In the huddled market stalls, sprawling farms and pulsing parties of Viacha, a scrappy town southeast of Bolivia’s capital, it’s typical for women to sport bowler hats, tiered skirts and fringed shawls.
A woman models a creation by a local designer at a Chola fashion show, promoting the Andean style and beauty of Aymara women, in Viacha, Bolivia , Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. A woman models a creation by a local designer at a Chola fashion show, promoting the Andean style and beauty of Aymara women, in Viacha, Bolivia , Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. Women model creations by a local designer at a Chola fashion show, promoting the Andean style and beauty of Aymara women, in Viacha, Bolivia , Friday, Nov.
One by one, the girls from Viacha — mostly students between 15-25 years old — strutted down the catwalk to a surprising soundtrack of early 2000s American pop music. Street vendors hawked hot dogs and empanadas. Supporters cheered in Spanish and the Indigenous Aymaran language. “It’s something I’m proud of, to see my daughter and her friends enjoy what I’ve worn for work my whole life,” she said, pointing to the wool shawl, velvet hat and lower-key beige pollera she had on — the same clothes, she said, she still wears to milk her cows and sell her cheese at open-air markets. Her own mother did the same.
Bolivia’s whiter, more affluent population has used “Chola” — and its diminutive, “Cholita” — as dismissive racial epithets. But in recent decades that stigma has dissipated, with Indigenous Aymara proudly reclaiming the word and younger Bolivians rediscovering the charm of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ vibrant garments.
Most of the girls parading onstage Friday, in the show organized by the Viacha municipality, grew up during the tenure of, the country’s first-ever Indigenous president whose championing of Bolivia’s Indigenous majority earned him fervent support across the cinderblock and adobe homes of the Altiplano., expanded recognition for Bolivia’s 36 ethnic groups. He promoted the teaching of Indigenous languages and boosted state funding for folkloric arts.
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In Bolivia's scrappy highlands, proud Indigenous Cholas take the runway by stormIn the huddled market stalls, sprawling farms and pulsing parties of Viacha, a scrappy town southeast of Bolivia’s capital, it’s typical for women to sport bowler hats, tiered skirts and fringed shawls.
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