Architectural Protest in El Alto: Freddy Mamani’s Challenge to Bolivia’s Lettered City

• In Event: On Protest I: “Endemic crises and continuing protests in comparative and transnational perspective”

Abstract

El Alto, just over 4000 meters above sea, is Bolivia’s fastest growing city and home to more than a million residents. It is also known as Bolivia’s youngest city because it did not become an official municipality until 1987. El Alto’s population is over 80% indigenous, with the Aymara making up just over 75%. This flat, dry, and vibrant plain has long been a site of popular protest and collective organizing, perhaps most notably in recent history in 2003 when protesters from El Alto descended to La Paz and forced Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada to resign over neoliberal reforms that would have increasingly privatized gas. Since Evo Morales’s 2006 entry into office, El Alto has experienced unprecedented economic growth as well as received attention from the government in ways previously unseen in Bolivia.

In his book La ciudad letrada (1980) literary and cultural critic Ángel Rama describes the rise of Latin American capital cities, like La Paz, as it coincided with the rise of the lettered class of modern nation states. Latin American cities, he argues, became the canvases for the dreams of order. European colonizers and the criollo elites came to construct new capitalist economies in a materially efficient and exclusive way through urban design that helped secure the interests of the elites. Considering the history of El Alto via Rama’s work, it is striking to me that in the Fall of 2014 social media in Bolivia, South America, Europe, and the States, ran stories almost all at once about Freddy Mamani, the “neo-Andean” architect of El Alto. Mamani disrupts the monotonous brick and concrete design scheme of El Alto as he inserts brightly colored buildings with Andean symbols from Tiwanaku into the landscape. His designs have been lauded as a sign of El Alto’s growing influence in the national imaginary or alternatively been disparaged as kitsch “cholets” that offend higher brow tastes. The primary issue at stake is that if a new idiosyncratic Aymara class is emerging, what does the old “lettered city” do with the fact that their own established definitions of order, beauty, or modernity might not be the dreams of everyone? Like them or not, Mamani’s buildings undermine expectations of what buildings “should” look like and stand as potent visual protests to outsider assumptions of what El Alto was, what it is, and what it is becoming.

Author

• Tara A Daly, Mount Holyoke College