This presentation will address the surge of urban social actors who have changed the traditional criollo city of La Paz into a newly-born cholo/mestizo city shaped after the influence of new socio-economic sectors of mainly Aymara ethnic origins.

It is during the second half of the past century that the long underprivileged and belittled Quechua/Aymara merchants of the city of La Paz opened the doors to smuggling and to the informal economy that has neither been taxed nor monitored by any form of government. Quechua/Aymara merchants, often stigmatized as troublesome and unmanageable, expanded rapidly to challenge the formal economy ran by merchants of diverse European as well as Middle-Eastern origins (mainly Croatian, Lebanese, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and German).

Gastón Gallardo’s presentation will explore the spatial consequences that rose from the “physical” creation of a Quechua/Aymara black market that commercialized with clothing and other imported goods. This black market created a vast ambulant commerce of informal nature that dramatically changed La Paz, the site of Bolivia’s government. What did this mean symbolically? How should we conceptualize the enormous changes the city is encountering today between the rationalized European spatial models of the past and the new mestizo baroque architectural forms of the present? What are the connections between commerce and the vibrant mestizo festivities that have conquered artistically the traditional criollo city of the past?

Gastón Gallardo is a well-known Bolivian architect and urban planner. Professor Emeritus of the School of Architecture at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, the most important public university in Bolivia, Gallardo has also been its Dean of the School of Architecture, Arts, Design and Urbanism, from 2015 until 2018. He is also a founder member of the School of Architecture at Universidad Católica Boliviana, and has taught at the postgraduate level at several other universities. He holds degrees from Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and Collegio d’Ingenierie della Toscana, Firenze, Italy, and has done postgraduate work in territorial and urban planning, in Italy and Argentina. Gallardo in widely published in Bolivia and Latin America, and is currently Vice President of the Bolivian Association of History.

Gallardo’s presentation will be in Spanish.

This event is co-sponsored by Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Institute for the Humanities, Rackham Graduate School, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.