Bolivian Free Style Wrestling For Women (GALLERY)

Welcome to Bolivian Free-style Wrestling.  Unlike the extravagant WWE, the women of Bolivian wrestling keep things real by wearing their traditional red skirts, white pompoms and a golden laced shawl, the traditional dress of the Aimara women.  In Bolivian wrestling, there are no show lights, no full arenas, not even a million-dollar announcer. At “El Alto”, Bolivia, with 800.000 Aimara and Quechua native inhabitants, fighting means going back to a time when late at night a boxing show used to present men wearing black outfit and the event was broadcast to the blinking black and white televisions, with the exception that the Bolivian free-style wrestling is not broadcast. Bolivia has its own team of fighters that wrestle in choreographic fights. The Bolivian organizers have introduced the “Cholitas” fighters, native Bolivian women who wear bowler hats and multi-underskirts. It is an exotic show in which the classic Bolivian “Cholitas” fly past knocking to each other over and over again. Those who want to see the fights - a growing number if you want – fill the “Centro Multifuncional” of El Paso, getting in hundreds and paying a dollar per person to sit on cement stands with very low temperatures (it gets colder at night), and holding tubs of pop corn. In a city of daily penuries, free-style wrestling brings amusement to people who have no time or money to have fun. Welcome to the show.