essays
Action Activism: Cholitas Wrestling
fighting domestic violence in public
Here flies Maria now. She’s the good one. The villain’s name I forgot, as though the happy ending was all that mattered in life. As though it mattered more than the fight for it. Tonight, every wrestling story ended in predictable happiness, which might be a flat happiness, but still a happiness. The evergreen routine – bad top dog dominates good underdog until good underdog beats bad top dog – fits in between two em dashes, but they sprinkled it with some referee interference, tag teaming, and other nuances of brawly storytelling.
Of course, it’s all show, but the show is real. The event venue, on the other hand, seems strangely detached from reality. The Ratchet looks like a casino-playground-crossover designed by a kid on LSD. Outside, the facade sports a transformer design while the whimsical interior looks like… well, you tell me. The building is one of El Alto’s cholets – chalets with an intentionally kitschy, glitzy, indigenous (cholo) touch. But this is just another one of those idiosyncrasies that La Paz and its next-door twin city El Alto are so rich in, and a story for another time. Which brings me back to this odd story. Cholitas wrestling. Wow, (wo)man, what a Thursday night.
The entertainment is undeniable. This might not be a line up of pro-pro wrestlers, but they are as pro as people with day jobs get, in that they are pretty pro, the bone-shattering kind. It feels like they’re spending way more time mid-air than humans are designed for. Jumping, flying, falling, like monkeys, birds, and meteors. And all that in their traditional indigenous attire. And with that indigenous attitude too. So cheeky underneath the reservedness. The way they involve the audience with their theatrical antics is anything from audaciously silly to hilariously ridiculous – from stealing sips of beer to kidnapping dance partners. A lot of the fighting takes place outside the ring and those lives lived on the edges of first row seats are, well, lived on the edge. Occasionally, the referee orders the evacuation of those ringsiders just before the imminent impact of another human bomb, a bundle of two or more wrestlers crashing into those chairs.
Eddying in that rapid action all around, it’s easy to forget (or never even know of) the history behind the spectacle: inspired by Mexican lucha libre, Bolivian Aymara women started it as a form of activism to draw attention to domestic violence. That explains the presence of a few male fighters, who do eventually get taken down, sí o sí. Happy endings delivered with cratering moonsaults. Turning around their stories of abuse, the cholitas own the symbolic men inside that ring, and as the perimeter of fighting expands around the ring throughout the night, one can hope that it extends outside the venue too, all the way home.
One thing is for sure: just like they own their male opponents in the ring, the cholitas own their lives and cultural identities. The term “cholita” used to be a derogatory verbal slap to belittle indigenous women and their traditional customs, lifestyles, and outfits, but nowadays cholitas own the word they wrestled from their oppressors to flip its connotation with a twist of self-empowered pride. Another victory, and perhaps even a happy ending.
