Owning modernity: Indigenous architecture, fashion, and the aesthetics of modernity in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia

Abstract

This article explores how popular markets and cultural aesthetics challenge colonial binaries of tradition versus modernity, focusing on La Paz and El Alto during a period of Indigenous political power and economic expansion (2006–2019). Drawing on fieldwork and Bolivian scholarship, I show how two visible formations—Freddy Mamani’s “ cholet ” buildings and la moda de la chola paceña —enact plural, ch’ixi modernities rather than simple incorporations of “tradition” into consumer spectacle. The trends examined demonstrate how popular aesthetic practices disrupt binaries (modern/traditional, rural/urban, gift/commerce), and demonstrate the importance of understanding the institutions which channel capital, as well as cultural dynamics and the power of confidence, shame, and recognition in shaping urban space. I also analyze the institutional reception—in Bolivia and internationally—to show how Indigenous designers reframe what counts as art, expertise, and contemporaneity. The discussion relocates debates on the “Indigenous city” to the Andes and connects them to Latin American work on plurality, livelihoods, baroque economies, and settler-colonial urbanism. Rather than reading architecture and fashion as evidence of a growing consuming middle class, I show how they organize belonging and redistribute visibility in the city on their own terms. The case invites a reworking of urban theory attuned to Indigenous economic and cultural logics and to forms of modernity and contemporaneity that are not derivative of northern trajectories.