184 CultureShock! Bolivia
the extra punishment of an occasional light snow on a frigid
winter’s night and sometimes even in summer.
El Alto is the Tijuana of Bolivia, a stop-off point for
immigrants searching for a better life in the metropolis. There
is no border patrol between the ridge that separates this city
and La Paz, but many arriving pilgrims end up imprisoned
in this settlement that has sprawled out anarchistically over
the Altiplano with endless, half fi nished redbrick monuments
to frustrated ambitions. The city spills beyond its haphazard
infrastructure into rutty dirt streets with open sewers.
Blending within El Alto’s population are invisible people
who have no birth certifi cates and no identifi cation cards,
and who, when they die, often prematurely, are buried in
clandestine cemeteries. Offi cially, they never existed.
Sometimes El Alto pioneers buy a cheap piece of land,
begin their house brick by brick, then discover that the same
plot has been sold several times over. In El Alto hospitals you
may have to bring your own medicine and supplies if you
expect full service. Clandestine El Alto butchers slaughter pigs
without government inspection. A slow and silent catastrophe
awaits arriving settlers.
Internal immigration from Bolivia’s more desperate
rural areas has infl ated El Alto’s population, which is now
approaching a million.
El Alto’s more fortunate indigenous and Cholo residents
make the long commute to La Paz to work as domestics,
bricklayers and day labourers. Llojeta, a panoramic highway
that winds down to La Paz’s affl uent south zone bypassing
upper La Paz, opens low wage employment opportunities
for El Alto residents in the Zona Sur.
El Alto’s main consolation is its dramatic view of the snow
covered cordillera (mountain range). Magnifi cent Illimani
bulges from this vantage point like a glowing, white robed
Buddha on the horizon. In the opposite direction, El Alto is a
quick drive to Lake Titicaca and the ruins of Tiahuanaco.
These features are not enough to diminish El Alto’s
emerging gangs, abandoned children who become addicted
to sniffi ng paint thinner and freelance prostitutes who avoid
weekly medical check-ups. The alienation of displacement