Text by Sara Shahriari - FOR REFERENCE ONLY, RIGHTS MUST BE OBTAINED FROM AUTHOR
As tourists pile off busses and working-class locals form lines outside the sports center in El Alto, Bolivia, Johana Huañaparo Vilela is preparing to fight. She is one of a small group of women wrestlers who jump into the ring for lucha libre, or wrestling, with masked men every Sunday.
But these women aren’t like the men in their spandex outfits and masks. They’re Cholitas, indigenous Bolivian women in their traditional Aymara Indian clothes. The outfit includes a layered skirt buoyed by petticoats, a shawl with long swinging fringe and a bowler hat adorned with gold pins. It’s what the women wear in, and out, of the wrestling ring.
Huañaparo Vilela’s wrestling name is Carmen Rosa the Champion. At 32 years old she has two sons, is a trained teacher, and has a steady gig as part of the Titans of the Ring, Bolivia’s best-known group of wrestlers.
Titans of the Ring added cholitas to its lineup about 10 years ago. Since then the crowds – and the media attention – have grown exponentially.
When Huañaparo Vilela emerges to fight as Carmen Rosa she is dressed to the nines, elegant, greeting her supporters with outstretched arms. Then she pulls away her shawl, hands her hat off and jumps into the ring. As a tecnica she represents the good guy in the fight, battling the malicious rudos, but that doesn’t mean she won’t take a beating. Carmen Rosa and her opponent, a man, circle each other until he grabs her and hurls her to the ground. She hits the ring floor with a bone-rattling thump.
“I’ve hurt my head, my face, my back,” Huañaparo Vilela says, pointing to a scar on her eyebrow and another on her chin. She insists that although the high-flying moves and passes the cholitas display in the ring are practiced ahead of time, outcomes aren’t fixed. In any case, it’s easy to see there is tremendous room for error and injury as men and women fling themselves from the ropes onto the concrete arena floor, crack wooden boxes over each others’ heads and execute flips.
In one match Vera Luz Cortéz Hidalgo, who fights as Yolanda the Loving, is knocked unconscious by her male opponent and carried from the ring. It’s shocking to see a person hit so hard, even in a wrestling ring.
The crowd roots powerfully for the women, cursing the male wrestlers as they pull their hair, hit them and pin them. It looks exhausting and often painful, but for Huañaparo Vilela the hard knocks in the ring have been worth the change she feels in her life. “I used to be a beaten woman, humiliated and in the corner,” she says. “But thanks to lucha I know how to defend myself and my children.”
Cortéz Hidalgo also finds wrestling as empowering. “Vera Luz is she who arrived in the world, but Yolanda is who is realizing herself as a woman, an artist and a professional,” she says of her wrestling alter-ego.
While the wrestlers find the right to fight empowers them, there are elements of the business that don’t look so empowering. The Titans of the Ring is run by a team of aggressive men, who some wrestlers say take the lion’s share of the profit and leave them with little – even if they’re injured.
Cholitas wrestling is an ever-growing business. Hundreds of tourists, and Bolivians, line up every week to watch the cholitas beat on each other. But why the fascination? “It’s something spectacular, something never seen before to have a cholita in the ring,” says Huañaparo Vilela.
In line outside the arena one sunny Sunday French tourist Stephany Pihery says she heard about the cholitas on a European radio show. She and her friend were drawn by the promise of sport combined with a heavy dose of theater.
To 14-year-old Bolivian twins Carla and Maria Mamani Flores, also waiting in line, the fights are just pure awesome. “Everyone wants to see the cholitas fight,” Maria says. “I think the cholitas do it because they like to fight, and for vengeance,” Carla adds.
