Grossman and Pérez communicated with the universities to launch a massive social media campaign. They recruited student volunteers who shared posts, photos, links, emails and even Internet memes to encourage people to vote for La Paz. While this was helpful, a significant portion of the city’s population doesn’t have access to Internet. ‘The most important communication device in La Paz is cell phones,’ said Grossman. ‘So we put together a national campaign to vote by SMS.’

They partnered with the three major cell phone companies of Bolivia and for the first time brought them together to encourage people to vote. And the strategy paid off. La Paz made it all the way down to 21 cities. At this point, the members of the campaign began to think they could make it down to the final 7.

The volunteers began to number in the hundreds. The campaign ran voting stations all over the city so people who didn’t have access to Internet or cell phones could vote. They put stickers on cars and buildings. The local government allowed children to paint certain walls with the motto, “La Paz Maravillosa”.

‘These were unique moments for the city,’ said Mayor Revilla. ‘People joined their interests into a single objective. It was easy to reignite pride in the people and respect for their city, for the opportunity that they had.’

Once La Paz made it down to the last 14 cities, the campaign went national. The strategy had to be subtle to convince people in different cities to vote for the capital.

‘We didn’t want the rest of the country to think that we were putting La Paz above the rest of the cities,’ explained Mayor Revilla. ‘We had to show them that the promotion of La Paz would benefit the rest of the country. If tourists come to Bolivia because of La Paz, it will undoubtedly bring more tourists to other regions.’

Revilla went to the national government to convince President Evo Morales to speak out publicly in support of the campaign and Morales agreed.

‘This is quite significant,’ explained Pérez. ‘We were working with the idea that modern day political issues are not important to La Paz Maravillosa. The Mayor is from a different political party than the national government, but that’s not important because the whole country united to reach the goal regardless of political affiliation.’

At this point, the excitement was contagious throughout Bolivia. Local actress Giovanna Chávez became involved, as well as some acclaimed international artists. According to  Adriana Barriga, a public employee who worked on the campaign, ‘It made us feel connected both nationally and internationally. It was quite common to get your relatives who were living in the US, Brazil, or Argentina to vote.’

Despite the huge support, in December 2014 Grossman and her team were shocked to hear that La Paz had been named one of the new 7 wonders. ‘It’s something that had never happened before,’ Pérez said. ‘We’re not used to winning contests, to feel so proud of our city, of our identity.’

As the Mayor of the winning city, Revilla hopes that the spirit of unity fostered by the contest will continue to unite a diverse array of people and organizations. ‘The achievement of the campaign is that La Paz is wonderful and we have made the world know it,’ he said. ‘Now it is the responsibility of everyone to utilise our new advantage.’ Studies have shown that becoming a world wonder means hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenue.

‘It’s very easy to say a place is a wonder, you can read any article saying so, but it is something fundamentally different when millions of people vote,’ said de la Fuente. ‘It’s a different kind of impact. You’re not just receiving information. There’s an emotional connection. You want to experience it because you worked to get it there.’

Photo: Luke Henriques-Gomes

The Peña’s Elder Statesman Reflects on His Storied Past, and Looks to the Future

Ask Pepe Murillo a question about his life, and he responds with a song. In the living room of his two-storey home in Zona Sur with a charango in his calloused hands and three glasses of whiskey on the coffee table for him and his guests, he has a melodic reply to every inquiry.

Murillo, who has rock star status in Bolivia, and has taken his songs to the United States, across Latin America, Europe and Japan, fashions his answers with the same sense of drama you hear in his music – a quiet, pensive bit here, some humour there, and plenty of vulnerability. ‘My mama, she was the biggest influence on my career,’ he says of his music-teaching mother, who has now passed away.  

The conversation traverses Murillo’s half-century in the music industry, including his success in Los Caminantes and his involvement with peñas, a type of meeting place for folkloric performances popular in Spanish and Latin American culture.

Murillo’s peña of nearly 40 years, Marka Tambo, on historic Calle Jéan, closed recently due to a lost lease. In his mind, the sort of peñas he remembers from his earliest playing days are few and far between these days.

‘I like it that, when I’m playing, the audience just listens to me,’ Murillo says. There’s a laugh that acknowledges the cheekiness of such a comment, but he’s not joking. He has fond memories of some of the first peñas in La Paz, founded in the ’60s, including one he helped found near Plaza Camacho. It’s now a printer, Murillo says.

‘There was a unique sound,’ he explains. ‘No microphone, and just one small stage to sing that was very close to the audience. These were dedicated to music. Now there are other places where people go to dance. These are different.’

One of these peñas is Gota de Agua, a raucous La Paz establishment that is more like a dance party than a concert. The crowd is almost entirely Bolivian. Couples dance unself-consciously to the hypnotic sounds of Bolivian folk music, both live and recorded, and drink flows freely into mouths stuffed with coca leaves. It’s fun, wild fun.

‘I don’t know the place, but I’d like to see it,’ Murillo says of Gota de Agua. ‘It’s another style, another thing. I really do respect what others are doing.’

Murillo released a new album this year, Todavia Puedo (I Still Can), which sounds like a statement to anyone who doubts his desire to continue. Standing in one of his home’s two rooms of gold discs, giant posters and other memorabilia, he confirms plans to open a new peña, and that another recording will follow next year.

‘Music has always been my life,’ Murillo says, gently strumming his charango. ‘When I play I feel like I’m flying. I have done other things... But music was always the thing I felt most strongly about. I play music to live, I live to play music.’

‘I play music to live, I live to play music.’

– Pepe Murillo

Photo: Isabel Cocker

Three Artists Reflect on Working in the City

‘I’ve tried to break the paradigm that art is only for people who understand it, or for people who have the money to buy paintings or go to a museum.’

– Mamani Mamani

When I tell my taxi driver, Juan, that I’m going to see Roberto Mamani Mamani, his face lights up. Juan was born in Cochabamba, but he speaks about La Paz with the enthusiasm of a lifelong paceño. The best thing about this city is the culture, he tells me: ‘It’s unlike anywhere else.’

The fact that Juan is so familiar with Mamani Mamani, perhaps La Paz’s most acclaimed painter, is striking. Later, a security guard at the Governor’s Office of La Paz is also impressed that Mamani Mamani is coming to his workplace. Visual art may be considered a middle-class pursuit, but the popularity of Mamani Mamani’s colourful Aymaran art – in La Paz, El Alto and throughout the country – speaks to what the painter calls ‘the socialisation of art’.

‘I’ve tried to break the paradigm that art is only for people who understand it,’ Mamani Mamani says when I met him inside his gallery on historic Calle Jaén. ‘Or for people who have the money to buy paintings or go to a museum.’

‘I remember that people from the school of art would say I wasn’t an artist because I hadn’t studied,’ Mamani Mamani continues. ‘There were these elites in La Paz that didn’t accept me. So I had to fly my own way, to try and put myself and my work in front of the people.’

As a child, Mamani Mamani used to draw on newspapers with leftover charcoal that his mother used to cook with. He has both Aymara and Quechua ancestry, and learned about Andean culture from his grandmother – whom he cites as his biggest creative influence. Today, his art is embraced by all corners of Bolivian society. In addition to myriad exhibitions across Bolivia, Mamani Mamani has also exhibited his work throughout Europe and in Japan and the United States. His style – a combination of bold, bright colours and Aymaran symbology – is copied by school students in art classes across the country, and his work is printed on postcards and coffee mugs.

‘I used to see my grandmother knitting with very powerful colours,’ Mamani Mamani says. ‘I would always ask, “Why do you paint with really strong colours?” And she would say, “It’s because the bright colours scare away the bad spirits.” So that’s why I paint the way I do.’

In the major-events room of the Governor’s Office of La Paz, there is a 20-metre-wide Mamani Mamani mural. Painted with the help of four of his students, it’s typical of his work. It depicts what he calls ‘the beginning of a new world’, a ‘new era of women’ who are represented by a large moon. There are llamas, snakes, a turtle and four stars, symbolizing the communal nature of Aymara culture, he explains. Standing in front of the mural, he spontaneously throws his arms in the air and exclaims the Aymaran phrase: Jallalla! It feels like a declaration of pride and joy from a quiet man who has embraced his culture and shown it to the world.    

Early on a weekday morning on the other side of La Paz, Marcos Loayza is sitting in a fifth-floor apartment looking out onto Zona Sur. Handsome, with a full head of dark curls and a manly, greying beard, Loayza is widely regarded as one of Bolivia’s best filmmakers. His debut film, Cuestion de Fe (1995), is considered a Latin American classic, having racked up a slew of international awards including a special critic's mention at the 21st Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival in 1995.

Loayza is a lifelong paceño, except for a short stint studying film in Cuba. The 56-year-old is currently working on his sixth film, El Arcano Katari, which follows a boy in search of his uncle through the many barrios of La Paz. He finds mythical elements of the city and meets different characters along the way.

‘I always try to be Andean in my movies,’ Loayza says. ‘It’s easier to be authentic than neutral.’

Making El Arcano Katari, which Loayza hopes will hit screens sometime this year, has been a drawn-out process that began all the way back in 2007. ‘The hardest thing in La Paz is to fund a film,’ he says. ‘And you spend much more time trying to get money than producing or creating.’

With this in mind, one might wonder why Loayza remains committed to making films locally. In part, it’s due to La Paz’s remarkable landscape. That so few films have been shot in La Paz gives filmmakers like Loayza the chance to show parts of the city to the rest of the world for the very first time.  

‘Here in La Paz, we are used to searching for the best views, looking out to Illimani [the mountain that dominates the city’s skyline] and the landscapes. It’s a part of us to look for these views,’ he says. ‘It’s the same in filmmaking. La Paz is like a virgin city. Not many movies have been made here.’

Loayza says El Arcano Katari could be translated as ‘the secret of the snake’. ‘But we must take into account that in the Andes the snake is not a creature of death, danger or treason,’ he explains. ‘On the contrary, it’s a being who represents life and has the power to change skin, and mutate to improve.’

Loayza says the film’s biggest challenge has been trying to ‘build things that don’t really exist, except in people’s minds’: mythical creatures and places that are not much written about ‘but dominate our oral tradition’ – the stuff of ‘the Andean imagination’.

Inside Sopacachi’s trendy Blueberries Café, in between sips of tea, 31-year-old José Arispe is explaining what it means to represent a new generation of Andean artists. His cultural identity really hit home during a residency in Rome, which culminated in his most recent photographic exhibition, Sola, which features images from home and abroad.

‘Sometimes when you’re from Latin America and you go to Europe, you think, “I want to go stay and live here,”’ he says. ‘You hear that the art world there is more attractive, more developed. But when I was in Rome I thought, “What am I going to do here?” In La Paz, I have so much to work with: nature, my history, my cultural heritage, my cultural habits, the dancing, the music, the language. Maybe it’s obvious, but you appreciate your home so much more once you’ve left it.’

Arispe’s emotive work feels modern, but it is imbued with his Andean identity in both conscious and innate ways. One performance piece, Soy, shows the artist covered from head to toe in coca leaves. Another, shot from a crane, uses taut and fraying ropes that are used to form circles to explore the Andean concept of time.

‘In Andean culture, time is not linear’, Arispe says. ‘It’s not just the past, the present and the future. For us, it’s a circle of movement. It’s important to recognise our past to work to the future. So you draw a circle.’

If La Paz’s creative skin is always changing, Arispe is a product of that constant state of flux. He represents a new wave of paceño artists charged with simultaneously following in the footsteps of Loayza and Mamani Mamani, and carving out their own creative path. It’s a fact not lost on Arispe.

‘In Bolivia, we struggle to make our art sustainable,’ Arispe says. ‘In an economical way, a critical way, a social way. So it’s important to organise and try to build our community.’

‘There’s a lot of work to do.’