La Cancha

On my tenth day in Bolivia, I went to the market. Well, yes and not exactly. I needed some hygiene items and some bathroom cleaning supplies. And though I could have obtained them two blocks from the convent, I decided to walk several blocks south to the place called La Cancha, the much-heralded popular market. Actually, it’s not accurate to call it a place. La Cancha is like a market of markets. The folks at the language school estimate it encompasses over 50 blocks, and that sprawl may be a conservative estimate. It is bounded to the west by the intercity bus terminal, as well as a hill, Colina San Sebastian, and a cemetery. To the north it is bounded for about nine blocks by a major thoroughfare. To the east is another thoroughfare running down a good six big blocks or more. The market stretches southward through a former train station and consumes all the territory, funneling down eventually. I’m telling you what the maps show me, for in truth I barely penetrated this mega-market, having got no further than one or two blocks past the northern frontier.

I’ve seen photos of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’ve been to the Tenement Museum and received an impression of how densely packed that neighborhood was on market days and, really, any given day. Well, I suppose that what I saw at the edge of La Cancha is today what the Lower East Side was all those years ago. Holy moly! No apparent traffic laws need apply here. Everyone is a small business owner. Everyone is selling everything. Everyone has a space from which to sell: tents, kiosks, booths, carts, galerias, sidewalks, pavilions. Who is a licensed vendor and who simply hangs a shingle and gets going? Who knows? In Cochabamba, who cares? Artisanal crafts, new clothing, old clothing, festival clothing (it is Carnaval), shoes, cosmetics, household products (I found most of my hygiene and bathroom needs), baby products, furniture (I passed three blocks of mattress stores on the way to La Cancha), musical instruments, cell phones and electronics, computers and printers, TVs, radios, CDs and DVDs, a galaxy of games and toys, a universe of produce and meats and grains and hot foods and beverages and baked goods, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves … the mind reels and the eyes drown. Cliché time: I was literally stopped in my tracks by the volume and density of commercial activity.

I am told by a friar that you could wander La Cancha for a week and not see everything. I am further told that, though I was brushed back in this first encounter, don’t give up hope. Keep plowing through the thickest thickets of the open-air markets until you reach the much broader plazas of La Cancha, with indoor venues, and where the aisles are wider—where there are actually aisles and not six inches of crumbling sidewalk between you and the street. And the vendors have much more space in which to spread out. I have a lot of free time on Sunday, and no need to make urgent purchases. So I will keep the bolivianos and my (useless) cell phone at home, take a breath, imagine that I am Dante (O Virgil, where art thou?) and descend once more, without despair, into La Cancha until its chaos reveals its beauty—until what looks like the Inferno yields to a more benign Purgatory.