The Aymara cholets: an architecture of abundance

Jacques Perkins Martin [e-mail]

Iron Man’s pied-a-terre ? A rare disco-funk album from the 80’s ? A place the Beatles built to store away their Yellow Submarine ? While accounts abound in Western media of Bolivia’s “neo-Andean” architecture, many are at a loss for words when trying to describe what seems to be reassuringly “pop,” and yet so far-removed from the modern canon. What is unanimous, however, is the surprise and sensory bedazzlement such buildings bring. What stands out most is that they simply stand out. This is what I focus on in my essay, in which I show that the core Aymara tenet of “abundance” can help us better understand how this hybrid architecture came to be. Through it, global consumer culture is integrated into the amplification and affirmation of an indigenous Aymara identity and, more broadly, of an Aymara cosmos. Such buildings therefore emerge as testaments to the recent economic, political, and spiritual flourishing of the country’s majority indigenous population.

El Alto – the Aymara metropolis

The city of El Alto sits more than four thousand meters above sea level between the west-most inner regions of the Andean plateau, or Altiplano (“high plains”), historically home to the country’s indigenous populations, and the more affluent, European city of La Paz. Since the 1980’s, El Alto has been the prime target destination for a rural-urban exodus that has led to the rapid growth of what was originally a suburb, on the periphery of La Paz, into a city in its own right, with the arrival of indigenous communities from the mountains and the plains.

In the process, El Alto has been transformed into a commercial hub, Bolivia’s “dry harbour.” (Andreoli, 2014: 6). Drawing on strong transnational kinship networks and El Alto’s strategic situation as a node connecting the Pacific ocean to the rest of the country, Alteños have developed a thriving trade industry. Indeed, these indigenous communities have found economic success from importing domestic appliances, mobile phones, cars, and textiles from East Asian countries, notably China, and reselling them to the rest of the country and across Latin America (Andreoli, 2014: 7). This has made El Alto the home of a new Aymara upper-class, the majority ethnic group alongside the Quechua, and the one to which I will be referring in this essay.

In addition to being able to preserve many of their rural community networks and customs despite emigration (Andreoli 2014: 14), for Tassi (2010: 14), the Aymara have developed a certain awareness of their traditions which has allowed them to better negotiate with and absorb urban, modernist cultural norms, ultimately enabling them to maintain their own cultural practices. For this reason, the predominantly Aymara El Alto - as opposed to the more white-mestizo capital, La Paz - has served as a locus for the representation of the culture, identity, and concerns of Bolivia’s marginalised indigenous peoples. It has shaped the country’s history and has been at the center of many indigenous struggles, the most recent being the Gas war of 2003, which paved the way to the election of Evo Morales in 2006. As a president of Aymara origin, Morales has since vastly promoted the political recognition and empowerment of the country’s historically marginalized indigenous population (despite their representing a majority of the total population).

A “neo-Andean” architecture

It is in this context that we can understand the success of the “neo-andean” architectural style in the last decade. In Western media, where pictures and reports on this architecture abound, the ways in which it is described and perceived point to a striking paradox: it is both seen as a hyper-local, vernacular example of “Southern Geometries,” (Chandès, 2018) and as a distinctly modern or even futuristic example of a “spaceship architecture,” (Quartz, 2015) with commercial, pop-art or toy-like aesthetics: a “transformer architecture” (Juxtapoz, 2016). I will argue that the moral, economic, and aesthetic value of “abundance” at the core of Aymara cosmology allows us to resolve this paradox by going beyond a simple dichotomy between traditional or vernacular architecture and modern, Western architecture. I will show instead how such an architecture of abundance integrates  global consumer culture in order to best amplify a local, Aymaran culture, ultimately allowing for the  “potentiation” (Tassi, forthcoming: 16) and intensification of an Aymara world.   

I will do this by first expanding on the crucial role of sensory and material abundance in affirming Aymara identity and the way “neo-andean” architecture contributes to this, drawing on local understandings of materiality. This will allow me to then explain how material abundance and excess upheld for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, becomes a powerful means to negotiate with and integrate Western capitalist consumer aesthetics and materials into traditional Aymara representations to create a hybrid architectural style. Finally, I will show how this principle of material abundance at the heart of this hybridity bestows generative and even cosmogonic properties to the built environment as it becomes involved in the reproduction of relations between things, people and spirits, allowing a reverberation and expansion of the Aymara world. Because of the holistic view necessary to apprehend these buildings, however, I will first provide a detailed architectural account of these buildings to which I will then refer throughout the essay.

What Bolivians call cholets, a contraction of chalets, as testifying to its Western influence, and cholos, the name given to urbanized indigenous peoples of Bolivia, are mainly commissioned by local economic elites in the commerce and trading sectors. They are largely, but not exclusively (Cárdenas, 2010) the work of one craftsman-turned-architect named Freddy Mamani, who works in close collaboration with these owners. Cholets are predominantly built in busy, commercial neighborhoods. These include the zone of la Ceja, as well as those of Villa Dolores, and of 16 de Julio. They are mainly located on the avenues and intersections which traverse these neighbourhoods, such as the avenue of 16 de Julio, the main artery of El Alto, or the Bolivia and Cochabamba avenues. (Cárdenas, 2010: 20, 56)

The floor plan (Cárdenas, 2010: 53, 54) of cholets admits little variation. The first two floors are reserved for commercial activities, with the ground floor often comprising of a shop, and the second floor of an event space or party hall. The third and fourth floors are occupied by living quarters, sometimes rented as office spaces, but most often occupied by the children of the owners. The last floor, on the roof of the building, often in retreat and representing a stylistic caesura with the rest of the building, holds the living quarters of the owner.

The buildings’ facades directly evoke culturally meaningful symbols, drawing on traditional andean aesthetics, an inspiration which Mamani makes explicit (Andreoli, 2014). The color scheme, in bright yellows, reds, greens and oranges is reminiscent of the whiphala flag, a multi-colored, chequered flag which often stands as a unifying, pan-Andean symbol for the indigenous peoples of Latin America. These colors are also reminiscent of indigenous textiles, particularly the aguayo cloths of rural communities, which used strong, contrasting colors as blazons to identify different villages, and conferred status to families who were able to weave the most attractive or contrasting color combinations (Andreoli 2014: 33).

The stair-like geometric motif on the facades and bordering windows explicitly points to the Cruz Andina, also a popular, religious symbol of indigeneity across South America, dating from the Inca Empire. Other geometric motifs are more broadly drawn from the tiwanacu civilisation (Andreoli, 2015) and culture mostly known through the pre-incan Tiwanaco city’s architectural vestiges, located near El Alto. They draw on the custom in pre-Columbian representations to reduce figurative elements to their essential forms, or what archeologists call “primary signs,” (Torres, 2004) each bearing certain meanings, and assembled into more complex agglomerations. Facades of cholets reemploy these figures by playing on the equally traditional procedures of symmetry and asymmetry, juxtapositions and repetitions, and playing with variations of striking oblique and jagged lines. (Andreoli, 2014: 34).

However, cholets are built using modern techniques and materials, many of which are imported from China. (Andreoli, 2015). To allow for the building’s dimensions, cholets are built with “reinforced concrete infilled with brick, pre-moulded beams for large spans.” (Andreoli, 2015). Facades are covered in large panes of reflective, glazed glass, bent using complex, modern techniques. (Tassi, forthcoming: 36) and are held by industrially produced metal window frames (Andreoli, 2015). The bright colors of the building facades are obtained from synthetic paints which allow a distinct intensity and shine (Andreoli, 2020: 195) It is a synthetic color seen in, and likely inspired by, mass-produced consumer goods (ibid.) such as textiles and home appliances. Many of the reliefs on the outer facades and walls and columns of the inner halls are executed in situ by Mamami and his team using “abundant quantities of plaster and polystyrene” which fill hand-carved moulds. (Andreoli, 2015).

A large portion of cholets include a ballroom or “party hall,” regularly rented out for weddings, baptisms, a girl’s 15th birthday, anniversaries, or community events. (Andreoli, 2015) These halls are spacious, often two stories high, with an upper deck held by rows of pillars. Reliefs are carved and decorative motifs and illustrations painted so as to cover the entire surface of  the pillars, balustrades, and walls of the building. (ibid.). The party halls often contain bars, tables to eat and drink, dance floors, and platforms for the bands to play. Glass chandeliers and hundreds of LED lights, embedded into the walls and ceilings, are imported in bulk from Chinese suppliers. (Andreoli, 2020). Expensive decorative porcelain tiles are also imported from China at the cost of 280 boliviano (around USD $40) each (Villavicencio, 2014).

Sensory engagement and Aymara empowerment

Overwhelmingly, owners state that through cholets they intend to showcase a cultural pride, and testify to one’s indigenous heritage, as seen in the above description of the facade and its influences. One owner states that the buildings represent “us as Aymaras that we are, the roots that we have, to demonstrate to the world our culture, what our grandparents have taught us.” (Perez, 2017: 56). According to many owners, the material properties of buildings are representations of the “Alteño character” (Perez, 2017: 60). Indeed, the different textures of a wall, whether flat or more in relief, as well as the alternating use of softer and more striking colors, are said to express the temperament of the Alteño man, “sometimes passive, but other times explosive,” (ibid.). One owner affirms that “the pillars of a building in this design are circular and are stronger and better support the weight of the structure. We are strong, and we work hard, like the pillars.” (ibid.)

This identification with the material properties of the buildings is to be understood as a mutual empowerment, where the material plays a role in sensually engaging people, through an affective presence which fills or grabs one with a force,  “a palpable and sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (Taussig 1993: 21). This is described by cholos as a visceral “attraction-envy” (atracción), “an aesthetic witchcraft in the sense that such physical display exerts a molecular captivation of the beholder.” (Tassi, 2010: 8). As a result, the more abundant the materiality of an object, the more it reflects into its onlooker with an equivalent potency. Indeed, Tassi notes that when dancers and worshippers describe the overwhelming abundance of sensory and material stimulation often present in religious celebrations, they say that “it has got into me.” (2010: 6). Conversely, one aspiring owner states: “I am an Aymara woman who is proud of my culture, joyful, and full of color. So why can my house not show what I am?” (in Flores, 2014) illustrating this synaesthetic mutual “blending and empowering of bodies, senses, and worlds,” (Tassi 2010: 6) where the material is the “ontological extension” of the living, and vice versa. (ibid.)

In light of this co-implication, where the subject is formed by the overlapping of relationships with things, and inversely, the material abundance of the cholets can be understood as ontologically coterminous with, and so necessary for, the thriving and affirmation of the Aymara community. After describing the features of his party hall, one owner is described as having a chest “swollen with pride.” (Villavicencio, 2014). Another interlocutor describes the buildings as a “cry which says, here we are, this is how we are.” (Perez, 2017: 10). The building’s material abundance allows for what Aymara often refer to as “reverberation” (retumbar) of people, things, spirits, “a process of intense, increasing concentration of multiple and repeated elements” which reproduces itself through space like an echo (Tassi, forthcoming: 31, 32). One woman, living near the zone of 16 de Julio, claims to have borne the Cruz Andina on the facade of her building as testimony to her belonging and cultural ascendency, stating that it participated in “reinforcing the spirit of the avenue,” (Cárdenas, 2010: 116), pointing to a penetration of Aymara culture and religion by and through the built environment.

Generally, El Alto’s urban landscape is characterized by the monochromatic earth tones of low, red brick buildings; buildings four or five stories high, with striking facades, perform a sensory rupture in the landscape felt as an empowerment of an indigenous culture that is propelled to the center-stage in our phenomenal perception of the city. The urban centers and avenues in which they are located (see description) work as an echo chambers which further amplify the building’s visibility and economic success. Therefore, Mamani often states how the addition of colors to the landscape of “exposed brick” (Villavicencio, 2014) is akin to providing the city an identity, and more generally, to giving it life. This parallels the assertion that aguayo cloth colors were meant to contrast with the barren landscape of the plateau highlands (Andreoli, 2014). A further homology can be drawn between this opposition and the one posed between indigeneity and whiteness in Aymara leader Felipe Quispe’s notion of “indianizar al q’ara,” or “indigenising the White other,” (Runnels, 2019: 4). Q’ara here is a term used to describe the Spanish colonizer and settler population just as it is used also to describe features of the Andean landscape, and which can be translated as naked, bald, or barren as well as culturally deficient (ibid.). The material exaggerations of cholets therefore vehicle feelings of cultural pride and amplify their potency in an urban fabric marked by marginalization and colonial repression.

Building with abundance and the “indigenisation of modernity”

Such a “postulate of abundance” (Tassi, 2010) poses the terms for the negotiation with and integration of modern consumer cultures. Indeed, the structure of the cholets, their facades, and the decorations of their interior, notably the party halls, are composed of a “heterogeneous assemblage” (Latour, 1990) of materials, techniques, and cultural references, both traditional and modern, local and global. When commissioners of cholets do not draw their own designs, although many do, architects describe having to carry out a work of “collage,” (Cárdenas, 2010: 69) from the owner’s sources of inspiration. As E Elinoff demonstrates , the re-ordering of the “sensible arrangements of the world,” through the physical assembly of disparate elements in a building, gives rise to “new political subjectivities,” which emerge as composites of the different “histories, ideologies, meanings” embedded in the materials and embodied by the subjects who perceive them (2016: 612). The cholet can undeniably be understood as a site of negotiation, or of a “politics in the making” (ibid.) which reflects the aspiration for belonging to a hybrid, cholos social group, at once Aymara and urban. This process echoes Levi-Strauss’s conclusions as to the nature of the “house” as an “institutional creation that permits compounding forces which, everywhere else, seem only destined to mutual exclusion because of their contradictory bends.” (Levi-Strauss, 1974: 189).

What is essential however, in cholet architecture is that the house’s material excess does not only serve as a way of voicing a cholos identity, opening a “space of struggle over the boundaries of the political community” (Elinoff, 2016: 613) and allowing for the recognition of this identity as a political subject. For Tassi, “the neo-Andean architecture does not aspire to ‘communicate’ with the white-mestizo sectors and does not expect their appreciation,” (forthcoming: 36) and the richness of the aesthetic is “not grasped by or directed to urban white mestizos.” In fact, these indigenous cholos are often excluded from mainstream intellectual and political discourses, as well as looked down upon by the white-mestizo bourgeoisie for practices of excessive spending, and for not respecting bourgeois values of modesty, thriftiness, and economic rationality. “Neo-andean” style is mainly dismissed by the country’s architectural circles, as too kitsch, ostentatious, or as one states, “a postmodernist style badly applied’ (Cárdenas, 2010: 63). Therefore, the building’s striking place in the urban landscape cannot only be understood as a “redistribution of the sensible,” (Rancière, 2004) which imposes a new “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,” (Rancière, 2004: 13) in favor of the Aymara.

Rather, it is in material excess itself that the political finds its endpoint and meaning or a redistribution by and through the sensible. This is because material excess contributes to what Tassi calls a “potentiation” (Tassi, forthcoming: 36) or amplification of already existing Aymara beings and connections, in an “aspiration to be who we are,” (ibid.: 4) rather than an aspiration to be recognized, or to “be something.” Instead of an institutional representation the house is to be thought of as a site of immediate and sensory presentation. Indeed, one can think of the opposition between material abundance and material lack as homologous to the oppositions of: excessive spending and thriftiness; cholos and mestizo bourgeoisie; conspicuous display and modesty; cholets and low red-brick buildings; color and nakedness/exposure; life and barrenness; aguayo cloths and pampa; indigeneity and q’ara. We therefore notice how abundance functions as an integrating factor which makes “two in one,” allowing, for instance, for buildings to emulate the traditional brightness of aguayo cloths with the complementary feature of imported synthetic paints. What emerges is that “more stuff,” or material abundance, is precisely the “external unity” which replaces an “internal duality,” (Levi-Srauss, 1979: 185) and concatenates “the ties society is supposed to secure and those that men once saw as the work of nature.” (ibid: 187). It allows us to consider politics of making as well as in making, where the making itself and thus material accumulation is the base requirement for the affirmation of Aymara identity.  One could metaphorically imagine as a covering of the gaps between Aymara tradition and the global market economy with abundant layers of plaster. This points to a specificity in the Aymaran means of adapting and integrating exterior elements, or of undertaking a process of “indigenisation of modernity,” in which occidental capitalism and “relations and goods of the global system are re-signified in the local order of things.” (Sahlins, 2007: 206).

Emerging buildings, emerging worlds:

cholets and the “afloating” of the Aymara cosmos

Material excess is to be considered as an end in itself because indeed “things,” as “corporeal agents,” (Tassi, 2012: 21) hold the potential to instantiate or consolidate relations between the material, the human, and the divine. It is indeed considered that material exaggerations and repetitions, by generating “attraction,” are practices which allow the “amplification” of “pathways” (Tassi, 2012: 22) between different beings, bringing them into relations of exchange and communication, or intensifying what networks already exist. One can already see this in the construction process of the cholets, often a communal endeavor which mobilizes networks of friends, family, and neighbors, for instance to carry materials. While women cook, the work of men is especially solicited from the community during one of the most arduous processes of construction, when concrete is poured onto the formwork or mold of the reinforced concrete floor, called a “slab.” (Cárdenas, 2010: 78).

This generative effect is more durably seen however in the practice of renting out party halls. Cholets are overwhelmingly described not only as showcasing Aymara ascendancy, but at displaying economic success and thereby social prestige. Indeed, the buildings are significant financial investments ranging from USD $250 000 to USD $600 000, and the majority of this expense is the result of the decoration in the Party Halls. (Andreoli, 2015). The extravagance of the ballrooms and of the party halls, described above, are markers of social prestige distinction: they are a rapid transfiguration of “economic capital into symbolic capital.” (Bourdieu, [1997] 2000: 199). One owner considers that “The ‘showy’ colors, the more striking colors, are to make [the building] more visible to our neighbors, to the people who come to recognize that it is us." (Villavicencio, 2014). An architect in El Alto writes that “What people want is ‘like my neighbor, but better.’” (Cárdenas, 2010: 25). The distinction is all the more potent if the building is located in a reputable, central neighborhood, already renowned for its large street fairs or for the fraternity to which it is a home.

The more opulent, and therefore renowned a cholet is, the more guests it will attract. In some, “elaborate invitations are sent out, photographers, videographers and several music bands are hired, (sometimes even mariachi bands from Mexico are flown in) and a fully catered service with huge quantities of beer is provided by the host.” (Andreoli, 2015). One of the wealthiest Aymara traders in the city, Alexander Chino, the owner of the “Alexander King”, boasts that his new hall, the “Alexander Prince”, is to include a swimming pool, multiple sport facilities, and a wedding suite. “It is the best one. I have 20 weddings already lined up. People come from all over to see it. In La Paz, they can’t even dream of it.” (Andreoli, 2015).

In what is locally described as “movement,” (movemiento) (Tassi, 2010: 2017) or the constant circulation and reproduction of wealth in the urban economy, investments in the building are therefore recuperated in only a few years, with the cost of renting out a ballroom rising as high as USD $50 000 (Andreoli 2015). This is also due to the diversity of activities located in the building. In one example, in a building on avenue Jorge Carrasco in la Ceja in El Alto, the bottom floor contains a hardware store and a call-center; the second floor, a vegetarian restaurant; the fourth floor, a technical training and education center, and in the fourth and fifth floors, domestic quarters (Cárdenas, 2010: 94). Cárdenas mentions how this functional use of the buildings stems from a rural logic of maximization and densification of complementary revenue-generating activities from diverse sectors on a single, limited parcel of land, each integrated spatially within a single building, with a single staircase linking each floor. Freddy Mamani, similarly, speaks of such a diversity as creating “ecosystems” of “autodurable” buildings which generate their own revenue. (Andreoli, 2014: 24).

The cholos ethic of “conspicuous consumption, placing moral emphasis on spending in excess, and rapidly materialising profit into abundant display,” (Tassi, 190) which is opposed to the thriftiness and economic rationality of the white mestizos of La Paz, is intertwined with the idea that economic activity, and more generally, one’s life, is necessarily seen as implicated in a “wide and constant drive” to “make the world live, to make the earth, spirits and matter reproduce” (Tassi, forthcoming: 14) and aesthetic performances hold such a generative power or ability to ‘give birth’ and produce living, tangible beings (Tassi, 2012: 21).

The ch’alla blessing given to cholets illustrate how these buildings are considered as life-generating beings. It is made to any material item which generates wealth, where one makes a request from Pachamama (Mother Earth). (Cárdenas, 2010: 84) In the case of the cholets, one requests the durability of the building and its prosperity as a source of income. It is a “regenerative act through which a process of reciprocal and communal growth is instantiated,” (Tassi, forthcoming: 16) independently of the private ownership of the building, but rather considering it to be necessarily co-implicated in relations of productive exchanges with other things, humans, and spirits: indeed, if not taken care of by the owner, the ch’alla will be executed by the constructors or masons, as a condition to continue with the construction. (Cárdenas, 2010: 84) Furthermore, In building the multi-storey cholets, constructors consider each roof that is newly built and which closes the story below as symbolically representing the the creation of a new floor. Many consider that every floor needs to be celebrated with a new ch’alla, since it thus represents a new ground endowed with reproductive and generative capacities. (ibid.) Indeed, “many people see the slab as if it were new land and, as such needs to be blessed” (ibid.) posing a homology between the size of the building and its reproductive capacity. Therefore the taller the building and the more floors it has, the more potent its reproductive and generative capacity.

These buildings therefore attract and generate relations, and in this they can be understood as having a polarizing function, acting as geographical center to which other, now tertiary peripheral spaces turn, allowing them to be sites in which wealth is created. This is reminiscent of the idea, illustrated by Tassi that sufficient reverberation or intensification and multiplication of things and people leads to an overflow, or a process of “afloating” through which the margins, “the laws and the forms of a relegated indigenous cosmos,” thought of as a mythical kingdom, buried underground, called Pachakuti, can rise to the surface (forthcoming: 37, 38). This implies a “spatio-temporal adjustment,” a “cosmological transformation that repositions the centre of the socio-political equilibrium in those marginal spaces, people, and practices.” (Tassi, forthcoming: 25). For Choque (2001: 25) this floating of “what has always been there,” is considered to be “time which returns so that we encounter ourselves.”

We have therefore shown how “abundance” is a driving ethical, aesthetic, and cosmological value at the heart of the new Andean built environment. It is a teleological value which sets in motion its own becoming, by commanding an aesthetic of material overflow which is responsible for generating its own reproduction of material wealth, or an aesthetic of “always more,” or “always on the edge.” This is seen by the fact that many cholet owners go on to building more cholets, some owning up to five or more, each more spectacular and opulent than the next.

It is this recursive feature of “abundance,” which might explain how such an extraordinary adaptation and integration to modernity is expressed in the built form, where rather than being alienated from their environment, cholos speak of complete identification and mutual empowerment with their surrounds. Like a force that is at once centripetal and in expansion, recycling what is foreign to better amplify itself outwards, it is a principle which calls for the absorption of all that which nourishes the “potentiation” of the Aymara cosmos, where integration of a global consumer culture nourishes, inversely, the global expansion of a local culture. In this “neo-andean” architecture has an almost cosmogonic or world-expanding function for the Aymara community.

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