Whoever has been to Bolivia during the last decade or so will have noticed the overwhelming quantity of grand scale urban fiestas in which the country’s population as well as the occasional traveler indulge: Carnival in Oruro, Gran Poder in La Paz, Chutillos in Potosí, Virgen de Urkupiña in Cochabamba, and so forth. There are virtually no two consecutive months without one of these fiestas, most of them held in honor of a local advocation of the Virgin Mary or some other Saint, most of them closely following the same sequence of events: There is the ‘entrada’, a folkloric pageant at the beginning, preceded itself by months of preparative church masses, rehearsals and ‘promesas’ to the respective advocation, which culminates in a more or less extended act of reverence; on the next day, a public pilgrimage will take place to the church or chapel in which the respective advocation is kept; and at some point in time in the immediate context of the fiesta, there will be a Feria de Alasitas, a fair at which, among many other things of course, miniature representation of desirable objects and outcomes – cars and trucks, houses and buildings of all sizes and purposes, domestic and foreign banknotes, travel visa and airline tickets, children, wives and husbands, cattle, academic titles, and many other things – are sold to the inclined costumer who would then carry these representations to the priest on duty for blessing and to a yatiri, an Andean ritual specialist, for magical treatment.
The paradigm for this sort of fiesta is constituted by Oruro’s much acclaimed carnival, an event which experienced its great rise toward the middle of the twentieth century and in relation to the nationalist revolution of 1952. As Abercrombie has argued, the carnival of Oruro is since then dominated by Oruro’s elites and mainly serves their semiotic and pragmatic needs [1] . Yet the fiestas clearly influence one another and take up elements which have proven to be successful at one of the others. The Alasitas fair, for instance, is most closely associated with La Paz, and the fact that it now takes place in the context of the other fiestas as well does not only owe to amendments made by fiesta committees trying to improve their respective events, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the great number of merchants engaged in the selling of miniatures who, on their own count, appropriate other fiestas as new markets.
On the other hand, there are more time-honed fiesta participants, as it were, now widely marginalized by town-hall designed, Oruro style patron saint fiestas, yet not entirely pushed out of the picture. Cochabamba’s grand fiesta, for instance, the one of the Virgin of Urkupiña, used to be a rather informal event until four or five decades ago, made up mainly of members of peasant communities coming to the provincial town of Quillacollo just outside the city of Cochabamba and approaching the sanctuary of the Virgin. They would drink, make music and dance on the day of the entrada, here clearly the entry of the mainly rural constituency of pilgrims to the site of the sanctuary [2] . In present times, this entrada of indigenous rural folks is displaced by a sumptuous folkloric entrada of city folks, but there are still spaces at the site, mainly on the plateau on top of the ‘calvary’ at which this particular advocation of Virgin Mary some centuries ago first appeared to an Indian shepherdess, where quite different sounds are played, quite different dances danced, and quite different rituals performed, different from what takes place in the town center, during the entrada as well as in the Cathedral at which it ends.
There is, in brief, a host of different participants engaged in these fiestas, all with their own backgrounds, their own economic purposes in mind and their own ideas and implicit understandings about whose Virgin/Patron Saint and whose fiesta it is and how every particular fiesta relates to the structure of the Bolivian society, how the fiesta responds to social relations and expressive needs and how it performs them for the future. Yet, as has been said above, there is not the slightest doubt that the main paradigm for this type of fiesta is constituted by the carnival of Oruro and that the grand proliferation of urban fiestas and the folklore performed in the course of them stands in intimate relation to the rise of nationalist sentiment as it has taken place from the 1930s onwards.
Richard Schechner insightfully discusses performance as the restoration of behavior which has, or at least is imagined as having taken place in the past [3] . As restored behavior, performance makes available genres, scripts and precedents – themselves quite obviously, or at least potentially, restorations of yet other behavior - for present and future purposes and re-contextualizes them in ways which are relevant to present concerns. Yet, as Joseph Roach has quite forcefully argued, appropriation of the past for the present is by no means an unproblematic process [4] : Surrogation, Roach’s counterpart to Schechner’s restored behavior, has to count with the possibility that the surrogate, the present performance, reveals itself as ‘only a surrogate’, as it were, as an insufficient attempt at mimicking the past the interestedness of which lurks through even if it tries to conceal it.
Roach’s surrogative performances are notoriously haunted by the possibility of a return of the past, or of versions of the past which can claim a higher degree of authenticity, and it is therefore that successful surrogation quite essentially entails a process of erasure, not only of the traces of its own interestedness, but also of that which it seeks to surrogate. Hence ‘dead’ as one of the favorite metaphors in Roach’s discussion, dead actors and celebrities whose lives are embodied by performers of the present, but who are also silenced – buried, as it were – through surrogative performance, not only, but also in burial rituals. Where the surrogate fails to completely substitute what it is sought to substitute, where there are other claims to the same sources it does not entirely delegitimize, it opens up positions from which to contest it. More so as performance is inherently palimpsestual, as one may argue, an overt reference to the past from which it draws its legitimacy and which it simultaneously reinstates: As restored behavior, performance bears the traces of what it seeks to surrogate.
If seen from this perspective, there are at least two dimensions to any given performance which lend themselves to analysis: On the one hand, one may look at the performance itself and try to understand it in its presence, in the relations out of which it arises and to which it speaks, and in the techniques it deploys and mechanisms on which it dwells to achieve its ends. On the other hand, one may try to have a look into the genealogy of a given performance, one may try to discern its overt and covert references and the palimpsestual inscriptions of past performances and relations which it bears and which might break open at some time in present or future and lend themselves to contestation or yet other re-arrangements.
This essay tries to shed some light on both of these dimension with regard to folkloric dancing in the context of urban Bolivian fiestas: In what remains, I shall briefly sketch the connection between the carnival of Oruro, once again the uncontested paradigm for all of these fiestas, and the rise of Bolivian nationalism roughly from the 1930s onward, as it has been described by Abercrombie [5] , and I shall identify theatrical representations of conquest and conversion as they were common in the context of religious festivals during the colonial period as one important source, though not necessarily the only one, for some of the most conspicuous dances which are part of the folkloric repertoire.
In connecting these two timeframes which are admittedly quite remote from one another, and extending on a historic connection made by Abercrombie, I shall finally forward the suggestion that the time in between, this is to say the time roughly between the decline of the colonial system, leading to independence in 1825, and the rise of nationalism, leading to the revolution of 1952, actually plays a pivotal role in the erasure of the colonial inscriptions the performance genres in question potentially bear due to the sources on which they draw: By forgetting that characters and plot of dances like Diablada (‘the Devil’s dance’) and Incas (featuring Pizarro’s victory over Inca Atahuallpa) were at some time put together as plays hailing the victory of Spain and Christendom over Indians and heathen idols, by forgetting the fact that characters and plot of these dances speak to colonial power relations more than to anything else, their indigenization, as it were, and subsequent folklorization were greatly facilitated. Or, in other words, the fact that contemporary Bolivians commonly see these dances as Andean in origin - that they tend to identify the devil of the Diablada as the lord of the inner mines and not as Satanas and China Supay has his female companion and not as the Deadly Sin of Lust, and that they barely notice Archangel Michael dancing in front of both of them - and precisely therefore as apt representations of the essential Andeanness of the Bolivian nation dwells on the erasure of their very permeation with colonial power relations over the time in which they were not any more performed in the context of the religious festivals by means of which Church and Crown asserted their power in colonial times, and not yet performed as national folklore and in the context of today’s ‘fiestas of national integration’, as the one in Cochabamba is officially subtitled.
It must be stated clearly: This last point of mine is a suggestion rather than an assertion. For it to be sustainable, one would first have to have a look at what happened in Bolivian cities at carnival and religious festivals in the nineteenth century. There must be evidence of this in Bolivian newspaper archives for instance, but I did not have access to them while preparing this paper. There is little published on this topic, and nineteenth century depictions of carnival, such as Melchor María Mercado’s and Alcide d’Orbigny’s [6] , are either not very explicit on what they actually depict, or they do not make reference to anything remotely resembling a story dance or a theatrical representation. Yet, taking this as evidence that the erasure posited above went so far that these things did not actually take place in the urban context would be overstressing the power of elucidation of the little material there is.
Benedict Anderson’s discussion of nation as imagined community [7] has instigated an extensive discussion of the conditions and processes which led people to emotionally invest in the sorts of territorial units which since the early nineteenth century all over the world constituted themselves as nations. As Anderson himself has pointed out, one of the pivotal – or perhaps the pivotal – characteristic to be achieved by a nation in formation is peoplehood: A sense that it is constituted by one people linked by essential commonalities and a common fate. Quite regularly, one of the key commonalities drawn upon is culture.
In Bolivia, as in other post-colonial Latin American nations propelled by a hegemonic criollo elite of European descent which over colonial times had had a vested interest in distinguishing itself from subaltern Indian, black and mixed populations, unitary national culture is a particularly tricky thing to be pursued: After all, racial and cultural difference, or what is perceived as such, still constitute very much the basis for social stratification, distinguishing those who take the lead in national society from those who are ‘yet to be developed’, thereby being kept in a state of deferred full citizenship in often times quite obvious ways.
Doris Sommer has discussed Latin American criollo nation-building with regard to nineteenth century novels, ‘foundational fictions’ as she calls them, which imagine the relationship between white criollos and other parts of heterogeneous populations in allegories of romantic, race and class transgressing passion [8] . Thomas Abercrombie, on his part, has analyzed the carnival of Ouro as a contiguous field of production of national allegories which takes up the same elements of transgression and configures them in quite similar ways [9] .
Perhaps slightly later than in most of the other Latin American nations, Bolivia’s nationalism experienced its rise toward the middle of the twentieth century, after the war with Paraguay had aligned the various strata of Bolivian society side by side in the trenches of the battlefields and the sons of the nation’s elites started questioning the economic and political relationships the country had with the outside which basically drained off Bolivia’s mineral wealth and yielded no or little benefit to the local population. The nationalist awakening of parts of the elites, arguably as well as the one of the lower social strata which had been called upon on the nation’s behalf in the course of the Chaco war, culminated in the revolution of 1952 which was led by sons of hacendados and mine-owners and very actively supported by peasants and mine-workers alike. As in other Latin American countries in similar situations, emerging Bolivian nationalism gave rise to mestizoism and indigenism as ideological stances, some times embraced by the state, sometimes not, toward race and culture.
It was in this social and political environment that the upper social strata of Oruro began to engage in the carnival of Ouro, forming new dancing fraternities with the purpose of participating in its pageant or taking over older ones which roughly since the beginning of the twentieth century had been formed among artisans and the towns mestizo populations [10] . The pageant itself had been taking place before, though only as one of alternative events during the period of carnival, and at least at the beginning of the twentieth century not as the one which drew participation by the cities elites. Abercrombie describes the situation at the turn of the century as follows:
‘By the late 19th and early 20th century, […] there were two carnival processions in Oruro: One belonged to the elite, who on carnival Saturday carried out a short procession, dressed in a variety of orientalist visions (like sheik and harem-girl outfits), ending up in gala balls; and the other pertaining to the ‘vulgar Indian masses,’ who in carnival Sunday’s procession (which successive municipal ordinances sought to prohibit), replayed old themes of colonial theater. [11] (p. 33)
Following this chronology, there would then be a double-step from the ‘themes of colonial theater’ replayed by the Indian masses at the turn of the century to the elitist mise en scène of the very same themes of colonial theater in the course of today’s carnival pageant. They would first have been appropriated by mestizo artisans and re-contextualized as part of the central procession, which then would have been appropriated as a whole by elitist indigenism.
Be it how it be - Abercrombie does not give additional detail regarding the performances of the ‘vulgar Indian masses’, nor regarding the relationship between their performances and those of the artisan unions of the early twentieth century – at the time the upper classes engage in the carnival pageant, the dances in theatrical representations they perform are marked to them as of Indian provenience. They dance, in other words, clad as Indians, transgressing race and class, but in attire and context which make sufficiently clear that this is not their everyday condition. Furthermore, the dramaturgy of the pageant itself contains an eventual rupture with this transgressive identification in that it ends before the Virgin, in this case a representation of the Virgen de la Candelaria, where the dancers take off their masks and kneel in an act of faith and repentance, confessing their sins, but – as Abercrombie puts it quite provocatively – perhaps more than anything else their sin of having become Indians, if only for the time of the carnival procession.
As seen from this angle, the carnival procession and all the folkloric pageants which over time took on the same structure constitute a specifically Bolivian variation on the theme of transgressive desire which underlies the formation of nation in post-colonial Latin America at large: A variation which surrogates carnival folklore for actual performances of Andean Indians and thereby seeks to create a link between criollos, Indians, and the national territory. For this particular variation to be effective, the dances to be performed have to be marked as original cultural manifestations of Andean Indians at least in essence, if not necessarily in all their expensive embellishment.
Yet, as will be laid out in the following, some of the dances in question find their precedents rather in the context of colonial displays of power than in an independent Andean cultural heritage. They were marginalized in the cities and in the context of religious festivals when the colonial rule declined, and only now came back as emblematic representations of indigeneity.
Within the repertoire of dances performed at Oruro-style pageants in Bolivia today, there is an intricately layered structure of relations and references which cannot be sufficiently elucidated at this point. Suffice it to say that the repertoire is still in heavy growth, the most of the new dances being adaptations of dances today’s folklorists find in the countryside or representations of rituals as they are supposedly performed by today’s Indians. The older components of the repertoire, though, bear clearly discernible traces of what Nathan Wachtel [12] l has termed ‘dance of the conquest’: Theatrical representations of conquest and conversion as they spread all over the Spanish colonies from early colonial times onward.
For Mexico, these performances have been discussed under the generic description of ‘Moors and Christians’, and the controversy which has arisen between Richard Trexler and Max Harris [13] with regard to early colonial Mexican evidence – whether these are ‘Plays of Humiliation’ (Trexler) which mainly achieved the Indians’ recognition of their own powerless situation, or whether, there was space for indigenous maneouvring in which Indians retained their own agency to a degree which let them re-contextualize and sometimes heavily distort the original script handed to them by Spanish missionaries (Harris) – may well raise issues relevant to Andean versions of these plays as well.
For instance, Wachtel analyzes Incas one of the dances performed presently at Oruro and some versions of it which conclude in the punishment of Pizarro, whose victory over Inca Atahuallpa is the historic event which this dance depicts, through the Spanish Crown and comes to the following conclusion:
‘The play, therefore, signifies a three-fold separation; between Indians and Spaniards, Inca and subject, earth and sun. This separation has two causes: the disappearance of the mediator [the Inca] and the coming of Spanish rule. Only an extraordinary event will restore the lost harmony of the world: the return of the Inca’. [14]
Incas in these versions would then be a comment of the conquest from the Indians point of view, rather than a ‘Play of Humiliation’ in Trexler’ sense, and that is, indeed, what Wachtel argues for. A comment which, interestingly enough and although Wachtel’s interpretation rather hastily suggests something slightly different, does not necessarily plot Indians against Spaniards, but rather identifies the Indians as subjects of the Crown and locates the evil in the criminal transgression perpetrated by Pizarro. Yet, Diablada as the representation of the defeat of the Devil and the Deadly Sins through Archangel Michael is far less ambiguous and clearly reveals its original edge, and there is little doubt with regard to the context in which it – and also Incas - originally belongs: religious festivals, as for instance Corpus Christi [15] .
As Abercrombie has shown, this type of theatrical representations in the context of religious processions became increasingly suspect to the elites of late colonial times, to an extent that it was actively pushed out of urban religious festivals and marginalized. This was due on the one hand to the imminent danger going out from the mock battles these plays and dances entailed and which at times transformed themselves into real street fights, on the other hand to new ideas about propriety and the distinction of elite and popular cultures as Enlightenment ideas about the order of society reached Bolivia in a similar fashion as the one described by Viqueira Albán for Mexico under Bourbon rule [16] .
Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, and lasting well into the twentieth century, theatrical representations belonged to the realm of popular culture. If they were at all regularly performed in the cities, for which there is some, though by no means conclusive evidence at the time of writing of this paper, they were identified with social strata which themselves were associated with racial mixture and a high degree of Andeanness. Furthermore, and as one may deduct from the variety of plays and dances still performed in the countryside, which did not ever find their way into urban folkloric pageants, there are versions of these and other plays and dances coming out of a similar performative tradition, which over the entire time-span were performed at provincial fiestas over which urban ideas about propriety and the order of society did not hold the same sway they did over similar occasions in their proper realm. It is these plebeianized state of the plays and dances originally conceived and performed within colonial power relations, today’s reframing of them as national folklore takes up as valid and significant instantiations of Andean essentiality.
Seeing with Roach folkloric dancing in present day Bolivia as the surrogation of a variety of Andeanness imagined mainly by urban middle and upper strata for other sorts of Andeanness as they are lived mainly by past or present peasants, the case at hand possibly offers a particularly interesting, prolonged period of forgetting, propitious for today’s appropriations of the performances and their implied traditions: On the assumption that there was in fact a relative silence around these dances, at least when it comes to the urban sphere, over much of the nineteenth century – an assumption which, again, cannot be finally asserted on the basis of the material to which I had access at the time of writing this paper – I suggest that the nineteenth century was a pivotal phase in the course of which they became eventually identified with Andeanness and the lower social strata to which this cultural quality was ascribed to a high degree; additionally, and by virtue of the fact that they slipped out of the contexts which brought their genesis within and as part of colonial power relations to the fore, most of the inscriptions of these colonial power relations they once bore became erased. It is these sanitized versions of the performance traditions, quaint representations of enigmatic Andean figures and deities, and not the plays of power and domination, that the Bolivian nation eventually came to appropriate as its national folklore.
[1] Abercrombie, T. 1992. La fiesta del carnaval postcolonial en Oruro: Clase, etnicidad y nacionalismo en la danza folklórica. Revista Andina 10:279-352, —. 2001. "Mothers and Mistresses of the Urban Bolivian Public Sphere: Postcolonial Predicament and National Imagery in Oruro's Carnival."
[2] Personal communication by Dr José Camacho, president of the Asociación Departamental de Fraternidades Folklóricas ‘Virgen de Urkupiña’, July, 2001.
[3] Schechner, R. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
[4] Roach, J. 1996. Cities of the Dead. Circum-Atlantic Performance. The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms. New York: Columbia University Press.
[5] see note 1 above.
[6] Please find them in the ‘photo essay’ section of my webpage linked in the text.
[7] Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London; New York: Verso.
[8] Sommer, D. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romance of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[9] Abercrombie, T. (2003). "Mothers and Mistresses of the Urban Bolivian Public Sphere: Postcolonial Predicament and National Imagery in Oruro's Carnival." In: M. Thurner and A. Guerrero (eds.). After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas . Durham: Duke University Press.
[10] Here, once again, I draw on Abercrombie’s description, for want of other, alternative sources. He names as the one group of city inhabitants which formerly had organized the carnival pageant the butchers’ union which up to this date plays a role in Oruro’s carnival. Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Wachtel, N. 1977. The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570. New York: Barnes & Noble.
[13] Trexler, R. C. 1987. Church and community, 1200-1600 : studies in the history of Florence and New Spain. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. and Harris, M. 2000. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians : festivals of reconquest in Mexico and Spain, 1st edition. Austin: University of Texas Press.
[14] Wachtel, N. 1977. The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570. New York: Barnes & Noble.
[15] For an early mentioning of Incas insuch a context, see Ramos Gavilán, F. A. 1976. Historia de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana: Segunda edición completa según la impresión príncipe de 1621. La Paz: Academia Boliviana de la Historia.
[16] Viqueira Albán, J. P. 1999. Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources.