"Vida de artistas": La borrachera andina en el ámbito del hampa boliviano

Abstract:This article studies the practices of drinking, drunkenness, and making sense of these experiences through narrative in an Andean urban context, specifically in the chronicles of Víctor Hugo Viscarra. The study places these practices in the context of historical and anthropological studies of drinking in the Andean region, from colonial times until the present, outlining remarkable continuities between the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries. Different functions of drinking and drunkenness are addressed: questioning authority, influencing social bonds, and searching for knowledge through near-death experience and the communication with the otherworldly. Drinking practices emerge as central to understanding the experience of marginality in an Andean urban context. The use of el hampa boliviano—the oral and local linguistic variant used by the marginalized in La Paz—in these written narratives is key for making sense of the drinking practices and for construction of a loosely articulated collectivity, which challenges the colonial categories of caste in Andean society and redeploys, with a decolonial potential, the Marxian category of Lumpenproletariat. While acknowledging the motley sexual, racial, and gender identities that constitute it, Viscarra's chronicles evoke a specific collectivity of an Andean city, defined by poverty and marginality, shared drinking practices, and common language use.