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 house in town. In this way, the dance represented an indigenous critique of the culture of the city; but it was crucially a city dominated by foreigners of a particular kind. 

The ch’uta dancer wears a mask with a “Germanic” beard and piercing blue eyes, speaks in a comically high voice, and cavorts in a manner alternatingly threatening and seductive with a Bolivian cholita. In other words, this dance performed a critical—sometimes mocking, sometimes wary—acknowledgement of the conditions of a frontier mining town: partially acculturated indigenous Bolivians in a town full of potentially dangerous, but also alluring foreign influences.

Carnival represented a moment of threat to local authorities as well as a time of joyous  excess enjoyed by workers and the merchants who sold them costumes and alcohol. The city of Corocoro was always worried about the legality of wearing disguises during the Carnival season and mine owners balked at the llama and sheep sacrifices that often accompanied these celebrations. Workers, on the other hand, saw company and city participation in these festivities as cementing a bond not just with the working class but with the entities that governed safety in the mines.

Source:

McGrath E (2025). Devil’s Bargains: Worker Citizens and Revolution in a Bolivian Mining City [Unpublished doctoral thesis].

Note: For didactic purposes, the photograph of the Ch'uta was added to this publication, it is not part of the research thesis.