CHOLETS

In the Andean Plateau, at over 4000 meters high, rises El Alto, satellite city of La Paz, founded in 1985. Today it counts almost one million of inhabitants and it’s the second most populated city in Bolivia after Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

The Aymara natives, coming from the countryside, make up about 75% of the population and are now part of the new middle class.

A growing economy and a renewed sense of indigenous pride has led to the rise of a new style of architecture which introduced some color in the city of El Alto, mostly characterized by a strong use of exposed brick.

These extravagant and colorful Nuevo Andino (New Andean) style buildings are called Cholet, a mix between the words “chalet” and “cholo”-a dismissive racial epithet that is used in some Latin American countries to identify the indigenous population- 

The authorship of this new style can be entrusted to the self-taught architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre and in his wake other members of the nascent Aymara bourgeoisie started to build their houses inspired by the colors and forms of indigenous folklore.

The Cholets have a fixed structure: on the first floor there is a commercial activity -butcher’s shop, ironmongery’s store, bazaar ..-, at the second there is the party hall, to the third apartments that the owners rent to amortize the cost of the building, and on the top floor the Cholet proper, the home of the owners.

These buildings in El Alto became the representation of success, understood in the same way as purely capitalist societies.

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