“Cholita groups were a mise-en-scène of the social revolution.”

Lucia Udvardyova: You have been researching cholita groups in Bolivia on an academic level, pursuing a PhD on the topic. You also have family relations to Bolivia. Can you talk about the motivation for your research?

Siboné Oroza: My reason for going back to Bolivia in 2012, after many years, was the female song-and-dance groups I had been following on YouTube since 2010. I was looking for a new Bolivian song to perform with our Tango Siboney Orchestra. Instead of the customary all-male folkloric groups, I saw these women musicians singing in high voices, often performing bold dances and lyrics, even sexual desire, which was very different from what I knew about Bolivian music. Of course, Andean women had traditionally performed songs and danced in this style during religious-agricultural feasts, but only now, with the democratization of digital media, was their art more accessible to wider audiences. I also deeply wished to take part in the celebrations of Indigenous political triumph at the turn of the millennium. Through my family history, I sought to understand the dialectical relationship between coloniality and anti-colonial resistance: the union of my Quechua grandmother and Spanish grandfather, and my parents’ involvement in a political movement that sided with the aspirations of oppressed Indigenous peoples for freedom. The University of Helsinki and, later, the Kone Foundation allowed me to bring it all together through a PhD and a film.

Udvardyova: The film When I'm on Stage, I Rule is a collaboration between you and visual artist Antti Nordin. Can you talk about your collaboration and how the film came about?

Oroza: I compare our collaboration in filmmaking with our collaboration in music: I select the songs and convey the stories to the public, while Antti holds the heartbeat of the story with his guitar. We call into dialogue other voices and hands that the songs have passed through before coming to us. I often translate songs from Spanish to Finnish, because, for example, Rioplatan tangos are chronicles of their time and location, yet universal in their quest for human dignity. Making the film with the Bolivian cholita artists was an option from the beginning of my doctoral research because the intimate and public spaces of laughter, noise, beauty, and storytelling to which we were granted access were truly filmic! Making the film was also a form of reciprocal exchange for the stories we received as gifts from my research collaborators. Antti also filmed many music videos for artists who wrote the scripts and co-edited them with him. I was happy to learn that these videos had been good for the artists’ economic endeavors.

Udvardyova: The documentary was produced in 2012, during a period of social change in Bolivia. Can you talk about the sociopolitical and cultural context in which your film was set?

Oroza: The social revolution that changed the country's fate in 2000–2005 was still strongly felt in 2012. The Indigenous majorities were exercising political power resulting from their own immense collective efforts in mass mobilization and grassroots organization in defense of important natural resources, such as water and fossil fuels, over which the neoliberal state had handed control to, or was planning to hand it over to, transnational corporations. Political power was accompanied by cultural celebration: Aymara religious authorities performed rituals at the entrance of the presidential palace, where the most powerful symbol of Indigenous triumph, President Evo Morales, held office. Morales was in his second presidential term in 2012, backed by 64.2 percent of the popular vote. There was a never-ending flow of religious-folkloric parades in every neighborhood, and dancehalls in the working-class zones attracted large audiences. Nevertheless, critical voices also made themselves heard. As far as feminist groups were concerned, misogynist violence was as strong as ever. Indigenous groups from tropical areas and environmentalists protested the continuing extractive economy, raising questions about how sincerely the government was committed to environmental protection and to the rights of all Indigenous peoples granted under the new Constitution. The westernized elite observed in anger how their privileges, inherited from colonial times based on the exclusion of the Indigenous population, crumbled in front of their eyes.

Udvardyova: Can you talk about the cholita musical group movement, also captured in the film, that emerged around 2006 with the ascent of Bolivia's first Indigenous President, Evo Morales?

Oroza: I claim in my PhD that the cholita groups were a mise-en-scène of the social revolution. The first group, Las Conquistadoras, was formed in 2005 and became enormously successful in 2006 with the publication of their second album, which, according to the group’s musical leader, Servando Cáceres, sold at least one million copies. Inspired by the success of Las Conquistadoras, hundreds of cholita groups emerged. The cholita group boom runs parallel with the electoral victory of President Evo Morales, and forms part of a wider Indigenous-inspired musical movement that was instrumental in his election. In 2012, there was still high demand for cholita groups that portrayed the independent, economically and symbolically powerful Quechua and Aymara women known as cholas. The Cholas were on the front lines of the mass mobilizations that led to regime change, often funding them as well. In 2012, many chola women were in high political positions, including several ministers in the Morales government. Chola women also regularly own the dancehalls where cholita groups perform, or hire them as entertainers for their family celebrations.

Udvardyova: How does this influence the rhythm and form of your films?

Oroza: The film shows that the cholita artists are in the leading role on stage. In Cochabamba, their voices controlled the sonic space of the dancehalls and beyond. There was an apparent paradox in their powerful stage personas and the unequal social relations based on wealth, ethnicity, and unbridled misogyny that they confronted off stage. The artists tried to solve this paradox, empowering themselves both creatively and economically. I borrow the term creative empowerment from Black US-American filmmaker Ytasha L. Womack, who has written about the Afrofuturist Art movement. Womack points out that Afrofuturism has empowering and transformative potential, as it can shape history and the future creatively, allowing its practitioners to transcend the social limitations that reflect the dehumanizing history of slavery. To do so, they often draw inspiration from a pre-colonial past. Similarly, the cholita artists used their stage power to challenge the colonial-inherited oppressions of racism, poverty, and misogyny. They drew inspiration from a tradition of treasured femininity in Andean music and a cultural memory of more balanced gender relations. They conceptualized their stage power as alegría (joy), which I have called Cholita Futurism or Political Joy. By sharing alegría with other working-class Andean-descendant women in the audience, artistic empowerment was a route to collective empowerment.

Udvardyova: There is also a fascinating and close connection between mothers and daughters within the movement - often the daughters continue the baton from their mothers. Besides an artistic aspect, there is also the business one - the contracts, the management, setting up the tours, etc.

Oroza: Yes, the cholita groups who participated in the film are family businesses mostly owned by the lead singer or her mother, and most family members are involved. Women of Andean descent in Bolivia have been providing for their families in precarious conditions since colonial times and are accustomed to being economically self-reliant. Economic self-reliance within an extended family forms part of a gender consciousness that chola mothers pass on to their daughters, just as musical traditions, and the memory of colonial violence. In the context of the cholita groups, working-class women, a term that includes salaried workers, smallholders, and market vendors from Indigenous backgrounds, have a central role both as producers and consumers. Entertainers and their female spectators have their own money to spend, which allows them to move around and to enjoy their free time dancing in the dancehalls. The cholita artists who collaborated with us produced and marketed their own music. As soon as low-cost video cameras, CD duplicators, and other digital equipment became available, they were able to cut out middlemen, control revenue, and present themselves visually as they liked.

One immediate impression after becoming acquainted with the artists and their families was the mothers’ unquestioned authority, which the eldest daughter inherited when the mother was not present. A mother’s authority had to do with growing up in a culture of respect toward one’s seniors, but also with the fact that the mother managed the family economy. Mothers looked for contracts for their daughters, organized recording and video sessions, and had a say in the song repertoires and stage costumes. I got the impression that male partners often served more as symbolic figures or took on supportive roles in the business, working as roadies or drivers, or playing an instrument when needed. Servando Cáceres, who was co-owner and manager of Las Conquistadoras and their backing band Los Reyes del Charango, together with Felicidad Ventura, was an exception. Daughters were eager to establish their own business as soon as they could to gain more freedom to use their own money and a position of authority within their circle.

Udvardyova: Can you talk about the filming and the production of the film? The film also captures the aftermath of a tragic accident where several cholita performers were injured. How long were you following the performers? Was there something that surprised you throughout shooting?

Oroza: We followed the performers from March 2012 to February 2013, and I went back to Bolivia in 2017 to ask their opinion about my research results and the film, and again together with Antti in 2025, when we showed When I’m on Stage, I Rule at the University of Cochabamba. It was a great occasion where we could enjoy the presence and music of the protagonists, who also received the Spanish translation of my PhD.

The road accident at the beginning of 2013 occurred the night Las Conquistadoras and Los Reyes del Charango were traveling from Potosí to Cochabamba to perform a show we were going to film. Servando Cáceres called us the next morning, telling us what had happened and asking us to come to the Cuban hospital of Cochabamba, where they had been taken, with our cameras and recorders. We decided to bring the footage to the film because it could tell something about the precarity of circumstances, including bad roads and sleepless nights, that lie under the spectacular shows of the cholita groups. The groups were constantly traveling to distant towns and villages in the highlands and tropical areas. Traveling in Bolivia is intrinsically perilous, and many cholita groups have experienced threatening situations on the road. Only two years earlier, another road accident had claimed the lives of eight members of another cholita group and their backing band. Felicidad Ventura was severely injured and was not able to return to the music stage for a long time. Servando then gave me a video recording of their ensemble's dancehall performance, produced by his and Ventura’s own record label, Producciones Chicha Internacional, to include in our film. Also, the environmentalist music video by Las Sirenitas that we included in the final cut was produced by the group’s manager, Lidia Vera, and filmmaker Abel Zambrana.

At the hospital, Felicidad Ventura told me that she had had a bad premonition about that trip. A similar logic of affectivity drives all the musicians' endeavors. My research collaborators told me in 2017 that, at our first meeting, they had “scrutinized” Antti and me carefully to see if we were worthy of their trust and time. I walked into the world of cholita groups equipped with my vague notion of Bolivia as a country in which women’s rights are consistently infringed. The greatest surprises and lessons for me came when I shifted my focus from structural disadvantages to my research collaborators' agency. Discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, and social class formed real obstacles in their lives, but they warned me against representing them as submissive women. They hoped I would talk about everything they did to remove the obstacles to their aspirations. They saw themselves as non-submissive, strong women. They had felt the force of the grassroots mobilizations at the turn of the millennium, which gave them a sense of empowerment and dignity. They all agreed that the Law Against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, passed in 2010 by the Morales administration, was their most important achievement, because they now felt protected by law as chola women. The freedom to express one’s culture without fear of racism-inspired violence was a matter of life and death for the performers and their female relatives. They were aware that Indigenous women’s organizations and some sectors of the feminist movement had succeeded in addressing major gender-specific claims in the new Constitution, and they came across feminist graffiti that decorated city walls every day, which inspired some of my research collaborators to conceptualize their shows as a kind of Pachamama power feminism. I was first surprised that the singer-entrepreneurs enjoyed considerable economic and sexual self-determination, but as I learned more, I became aware that this is how cholas are characterized in both historical literature and popular culture.

What perhaps surprised me most was how strongly the artists manifested their individuality. Of course, as performers, they invested in personal branding, but it was also part of growing up in a culture of respect: respect for one’s own and everyone else’s personhood. The strong sense of individuality among Indigenous Bolivians does not preclude organized collective action, as we have seen throughout Bolivian history and again today, when their hard-won achievements are threatened by a neoliberal government. The artists insisted that I did not assign them simple categories such as ethnicity, but that I instead tried to see the mobile, complex, and flexible character of their identifications. Throughout this interview, I have talked about the protagonists as Indigenous women, but they did not necessarily identify as such. They identified as Quechua-speaking daughters of cholas from Cochabamba, but also as artists, mothers, lovers, students, teachers, butchers, fashion designers, and living between Indigenous and westernized worlds. They were comfortable in their own culture in a way that allowed them to use modern music technology to produce commercial music videos, yet still claim that it was “our traditional culture”. The relaxed attitude towards sexual minorities in the dancehalls and cholita group fan clubs was also a surprise for me. Young Bolivians of Indigenous descent were breaking through the mentally and physically confining colonial racial/ethnic and gender categories that had obstructed their freedoms, and they were constructing their own subjectivities and stage personas. This is the most important lesson I learned from the cholita groups, and I have tried to convey it in both my academic research and our film.

Udvardyova: How has the cholita movement transformed since 2012?

Oroza: In November 2023, Verónica Torrico paid attention to my use of “cholita”, the diminutive of “chola”, during a presentation she gave at the University of Helsinki. In 2012, the performers were referred to as cholitas due to their young age, but today they are grown women with children of their own, and Torrico pointed out that the diminutive diminishes adult chola women and should therefore be avoided. This also means that there has been a significant change in the Bolivian lexicon of social differentiation since 2012: “chola,” which was used as a racist slur at the time, has now become a desired term for self-identification. When the dancehalls were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Roxana Torrico began producing and selling clothes inspired by the stage outfits of her group, Las Florecitas de Mizque. In July 2021, she opened a chola fashion boutique in the center of Cochabamba, and since then, Roxana and her sisters have opened several other branches in Bolivia and its neighboring countries. As Verónica Torrico says, she aspires to empollerar el mundo, to invite everybody to wear the pollera skirt, playing with the word empoderar (empower). Las Florecitas de Mizque still regularly performs. Laura Mendoza from Las Traicioneras del Amor has also continued her musical career. Erlinda Cruz y Las Consentidas were equally hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Erlinda organized several online concerts in 2020 to mitigate the effects and has recently celebrated her 18th Anniversary on stage. Las Conquistadoras are living a musical renaissance after their old hit tune from 2006, “Amor por Internet”, a song about the experience of migration and leaving loved ones behind, became a major success again in 2023. You can follow the artists' social media sites to get a better picture of their recent activities and the newly arrived cholita groups.

Udvardyova: The film is a collaboration between you, a researcher, and Antti Nordin, a visual artist. How do you view cinema as a tool for academic researchers, and how can academic research assist music documentaries?

Antti Nordin: From the very earliest stages of production, we realized that the editing had to be driven by the protagonists’ own words, as well as the events captured in the concert footage. Our goal was to ensure that their voices and perspectives remained central to the film. We were eager to honor the artists' wishes and respect how they wanted to be portrayed on screen. The material generated its own drama and narrative flow. Except for a couple of background themes, all the music is drawn directly from the group’s performances or videos. Naturally, the music plays a pivotal role, acting as a soundtrack that propels the drama from scene to scene. In many ways, you could say the material edited itself.

Siboné Oroza: We decided early on that there would be no narrative voice-over other than the protagonists’ in the film; they were the experts on the cholita groups movement, and agents with a political interest in bringing forth their perspectives. Antti filmed my interviews with the artists and their live performances, edited 12 music videos with them, and cut When I’m on Stage, I Rule from the many hours of recorded material. With the help of that material methodically organized by Antti, I could refresh my memories whenever I needed. I was reminded over and over again that whenever I lost my track, I could find it again in the words, singing, and dancing of the artists who participated in my research. The interviews my research draws on most heavily are included in the film. Antti handled the visual storytelling, including the beautiful animations, and he also took into account my request to include as many polleras as possible!

A 90-minute documentary cannot cover all aspects of the cholita art movement. It took me almost ten years of academic work to try and understand the full depth of the words and performances of the women musicians, including the connection between song and the more-than-human world; dance, beauty, and gender ideologies; conceptions of time and resistance/adaptation to colonial rule; popular markets and racial capitalism, and there are many more films to be made about the futurist cholitas and cholas! As an ethnomusicologist-documentarist colleague once said, an academic book will find perhaps five readers, but a film on the same subject can reach many more spectators! Toward more cinema-academia collaborations!