McGrath: "(...) the ch’uta is a dance that originated between 1900 and 1920 in Corocoro"
The first embroiderer who originated the Ch'uta costume Don Juan Altamirano Carrasco and his wife Manuela Catari. (Graphic testimony collected by Mr. Rogelio Altamirano). by Elena McGrath (...) In Corocoro, the right to celebrate was a concern that united mineworkers and their worker, artisan, and merchant neighbors. In fact, workers produced a form of Carnival celebration during this time that has become one of the enduring patrimonial claims of Corocoro in the twenty-first century: a dance known as the ch’uta. Now practiced throughout Bolivia, particularly in the Carnival parades in La Paz and Oruro, the ch’uta is a dance that originated between 1900 and 1920 in Corocoro, as the story goes, to mimic the dancing of a drunken pongo mocking the urban residents of the town. Pongeuaje was a colonial institution that lasted through the first half of the twentieth century in parts of rural Bolivia, where hacienda workers owed a period of unpaid domestic service to the master’s ho...
