Bolivian Cholitas Go From Fashion Icons To Wrestling Stars

National Georgraphic Magazine is profiling Bolivian Cholita wrestlers this month…needle scratch. Como? Bolivian cholita wrestlers? OH OUR GATOS! That’s the greatest thing we’ve heard since Manu Chao remixed Vicente Fernandez’s “Volver Volver!” Bolivian cholitas, known for their iconic fashion trends, have now ventured into the world of mat-splatting and choke-holds. And we couldn’t be more excited! From National Geographic:

Welcome to the delirious world of Bolivian wrestling. In the cold, treeless, comfortless city of El Alto (”high point”), 13,000 feet above sea level, there are one million people, most of whom fled here over the past three decades to escape the countryside’s pervasive misery. The lucky ones find steady jobs down in the capital city of La Paz, which El Alto overlooks. Many sell clothes, onions, pirated DVDs, Barbie dolls, car parts, small desiccated mammals for magic rituals. The poorest alteños employ themselves as beasts of burden. All of them battle hopeless traffic, a constant scarcity of fuel and water, the dull fatigue of numbing labor, the odds that are stacked against them. When they’re done working, they need to play, and when they want to play, one never knows what they will come up with. Lately, they’ve come up with the extraordinary spectacle of the cholitas luchadoras—fighting cholitas—which has given new life to Bolivians’ own version of Mexican lucha libre, a free-form spectacle somewhere between a passion play, a wrestling match, and bedlam.

Please, please, please don’t let Vince McMahon get a hold of this and make a mockery out of it. Please. Seriously. Anyway, they even had a movie come out (before Machochip was ever launched so don’t yell at us.)

Eat your heart out, Lucha Libre! We’d love to hear what you guys think. Have you been to a Bolivian cholita match? If so, what’s it like? Do they have characters? Do they have signature moves? We have questions, but we want your answers! In the meantime, check out some more pictures below.



Ok, the last picture shouldn’t be on any billboards advertising the sport because it looks hella creepy. More pics here. Y, Arriba Cholitas!
Bolivia’s Wrestlers [National Geographic]
Images [Ivan Kashinsky]