Marta La Alteña ("The Woman from El Alto") staggers toward the ropes, her knees wobble and desert her, and she strikes the mat with a dull thud. On her back, Marta’s black braids brush the boots of her torturer, Satanica, a strapping woman wearing a red mask with black horns. Popcorn, orange rinds and freeze-dried potatoes rain down on the assailant as she sits with her legs wrapped around Marta’s inert body, planting her right hand a few inches from Marta’s forehead—a human pillory. She secures her position, nods fiendishly at the crowd, and violently screws her hips counter-clockwise. Marta’s torso lurches into the air, twists 180 degrees and crashes clumsily to the ground. The mat trembles, catching her face. A flash of blue spandex underwear appears beneath her pink pleated skirt which has ascended past her thighs.
Minutes later, Marta is collapsed on the concrete floor outside the ring after being slapped by a midget in a bridal gown, bitten on the arm and tossed through the ropes by a perfectly executed hammer throw. Satanica drags her braids and hurls her over a barrier of waist-high yellow bars into the crowd; Marta crouches, petrified. Her powerlessness becomes unbearable; the spectators chant, “Come on! Come on!” A stout, graying woman wearing a coarse brown apron and purple velvet skirt squats warily and slips her hand through the flimsy bars, pressing it against Marta’s glistening forehead as if delivering a benediction.
       
       Suddenly reinvigorated, Marta bounds back into the ring and executes a piledriver, then leaps onto the stunned Satanica for a count of three. The fight is over. Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” fills the arena and Marta leaps from one corner to the next, gallantly climbing the ropes and thrusting her arms into the air. Satanica exits petulantly, cursing the audience and kicking barriers into the bleachers. Marta’s assistant rushes to the stage with her bowler hat and jewelry, and the cholita dashes out in a flurry of air kisses and curtsies.

       El Alto ("The Heights”) peeks over the northwestern rim of the canyon enclosing La Paz, Bolivia, a sprawling agglomeration of open-air markets and brick boxes overlooking a drab colonial center 13,000 feet above sea level. Over the last 30 years close to a million people, mostly indigenous Aymara, have emigrated from the countryside to El Alto. They inhabit a plateau extending away from the snow-capped Andean peaks that flank the Bolivian capital to the south and east, toward the high plains that meet Lake Titicaca on the border with Peru—an interminable stretch of hard earth and dusty improvised settlements, half-finished roads, and an endless stream of dilapidated hand-painted buses.
The Multifuncional (Multifunctional Center) in El Alto—"Multi" for short—is an ersatz arena, an oblong warehouse with basketball rims on the narrow east and west sides and a dressing room the size of a modest closet tucked behind the bleachers on the north side. Skylights tinted pale yellow and pastel blue streak the middle of a vaulted ceiling made from layers of salvaged sheet metal. Blackened steel supports gird the structure. Coca-Cola banners are painted behind the basketball rims and crude lime outlines of boys playing basketball and soccer and practicing martial arts hover above the concrete bleachers on the broad northern and southern walls. The Multi lives up to its name, serving as a venue for reggaeton concerts, sermons, indoor soccer, community meetings and lucha libre.

        Every Sunday afternoon hundreds of fans pack the Multi, paying one dollar to watch three hours of the Mexican freestyle wrestling (lucha libre) now ubiquitous in Latin and Central America. The main attraction is the cholita wrestlers of the most popular group in Bolivia, "Titans of the Ring" acrobatically bludgeoning each other. (In Bolivia cholita, the feminine diminutive of the Spanish cholo, slang for "peasant," refers to indigenous women who maintain the traditions and dress of rural communities.)

        Carmen Rosa and Yolanda Amorosa joined the Titans of the Ring in 2002, along with Julia La Paceña ("The Woman from La Paz") and Marta La Alteña. “Before we were wrestling in the Multi it was empty,” Yolanda recalls, sitting on a bench with Carmen in a park overlooking downtown La Paz. “Once we started fighting there it was full every week. Thanks to us there is a public for lucha libre, people who come every Sunday to see the cholitas wrestle.”

        Carmen used to be one of the most popular cholitas
wrestling at the Multi, frequenting Bolivian talk shows, touring Peru and packing the arena every week.  But in October, she and the other women quit the Titans after feuding with Juan Mamani, the group’s manager and founder, who provides space and equipment for training and pays for the use of the Multi each Sunday. Since then Carmen, Yolanda, and Julia, who I wasn’t able to meet because she was recovering in the hospital after being attacked and robbed, have been working to found a rival group.