How to Cite: Giroto, Ivo Renato. "The new mestiza? Architecture and identity on the border". Dearq no. 36 (2023): 16-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq36.2023.03.
How to Cite: Giroto, Ivo Renato. "The new mestiza? Architecture and identity on the border". Dearq no. 36 (2023): 16-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq36.2023.03.
Ivo Renato Giroto
Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo.
Universidade de São Paulo (FAU USP), Brasil
Received: June 15, 2022 | Accepted: February 1, 2023
Over the past two decades, extravagant examples of architecture in the Bolivian city of El Alto have attracted the world's attention and generated controversy amongst architectural critics. Analysis of their aesthetics, construction and functional characteristics allows us to extract, from this specific and geographically delimited case, general considerations regarding architectural production in Latin America. This article focuses on architecture to reflect on sociological, anthropological, and historical concepts, such as the border condition, contemporary forms of identity development and opportunities and constraints linked to political and cultural action.
Keywords: cholets, Neo-Andean architecture, El Alto, Bolivia, frontier, border thinking, Ch'ixi identity, Baroque Ethos.
Figure 1_ Photograph of El Alto with Huayna Potosí in the background. Source: the author, 2019.
At the dawn of the 21st century, extravagant examples of architectural production in the Bolivian city of El Alto caught the world's attention and aroused heated reactions from architectural critics. Many adjectives have been used to synthesise the colour-saturated and gaudily ornamented buildings that dominate the desolated townscape of the city's main roads. Some are general and inclusive terms, such as emergent architecture or Andetectura; others are more pretentious, such as New Andean architecture. There are even popular nicknames, originally pejorative, such as cohetillos (rockets), transformers and cholets. The latter has been the most successful of these terms and has entered the popular vernacular.
In addition to the intrinsic characteristics of these buildings, part of the astonishment was caused by the doubly peripheral expression they represented. They were produced principally by indigenous Aymara architects, and were built for Aymara clients, wealthy merchants of peasant origin who had migrated to the outskirts of La Paz. It was an architecture made and consumed by a population which until then had been ethnically and culturally marginalised and economically disadvantaged, in the peripheral part of a city, in one of the most impoverished and least-known countries in Latin America.
Not only have these peculiar buildings been analysed in academic publications (Cárdenas 2010, Daly 2019, Salazar Molina 2016), they have also been addressed in a book produced for the international market (Andreoli and D'Andrea 2014), an artistic exhibition (Fondation Cartier 2018), and a documentary (Niemand 2018).
This visibility indicates that deeper issues underlie the apparent superficiality of their walls, clad with decorative, iconographic motifs, which denote a particular ethnic-cultural identity. These motifs are expressed in the economic and social purpose of the buildings, their functional structure and even in their materiality, design and construction methods.
Beyond the controversy surrounding it, the emergence of this architecture has no parallel in the recent Latin American context, mainly because it seems to escape the central codes that govern global architectural thought and production. Perhaps this explains the attitude of most critics, who hesitate between treating it as an extravagant curiosity (even a little comical and ridiculous) and refusing to consider it as architecture at all, on the grounds that it does not obey the rules of the canonical Western repertoire.
Going beyond the arrogance, prejudice or disdain that characterises most of the scholarly observations on this architectural genre, this text is an attempt to read between the lines. Apart from the buildings themselves, this architecture deserves attention for what it proposes and suggests. It is interesting not only as an expression of a particular culture but also because it provokes discussion of the challenges faced by the contemporary Latin American context and its insertion in the world.
The term cholo denotes a direct association between ethnic and architectural characteristics, which stimulates reflection on the role played by identity in the contemporary world. Likewise, the geopolitical and human characteristics of the birthplace of this architectural expression entail recognising and attempting to understand its manifestation as a border phenomenon, born at a crossroads and between ethnic-cultural frictions.
Figure 2_ Central Avenue, El Alto. Source: the author, 2019.
El Alto, the place of origin of these unique constructions, is a city forged by the peculiar border condition it occupies. It lies on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in a region shared principally by Aymara and Quechua populations, in territories that were once under the control of the Inca Empire.
Cultural characteristics developed over centuries are still very present in the daily life of the inhabitants of the area, which consists of western Bolivia, southern Peru, and part of northern Chile. Like a few other corners of the contemporary world, this culturally and ethnically shared space exposes the arbitrary lines that define national borders on maps.
The young city of El Alto (founded in an area of great historic-cultural importance) epitomises the trajectory of disruptions, discontinuities and overlaps that characterise Latin American history. Its strategic location transformed it into a node for infrastructure, connecting La Paz with the interior of Bolivia and the borders of neighbouring countries. Since the 1980s, it has experienced large-scale rural-urban migration, accelerated principally by the massive dismissal of miners resulting from the privatizations of state companies in the interior of the country.
Its growth has been explosive and unplanned. The absence of the state favoured the consolidation of a popular organisational tradition, which remains ascendant in the territory's administrative forms today. Consequently, El Alto was the epicentre of the so-called gas war, which precipitated the fall of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and opened the way for Evo Morales Ayma, Bolivia's first Aymara president.
New policies that value indigenous cultures, introduced by Morales's government (2006-2019), have reinforced not only a sense of belonging and representativeness, but also the consolidation of a cholo bourgeoisie in El Alto. These policies are mainly based on informal commercial activities and use community logic and ancestral reciprocity to increase and improve the city's businesses.
This is how El Alto transformed, very quickly, from a functional suburb of La Paz to a dynamic and autonomous economic pole. The city's one million inhabitants already exceed the population of the capital city, creating a complex sociocultural border where the urban and rural universes of the Andean highlands mix.
Between the two cities, there is another less porous border, which separates the Aymara municipality (created less than 40 years ago) from the long colonial history of the capital. While the political administration of La Paz has always been in the hands of a minority descended for Europeans, in El Alto the absence of a “white” elite makes the city the only one in Bolivia where social classes are based on economic and social capital, and not skin colour (Hilari 2020, 50).
This border is noticeable in the use of quechumara (a linguistic fusion of Quechua and Aymara) or castimillano (an Andean-Spanish fusion used by the popular classes). This is also observed in the clothing worn by cholos, a reinvention of the traditional Borsalino skirts with a hat inspired by the original Italian and Spanish mantillas of colonial times.
El Alto is not a city that has received migrants but has instead been built almost entirely by them. This migratory movement seems to have replicated, decades later, the movement identified by Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar (1977) during the settlement of Lima's poor neighbourhoods. These areas were occupied by migrants from the Andean highlands, forming a division between what effectively became two cities. One was inhabited by a mestizo (mixed race) class, with “urban values and manners”, while the other comprised traditional nuclei of rural (especially indigenous) culture which reproduce “compensation mechanisms” based on cooperative and organisational community systems (1977, 196).
Figure 3_ A cholet designed by architect Freddy Mamani. Source: the author, 2019.
In El Alto, we did not have an architectural identity. When tourists landed in La Paz, from the plane they could only see colourless brick buildings. Now we are trying to create an identity in our city. I am inspired by our millenarian Andean culture, our music, dances, crafts, and animals (such as the condor and the llama). We mix this with the modern and elegant and with the client demands (translated from a quote by Mamani in Iriarte 2014).
In the above testimony, architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (considered the creator of the new style), summarises the characteristics and central issues of El Alto's intriguing architectural phenomenon. The architect explicitly mentions identity as the goal and principal reason of his work. This is an elusive and changing concept. Many authors of the North Atlantic axis (such as Stuart Hall) argue that since the final decades of the 20th century, modern monolithic identities (based on the invention of tradition –Eric Hobsbawm– or on Benedict Anderson's imagined communities) were decentralised. This means that they were dislocated or fragmented, in turn dividing classes, cultural landscapes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, races and nationalities.
In the case of Latin America, the post-modern “identity crisis” seems to be characterised, instead, by an acute form of a chronic condition present since the colonial occupation. Latin American republics tried to resolve this problem with what the Bolivian sochólogo (Cholo sociologist) Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui calls the ideologema of miscegenation (2010, 94-96). According to her interpretation, miscegenation permitted the enforced citizenship of indigenous populations through the use of physical and symbolic violence combined with a territorial and ornamental vision of the indigenous identity that was presented in state discourses.
The identity that Mamani seeks refers to is a specific ethnic, cultural, and geographical universe, which is not to be confused with that of the Bolivian territory as a whole. The abundance of geometric patterns that cover the cholets combines references to the Andean mythical-natural world, for example, chacanas (the Andean cross), achachilas (tutelary Aymara spirits), condors, llamas, and snakes, all drawn from different historical times (Tiwanacota iconography and popular contemporary arts).
Initially considered a derogatory term, the cholet (a portmanteau term that merges cholo with “chalet”) has been incorporated as an emblem of cholo pride, which was transformed from a prejudiced racial marker to a symbol of identity based on ethnic-cultural characteristics that challenge analyses of miscegenation that obscure the violence of the process. Originally, this term was used to designate people who had passed through at least a double process of miscegenation, with a predominant indigenous racial factor.
The idea of cholo architecture in the 21st century finally calls into question the understanding of miscegenation as a tool for racial and cultural cohesion, which was necessary to the invention and sustenance of the modern nation. This process was described by the Mexican José Vasconcelos in Raza cósmica (1925), as well as in the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre's Casa grande e senzala (1933), a harmonious idealisation of the meeting of the races and in Euríndia (1924) by the Argentinian Ricardo Rojas.
From a contemporary perspective, this may be related to the hybridization processes described by the Argentinian Néstor García-Canclini (2019, XIX-XXIII), in which disconnected structures objects and practices are combined to generate new equivalents. The phenomenon of globalisation could lead to the construction of an intercultural and connected world, where there is no room for the pretentious establishment of “pure” or “authentic” identities.
The Argentinian anthropologist reveals an optimistic (though far from naïve) understanding that contrasts with the ch'ixi epistemology, defended and defined as follows by Rivera Cusicanqui:
If in the 1970s and 1980s, the intellectual debate took for granted the imminent homogenisation or cultural hybridization of Latin American societies, since the mid-1990s we have experienced the multiple irruptions of undigested and indigestible pasts (Translated from Rivera Cusicanqui 2018, 17).
The Aymara word ch'ixi has many connotations. It translates as something like a colour formed by the juxtaposition of small dots of contrasting hues that never mix completely. It refers to something that is and is not at the same time. It symbolises the conjugation of opposites without blending and the indigenous world with its opposite, with no annulment or loss of substance (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 70).
Rivera Cusicanqui describes a contemporary superposition of worlds, images, references, techniques and aesthetics that denote the coexistence between archaism and actuality in Andean society. Marina Waisman (2013, 65) identified the same discontinuities and historical overlaps affecting Latin American architectural practice and which have led to a significant part of the trend to fragmentation typical of what were at the time she was writing known as postmodern architectures.
The association between the facades of cholets, used as canvases to apply iconographic elements and highly expressive colours and the concept of the decorated shed, coined by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), is almost automatic. For example, in Learning from El Alto Elisabetta Andreoli (2013, 42-43) referred to the differences between the architecture of the American trio and the intergalactic chola and polychromatic architecture of El Alto. According to Andreoli, in El Alto, there is no search for a heroic past or an everyday vernacular, but a representation of urban and contemporary indigenous cultural elements.
If the kitsch of Las Vegas casinos is compared to the work of an architect like Mamani, it is not in a theoretical sense. Cholet architecture is not imitative. Its outstanding facades express the contentious juxtaposition of patterns from pre-Columbian art (rooted in Andean textiles and craftsmanship) and industrialised materials and artisanal techniques. Different worlds and times coexist, from the construction process to the final product.
Figure 4_ A marked two-dimensionality in two semi-detached cholets. Source: the author, 2019.
[Cholets] are also a result of the “process of change” (if we conceive of this as an epistemic process) experienced since the revolts of 2000 and 2005. Today it is reflected in the creativity and originality, and the chicha way of designing and building, as a baroque expression of a new collective mentality (Translated from Rivera Cusicanqui 2018, 23).
By using the term baroque expression in her brief mention of cholets, Rivera Cusicanqui suggests a current behaviour, whose presence is recognised as a distinctive cultural feature in the American periphery of the modern world. According to the Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, “the gravitation of capitalist modernity was always fading away, together with other discontinued ‘premodern and semi-modern conditions' that anticipated the ‘postmodern condition' described by Lyotard” (2000, 14-15).
Echeverría (2000) identifies the persistence of a baroque ethos where a formal constant reappears as a “taste – and the judgment on that taste – for the unstable, the multidimensional, and the mutant”. This can be associated with a trajectory of discontinuities identified by Waisman throughout Latin American architecture history.
According to the Argentinian, from the morphological point of view, the Spanish-American Baroque is non-structural, since its load-bearing elements are replaced by the vagueness of the relation between the support and the supported, which frees fantasy from all constriction. In these cases, strong cultural characterisations and historical and regional references emerge from capricious surface details (Waisman 2013, 125-126).
It seems that the Latin American baroque ethos has not been limited to the original colonial context, from the facade of San Lorenzo de Carangas church (1744), a masterpiece of the mestizo baroque of the indigenous architect José Kondori in Potosí, to paradigmatic works of modern architecture such as the UNAM Central Library (1952) by Juan O'Gorman.
According to Waisman (2013, 127), indigenous-cultural thought (indirectly inherited by modern Mexicans and contemporary Bolivians) was certainly incompatible with European rationality. Its way of articulating and analysing things integrated different and overlapping worlds and times. Additionally, today, global economic, social, and cultural movements favour certain forms of hybridization that no longer depend on long artisanal or erudite patience but are driven by an overwhelming circulation of simultaneous and decontextualised images (García-Canclini 2019, XXXVI).
Therefore, the cholets cannot be understood in a Manichean or reductionist way since they are a reflection of the confrontational encounters between the ch'ixi world and the manifestation of the Latin American baroque ethos.
The actuality of the Baroque is certainly not in its capacity to inspire a radical political order that is alternative to the capitalist modernity that is currently struggling with a deep crisis. Instead, it resides in the strength with which it manifests, on the profound plane of cultural life, the incongruity of present modernity and the possibility and urgency of alternative modernity (Translated from Echeverría 2000, 15).
Figure 5_ Diamonds, symbols of wealth embedded within the facade. Source: the author, 2019.
Beneath the superficial veil of identity that cloaks this architecture, Randolph Cárdenas (2010, 97) identifies a desire of El Alto's cholo bourgeoisie to differentiate themselves from their own neighbours as successful merchants rather than to compete as equals with the “white elites” of La Paz. The extravagant shapes, colours and windows of the buildings aim to communicate a journey that has involved overcoming rural poverty and finding individual glory in the city.
These buildings are, above all, efficient money-making machines, an aspect that resonates in their architectural purpose (commercial premises, party venues and rented housing) and in their morphology (blocks that occupy the entire lot). The marked two-dimensionality of their facades and volumetry is broken only by the villa perched on the top floor, where the owner lives.
This architecture balances superimposed frontiers between individuality and collectivity, archaism and contemporaneity, the search for cultural autonomy and a dependent economic reality. It incorporates the contradictions and asymmetries of global geopolitical relations, which benefited the caste of “21st century Aymara merchants” (Salazar Molina 2016, 43), whose international transactions are usually conducted on the margins of legality.
Behind the hypermodern skin (generally clad with materials imported from China) hides a flesh built using ordinary clay bricks and cast-in-situ concrete structures. While the digitisation and automation of labour and production are rapidly advancing in rich and middle-income countries, architects like Mamani still draw parts of the project directly on the walls so that masons know how to build the structure they are working on. The contradiction between image and reality is reflected in the cynical luxury of these Andean palaces, whose ornamental exuberance belies their rudimentary construction and the poor conditions experienced by the workers who build them. Behind the dreamlike appearance of wealth, a proclamation of individual success, are hidden false promises of the asymmetrical capitalist world.
Once again, the reality of a border permeated by ethnic, cultural, and economic overlaps is imposed, in a process that is characteristic of the conditions of production and reproduction that exist on the planet's peripheries. The behaviour and social relationships of the powerful caste of El Alto's Aymara merchants demonstrate the adaptive capacity of migrants and their struggle to get ahead, as well as their ability to create an environment that is appropriate to their way of life. They reflect the hybrid condition of mestizos in the midst of an urban culture that lies halfway between the countryside and the city, between the past and the future, the local and the global.
The Argentinian architect Claudio Caveri pointed out that in these hot frontiers, the mestizo condition plays a central role in the disjuncture between the system and the environment:
The mestizo plays, sways and changes position because he is not an individual governed by ideologies. In his dream nothing is firm or nailed down, nothing is clear and perfectly structured. He is a living being full of opposites, which run through his veins, and he thinks only when reality forces him to do so (Translated from Caveri 2002, 162).
The pragmatic nature that Caveri recognises in mestizos does not exclude their desire for change and world transformation, nor does it mean the abdication of their complex cultural heritage. However, it is not possible to escape the ambiguity of those conditions. “On the one hand the brave new world, the fascinating, floating, superficial world of the simulacrum, moving in the vacuous sumptuousness of appearances. And on the other, the world of the harshest reality and the biological struggle to survive” (Caveri 2002, 209).
Figure 6_ A chola from El Alto. Source: the author, 2019.
In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa describes the experience of an inhabitant of the complex US-Mexico border, who is not recognised (nor self-acknowledged) as belonging to either nation. The border presented by this chicana writer describes a condition that seems to resemble the context of the Bolivian-Peruvian highlands, a complex space of migrant resistance and reinvented identity, divided between at least two systems, two ways of thinking, two souls and two different cultural worlds.
This text has sought to show that the search for architectural identity in contemporary peripheral border areas cannot be read as a naïve expression of the condensations of ancestry, nor as a movement born of a New Era. Neither can it be considered irrefutable evidence of capitalist modernisation, globalisation, or homogenising processes. This is proven by a kind of cultural atavism, called upon to invent contemporary identity based on a certain idea of historical-cultural heritage. It is a process that is showing early signs of weariness though. The intense exploitation of the imagery of identity expressed by this architecture (illustrated by the sale of MDF and resin souvenirs inspired by cholet facades and metal doors, as well as a tourist route that takes in the best-known examples) reinforces Mamani's individual signature, while loosening its collective sense.
Likewise, the desire to emulate capitalist hyper-modernism has changed the references of these buildings, which have moved from Andean motifs towards surfaces with robotic imagery, inspired by sources such as the Titanic or the American film Transformers. As Beatriz Sarlo (2015) has said, El Alto is an example of contemporary complexity in Latin America, where there is no room for naivety.
As Marina Waisman (2013) argues, cholets might stimulate the opening of a critical window into the subcontinent's intricate cultural and architectural landscape, which depends on the conscious use of instrumental concepts of valuation that originate from a Latin American viewpoint. However, many studies1 of the El Alto phenomenon show the predominance of extemporaneous and exogenous analogies, accompanied by a doctrine of influences. This denotes a genealogist's obsession that, as the Brazilian literary critic Silviano Santiago (2019, 30-32) has observed, reduces the creations of Latin American artists to the condition of parasites, feeding on another artist's creations without ever adding something personal. Santiago urges us to analyse the work of a culture that historically has been dominated by another as a result of restless and insubordinate assimilation, but that has also been born in the gaps between places and borders.
The concept of border thinking, developed by Anzaldúa and later refined by authors such as Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel, can become a powerful evaluative tool, both for critics and for architectural practice in Latin America as a whole. The astonishment caused by the appearance of El Alto's cholets exposes the reluctant Eurocentric dimension in much of the value judgements of Latin American architecture and reveals, once again, the condescending and exotic vision of many analysts who are based in the global centre.
This text sought to address opportunities for discussion (and self-reflection), inspired by idiosyncratic buildings that impose interpretative challenges beyond the architecture itself. It has sought to employ the analysis of frontier thinking as a theoretical-critical alternative to Eurocentrism, arguing that thinking from the borders can generate an external epistemology (an outside created from within). This is an exercise that constitutes a decolonising project (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006, 2-6).
* Acknowledgement: Fundação de Amparo à Pesuisa do Estado de São Paulo – FAPESP, process no. 2021/11782-6
1 For example, the analysis of Bruno Zevi's and Frank Lloyd Wright's work by Bolivian architects Juan Carlos Calderón Romero and Gastón Gallardo (Dean of FAADU-UMSA) in the documentary Cholets, where they argue that Mamani's work is not architecture. It is worth mentioning that the architectural status of the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, Charles Moore, or John Outram (which is repeatedly compared to Mamani's work), has been criticised but rarely addressed as an extemporaneous imitation of postmodern populist architecture.