On Luxury and Necessity

I have just gotten back from La Paz, Bolivia, where I have been working on a telenovela (Latin American soap opera) made by a group of indigenous kids from the shantytowns above the city.  One of the most striking and picturesque elements of Bolivia, memorable to most tourists, are the cholitas or mulheres de pollera, women dressed in what one would be tempted to call "traditional indigenous clothing," but which is really an autochthonous, hybrid fashion with both European and Inca roots.

Though many tourists see the cholitas as picturesque, these women also inspire hidden laughter ("bowler hats?") and more open criticisms.  Dressing in pollera fashion is expensive, after all, and many observers have commented that in a country as poor as Bolivia, as mothers of extremely poor families, these women would do much better if they dedicated their scarce money to educating and feeding themselves and their families.  Amidst starvation and the biting cold of El Alto, the shantytown where most cholitas live, fashion seems an unpardonable luxury.

Let me step back a moment, though, before I continue.  The first time I visited Bolivia was in 1991, not terribly long ago in terms of major social changes.  At that time, I was struck by the frightening sadness of the indigenous people, their downcast eyes and stooped postures, the fact that indian women would step off the sidewalk into the muck of the street when a white person wanted to pass.  Cholita fashion existed, but mostly in the form of old bowler hats and ragged long dresses, nothing like the rich silks and satins in the photo here.

In the 1990s, cholita fashion went wild, with new fabrics and cuts, new hats, and even cholita pro-wrestling (another story entirely).  There was an unexpected result of this excess, however: proud of their clothes and their appearance, cholitas no longer dropped their eyes, no longer stooped their shoulders, and no longer ceded their place on the sidewalk.  Their fashion had transformed their bodies.  And within a few short years, this pride had political consequences: cholitas were at the forefront of the two peaceful revolutions that took down the corrupt and clientelistic governments of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and Carlos Mesa in 2005.

I don't want to make any grand conclusion from this idea ("luxury is a necessity of revolution" or any such thing), but I do think the story challenges many of our basic assumptions about social change.  It often comes about by strange, torturous routes, and not by the straight line we thought would get us there.