Himpele 2003-Gran Poder Video Essay

The Gran Poder Parade and the SocialMovement of the Aymara Middle Class:A Video EssayJeff D. Himpele

The parade for the patron saint of the parish of Gran Poder is the largest city-widefolklore event in La Paz, Bolivia, in which tens of thousands of indigenous Aymaraand mestizo residents of the city participate in dances that tie them to the nationsindigenous past. The sequences of images discussed in this article focus on a dancefraternity composed of members of the prosperous urban Aymara middle class (orcholos) who use their indigenous costumes and dance movements as vehicles in whichthey enter and display their modernity. Using harshly exaggerated masks that relatesocial subordination to racial difference, the performance of the Morenada by todayswell-to-do Aymaras revisits the cultural marginalization and hardship they experi-enced in their own migration to La Paz from the rural countryside. Wearing a series ofexpensive outfits and ostentatious costumes, these dancers vividly flaunt their dis-tinction from the Western-mestizo middle class, and its signs of well-being. This essayargues that the parade itself is a performance of the political and economic emergenceof a parallel Aymara middle class that uses dance as a social movement toclaim legitimate status for cultural hybridity and to seek the benefits of full national

JEFF D. HIMPELE currently teaches in the Department of Anthropology at New York University.In La Paz, Bolivia, he has done fieldwork and research on popular culture, the history and circulationof cinema, populist television and politics, and the new indigenous video movement, which will beincorporated in his current book project, States ofCinema:Moving Images andSocial Productionin Bolivia.He is the author of Film Distribution asMedia: Mapping Difference in the Bolivian Cine-mascape, on the social mediation of transnational film distribution [Visual Anthropology Review,1996], and Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere onfieldwork dynamics in the public sphere and among others similarly interested in representing culture[in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, 2002]. As an ethnographic filmmaker, he hasproduced Taypi Kala: Six Visions of Tiwanaku [1994, Bolivia], and co-produced the award-winning Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza [1997, Mexico]. Address correspondence [email protected]

This article based on the Gran Poder parade in 1994 which I videotaped as part ofresearch supported by the Department of Anthropology, the Program in Latin AmericanStudies, and the Council on Regional Studies at Princeton University. I owe much gratitudeto the Rosas de Viacha whose members allowed me to accompany, videotape, and inter-view them. I also thank the Alvarado family for all of their support while I researched in LaPaz. Any errors here are my own, and any exaggerations are probably shaped by the spiritof the parade.

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Visual Anthropology, 16: 207243, 2003Copyright # Taylor & Francis, Inc.ISSN: 0894-9468 printDOI: 10.1080/08949460390212814

citizenship. Finally, this article shows that the parade is a vitally performative venturein their collective production of capital as the parade itself takes the form in whichbourgeois Aymaras practice modern commodity capitalism.

INTRODUCTION

As I begin to tilt the video camera up, the multicolored boots of Oscars renteddance costume are in the frame. Moving the frame upward reveals his outfit ofgray suit pants and a light grey sweater over a neatly pressed white shirt and tie,which suggest he is a modern professional, perhaps a doctor, teacher, or anentrepreneur. Then, as I finish framing his head, the image of the Morenada maskhe is wearing seems to contradict the clothing below [Figure 1]. As Bolivians, thisis our tradition. Today we are remembering the customs of our ancestors, Oscarexplains to the camera and me as he continues to put on the sequined costume ofthe Morenada, a dance in the parade of the Fiesta del Gran Poder (Festival of theLord of Great Power, hereafter the Gran Poder). This annual festival for the patronof the church parish of the prosperous Aymara (cholo) commercial neighborhoodof La Paz is arguably the foremost site of cultural production in the city. Followingmonths of rehearsals and organization, tens of thousands of people from theregion participate as musicians and dancers in dance fraternities in the cityslargest annual parade which lasts up to 15 hours.Perhaps because they are the most prestigious and the most costly dance fra-

ternities in which to participate, the Morenada dance is unique among the dozensof dances that are performed by over 100 groups in the parade. Unlike some of thenostalgic dance groups that seek to recover the authentic charm of ruralindigenous life and lost dances, or those that play out the battles between colonial-era forms of good and evil in the present, the Morenada features urban Aymaraswho imitate how their rural forebears burlesqued their own cultural others: thecolonial-era European invaders and the African slaves they brought with them. Inthe dance, the former drives the latter to march to work in mines and to dance ongrapes to make wine. Using harshly exaggerated masks that relate social sub-ordination to racial difference, the performance of the Morenada by todays mostwell-to-do Aymaras like Oscar revisits the cultural marginalization and hardshipthey experienced in their own immigration to La Paz from the countryside. Withexpensive clothes and ostentatious costumes, the dancers articulate their indi-genous identities while they boast of their subsequent success in urban modernity.As I begin to tape Oscars Morenada dance group this morning, I see these menembodying the political and economic emergence of an indigenous Aymaramiddle class in a social movement claiming legitimate cultural status and benefitsof national citizenship. As I will come to see the event afterward, their very par-ticipation in the parade is also a vitally performative moment of social productionin a particular culturally hybrid form of commodity capitalism. In synthesis, thisarticle argues that the wealth and status of the Aymara bourgeoisie, their culturalidentities, and citizenship in the Bolivian nation all turn upon these expensivedisplays of exaggerated Indianness.1

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In this essay, I review my shooting of the video I made with the Roses of Viacha,The Legitimate,2 a Morenada dance fraternity. I began going to their rehearsals forthe 1994 Gran Poder parade with the invitation of Dionisia, one of the comparsas3

Figure 1 Oscar changing into his Moreno costume for the Gran Poder Parade.

The Gran Poder Parade 209

three organizers two weeks earlier. During the first night, the organizers told methat several of the dancers had wanted me to join the group for the parade becauseI am, they said, very obvious6 feet tall, taller than many men in the group,and conspicuous. Reluctant to dance, I recalled that the judges who award prizesto the dance groups would disqualify from competition groups with foreignersdancing or playing in their hired marching bands, so I offered to videotape thegroup in the parade instead and to make copies available in exchange for theirallowing me to videotape the rehearsals and parades. When one of the organizerssuggested that I sell copies of the video, I explained that I would benefit enoughby accompanying them. At the same time, I was not surprised by his entrepre-neurial opportunism regarding culture. After all, these flamboyant Aymaras havebeen eager participants in capitalist modernity.

PARALLEL IMAGES OF BOLIVIAN MODERNITY

If Bolivias rough pursuit of modernity over the course of 20th Century reached awatershed with the social revolution in 1952, then it set a high watermark in themid-1980s with the abrupt implementation of neo-Liberal economic policies,representative democracy, and the apparatus of NGO development schemes thatexpanded subsequently as the state enterprises were sold off to national andforeign investors. When the social revolution of 1952 and the 1953 AgrarianReform disassembled haciendas and forms of debt-peonage and expanded land,wage-labor and other commodity markets to rural Aymaras, many of themimmigrated to La Paz and the adjacent shantytown of El Alto, where they enteredand expanded the informal markets of small-scale commodity production andcommerce. The cholo Aymara sector became a nexus in the national flow of con-sumer commodities and the transportation industry, for example, and became acrucial space where the multiple strata of urban and rural societies came face toface.4 In the precarious post-1985 La Paz, many urban Aymara men have soughtwork as unskilled laborers and itinerant vendors, while some women entrepre-neurs and households sought cheap credit from NGOs to start up fragile smallbusinesses. Debts and changing economic conditions have meant that manyengage multiple sources of income including informal commerce as vendorsproliferate along the sprawling street markets of La Paz, which have becomehighly organized centers for socializing and the basis of a variety of collectiveassociations among migrant Aymaras [Buechler et al. 1988].By expanding wage-labor to former Indians, and by redefining them as

peasants, the mestizo middle-class revolutionary ideologues had intended thenew market-mediated economy to provide the means to prosperity and thesynthesis of a mestizo nation. What the mestizo revolutionary ideologues couldnot foresee in the 1950s, however, was that the successful Aymara entrepreneurswho emerged would invest their new wealth into enhancing their own culturalsystem and their status in it. The commodification of clothing and the assem-blage of elements for festivals, for example, has provided representational forms,practices and networks that successful Aymara entrepreneurs have exploited toproduce their wealth as well as mark their status near the top of indigenous

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society, and in broader terms, as both indigenous and modern at once. Indeed,Aymara adults use the verbs progresar and modernizar as the terms in which theyseek to succeed upon migrating to the city. But the Aymara middle class disruptsthe linear neoevolutionary expectations of these terms for cultural assimilation inrural to urban migration; they have subverted the linear narratives of politicalmodernization, and culturally interrupted the dialectic images of ruin and pro-gress as well as the structures of class opposition in modern capitalist histories.As we will see, rather than risk segregation by struggling to establish authen-ticity or purity, urban Aymaras have sought cultural visibility and politicallegitimacy on established terms [Sanjines 1996] using capitalism, nationalism,and folklore, for example, as instruments they could appropriate to obtain theseductive images of modernity which had been promised since 1952. Con-temporary La Paz, I argue, can be seen as having two competing, parallel,middle classesthe mestizo and the Aymaraeach with distinctive affiliationswith Bolivia, signs of prestige, forms of well-being, and capitalist practices.Along with this dual image of social class, however, it is essential to point out

that in the wider frame of popular culture these parallel middling sectors in LaPaz are intimately connected through alliances of ritual kinship and exchange(compadrazgo) that are often deployed as economic and political tactics foraccessing wider elite social networks. In the public sphere, unexpected alliancesbetween urban Aymaras, elites, and mestizos which exploit the honorifics ofrespect and intimacy as well as the moralities of exchange between ritual kin, forexample, have provided the frameworks for neopopulist political parties andhave given some urban Aymaras a foothold in party politics, although this ismostly at the metropolitan level. In the domestic space of everyday life, the sameparallel formations of social class appear within many families of the popularsectors of La Paz, in which rural-born parental generations maintain theirindigenous identities while their urban-born children are brought up withWestern mestizo clothing and culture. They are usually raised this way becausethe Western clothing is cheaper; in other cases, it is so that their children wouldnot face the social discrimination parents had faced as indigenous. These alli-ances of kinship and exchange that are laced across the citys popular sectorscomplicate the image of two opposed social blocs [Frow 1995: 5556]anindigenous bloc opposed to a bloc of mestizo and elites. Rethinking dualisticimages of cultural domination, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith offers a vivid model forreimagining the relations between classes within the popular sectors: The pre-sent situation is one in which it is possible to say that there is one culture (albeitwith divisions in it) or several cultures (overlapping and rubbing against eachother), but no longer that there are two cultures . . .divided from each other [inFrow 1995].These frictions and antagonisms become visible in my videotape of the Gran

Poder, although they might be difficult to discern at first. This is because, as wewill see, the production of the parallel middle classes in La Paz is emphaticallyplayed out through public performances of Indianess, a polysemic image thatthey each inhabit with alternative motives.As the mestizo middle classes in La Paz sought to incorporate the fantasies of

modern progress over the course of the 20th Century, the political and economic


capital city also became dramatically indigenous. The peripheral neighborhoodsand shantytowns that line the brow of the city canyon and along the steep wallsof the canyon itself have mushroomed with colonization by tens of thousands ofrural Aymara families. These popular neighborhoods as well as the elite center ofthe city at the bottom of the canyon have become the sites of flourishing displaysof folkloric festivals and parades of increasing scale, like the Gran Poder, per-formed by people up and down both of the parallel middle-class formations. Onone hand, the postcolonial creole elite and mestizo middle classes carefully deployand perform indigenous dances as folklore to construct and connect with theirnational and genealogical pasts. On the other are the economically thriving,politically connected, and culturally hybrid urban Aymara post-peasants[Kearney 1996], many of whom had immigrated to the city after 1952, whoostentatiously exaggerate their Indianness as they near the top of the indigenoussocial classes. As self-conscious objectifications of culture that have becomesocially valuable and visible in modernity, the proliferating indigenous imagesparaded through La Paz are the very vehicles in which middle-class Bolivians areactively entering, embracing, and defining modernity itself.5

Thus, if bourgeois nationalism is the form in which (formerly) colonizedsocieties enter modernity [e.g., Lowe and Lloyd 1997], then at stake in the GranPoder is how each of these contending middle classes defines the Boliviannation. And how will each middle class shape the course of Bolivias pluralmodernity? By providing captions to contextualize the image sequences takenfrom my videotape, this essay will reveal some of the antagonisms and alliancesamong middle-class Bolivians in La Paz that are shaping Bolivian modernity.Many of the parallel image sequences here are positioned as contrasting pairs toconvey simultaneities and tensions in relationships and constructions of theparade across them; they are intended to be viewed from top to bottom and leftto right.

CINEMATIC SUBJECTS: ARTICULATING MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

As the Morenada dancers proceed through clothing changes over the course of theweek of the festival, they perform a series of moving images in which men andwomen cinematically move through highly visible public space changing amongmultilayered cultural identities that articulate rural and urban, indigenous andModern identities [Figures 2ae]. As with Oscar, I videotape how men alternatelayers of their clothing to arrange their own shifting affiliations as they changeclothing. Working with background and foreground layers of clothing, men orderand reorder images of themselves in multilevels.6 The new suits, shirts, and tiesin which they arrived, a style they use everyday, remain exposed in the backgroundof the Morenada wine barrel costumes they say were worn by their ancestors. Butthese signs of their indigenous ancestry are expensive. In addition to buying theseveral tailoredWestern-style suits they wear underneath for several related eventsbefore and after the feature parade, the men also spend hundreds of dollars to renttheir Moreno costumes. While the men change into their Moreno costumes here,the women have arrived at the dance hall this morning dressed and ready to dance.

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Figure 2 (a) Series of clothing changes for men and women Morenada dancers in the Rosas over thetwo days of parades.


Figure 2 (bc). Inhabiting plural identities: detail of mens costume.

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Figure 2 (de). Inhabiting plural identities: detail of mens clothing changes from the day of the GranPoder parade to the Diana parade the next day.


The Morenas spend up to $1,000 to buy each new outfit, which are the typical cholapacena (Aymara women who reside in La Paz) styles they use everyday, consistingof a series of matching outfits combining polleras (multilayered gathered skirts),new bowler hats, new shoes, elaborately hand-embroidered shawls, layered shirts,and flashy jewelry. What is more, tomorrow morning they will dance again withcompletely new matching outfits they all have bought for the event. We want toshow off our new outfit and how it matches. We all have the same and we must allmatch well, some women explain to me. While men compose their identities bysharply differentiated layers that index separate contexts, the Aymara womendistinguish themselves by adding expensive jewelry and several accumulatedlayers of heavy pollera skirts made of fine material worn over lighter and simplerskirts, which are visible as the outer layer worn by women in the countryside. Sothat the expressions of joy on their faces will be visible, some women are havingmascara and blush applied for the first time by their urban-born daughters who usemake-up regularly. The Lord [of the Gran Poder] will see what we are doing. Andwe will dance to show him great joy. To show him our faith, one woman explainsto the camera and me.The two 100-member bands arrive at the hall and practice their instruments and

songs simultaneously but not in synchronization, filling the large room with acacophony that is only occasionally recognizable as the theme song of the Rosasde Viacha. As I continue to pan the camera around the room, I tape the pre-parations of a hundred or so younger, usually single, men and women dressed asfiguras, such as the achachis, elaborate demon-like and animal characters. Otheryoung urban-born women are dressed as seductive cholitas, with very short skirts.Married Aymara couples typically dance in the Morenada together as the presti-gious Morenos and Morenas because they compose a complementary male-femaledualism and are more fully socialized than single people, many of whom wereborn and raised in the city. The rented costumes of these individual figuras are sites ofinnovation and attention in the parade, but they carry less social prestige becausethey downplay the higher social values of collectivity, seniority, and synchrony.Show us dancing together. We want to see how we all dance in rhythm

together, a bunch of older women from the group suggested, directing me withan aesthetic of collectivity and synchronization. One of them recalled, The firsttime I danced in the Gran Poder I was scared. There was a lot of pressure by thespectators along the way. The audience was shouting, In line! In rhythm together!I almost walked out of the parade! The crucial perfection of synchrony in theparade is achieved through the several months of rehearsals and practice neededto attain it. While other dance groups with less money rehearse infrequently in astreet to cassettes of their music, the organizers of prestigious comparsas like theRosas of Viacha began rehearsals five months earlier in a rehearsal hall theyrented themselves. In the weeks before the parade arrives, the organizers are alsoresponsible for providing the drinks and food for hundreds of dancers duringrehearsals, as well as for their two accompanying marching bands, who cansimilarly demand a high price depending on their size and prestige. The dancersthemselves also must be capable of affording the time and money to attend andcontribute to rehearsals, which are held three to four times a week in the monthbefore the parade. The rehearsals conclude with the Convite, a public parade

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which is held on the Saturday before the Gran Poder parade and which ends in alate night street party in the neighborhood around the church of the Gran Poder. Ifthe principle aesthetic of the Morenada is the detail and scale of synchrony of thedancers, this parade displays the repetition of the rehearsals, themselves repeatedand composed of repeated practice, which are visible indexes of the faith, eco-nomic well-being, and the sacrifices required to produce them.

THE PARADE AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Just before noon, the hundreds of dancers of the Rosas Viacha and their twomarching bands finally enter the street in parade behind other groups performingLlameradas, Tobas, Diabladas, Waka Wakas, and Caporales, and they prepare todescend toward the center of the city [Figure 3]. As they begin dancing down thesteep streets, I move among them with the camera filling the video screen withmovements of the heavy pollera skirts the women are tossing back and forth inrehearsed unison as they dance. Oscars wife is moving her arms widely andjubilantly. Younger women, wearing blue shimmering short skirts and bowler hatsfollow behind and occasional whistles come from the crowd. A group of youngachachis precedes groups of the Moreno men who rhythmically crank theirmatracaswooden boxes that make a textured crack! when the handle is spun.They are stylistically encased with miniature Moreno faces and bottles of beer. Awoman at the front of each senior group raises her hand and signals the nextdance step to the Morenas behind her. In unison, a hundred women confidentlytake four steps backward, turn around, and then move forward, holding out,cranking and spinning their matracas in synchrony. These are the same womenwho hide their faces behind their bowler hats when tourists attempt to photo-graph them in public or in their market stalls. A common reason for this, somecholita women explain, is that They are making fun of us. Moving among themlike me now, photographers are taking pictures of the dancers to sell to them later.In a wide shot I take from the center of the street, rows of Moreno men move off

each side of the video screen [Figure 4]. I am in a narrow space between them andone mans skirt twists and bumps into the camera. Music punctuated by horns, thedrum beat and matracas, synchronizes the movement in the continuous serializedrows of dancers bodies as the spectacle moves and shimmers along the high-elevation sun-blasted streets going down the canyon wall. The sequins on themasks and the costumes are intensely brilliant and the play of glittery dots andlines in the sunlight is extraordinarily clear and hypnotic. On videotape, thecinematic practice of the Gran Poder parade resembles a form of documentary thatBill Nichols calls performative: a mode that diverts realism with dominantlyantireferential expressions that heighten the theatrics of performance and the effectof spectatorship [Nichols 1994: 92106]. At rehearsals, dancers themselves did notspeak of the characters their costumes represented or texts they indexed. Theyspoke instead about how they experienced themto show our faith; to recalltheir ancestorsthat is the dance that our ancestors had; to constitute col-lectivitythese are our colors of the Rosas de Viacha. Red and black, black andred. The excess of detail in the costumes and dance steps supplies an evocative


and hallucinatory quality to the event that would disrupt a realist narrative andwould constrain the possible meanings of the costumes to a singular referentresiding inside them. And as I see it in cinematic form, there is no single unit

Figure 4 Parade spectators in the popular neighborhoods.

Figure 3 Morenada dancers lining up to enter the parade in the street above the city center.

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inherent in the parade as the performance of a series of moving images; they mustbe understood as intrinsically in motion as they pass by. Captivated by the flood ofmusic and rhythmic motion surrounding me as I shoot in the street, I thoughtseveral times that perhaps I should have taken the Rosas invitation to dancewith my camera! Imagine that sight, I thought while standing in the street: acostumed achachi with big softball-sized eyes and snakes climbing out above itshead, holding a video camera to its mouth (so the dancer can see from inside) as itdances the Morenada down the street! Perhaps I was already conspicuous enoughin the middle of the parade with the Rosas dancing around my camera and me[Figure 5].Two blocks below at the Plaza Garita de Lima, the main intersection in the

surrounding neighborhoods, the crowds from the nearby popular neighborhoodswatch from makeshift bleachers lining the streets, bleachers that many haveerected the night before to rent. For spectators from the popular classes here, theparade is a site where they come face to face with themselves, who they mightwish to be, as well as radical if not racially exoticizing images of Otherness[Figures 4 and 6]. Marching past the Cinema Roby are students from a privatehigh school dancing the Toba, a dance imitating African slaves but whosehunched-over movements and drumbeat rhythm were drawn from images ofNorth American Indians seen in 20th Century Hollywood films. Their faces, armsand chests are painted black; their legs and bare feet are painted black underneathtorn shorts. Some carry huge black and white flags. One student plays with amonkey and others are whipped to the ground by their slave driver. All are usingdrums and beat a threatening rhythm with their hands, Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Above the spectators and dancers across the street from the

Figure 5 Author videotaping while moving among the Morenas of the Rosas in the city center;close-up of an Achachi mask.

Figure 6 Spectators from the popular neighborhoodswatching theMoreno dancers parading by them.


plaza, the Cinema Roby displays the face of Geronimo on its billboard advertisingthe Hollywood movie [Figure 7].Just below the Plaza Garita de Lima, the music and the dancing stop as the

performers in the preceding dance groups take a break. I continue recording as the

Figure 7 Young Tobas dancers parading by the Cinema Roby advertising Geronimo:

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senior women sit on the ground in small groups and men remove their heavymasks, reveal their faces, and chat. Some people from the audience buy beer fromitinerant vendors to give to dancers they know [Figure 8]. Although masks areessential parts of the Moreno and figura characters, the parade does not play withthe concealment and revelation that wearing masks might imply. Here, we see theGran Poder move between the performance and the staging of the event in thesame way that the dancers articulate multiple identities from their own everydaylives. Aymara women may wear the same outfits used in a parade for animportant social event afterward. At home or at work in the market, women of thepollera wear less expensive combinations, but the same style. Although the imageof the de pollera cholitawoman in Bolivia has become an overdetermined sign of thetraditional Indian and has been co-opted in a variety of popular political pro-jects [Albro 2000], Aymara women in La Paz originally adopted the heavy layersof dress to imitate elite women of colonial Spanish society, preferring to be theelite of the Indian-peasants than being the lowest scale in the Spanish andmestizo-criollo world [Gill 1994: 104]. Exhibiting their urban success sincemoving from their native rural towns to La Paz, usually as domestic help inmestizo and cholo households and businesses, young ex-peasant Aymara womenmove up in urban status as they save for expensive and elaborate reproductions ofrural dress [ibid.]. When they visit their native towns in the countryside, they wearthe newest and most expensive outfits that they have. Eventually, when they aremarried and=or have their own businesses, they bring gifts and sponsor annualfiestas to display their prosperity and to develop and maintain economic rela-tionships in their native towns in order to support their own businesses in the city.Drawing on the capital acquired in these multiple urban-rural circuits fromeveryday life, Aymara women amplify their status in the scale and logic ofspectacle that culminates in the Gran Poder in La Paz, where distinct multiplelayers of dress are hierarchical forms of social differentiation.In the hybrid form of performance, the parade is both the substance and the

expression of a bourgeois social movement claiming not only a right to differenceand visibility in the city, but in a more complex way a right to their status and theirmarked cultural hybridity, which had always repulsed national elites even afterthey adopted the ideological synthesis of mestizaje. The dancers costumes and

Figure 8 A dancer stops to take a beer in the city center during a pause in the parade.


masks do not reveal, hide, or produce new social identities, then; they articulateplural and complementary identities that are co-present [Albo and Preiswerk1991]. Women, as well as men, accumulate, reveal and rearrange multiple subjectpositions through a collage of layers that participate in and evoke multiple con-texts and histories. In doing so, they affiliate themselves collectively with themodern, bourgeois, urban, rural, indigenous, and national all at once. Working invisual, tactile, and corporeal media, the dancers exploit the ambivalence betweenthe open-endedness of meaning and the simultaneous specificity of context thatimages can index.Like the parade itself, social identities have always seemed to exceed linguistic

terms in La Paz. They are highly contextual and unstable. Even familiar categoriessuch as mestizo, cholo, Indian, peasant, blanco, and criollo, which are often used andhyphenated by scholars to situate people, are terms that people themselves wouldrarely use to define themselves since they are typically pejorative terms used forothers. Rossana Barragan suggests thinking about cholo-Aymaras, for example, asa group with an identity defined more implicitly by its conduct than explicitlyin its consciousness [1993: 102]. In arguing that identity is expressed emble-matically or tacitly in visual realms such as clothing, to which we can addbodily practices such as dance which involve clothing, Barragan indicates theimportance of thinking about identity in subtle visual forms in Bolivia. But herformulation of identity practice as unconscious because it is visual and notverbalized falls short of considering the implications of this as self-conscious socialmovement carried out collectively by the Morenada dancers. As Randy Martinsuggests [1985], the emphasis on a linguistic basis for politics is a legacy of Marxistsocial theory concerned with the role of consciousness. And while linguisticcategories are based in differentiation and contrast, and may ring awkwardlywhen hybridized, visual and corporeal images leave open possibilities for usingmimesis as a strategy for multiple identity constructions, recombination, anddifferentiation. The clothing, the costumes, the bodies, and the dance of theMorenada, I argue, are the very stuff of a self-conscious performance of citi-zenship in which, for example, women are seen as agents of modern capitalisthistory. For both men and women, their very performance not only expresses, butalso articulates affiliations among multiple networks and subjectivities in themobilization of collective class solidarity [Escobar 1992: 789]. The corporealimages of the Morenada dancers as differentiated popular subjects descendingtoward the city is a social movement that subverts language-based categories ofdifference and political institutions. Combining the forms of a parade, music,costume, and dance (and resembling cinema), their social movement is commu-nicated through kinetic effects, the stimulation of the senses or sentience . . .expressed directly [sic] from one body to another and amongst a group of bodies[Martin 1985: 55]. These embodied images challenge the ongoing forms of cul-tural marginalization and unicentriceven new pluriculturalpolitical dis-courses. While state-level political elites, who continue to enact their ownidentities as mestizo nationals, have notably adopted pluralistic political dis-courses, they direct their attention and legitimacy toward the real Indians inthe countryside.

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CONVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES IN THE NATIONAL CENTER

The music begins to play a block below. The Pagador starts to play the familiarRosas theme, and all stand up, put on masks and form rows to begin dancingdown the walls of the canyon toward the city center. I change a camera batteryand continue descending ahead of them. I hurriedly walk several groups ahead ofThe Rosas and down the steep streets so that I can frame them arriving in thecity center. I look up the street with the camera and record Morenas descendingand dancing toward the center [Figure 9]. Above and behind the parade is thecitys canyon wall lined with the almost vertical neighborhoods of the Aymarapopular sectors, frequently known as the gente periferica (peripheral people).Cast onto the small two-dimensional screen in the cameras viewfinder, the urbanwall in the background is virtually vertical, if not overbearing, and the dancers,dressed as Inkas, who were descending from it evoke a counter-invasion into theestablished colonial concentric arrangement of urban space.7

During the first decades of the 20th Century, festival dance groups in La Pazwere organized by trade, common origin in native rural communities or co-residence in an urban neighborhood. At that time the annual festival in the parishof Gran Poder was marginalized in the press as an Indian event and was oftendenigrated because it annoyed some people in surrounding neighborhoods. TheAymara dance of the Pachokis was prohibited from being performed in the cityafter dancers repeatedly warned from behind the colonial Spanish shields andcrosses, The grand day [jacha uru] is coming; We will rise up, We will cutyour ears; Look out, I will kill you, I will kill you, gringo invader [in SalmonIturri 1994]. At the same time, however, intellectuals, artists, and politicians fromthe mestizo middle classes of La Paz and Cochabamba were assembling thepopular-national movement that eventuated in the Revolution of 1952, whichculminated in a victorious parade of indigenous people marching down thecanyon walls of the city and along the Prado, the well-manicured walkway alongthe main avenue in the center, where Indians had been restricted from enteringuntil that moment. In the Revolutionary ideology of mestizaje, folkloric Indiandancing in La Paz was redefined and romanticized as a national treasure sharedby the citizens of the new nation whose synthesis ideally could take place infolklore pageants.8

The Gran Poder expanded into a pageant of civic and national proportionsduring the US-supported military regime of General Hugo Banzer Suarez (19711978), a rightist regime also known for the excessive external debt it accumulated.Aymaras in La Paz, who understood how they were saddled with it the worst,sometimes pointed me towards the skyscrapers built during the 1970s in the citycenter below as a sign of the oppressive debt. In a strategy frequently used toachieve consent for repressive regimes, while also containing and redefining ahistorically volatile form of cultural critique, Banzers regime awarded the pop-ular classes the chance to enter the exclusive center and perform themselves asIndians. Through his government and municipal support and appropriation, theanticolonial history and imagery and dancing were submerged, only to returnwithin a frame that defined and exhibited such folkloric dances as the imagesand practices of authentic national mestizo culture. After 1975, the Gran Poder


parade continued to accumulate dance groups from around the country and tomarch down into the city and along the Prado. As the parade expanded, most ofthe Morenada groups have been composed from networks across the metropolitan

Figure 9 Morenada dancers parading into the city center after descending from the popular neigh-borhoods above.

224 J. D. Himpele

region of Aymara residents who were born in rural Altiplano and valley townsand who can afford to participate in and thus contribute to the spectacle.In the 1985 event, after the jolting political and economic shifts introduced by

the rapid succession of elected governments that followed Banzers regime, and ashyperinflation soared, the number of registered groups in the Gran Poder jumpedfrom 58 to 72. Filling a political void opened by a discredited institutional politicalsystem of authoritarian and democratic regimes, spectacular images from popularculture in festivals and talk television, for example, charged into the public sphereoffering political alternatives and hopes for getting by in their new precariousrealities [e.g., Himpele 2002]. As popular social pressures mounted against thegovernment that year, the police blocked the Prado with trucks that diverted theGran Poder parade away from the center and immediately back upward towardthe Aymara neighborhoods [Albo and Preiswerk 1986]. As it is connected tosubterranean historical memories of anticolonial movements, the parades kineticimages also charge peasant mobilizations and urban popular protests (and viceversa) that continue to invade the city center with blockades and strikes thatprevent traffic and commerce in and out of the city. While protesters are frequentlymet with waves of tear-gas and rubber bullets and diverted back up into thepopular neighborhoods above, their political counter-invasions into the centerhave been contained and routinized, if not ritualized, as they must be registeredwith the municipal government so that police can re-direct traffic, just as they doin policing festival parades in the center [Figure 10].

PARALLEL PREDICAMENTS OF CULTURE: COMPETING IMAGESOF A NATIONAL MIDDLE CLASS

Walking on the Prado alongside a dancing Moreno, and looking over his shouldertwisting back and forth in the foreground of the spectators, the camera reveals thefrictions between two competing and parallel middle classes. As the Morenodancers in the foreground dance by spectators in the background, they seem tooverlap and rub by each other in the frame. In the background, spectators from thecity center and elite Southern Zone area of the city wear single-layered cheaperclothing. Middle-class mestizo men from the Southern Zone, for example, whowear suits to work, now distinguish themselves with casual weekend outfits ofshorts and golf shirts, and women wear jeans, pants, and single layered dresses[Figure 11]. From the viewpoint of the men dancing next to me wearing layers ofexpensive clothing, the insubstantial dress of these spectators suggests the culturalpoverty of the Westernized mestizo middle class.By late afternoon now, the Morenos costumes no longer glimmer on the Prado.

The sun has gone behind the rowof 20-story skyscrapers casting shadows across thewide boulevard so that no light directly strikes the waving surfaces of the dancerscostumes.Many of themen have removed their heavymasks and are revealing theirfaces; organizers andhelperswalk alongside them carrying theirmasks andpouringbeer for them. Framed by the tall buildings on both sides of the street, the seniorMorena women of the Rosas de Viacha come down the Prado toward my camerasinging in concert several times as they toss and twirl their heavy pollera skirts:


Rosas de Viacha, are the bestIn the Fiesta of the Gran Poder.Rosas de Viacha, are the bestIn the Fiesta of the Gran Poder.

Figure 10 Anti-riot police shooting tear gas toward escaping protesters and crowds in the citycenter during strikes.

226 J. D. Himpele

Cry, cry you behind us.You will never be able to catch us.Cry, cry you behind us.You will never be able to catch us.

These words are as socially competitive as the ostentatious displays of wealththe performers wear. Indeed, for the dancers at stake in the Gran Poder is theirsocial status in relation to their mestizo middle-class counterparts and to the lessprestigious dance groups with indigenous participants. As they march and singdown the modern urban center, a cholo model of prosperity defines a nationalmodernity in which they are active participants in their own terms, rather than thefolkloric images in the mestizo ideology of egalitarianism and paternal culturalsynthesis. If this is a model for a modern Bolivian state, it is one that recognizeshierarchy as well as plurality as immanent to society.While in the popular neighborhoods above, spectators watch from the streets

and bleachers, along the Prado small groups of young criollo-mestizo friends

Figure 11 A young Morena cholita dances past spectators from the mestizo middle class.


dressed in Western clothing are captivated by the music and dance and jump intothe parade alongside the bands and dancers as they pass by, most especially intothe new Caporales dance groups. Until recently the Caporale was a figura in theMorenada; these were lasso-wielding, sequined, high-booted dancers who jumpedand twisted with the music as they rhythmically drove the dark-skinned slaves tomarch [Figure 12, sequence on right]. In the mid 1980s, urban-born youngerpeople, many of them from elite families, decided to form their own independentCaporales groups. It is largely in these groups that young people from the eliteSouthern Zone also participate officially in the Gran Poder. Young mestizo womenparticipate as cholitas in rented costumes with folkloric sequins, tight blouses, andvery short polleras. The Caporales dance is disliked by many of the older Mor-enada dancers from the higher and popular zones of the city who aver that it isperformed by youth who dont know how to dance or that it looks like thedances from Brazil. Mirroring this appropriation, young people in the popularclasses recently have caught on and begun to form their own Caporales groups.Were the mestizo and elite spectators along the Prado captivated by the cor-

poreal rhythm of the dance and provoked into imitation and participation? If so,this is also an opportunity for Bolivian mestizos and elites who historically haveparticipated in festivals to negotiate their own awkward post-colonial situationamong the formerly colonized indigenous majorities [Abercrombie 1992]. Theirpredicament was explained to me by a filmmaker from a politically-connectedfamily who recalled: Now I can still pass as a foreigner without any problems. Idont know what it did to me. I dont know ifI knew I was in the privileged partof society. That was obvious because I had thingseasy. I could do things easily.But at the same time I felt marginal. Its a very funny feeling; you belong but youdont belong.In the post-colonial Gran Poder, criollos and mestizos attempt to resolve this

uneasiness in folklore events, where they can legitimately ground themselves inBolivian territory by camouflaging themselves in Indian garb and dances [Aber-crombie 1991, 1992]. Elites become Indians when they want to, and then theydissociate themselves when they and their young Caporales kids drive home intheir cars to the lower parts of the city where the Aymara neighborhoods on thecanyon wall cannot be seen. Morenada dance groups also include mestizo familyand friends. However, here is a reversal of the slippage of colonial mimicry thatHomi Bhabha [1984] writes of, where the colonial Indian subject is dressed inBritish military costume. Instead of attributing the revealing almost the same, butnot quite to the socially subordinate, Aymara spectators play at identifying thealmost the same Indians, who are white mestizos with makeup or blue-eyes, oreven false braids of hair, and of course very revealing inexperienced and out-of-sync dance steps [Figure 13].If the elites and mestizos use the parade as a pageant for their own indi-

genous national bodies, while Aymaras use the event to define Bolivia forthemselves, then the whole society that would be represented by these partsnever encloses itself as a complete whole [e.g., Laclau and Mouffe 1985]. Thesigns produced by contending parallel middle classes remain in mutual tension[see parallel sequences of Aymara and mestiza dance groups in Figure 13]. Inthe series of these indigenous images paraded along the Prado, the nation

228 J. D. Himpele

Figure 12 Left: The senior Moreno men from the Rosas. Right: Young men dancing in a Caporalesdance fraternity.


Figure 13 Parallel middle classes. Left: The chola women Morenas from the Rosas. Right: Mestizawomen in the Llamerada dance fraternity.

230 J. D. Himpele

appears to be defined and synthesized into a single homogeneous communitythrough the diverse folklore shared by all nationals. The route of the Mor-enada dancers, who proceed from the Aymara commercial and cultural centerinto the Prado, displaces the post-colonial organization of the city and intro-duces an emergent Aymara bourgeoisie ready to occupy the mestizo elite center[Figure 9]. There is room for us in the center too, one dancer says to me afterthe parade. Perhaps most threatening to the official definition of the event asfolklore to manage the Indians newly arrived to the city is the incursionthere of the same Indians flaunting their excess as a new bourgeoisie andeven their recent gains in political participation. As a national folklore pageant,ostensibly aimed at objectifying the modern ideologies of unity and equalityand based in the construction of a national shared indigenous past, the paradeis a scenario where the experience of hierarchy is materialized as dramaticallyas the social topography of the city canyon.9

Thus the parade ends as it reaches the Plaza of the Student at the east end of thesloping Prado and on the verge of the mestizo middle-class neighborhoods inSopocachi and the Southern Zone below. Here, the dancers must turn and walkupward into the popular neighborhoods to continue the festival. Roberto, who isone of the original organizing members of the Rosas, walks back with me andgives me a tall bottle of Pacena beer and a small glass with which to share it withhim. He is a tall, older man, with protruding belly that suggests he is doing wellvery visible for his part as a parade leader of the Rosas. He puts a friendly handon my shoulder as we walk and says, When foreigners come here we treat themwith a lot of carino [care]. But when Bolivians travel to the United States, they aretreated like dirt. Along the way, I stop at home to drop off the video camera,knowing from the Convite the week before (and other festivals) that the dancingand drinking that I would be doing that night would jeopardize it.Approaching the Chijini neighborhood near the Gran Poder parish and the

festival in the streets above, I hear the cacophony of several festival bands deli-vering their theme songs in the narrow cobblestone streets below. Filled with thebands, dancers, and organizers, the streets are lined with endless stacks of thefamiliar red plastic beer crates that each hold a dozen 1-liter bottles of Pacena beer.Chola women have set up small beer stands with wood planks atop empty redcrates arranged in a U-shape where groups of friends can sit for hours and laugh,talk, and dance. The vendors are washing small drinking glasses in buckets ofwater and opening bottles, always two at a time, saying to their customerspolitely, Sirvanse (Help yourselves). As I arrive to sit with a group of Rosasdancers, Eugenia pours beer into my small half-filled glass.We Bolivians are very folklorista, she says.I ask, What is folklorista?We Bolivians are very folklorista with our music and dancing, her friend

explains.Eugenia adds, But not everyone dances. Some people prefer to watch. The rich

dont dance, only us poor. They prefer to build tall buildings than dance.I think, Poor is relative, and imagine the poor Aymara woman who sells

me bananas, and I see the husbands and wives selling beer here who cannotafford to dance or watch the parade. Eugenia overlooked the value of the event


in marking her own status within the majorities of urban poor who are worse offthan she; instead, she recasts the social landscape in terms of the broader frameof the marginalization of indigenous culture. But dont you have to spend a lotof money on the clothing to dance? I ask. She continued her explanation:

The rich dont dance because they would rather buy cars and travel. But they cant take thatwith them when they die, can they? But I can take with me the joy I have when I am dan-cing. Its important to show joy. Im dancing for the Lord of the Gran Poder. He watches me,and he knows what I am doing for him. That I can have when I die. You cant have cars andbuildings.

I glance down the street toward the tops of the tall buildings in the center. Itseems that she tore down the excesses of the mestizo national elite with her ownspectacle of excess and its formula for well-being. Yet at the same time, Eugeniaadopted the modern and hegemonic term of folklore but, by wielding thismodern apparatus of nation-making [Gara Canclini 1995], she not only rede-fines folklore and Bolivia in cholo terms, but includes herself as an author ofmodern Bolivia.At that moment Petrona stands up with her bowler hat in her handso that it

would not be stolen off her headrevealing her missing front teeth with a smile.She said, You can see that my husband loves me, and then laughed. Some of thewomen also chuckle. She spills a little of her beer onto the ground, toasts the restof us and then suggests that we join El Pagador and dance. We continue to drinkand dance in the street for several hours, showing carino (caring) by buying andpouring beer for each other and pouring libations on the ground to the Pacha-mama (female spirit of the earth). People walking by across the crowded streetstare at me and titter at my same but different dancing. Drunk on beer and shotsof alcohol as we dance the cueca gracefully and then the huayno at high speed, weexhibit joy to the supernatural world in hopes that the excess we create here wouldbe replicated and then recirculated back to us during the following year.

ANOTHER REPLICA OF THE PARADE: LA DIANA

After a night of drinking and dancing, I return at 6 a.m. the next morning to see allof the senior members of the Rosas de Viacha back in the hall rented by theirorganizers [Figure 14]. In a not-so-subtle demand for collective action, those whoare waiting there ritually whack men who arrive late with sticks. Thanks to theorganizers, we are all served beer and spicy fricase for our hangovers by well-dressed servers. The men are dressed in their new gray suits now with only adecorated cuff from yesterdays Moreno costume, and they hold their matracas toinvert the layers in yesterdays image of their coexisting identities. Two photo-graphers have arrived to sell prints of photos they shot during the parade. Oscarapproaches me and asks how the videotaping went yesterday.Fine, I say, The group looked great.Yes, it is nice that you recorded the parade, but frankly, with our masks on,

people could not see who we are. Now our faces will be seen. Who we are.

232 J. D. Himpele

The organizers circulate among us generously offering bottles of beer to drink,and at this early hour, the Pachamama also receives her share as we spill a littleonto the ground for her. The women are dressed in new pink and blue outfits,every element new again. Many of the younger men and women have not shown

Figure 14 Early the morning after the parade, members of the Rosas return to their party hall innew clothes for dancing in the La Diana parade.


up to dance. They probably have chaki [a hangover], some people estimate.Others say that the young dont understand the festival and only use the parade asan opportunity to show off [see Figures 15 and 12, right column]. For example,

Figure 15 Left and Right: Senior women and cholitas in the Rosas fraternity displaying contrast-ing images of femininity.

234 J. D. Himpele

their rented outfits and the exposure of their legs are signs of the reduced wealthand cultural values of the younger generations. Are the seductive young figuras inthe Morenada dancing to attract attention for themselves and staged to directdesire toward the nation in which they appear to be indigenous? Or are theypositioned by the senior women to make their own wealth and joy appealing togreater forces? As Dionisia, the organizer of the Rosas explains the parade, theexcess is not valuable without faith. The young people dance only to show off,but we mayores [older ones] dance with faith, to show great joy. If we dance withfaith, if we get something, it is because we danced well, and then we will have torepay the Lord again.Today the parades itinerary repeats and condenses yesterdays route. The

dancers go only several blocks down through the neighborhood and stop at thechurch of the Gran Poder itself. The parade replicates yesterdays downwardmovement which imports the urban indigenous into the elite central space ofthe city. Now, however, the distinctions within the indigenous and mestizopopular classes are reinforced as an elite center is now relocated here in thespace of prosperous cholo merchants and entrepreneurs in this commercial zonesurrounding the church of the Gran Poder, and perched above the Prado 15stories below [Figure 16].As I finish shooting the dancers arriving at the front of the church of the

Gran Poder, I think of Tom Abercrombies [1992] analysis of the dancers in theCarnival in Oruro who perform an allegory of conversion to Christian andnational modernity (in which nationalism replaces colonialism). By the time theMorena dancers arrive here at the Church over the course of two days, the menhave removed the masks and have conjured up, performed, and displaced theirpagan ancestors. But the changing costumes and shifting layers of the mensuggest the partial nature of the conversion; that is, their multilevel identitiesare reordered, not removed, by urbanization. The nationalist synthesis thatwould be Bolivia cannot be achieved in the linear tradition of theJudeo-Christian civilizing project nor in the opposed terms of hydraulicsbetween forces of repression and wildness. After the dancers visit the Church,they will attend a three-day party of excess again given by the three organizers.Perhaps the key conversion rearticulated and pulled off here is the self-consciousmovement from rural Aymara peasant into the urban Aymara bourgeoisie. Forthe Morenada dancers, in other words, the event has as much to do withreligious faith and national identity as it does with the capital they are capableof producing as Aymaras.For the rest of the week, fiestas festivals will continue to push at the limits of

excess through drinking and dancing with the festivals kacharpaya, an Aymaraword that refers to the exhilarating dancing and drunkenness that ends a fiesta.Fiestas usually begin with calm dialogue and reciprocal pouring of beer assigns of carino (caring). The cordiality and politeness among close friendsunravels and conversations can become more intimate, sometimes politicallycharged, louder, as well as potentially aggressive as people also stumble, fall,vomit and urinate in the streets. Among mestizo friends and family too, peoplesometimes recall fiestas charged with fast huayno music, which also speeds upat the end, and they say their Indian comes out. The reciprocal exchanges,


Figure 16 La Diana: The Rosas dance through the popular neighborhoods to the church of theparish of Gran Poder and begin drinking in a fiesta that will continue excessively for several days.

236 J. D. Himpele

expense, ecstasy and exhaustion of dancing are all produced as a venture thatthe sharing, prosperity, and joy displayed will be noticed by the saints andspirits and reflected back into the human realm in the future. The Indian is acrucial image of capital for modern urban Aymaras, and its production andexhibition in the festival are themselves a source of value.

INHABITING AND EXHIBITING CAPITAL: THE ABUNDANCE POSTULATE

If the Gran Poder and the proliferating images of Indians in La Paz are vehiclesthrough which modern Bolivia is imagined, for the bourgeois Aymaras, theseimages of excess and capital are also prime ingredients, if not a precondition, fortheir prosperity in capitalist modernity. In other words, the parade is a tournamentof social class for the Morenada dancers, but the ostensibly excessive bingeing ismore than an expression of wealth produced elsewhere by calculations of labor-time behind the scenes. The appearance of excess in the Gran Poder itself is a forcedriving market exchange and value. A principle of dominant Western politicaleconomic discourse, in contrast, is that scarcity forces people into economicexchanges in the marketplace for their own survival; scarcity is the first term in theeconomic formula for surplus. When compared with the classic moral logic ofeconomic accumulation and reinvestment, and its associated stratigraphic modelof individual subjectivity as singular and caught between desire and repression,however, the Gran Poder appears as extravagant, unproductive, and irrational.Can modern political economic discourse accommodate culturally plural sub-jectivity and overindulgence? What form of capitalism begins with excess? Howdoes the Gran Poder produce these motives and values?If market economies institute a gap between producer and consumer (and the

resulting scarcities for each side), then thousands of Aymara merchants inhabitthat very gap. For Aymara entrepreneurs working in Bolivias economy of small-scale industry and informal markets of contraband and mass-produced com-modity traffic, negotiating the exchange of values and control over the flow ofcommodity circulation itself yields profit [cf. Harris 1989]. In this economy ofrecirculating commodities, the image of a well-stocked marketplace heightensvalue as the flow of items is stalled and accumulates into an exhibition of wealthand serialized images of commodities on display that attracts clients. After seeingtheir parade, it is now worth recalling that Aymara marketplaces achieve theirlavish displays not only through the replication of the commodities themselves,but through the repetition of people selling the same items and classes of items(e.g., potatoes) sequentially along the same street. As parades of repeated images,both the Gran Poder and the Aymara markets are sites of conjunction for theaesthetics of replication in commodity capitalism in industrial mass production,and the particular esthetics of repetition and mimesis that organize this collectiveform of social production.Combined with the exhibits of excess in the marketplace, however, are the

insecurities and vulnerabilities of the lack of credit, healthcare, and social security,for example, as well as the threat of being robbed while traveling between homeand the market and while on business trips in the countryside. While conditions


worsened for the majority of Aymaras recently arrived in La Paz, especially since1985, status is still precarious for well-to-do entrepreneurs and success alwaysprovisional. Among urban Aymaras, as well as some members of their mestizofamilies, aspirations to achieve well-being are conditioned by a panoply of spiri-tual and structural forces that are larger and more capricious than the market, andwhich must be properly revered, supplicated and fed through rituals and festivalsmade on specific occasions throughout the year.Here, where the larger, abstract, structural and spiritual world is an ontological

extension of the material world, rather than separate, what occurs in the humanworld is reflected from those greater forces back into the human world. Faithfuldisplays of joy and excess made to the spiritual world are risky wagers, driven byan undercurrent of uncertainty, that the same and more will be reflected back intotheir own lives. Upon return, surplus value is incorporated into the bodies of theurban Aymara bourgeoisie itself as their excess both sustains and fattens them.Profit buys women their expensive heavy clothing and fattens their bodies,making their abstract profit concrete. Just as it can be difficult to perceive wherebodies stop and the clothing begins, for example, layers of shirts also bulge withthe money and jewelry they guard underneath, as material and abstract values areeach folded into the other (like money). Profit takes on the cultural form of fatwhich is considered an inalienable life force, like blood might be in other economicmetaphors, a precondition for life, and a sign of prosperity. For women as well asmen in the popular classes in La Paz, gaining weight with age and marriage is alsoan important sign of economic success and an indication of well-being.Parading themselves down the street in a festival parade or in everyday life

inflated with urban capital, their bodies and clothes are also fetish-images of awider network of rural and urban affiliations that encompass relationships ofwage labor and patron-client exchanges that produce their profit. As LibbetCrandon-Malamud [1993] showed us for the period that followed the applicationof strict neoliberal policies in the 1980s, the sponsorship of rural festivals began tobe co-opted by prosperous urban mestizos and Aymara investors from La Pazwho have increasingly flexible and temporary ritual kin relationships with theinhabitants of rural highland communities. These new sponsors from the cityprofit from the festivals themselves, through their own related businesses, as theybuild a network of available and cheap wage-labor in communities. At the sametime, rural community members and recent migrants to the city who work forthem began to gain access to urban social networks. While it is not surprising thatthe neoliberal decrees coming from the state yielded an atmosphere of increaseduncertainty, it should not be a surprise that bourgeois Aymaras responded to theintensified political economy of scarcity with a profusion of strategic kinshipnetworks and investments in festivals and images of excess.Following strategic practices of redistribution and prestige, using ideologies

and techniques of reciprocity, the organizers of Morenada dance groups gener-ously supply meals and alcohol for the participants they have invited to danceand play in their marching band in the cycle from rehearsals to the three-dayfiesta after the parade. As organizers and dancers save money and take on loansto participate during the year, they delay the circulation of value by not spendingin the marketplace in order to profit later by showing off how well they can dance

238 J. D. Himpele

with faith and what they can disperse and consume all at once. While paradingdown the street, fashioned in these cosmological terms and strategies, the Aymaramiddle class does not propose an end to modernity, such as a return to a purernoncapitalist indigenous past. Capital, one might say, is also the habitus they seekto acquire through practice in repeated rehearsals and in the excess of the GranPoder parade. The polysemy of their capital reveals the ambivalence and awk-wardness of Western cultural hegemony [Beverley and Oveido 1993], which isdisplaced by the parallel cultural system of bourgeois nationalism with whichthey strut down into the capital city. For the Morenada dancers, this ostentatiousparade which features themselves as capitalist Aymaras is one of modernityshighest forms.

NOTES

1. The review of my video footage in this essay is also intended to initiate a larger project on thepolitical and economic emergence of the Aymara middle class and the performative practices ofcapitalism. Much of the scholarship on festival practices in Bolivia (and the Andes and else-where) examines the festival parades and performances in terms of interwoven threads of nation-alist and religious meanings and narratives, for example, or as contests of cultural resistance andappropriation [Poole 1990]. Indeed, these are valuable lines of analysis; however, I want to fore-ground another attraction here. Many viewers and participants with whom I spoke in La Paz didnot indicate an interest in representing an accurate sense, or an authentic reproduction, of origi-nal scripts or meanings in the dances they performed as much as they were concerned with theirown synchrony, rhythm, costumes, and visibility. Following their emphasis in the momentarywindow of this essay, I want to begin a project of relating their performative emphasis to theformation of an emergent social class and its forms of solidarity and new exclusions. By focusingon the socially-calculated, yet sensationally mesmerizing and sometimes vulgar, dimensions ofthe event for the members of the Rosas de Viacha, I undertake a departure which reexaminessocial class and capitalism as a performative cultural practice, a social process, and a category ofexperience, rather than as an objective relation of production. This framing intersects with somerecent work in the Andes that has begun to open up ethnographic space for Andean well-to-doindigenous peoples with unexpected and multiplex social categories [e.g., Barragan 1993;Bouysse-Cassagne and Saignes 1993; Colloredo-Mansfield 1999; Kearney 1996; Lagos 1994;Rogers 1998].As I review the tape and the video images reproduced from it here, I incorporate much of

what I considered while shooting the videotape as well as subsequent connections I have madeabout the event. Thus this essay provides a voice-over, or captions, for the tape while it describesthe event. This is a form of theorizing in an original sense of the term which means to look at,or examine, and thus collapses distinctions sometimes too easily made between these sites andforms of anthropological knowledge production: analysis and practice, textuality and visuality,the field and home, as well as between cultural and visual anthropologies.

2. The True Roses of Viacha is the counterpart of this group. A split within an original group re-sulted in these two competing groups. Viacha is a large Altiplano town outside La Paz and El Altowhere the group was originally started. Today, relatively few dancers in the Rosas are from Via-cha, as the organizers invite and obligate wealthier friends and family from La Paz to dance.

3. Comparsa originally means a theater group.4. On the market women in Peru as crucial mediating figures, see Seligman [1993] and Babb

[1989].5. For an excellent sample of the emerging work on the packaging, objectification, and performance of

culture and identity as a particularly Andean form of modernization, see the essays in Rogers, ed.[1998].


6. The shifting layers of clothing and identities across different contexts of the Gran Poder fit withElizabeth Ermarths [1992] use of the term multilevel which refers to practices and narratives thatdirect attention simultaneously in several different, perhaps contradictory, directions. I arguehere the sequence of outfits worn by the dancers is used to organize the multiple cultural contextsin which they participate and live.

7. Not long after the Spanish invasion, the Taki Onqoy movement (ca. 1560) in the Central Andescreated a period of rebellion in which native Andeans and their gods were staged and mobilizedagainst the Christians and theirs. Described by Spaniards as a dancing sickness, it was immedi-ately attacked with an extirpation campaign [Castro-Klaren 1993]. The Taki Onqoy movement of-fered the hope of transcending native ethnic and community conflicts so that the world would bereversed and the Inka king would return from underground. Since then, indigenous and mestizodances have recreated and resignified memories of the Spanish Invasion often by employing thesame theatrics which were already being played out in the pre-Invasion Andes and which wereincorporated into the Catholic auto sacramentales. Thus rebellions in the post-Invasion Andeswere frequently staged to coincide with Catholic religious festivals [Stern 1987], and political pro-tests continued to challenge colonial domination through counter-invasions of urban space. Duringthe multiethnic Andean insurrections (1780-1782), the Aymara hero Tupac Katari led a siege on LaPaz that surrounded the colonial merchant city for days (ironically, the elites could escape only bydressing in native clothing). While he was quartered by the criollo colonial elites, Katari promisedthat he would return in the form of thousands.

8. In the decades that followed 1952, military dictatorships and democratic regimes continued alter-nately to repress and revive festival events and practices in cities and in the countryside.

9. For a further description of how the social status is inversely related to elevation in topographicspace in the city canyon, see Himpele [1996].

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