The Social Setting 93Pakistani dances or American Puritans joining a Native
American pow wow, dressed in colourful pre-colonial garb.
Such was the initiation of members of Bolivia’s declining
Creole aristocracy into the world of the native majority. In the
late February summer Carnavals of La Paz and Oruro in the
1990s, the grandchildren of racist land owners merged with
the descendents of indigenous share croppers in uninhibited
street dances. The blend was inconspicuous as the ornate
dress for the Diablada, Los Caporales or La Morenada dances
includes a surreal mask representing the devil.
Class and Racism
A few decades ago, this scene would have been inconceivable.
Bolivia used to be entrenched in a seemingly unbreakable
caste system. Society luminaries would take pains for it to
be known that they were of Spanish heritage. A few notches
down in the pecking order,
mestizos, known in the Andes
as cholos, with vague visions
of upward mobility would fi nd
overt or subtle ways to proclaim
that they were not of indigenous
descent, for the few drops of
trickle-down colonial power they
were allowed.
The triad of power—
landowner, clergyman and political boss—conspired to
squeeze the maximum profi t from human capital. Cholos
(a cultural more than racial distinction) were the object of
a divide-and-conquer strategy; they were employed by the
landowner to police the ‘indios’.
Countercurrents of noble efforts to enfranchise the
oppressed began with the Jesuit missions in the Chiquitos
area of the Oriente lowlands, continuing with Mariscal
Antonio José de Sucre, Bolivia’s fi rst president, and reaching
an artistic peak in anti-racist fi lms of the 1960s and 1970s
such as Jorge Sanjinés’ The Blood of the Condor (Ya w a r
Mallku), named by the United Nations as one of the 59
fi lms of greatest social impact in the history of cinema, and
Until the middle of the 20th
century, a class of indigenous
sharecroppers, economically
bound for a lifetime to
estates called latifundios,
were called pongos because,
from the viewpoint of the
landowner, their names
were insignifi cant.