Today is 12 of October. In the Midwest, where I went to elementary school, this is known as Columbus Day. Later, as I gained a bit more worldly perspective I came to call it Indigenous People’s Day or Genocide Day under my breath. A few days ago, I got upset when my mother, who is a second grade teacher, mentioned she had Columbus Day off—partly because it is still institutionalized and partly because she called it Columbus Day without a hint of critique. But I’ll cut her some slack. When I’m in central Illinois she usually lets me come talk to her class about colonization. And the amazing thing is, when you explain that colonization was simply a bunch of Europeans who wanted to take the resources on another continent and felt it was necessary to murder, enslave, rape, and destroy the residents of that place in the process, even 8 year olds are pretty quick to realize that this is not something to be celebrated.

I arrived at the Preuniversitario where it was held around noon and was immediately asked where I’m from. I felt a little defensive and said that Raquel had invited me and hoped it would be ok if I could just stand in the back and watch. And then I realized the woman had asked me because all of the other audience members had pin on badges that announced what country they are from. Chile and Peru dominated the group of 50, but there were a few small nametag-sized Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and Colombian flags pinned to shirts as well. Unfortunately there were no United States pins on hand, but they were happy to have me. The chairs were all full, so I stood along the back and watched a slide projection on the front wall. There were pictures of Alto Hospicio and various local groups interspersed with graphical slogans such as “12 de octubre, 2013: 521 años de resistencia” [521 years of resistance] and “Por la dignidad de los pueblos americanos, 12 de octubre nada que celebrar” [For the dignity of american peoples, 12 October is nothing to celebrate].
 

The program began with a Chilean Cueca dance performed by two pairs adolescent boys and girls. Then the Ecuadorian woman who had greeted me earlier performed a pop song from her country. Representatives from the Colombian and Ecuadorian immigrant associations in Iquique spoke. An Afro-Peruvian woman sang two more songs, and several community figures and political candidates spoke briefly. Scattered throughout all of these various performances were discourses about the unity of the Americas against Europeans and Gringos (“that’s me!” I thought…). The Peruvian singer shouted several times over the boombox that accompanied her “America Latina es una sola!”

As the last local leader was speaking, Raquel came and stood next to me at the back. She asked if I could stay for the reception afterwards because she’d like to introduce me to a few people. I accepted and met several of the people she works with at the Preuniversitario along with being coerced into eating plenty of bocadillos, ceviche, and grilled shrimp.

As the reception was ending, Raquel’s friend Juan called everyone to the back room to take a photo. I lingered in the front room, but he singled me out saying “You too, Nell. You’re from the Americas. We need our representative from the United States present.” So I followed the crowd to the back, where we rearranged ourselves a number of times against a backdrop of handpainted paper flags, and finally got a decent shot (well, you can be the judge). 

There is certainly some multicultural pride here in Alto Hospicio, at least when it comes to public presentation. And the mix of anti-colonial and multi-cultural discourses was interesting, but not surprising given what I’ve seen here so far. But what I find most interesting is the memorialization that occurs through such events. Though the focus is on celebration and community, it is framed by this discourse of resistance to colonization and a memorialization of a past that continues to influence present events. One of the SocNet themes of focus is on the way memorialization occurs through social networks (see Shriram Venkatrama's account from India here). I’ve been keeping my eye out for Facebook pages dedicated to individuals who have died, but perhaps more important are these ways of memorializing political events and figures, not only online but in real life events, and the naming of institutions (more on that in the next post!). 

When I began doing fieldwork for my dissertation in the spring of 2011, I met several luchadores and luchadoras for interviews. Most were between 20 and 35 and almost every one of them asked me at some point if I had “face.” Using the English word within otherwise purely Spanish dialogue, “tienes face?” they were asking if I used facebook. I quickly became “friends” with all of them on the social networking site as a way to stay in touch, especially during the four months that I returned to the United States at the end of 2011.

And I quickly learned that for the luchadores of SuperCatch, facebook functioned as a way to stay in touch with many people abroad. My fellow Super Catch wrestlers saw the connections they were able to make on the internet as one of the most important ways of achieving international exposure. Whether inviting foreign luchadores to perform in La Paz or organizing their own trips to perform in Lima, Santiago, or Buenos Aires, Facebook was a primary way of connecting with different international groups of wrestlers. Often after a long afternoon of training in Don Mauricio’s ring, we would walk back to Avenida 16 de Julio and stop in one of the small restaurants for the daily special. After shoveling giant plates of silpancho, pique macho, or falso conejo into our mouths and washing them down with mocochinchi (a peach flavored drink), we would walk a block further to the small shop with several computers set up as an internet café.

For just 50 centavos an hour we would sit in a row at the computers, and everyone had a browser tab open with Facebook. Of course the luchadores would look at their Paceño friends’ pictures and send birthday wishes to cousins or schoolmates, but they spent most of their time connecting with wrestlers from other countries. All of the luchadores were members of online virtual Facebook groups of South American and international wrestlers. Occasionally these groups would have scheduled discussions, and the Super Catch luchadores always made a point to participate. Discussions ranged from the latest WWE pay-per-view program to moves wrestlers were working on. But the most important were discussions about travel and the arrival of visiting wrestlers.

I often would finish sending emails to friends in the U.S. and exhausting everything I could think of to look at on Facebook long before they finished their conversations with Peruvian, Mexican, and Spanish wrestlers. Sometimes I was relieved to be asked to translate an English language message that someone received from a U.S. wrestler just because it gave me something to do. We would stay at the internet shop sometimes for almost two hours, as I silently whined in my head that it was already 9pm and I just wanted to go home and sleep. But I slowly understood the importance of these interactions. For just 0.50 Bolivianos an hour (about $0.07) the luchadores were actively participating in what they saw as an international “community” of which they wanted to be a part. 

This global networking online can be understood as a kind of imagined cosmopolitanism in which the SuperCatch luchadores’ desires to connect with other wrestlers overcome spatial constraints, allowing them to feel a sense of “worldliness through engagement, in whatever form, with the world’s goods and lifestyles” (Schein 1999:359).  Here, the “lifestyle” of international wrestling legitimacy was practiced using the internet and membership in international groups. Shein draws on Anderson, using the notion of imagining to demonstrate the ways participants in cosmopolitanism may not necessarily meet face-to-face, but nonetheless fashion communities that are just as genuine as those created by people who share physical space. Though it is possible no all participants in these facebook interactions saw this form of sociality as a community, the SuperCatch luchadores were precisely interested in participating in what they understood as a community. They felt that being part of online communities would grant them more legitimacy than would simply being a part of local lucha libre circles. In many ways, they valued their international connections more highly, because they saw them as legitimizing, while they understood the local as degrading.

As Schein point outs, it is electronic media that allows this sort of “supralocal transmission” to occur. The interactive nature of the internet (even if it was infuriatingly slow at times), allowed for a horizontal exchange that unlike media of television and film, “brings into possibility an imagining of community on the scale of the globe” (Schein 1999:359). Within these new communities identifications may be refashioned. For the luchadores, their involvement with wrestlers outside of Bolivia allowed them to see themselves and the group as part of “international lucha libre” despite the fact that they rarely if ever traveled to perform outside of Bolivia, and visits by foreign wrestling groups were only occasional. These connections allowed them to imagine the eradication of economic exclusions, and restrictions imposed by state borders that their own particular citizenship determined. Yet, even as cosmopolitan exchange allowed for the imagining of mobility, it was also conditioned by the endurance of relative physical immobility (Schein 1999:269) that the luchadores knew was part of their reality. Appadurai writes that “Fantasy is now a social practice” (1996:7) and many people long for horizontality described by Anderson (Appadurai 1983:7), without global differentials of power and wealth (Schein 1999:369). For the luchadores, these differentials were manifested in their desire for legitimacy.

Yet legitimacy continued to be fleeting for the Super Catch luchadores. Clearly the reputation of Bolivian lucha libre among wrestlers outside of Bolivia was part of a global dynamic in which Bolivia either appeared invisible or was understood as derivative of better established wrestling traditions in Mexico or the United States. As Rocky Aliaga, a Bolivian who now wrestles professionally in Spain explained to me, people in other countries only knew what they saw of Bolivian lucha libre on the internet. “Aqui llega informacion de monstruos, momias, hombrelobos...En Bolivia hay talento y nuevos valores, pero sin dar oportunidad. Cada una lucha hasta tres veces para no dar oportunidad a jóvenes. Por eso se disfrazan de monstruos” [Here they find information about monsters, mummies, wolfmen…In Bolivia there is talent and new values, but without opportunity. Each match of three falls doesn’t give the opportunity to young wrestlers. That’s why they costume themselves as monsters]. Rocky confirms here what those luchadores still in Bolivia suspect: that in the larger world of exhibition wrestling they are seen either as a joke or as underdeveloped. But the luchadores often attribute this formation to the local dynamics of clowning rather than global processes

Over the course of my year of training as a luchadora, Edgar consistently used the feminine form of clowns, “payasas,” when referring to wrestlers that he felt had a low skill level. For several of the SuperCatch luchadores, the cholitas stood in as emblematic of the “problem.” In September of 2011, while in the United States for a few months, I posted some pictures of cholitas luchadoras from Titanes del Ring on facebook. Two days later, I noticed that Edgar had written in the comments section, “Por que muestras estas payasas de El Alto si tu hablaste con los mejores luchadores de Bolivia y los más antiguos? Si hasta criticabas a estos bueyes por que los promocionas? Hay grandes profesionales que puedes mostrar como LFX, Halcones del Ring, Super Catch…Que mal!” [Why do you show these female clowns from El Alto if you have talked with the best and oldest Bolivian wrestlers? Until you criticize these oxen, why do you promote them? There are great professionals you can show like LFX, Halcones del Ring, Super Catch…How awful!]. Anarkista, a luchador from GLLP in Santa Cruz, Bolivia agreed, “Bien dicho.... Sabemos que hay mejores luchadores que estas cosas.” [Well said…We know there are better wrestlers than these things]. I eventually removed the pictures, but the conversation they had evoked stuck with me. As a foreigner, putting pictures of the cholitas luchadoras on a website only exacerbated the “problem” male luchadores were working so hard to “correct.” To Edgar and Anarkista I was reinforcing the image of Bolivian lucha libre that they were constantly working against in front of an international audience. The luchadoras were the most visible example of Bolivian lucha libre outside of the country, but as Edgar explained to me many times, to the wrestlers of Super Catch they were not representative of the true talent within Bolivia. Thus, facebook became both a subject of study and an (accidental) methodological tool for further understanding the ways that imagined cosmopolitanism was at work among my wrestling partners.

Titanes del Ring events are some of the most popular tourist attractions in La Paz, but tourism in Bolivia is not a big business compared to many surrounding nations. Bolivia garners roughly 300,000 tourists per year, while neighboring Perú attracts more than two million. So Bolivia tends to retain a sense of being somewhat “undiscovered” for many travelers. In fact, one day when I asked some Ekko hostel bar workers [some of whom I have discussed previously] how much of the “Gringo Trail” they had been through, Dr. Joe declared “Bolivia’s the best. No one even knows where Bolivia is!” [Indeed, the wikipedia entry I linked here doesn't even include La Paz on its list of Gringo Trail "highlights."]

The Andean Secrets advertisements and the Cholitas Luchadoras themselves appeal to travelers’ sense of adventure, inviting them to experience something “crazy” and unpredictable; something unknown at home. Many backpackers related that other young tourists had told them that there would be fireworks, “midget tossing,” and “women on women action” as part of the show. These comments, along with those suggesting the show might be “brutal,” “disturbingly real,” or “crazy” suggest that some travelers hope for something understandable, yet beyond the bounds of what can be found in travel locations closer to home. 

This desire for adventure became strikingly apparent to me on a bus ride in 2009, when I heard a group of Dutch young men recommend a specific tour guide to some women who were leaving La Paz for the Peruvian Amazon the next day. The men, who had just come from the Amazon, suggested that the women ask for their previous tour guide because “He’s the best. He’s crazy.” They then recounted stories of him throwing a piranha at his wards and picking up pythons. I also heard tourists boarding a bus to a wrestling match joke about combining Peruvian and Bolivian “cultural” experiences; they envisioned holding a rave at Machu Picchu that featured midget wrestling and strobe lights. 

Not surprisingly, by far the most popular tourist attraction in La Paz was riding a bike down “death road” [which I have written on briefly, before]. Officially known as Yungas [Jungle] Road, this 38-mile road leads from La Paz to the city of Coroico. It was built as a single lane width gravel road in the nineteen-thirties, and includes some overhangs of 1800 feet with no guardrails. It is estimated that between two hundred and three hundred vehicles have plummeted off the road, leading the Inter American Development Bank to bestow on it the title of World’s Most Dangerous Road. Particularly hazardous portions of the road were closed in 2006, leaving it open to biking tours. Despite the fact that about 20 cyclists have died on the road since 1998, it remains popular because of the amazing scenery it provides, and the simple sentiment that “you can’t find this anywhere else.” 

There was a seeming refusal on the travelers’ parts to believe that the death road was truly dangerous, despite the fact that several people per month were sent to the hospital after minor falls, and one woman even died while biking during my time in La Paz. Cater argues that “the prime motivation for the practice of adventure is thrill and excitement.” Beck further suggests that even though adventure experiences are understood within a discourse of risk, tourists that engage in them have no desire to actually be harmed. Instead, it is the unpredictability of the experience that attracts them. As one German woman proclaimed on facebook, “Today I survived the World’s Most Dangerous Road. Just like 50 other people every day.” Much like exotic animals, crazy tour guides, and death-defying bike rides, “cholitas” wrestling fulfills the need for an epic and hazardous journey into the unknown exotic continent of South America and legendary stories to tell other backpackers and friends at home, upon return.

Cholita wrestling is quite obviously a scripted spectacle and further, clearly resembles the exhibition wrestling of the United States most travelers have seen numerous times on television. No matter what travelers expect on the bus ride, once the show starts they discover “its far too WWF” to be unknown. So while tourists are often motivated by a desire for unknown experiences, something more nuanced motivates travelers to see the Cholitas Luchadoras events. The Andean Secrets flyer in fact clearly depicts an audience made up of gringos and gringas, with piercings, brightly colored hair and sunglasses. 

In this case, “the unknown” creates a focus primarily on difference as something to be accumulated. Whether situated in natural landscape formations or in the local people, difference is there to be collected in the form of stories and pictures, primarily shared with friends at home through facebook posts and compared with other travelers when flipping through previous pictures on their digital cameras in the hostel bar. 

I concur with Adler’s assertion that travel is a “performed art” which includes the anticipation and daydreaming that precede the journey as well as reflection during and after the journey. Molz points out that these performances include the consumption of symbolic items that allow travelers to perform and recognize each other as legitimate. Indeed, while tourism may expose travelers to “traditional” cultural practices, their consumption behaviors are motivated by the desire to possess a symbol of those cultural practices. And while an ugly llama sweater may be requisite attire in the Ekko bar, consumption also includes the accumulation of non-commodified symbols, such as photographs or the identification bracelets from hostels that many travelers collect on their wrists. The photographs, including those of the Cholitas Luchadoras, function as a friendly competition of evidencing the strange, unusual, exotic, and “risky” things travelers have seen on their trips. 

Adler, Judith
1989 Travel as Performed Art. American Journal of Sociology, 94:1366-1391.

Beck, Ulrich
1992  Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Cater, Carl I.
2006  Playing with risk? participant perceptions of risk and management implications in adventure tourism. Tourism Management 27(2):317-325.

Molz, Jennie Germann
2006  Cosmopolitan Bodies: Fit to Travel and Traveling to Fit. Body Society 12:1-21.