The Fighting Cholitas are a group of female lucha libre wrestlers who perform in El Alto, Bolivia. The Cholitas were the subject of an award-winning 2006 short-subject documentary, The Fighting Cholitas.
The Cholitas are part of a group called the Titans of the Ring, which includes both male and female wrestlers. The Titans perform each Sunday for an audience of hundreds at El Alto's Multifunctional Center; tickets to the exhibitions cost $1.
The idea of including female wrestlers as a maneuver for publicity came from Juan Mamami, a wrestler and president of the Titans. They routinely attract over a thousand spectators to their bouts in El Alto and several hundred spectators when they travel with the Titans to smaller towns.
Like the general population of El Alto, which consists almost entirely of Aymara and Quechua residents, the Cholitas are indigenous. They wear braided hair, bowler hats and multilayered skirts in the ring.
According to a 2005 New York Times article, the Titans earn about $13 for each bout. Most of the wrestlers have other jobs besides their wrestling careers.
The Fighting Cholitas were featured in an October 2008 episode of the American reality series The Amazing Race, in which a contestant from each team was tasked with learning and performing a six-step wrestling routine with a Cholita.
Read more about Fighting Cholitas: 2006 Documentary
Famous quotes containing the word fighting:
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
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