Dating in La Paz as a Woman: Polleras, Parity, and Painted Walls

The morning economy of La Paz is arranged by women. The caseras, the market women a paceño household buys from by name and by loyalty, stack their fruit before dawn from the Rodríguez market up through the sprawling street commerce of El Alto, and a large share of them work in the pollera, the layered skirt, with the bowler hat pitched at an angle and the shawl pinned just so. Nothing about the picture is quaint. These are businesswomen running margins, credit and rank in one of the hemisphere’s toughest trading cities, and their dress is a declaration of exactly who is doing it. Any honest account of what it is to be a woman in La Paz starts here, with the fact that the city’s most visible public women are indigenous, working, and no longer asking anyone’s permission to be either.

The pollera, reversed

Within living memory the pollera was a bar to entry. Women who wore it were kept out of certain offices, certain restaurants and certain futures, waved to the back of things, read instantly as servants whatever they actually were, and the discrimination ran well into this century. The reversal of the last generation is the most important social fact in the city. The pollera is now worn on magazine covers and runways, cholita is spoken as a title of pride where it was flung as an insult, and a chola paceña in full dress commands a respect in public that her mother was refused. For dating, the dress is legible in a way outsiders miss: whether a woman wears the pollera always, or only for fiestas, or never though her mother does, places her family, her barrio and her politics in one glance, and paceños read the glance automatically. A relationship across those lines is common and is still a conversation, in both families, and pretending otherwise is the one dishonest way to tell it.

The walls talk back

La Paz is also the home ground of Mujeres Creando, the anarchist feminist collective that María Galindo has fronted since the early nineties, and the city literally wears their work: aphorisms in looping paint on walls across the centre, sentences about machismo and desire and housework signed with their name, a radio station, and a cultural house where the graffiti comes indoors. No other capital on the continent has feminism this physically present in its streetscape. The state, meanwhile, runs one of the world’s most gender-balanced legislatures, because Bolivian electoral law requires party lists to alternate women and men, and the assembly sits close to parity. Paceñas hold both facts next to a third one, which is that the household did not get the memo, and the gap between the law’s arithmetic and the kitchen’s is the running argument of the city. The Aymara ideal of chachawarmi, the man-woman pair as a single complementary unit, is invoked on all sides of that argument, as an inheritance of balance by some and as a polite cover for unpaid work by others, and the debate is conducted in the open, on the walls included.

Sunday the women wrestle

On Sundays in El Alto the cholitas luchadoras take the ring in full pollera, braids flying, and throw each other over the ropes to a hall that is half neighbourhood crowd and half visitors up from the canyon. It began as spectacle and became an institution, and the women who headline it are local celebrities with day jobs in the markets. It earns its place in an account of dating because of what it normalised: the sight of an Aymara woman in traditional dress being publicly formidable, cheered for aggression, paid for it, home by dinner. The generation of alteña and paceña women raised on that image negotiates courtship with a different posture than the one before it. The deference scripts still exist, especially in older and more rural-rooted families, and a woman is still expected to be respectable in ways her brothers are not. But the ambient evidence of the city says women hit back, run the stall, hold office and paint the walls, and the evidence gets into everything, including who messages first.

Vertical class, read exactly

The canyon sorts the city by altitude and the sorting is social. The Zona Sur at the warm bottom is moneyed, whiter, private-school; the centre climbs through the middle class; El Alto on the rim is Aymara-majority and commercially ferocious. A woman dating across those contour lines is doing something ordinary and closely read. Her family will want to know which line the man lives on, and his will want the same, and the question underneath is not merely money but which of the city’s two calendars a future household would keep, the Catholic one or the Andean one or the usual braided both. The fiesta economy complicates the picture in women’s favour. The great folkloric entrada of the Gran Poder is sustained by women, from the bordadoras who sew the costumes to the matrons who dance the morenada in velvet polleras, and a couple asked to sponsor a fiesta as prestes has been handed the city’s most public honour, one that requires a capable woman at its centre and everyone knows it.

Radio taxis and the flying commute

The practical habits are specific and unremarkable to the women who keep them. By day the minibuses go everywhere and women ride them without thought. At night the habit is the radio taxi, called from a known company rather than hailed, a custom so settled that the phone numbers are family property. The teleférico changed the texture of moving around more than any policy did: the cabins are lit, cameras run, the stations are staffed, and women name the cable car, unprompted, as the transport where they stop monitoring the door. Drinking is its own subject at 3,600 metres. The fiesta calendar involves serious alcohol and women take part fully, and the altitude arithmetic, which doubles everything, is managed openly; a woman pacing herself at a preste is exercising a competence the culture respects rather than a caution it imposes. Unions here often formalise late, after years and often after children, and the concubinato, the recognised unmarried union, is ordinary. A single mother in La Paz is a demographic, not a scandal, and in the markets she is very often the boss. The casera relationship itself is worth naming as a woman’s institution: the loyalty between a household and its market vendor is personal, decades long, inherited down the female line on both sides of the stall, and it is one of the quiet ways women in this city bank trust with each other.

The person, verified

What La Paz asks of a woman dating in it is that she read the city correctly, the dress and the barrio and the calendar, and the city repays her with more visible female authority than almost anywhere on the continent. What it cannot always tell her is who exactly she is talking to, in a metropolis of two cities and constant arrival, and that is the one place software has something to add. L’Amore Vince verifies that every person is a real, present human with a daily face check before any conversation goes anywhere, which is a small mechanical version of what the casera system always was: known counterparties, vouched for, dealt with by name. The rest the paceña can do herself. She generally could all along.