El Alto

Someone described La Paz to me as an inverted San Francisco: built in a huge valley between mountain range and altiplano, the city slopes downward from the red brick shantytowns high up on the eastern and western valley walls towards the government center and the big glass towers and fancy apartment buildings in the middle, and then down southward as well, from the top of the valley in the north where the autopista snakes its way up to El Alto and the altiplano, down to La Zona Sur, near the Valle de la Luna, where La Paz's wealthy suburbs bask in the relatively lower altitude and warmer weather, far away from the poverty up above. It's a weird topography - much like Caracas or Rio de Janeiro I guess - that puts the wealthy neighborhoods far down below the poor ramshackle semi-squatter villages. At least they get the views of the Cordillera Real.

And then there's El Alto.

Way up above La Paz, clinging to the lip of the valley and sprawling outward from there across the 4000+ meter altiplano, El Alto is South America's fastest growing city, with over 800,000 residents living in pretty much total squalor, the majority of houses without running water and definitely no heat to guard against the freezing nighttime temperatures, most buildings cobbled together from cheap brick and whatever else was available, no planning, little infrastructure, crowds and minibuses spewing exhaust and little Aymara women selling anything and everything on the streets and everywhere stray dogs and mud. The majority of El Alto residents are Aymara, one of Bolivia's major indigenous groups, and the majority have moved from tiny altiplano communities in the past 20 years or so, looking for work and opportunity in the city down below. El Alto only became incorporated as its own city in 1986 - before that it was just an encampment of poor indigenous folks - and that's still pretty much what it is, just bigger.

El Alto has also been the epicenter of Bolivia's social movements, as the Aymara are traditionally the best organized and most radical of the country's indigenous groups, and the extreme poverty of El Alto has been a sort of crucible for hardcore organizing and mobilizations and autonomous community actions that have not only changed the course of Bolivian history (2003 mobilizations and road blockades that toppled the Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada presidency) but also created a thriving community with a strong identity and some hard-won treasures like UPEA, the Universidad Publica y Autonoma de El Alto, founded in 2003 as a result of student and youth mobilizations and steady pressure on the government.

On Friday and Saturday of last week I attended an amazing Andean/Mesoamerican Indigenous Movements Conference up at UPEA, where academics and indigenous leaders from across the hemisphere came together to share stories, experiences, strategies for social change. To say UPEA is underfunded would be a stretch - the "quad" is a muddy dirt field between a few small buildings - but this is the newest and most politically radical university perhaps in the hemisphere, and the lecture hall was packed with young Aymara men and women in traditional dress and the energy was electric - this was the real deal.

On Saturday afternoon the conference ended with a beautiful ceremony and song and dance and a big community feast of potatoes and plantains and beans all laid out on the floor for everyone to dig into. Just as the blessing over the food was said, the air turned cold and thunder struck and a hailstorm just opened up in the sky, making it hard to even hear each other as the stones hit the metal roof overhead. As the andean drumming and reed flute music got faster and louder, everyone held hands and started doing these long snaky line dances like at a bar-mitzvah, and I joined in and danced until I was breathless in the thin cold air and had to stop. I made my way out into the crazy muddy streets and hopped on a microbus full of sopping wet Aymara women in their bright rainbow colored shawls and bowler hats and rode down the autopista back to La Paz, where the sun was shining and the air was warm.