Arequipa, second city of Peru, in its desert oasis, backed by Misti Volcano
“Suddenly the bleak pampa falls away at one’s feet, and La Paz in its hole in the ground, 1,200 feet below, spreads out at the foot of Illimani and its sister peaks”
Third (to be marked Baedeker-fashion with two stars) comes the most picturesque figure in Bolivia, if not in South America,—la chola de La Paz. Her mate may blossom out in all the atrocities or “European” attire, but la chola clings tenaciously and wisely to the costume of her ancestors. Moreover, in this case the picturesque is not attended by its usual handmaid, uncleanliness. La Paz is not immaculate by modern standards, but at least la chola does her share toward making it seem so. She wears the usual multiplicity of skirts, but of a finer material and better fit than elsewhere, so that while she is still somewhat bulky about the hips, she is not disagreeably so. Her outer skirt is always of a solid color, distinctly gay, but never of the crudeness this garment attains among the Indian women. Of well-woven cloth, it stops just halfway from foot to knee, never high enough to suggest immodesty and never low enough to drag on the ground, as is the distressing custom among many of the middle-class women up and down the Andes. Above this she wears two shawls—at least that is the nearest English equivalent in a male vocabulary—of some excellent material closely resembling silk, with perpendicular stripes of varying width and color, the whole gay in the extreme, yet never clashing with the rest of the costume so far as the mere male eye can detect. These being large, they are folded in the middle and thrown about the shoulders, a glimpse of the inner one adding to the gaiety of the ensemble, the fringe of both sweeping her ankles. Her hair, jet black, and coarse as a horse’s mane, she parts in the middle and combs flat on either side, the ends of the braids, without the suggestion of a decoration of ribbon or flower, hanging sometimes inside, sometimes outside the shawls. From her ears swing heavy earrings of fantastic design some two inches long. Most striking of all is her unique hat. This is of straw, of “Panama” texture, with the general form of our derby or the Englishman’s “bowler,” lacquered or glazed over with something that causes it to reflect the brilliant sunlight of these heights like a mirror, and seeming at first sight as absurd and out of place as our own “’ard ’at” might to a visitor from Mars.
But one soon gets used to it, and even to like it, especially as la chola wears it at just the suggestion of a rakish angle, ever so slightly inclined over the right eye, though the near-certainty that she is wholly unconscious of that fact only adds to the attractiveness. When she grows excited, as in arguing the price of a nickel’s-worth of beans in the market-place, she has a way of giving the front rim a flip of the finger that knocks the hat back from her brow, under which circumstances she so vividly recalls a Western “drummer” in a heated but friendly argument in a bar-room, that one sighs with regret that she has not a half-burned cigar protruding at an aggressive angle from the corner of her mouth to complete the picture.
There remains but to speak of her footwear. This consists of a high shoe, native-made, on a very Parisian last, with high, slender “French heels,” of every color a shoe could be by any stretch of propriety, but with cream or canary-color the favorite, a bow of the same material—it seems to be kid—down near the toe and a bundle of tassels at the top. Occasionally the shoes are high enough to join company with the halfway-to-the-knee skirt, below which peers the white lace of an inner petticoat, but even then when she stoops over in arguing a purchase, one notes a “clocked” stocking, that adds still more to the debauch of colors, going on up—at least to where it is fitting for a stranger to cease investigation.
Astonishment grows that la chola can afford such garments. The shoes alone cost as high as $10, and every stitch in sight is of a grade and workmanship that come high in Bolivia, that would not, indeed, be cheap in a far more productive country. Yet the chief wonder is the specklessness of her entire garb—doubly wonderful to one of long Andean experience. The glazed hat shines like the polished dome of a mosque, the skirts and shawls always look as if they had just that moment come out of a Parisian shop, and the cream-colored shoes have not a fly-speck upon them; yet la chola wears this costume at any hour and under all circumstances—in the street, at least—and carries on her often soiling business in all parts of town. Some assert that she starves herself to dress; but her appearance does not uphold the contention. However she affords it, it is to be hoped that the means will continue, and that she will not some day abandon in favor of the atrocities of foreign fashions the most picturesque costume in South America, and the chief decoration of every outdoor scene and public gathering in La Paz.
The chola is not exactly chic; the thick-setness bequeathed her by Indian forebears makes that word fail. But she is as nearly so as the Andean Indian type can become; and as she trips along at a “snappy,” energetic stride up and down the break-neck cobbled streets of La Paz, in her slender-waisted “French heels,” and not only does not break her neck but does not even jar from its angle her “stiff ’at,” the eye is as certain to note her passing as it would that of a meteor in the sky above. She is always full-cheeked and plump, often good to look at in spite of her rather bulky Indian features, and aggressively independent, going anywhere at any time she chooses in complete indifference to the oriental seclusion that still clings about the upper class women. She treats the rest of the world with a manner midway between sauciness and impudence, scorning anything on the plane of reading and writing with the disdain of her Indian forebears. She holds most of the places in the market and the pulperías, or little liquor and food shops, and ranges all the way from small shopkeeper to unservile serving-maid to well-to-do women. One gets the impression from a brief acquaintance that she is as superior to her mate, the shifty-eyed cholo, as are the women of Tehuantepec to their men. She speaks Aymará by choice, but will use Spanish when necessary; and she is always at least comparatively young. One sees cholas up to thirty or thirty-five, but as they do not look as if they died off at that age, the natural conclusion is that they fall into a more somber and less agreeable costume. La chola is seldom married “legally and Catholicly,” but if she has a baby, a mishap that not infrequently befalls her, she wears it as all Andean women wear their babies,—on her back. Instead of being carelessly slung in a blanket tied across mother’s chest, however, this fortunate mite sits in a whole nest of clean, gay garments, the spotless white lining hanging down a foot or more on all sides of it, ending in a lace fringe. Indeed, this better care of baby is notable in La Paz, and has its influence even among the Indian women.
But I set out to give a half-dozen female classes. The fourth is the same chola, just a shade lower in the scale. She also wears a little round hat, but of brown or black felt. Her skirts and shawls are less gay and of coarser texture, her stockings are dark, and her footwear a shining-black, low slipper without heel. The fifth is usually a common servant, almost touching on the Indian woman, her garments sometimes descending to the plebeian, crude-colored, made-in-Germany-and-in-a-hurry bayeta in which the higher grade chola would scorn to be seen, though it is almost universal to her class elsewhere in the Andes. She wears also a shiny black slipper, but no stockings, though her brown plump leg looks almost like finely woven silk. There is no suggestion of immodesty in this absence of nether covering, yet when one of this class, for some sojourning-gringo reason, suddenly appears in the bare white legs of what at first glance seems a lady of our own race, the sight brings something of a shock. Of the three types of chola, the third and fourth may blend a bit, sometimes to the extent of coiffing the latter in a glazed hat; but only the first ever falls into the foolishness of the “upper” class in flouring her face a bit, and at worst it is confined to a few sporadic cases.
At the bottom of the scale, as everywhere in the Andes, comes the Indian woman, varying a bit in garb, according to the degree of her poverty. She wears the round felt hat and endures the chill highland winds by wrapping several thick bayeta skirts of clashing colors around her waist in bunches, until she looks like—I am at a loss for a comparison that is ugly, awkward, and bulky enough;—may I say, like a very badly packed sack of assorted hardware with the looser and lighter things above the compressed middle? She likes red best, and as the day warms, every second or third of the skirts she removes one by one is of some shade of that color. Below them are bronzed legs and either bare feet with hoof-like soles, or, as La Paz and vicinity are distinctly stony, as well as cold, with a flat sandal of a single piece of leather, with thongs over the heel and between the large toe and the others. Solidly built as she is, one wonders how the Indian woman’s waist can support the weight of six or eight heavy bayeta skirts. Yet always, in addition to these, night or day, young or old, drunk or sober, filthy or only dirty, she carries a bundle on her back in the colored blanket tied across her chest, with, whenever possible—and her possibilities in this line are infinite—the head of a baby protruding somewhere from the load, now gazing earnestly at the road ahead, now dancing a crowing hornpipe on the broad back of the utterly unresponsive mother.