William Neuman
EL ALTO, Bolivia — Turn a corner in this sprawling, bustling, fast-growing city and the Ovando family home suddenly bursts into view, a party-colored mirage floating above the drab, brick-red metropolis like a beacon of an alternate Andean future.
Brightly colored buildings are often topped with homes for the newly prosperous merchant class.
“We didn’t want it to be just another brick house,” said Karen Ovando,
26, a government customs lawyer, standing on the terrace of her parents’
bright yellow, orange and red penthouse, six stories above the street.
“They’re all matchboxes here, all the same. We wanted to show something
about ourselves, something about our family.”
But the Ovando home and others like it — popularly called chalets for
their size and extravagance — also have a lot to say about the unbridled
energy, aspirations and political contradictions of this churning,
whirligig city and its place in a changing Bolivia.
Rising incongruously above much poorer dwellings, these urban, Andean
versions of the suburban McMansion reflect the economic growth that
Bolivia has been able to achieve in recent years — and how unevenly it
is often distributed. But rather than stir widespread resentment in this
bastion of rebellious politics, these open displays of wealth are often
embraced by El Alto’s residents, an illustration of the city’s unusual
mix of leftist uprisings and capitalist strivings.
“El Alto is simultaneously the most revolutionary city, perhaps in all
of Latin America, at the same time as it’s the most neoliberal city, the
most individualistic city in all of Latin America,” said Benjamin H.
Kohl, an associate professor of urban studies at Temple University in
Philadelphia.
El Alto sits at about 13,150 feet on the barren altiplano.
Directly below it, Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, spills down the slopes of
a steep valley, with the towering snow-covered peaks of the Andes as
backdrop.
La Paz has long had a clear geography of status. The wealthiest
residents live at the bottom of the valley, and the poorer ones live
higher up. On top of everything is El Alto, whose name means “the
Heights.” For years a slum appendage of La Paz, it became an independent
city in 1988.
El Alto’s location is also the source of its power. The airport is here,
and the main highways connecting La Paz to the rest of the country pass
through El Alto. In times of unrest, El Alto can lay siege to the
capital. The model was set by Tupac Katari, an Aymara Indian leader who
led a late-18th-century rebellion against the Spanish colonialists,
using El Alto’s position to cut off La Paz.
Centuries later, in 2003, a similar strategy was used by the modern
residents of El Alto, who rose up against a government proposal to
export natural gas to the United States through a port in neighboring
Chile, Bolivia’s traditional enemy. Scores of people died in the unrest,
and President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was forced to flee the country.
El Alto residents then became a key source of support for the leftist president, Evo Morales,
supporting him overwhelmingly when he was elected in 2005 and again in
2009. But even Mr. Morales found that he was not immune to the anger of
El Alto. In 2010, when his government proposed changes to subsidies that
would have led to a sharp rise in the price of gasoline, El Alto’s
residents again blockaded the capital and forced Mr. Morales to back
down.
Still, for all its rebellious spirit, El Alto is far from being a
typical bastion of the left. It is a hive of commerce, small-scale
manufacturing, international trade and contraband.
“Lots of people describe El Alto as a revolutionary city, but it’s the
capital of capitalism,” said Mario Durán, an activist who works to
improve Internet access.
Home to about 220,000 residents in 1985, the city swelled as poor
farmers and out-of-work miners poured in from the countryside. It is now
bigger than La Paz, with an estimated size of well over one million.
The population is overwhelmingly Aymara, one of the country’s main
indigenous groups, and the immigrants have brought with them a fierce
work ethic and a laissez-faire zest for business.
The most prominent feature of El Alto is its vast open-air market, which
fills mile upon mile of city streets every Sunday and Thursday. Here
vendors by the thousands offer a huge array of goods: piles of used
T-shirts and other clothing that arrive in bales from the United States;
cars, new or used (and sometimes stolen); neatly arranged arms, legs
and heads from broken Barbie dolls; electric guitars; mummified baby
llamas; pickax handles; and myriad other items. Each week, millions of
dollars pour through the market, which operates in an almost total
vacuum of government intervention, taxes or regulations.
Residents describe El Alto as a nonstop city financed by immigrant
dreams of a better life. Beyond the market, there are thousands of small
businesses, including importers, manufacturers and garment shops that
make knockoff brand-label clothing. The city seems to be in a constant
state of construction, fueled by the commerce and, locals said, by money
from Bolivia’s drug trade. And there are language academies that give
courses in Chinese for El Alto entrepreneurs.
“El Alto can be Hong Kong in the middle of the altiplano,” Mr. Durán
said. “Or it can be a slum. You’re in the exact point where you need to
establish the foundations for the city’s development.”
The other key aspect of El Alto is its indigenous character. Bolivia is a
majority indigenous country, but El Alto is special, scholars say,
because of the way it has developed. It has no old colonial town center
with a plaza, church and government buildings, a significant departure
in a country that still struggles with the legacy of conquest.
“It is the first indigenous city since the colonial period,” said Félix
Muruchi, a professor of pre-Columbian culture at the Public University
of El Alto. “A Spaniard didn’t make it. A Creole, a descendant of the
Spanish, didn’t make it. It was the indigenous people themselves, the
Aymaras, who made it.”
Now El Alto’s brightly colored buildings topped with luxury chalets have
become a symbol of this vibrant, dynamic city, representing a homegrown
architectural style with a crazy quilt of building materials and
decorative motifs, including some copied from pre-Columbian ruins.
Some have giant diamonds raised in bas-relief on the stucco facade, or
plaster lions or a condor perched on a penthouse terrace railing. Some
look like castles; others have slashing diagonal swaths of reflective or
colored glass. Most buildings have stores or restaurants on the ground
floor and often a large event hall on the second and third floors, for
weddings or parties. At the top sits the chalet, often with gabled roof
and many-tiered chimney.
But most of all they are oases of color: electric greens, blues,
yellows, reds. Other buildings here are made from brick and concrete,
and few are painted, creating a subfusc cityscape exacerbated by the
dust blowing across the altiplano. Paint is expensive, and Bolivians are
poor. And residents believe their property taxes will rise once a home
is finished and painted. Government officials say that is no longer
true, but the belief, and the lack of paint, persist.
In that context, there is no surer sign of wealth than a painted house, and the brighter the paint the better.
“We came from zero,” Ms. Ovando said, recalling how her family used to
live in a single room behind her parents’ restaurant. The family now
runs two restaurants, a cattle ranch and other businesses. Now, she
said, she can drive around El Alto and see copies of her family’s home
popping up all around.
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