Now that the Olympics games have wrapped up and everyone’s gone off to their respective lives of either lying about being old enough to qualify for gymnastics (China!) or posing on cereal boxes, it’s time to obsess over something new. Women’s wrestling! It’s a big hit (lolz) in Bolivia, where contenders dress in traditional items like various petticoats and bowler hats while rearranging each other’s faces. Here’s a little taste of a fight between the impeccably dressed Amorous Yolanda and Evil Claudina:

Swiftly they remove their hats, unpin their shawls, and … whap, whap, whap! Claudina belts Yolanda one, Yolanda slaps Claudina, Claudina tries to escape, but Yolanda grabs Claudina by her pigtails and spins her around, and WHAM! Claudina whirls through the air, petticoats and braids flying, and lands flat on her back on the mat, gasping like a fish. The audience goes nuts.

This fascination with Bolivian “cholita” fighters comes, the article suggests, from the tough life many poor workers in the Andean highlands face and their need for some sort of escapism. Kind of like the stereotype that lower-class Americans are the most obsessed with pro wrestling. And, also like American pro wrestling, cholita fights are full of more drama that you can shake a stick of jerky at:

“Watch out!” the entire audience shrieks. Yolanda has been celebrating her victory, but Claudina, as proof of her evil nature, is about to lunge at her from behind. Yolanda spins too late; Claudina knocks her flat and clambers like a crazy person onto the ropes. “I’m the prettiest!” she yells at the audience. “You’re all ugly! I’m your daddy! I’m the one the gringos have come to see!” Indeed three rows of ringside seats are filled with foreigners, all pop-eyed, but they’re actually irrelevant. It’s their fellow Bolivians the cholitas are performing for.

Well damn, Claudina. You pretty much summed up our questions after reading about this sport: Is cholita fighting a uniquely male-driven form of escapism, watching “the prettiest” girls tear at one another’s pigtails? Or is it about women asserting their role as “the daddy” in a machista society? Or a little bit of both? Well, smooth out your petticoat and have a chat with Juan Mamani, the man who credits himself with creating the concept of cholita fights:

Mamani is a tall, angular man whom it would be kind to call unfriendly. He cuts phone conversations short by hanging up, does not show up for appointments he has been cornered into making, and tries to charge for interviews. His cholitas are terrified of him. “Don’t tell him you called me; don’t tell him you have my phone number!” one of them begged.

Remind you of anything? Then, as a constrast, there’s Señora Cancina’s take on the whole thing:

The music is booming, and it’s hard to conduct a conversation, but Señora Cancina is amiable and cooperative. She had 12 children, she says, but after a pause adds that six died. How? Her face takes on a distressing blankness. “Scarlet fever, diarrhea, those things … ” she murmurs, and has to repeat the answer over the noise. Would she have wanted to be a luchadora too? Definitely, she says. “Our husbands make fools of us, but if we were wrestlers we could express our fury.”

There’s nothing quite like smashing an aluminum folding chair on someone’s head to get back at generations of oppression. But when the adrenaline rush wanes and these cholitas go back to their homes and children and husbands and bills, will the cheers and jeers of their audience still echo on their kitchen walls? Do they change anything?

Bolivian Cholitas Go From Fashion Icons To Wrestling Stars [Machochip]
Bolivia’s Wrestlers [National Geographic]