El Alto, Bolivia, at 13,300 feet above sea level, is in shambles viewed from the outside, if one cultivates someone else's Western, colonial way of looking. Another perspective, though, reveals the history of an amazing place where social mobilization has called the powers that be into question and done it without centralized or unified organizations. Here are facts and insights for understanding the Aymaras' capital city that reinvented the word insurrection.
Chaos in motion. A perplexing Babel. Street vendors and shopkeepers, merchants in their stores and sellers in their stalls, brokers and commission agents going on and on over persistent rumors, waves of movement on sidewalks and streets that are black and sticky with mud; blaring horns mix with Andean music -- traditional songs combining pututus and electric guitars -- fused with voices offering, selling, demanding, haggling; hundreds of pickup trucks preparing to be engulfed in the La Paz flow, and so many others plowing through the endless tide: this is El Alto's La Ceja district, the commercial and political junction of the Aymara capital. An orgy of color and sound. At the point when an outsider’s senses adapt themselves to the 13,300 foot elevation and icy breeze from the snowy Cordillera Real, when the outsider gets used to the hustle and bustle and the crowd, the pandemonium begins to take on a certain form. It's enough to let oneself be swept along by the scene, so the noise of the milling crowd turns into a murmur, and the cacophony into song. El Alto is chaos seen from outside -- that is, if one cultivates someone else's Western, colonial way of looking.
