The centro has always been a place where unconventional proclivities and desires converge in public. To be sure, the north of Bogota has never wanted for brothels or casinos: sex and gambling are integral parts of the Colombian recreational canon. But like every good burgher’s bad side, vice in the north is kept behind closed doors. Downtown, in the centro, they are aired in public – almost as a badge of honor. “You may have faux-French cheese and college degrees, but we do as we please, nyungka.” Hairy transvestite? Show us those thighs. Unrepentant glue-sniffer? I’ll fetch you a paper bag.
Much of Bogotá has been ravished by overdoses of globalization and cheap consumerism, but the centro has managed to squeeze a little charm from its decades-long downgrade from commercial and residential hub to welfare crack-baby since being swept by widespread political violence in the late 1940s. If there’s one thing the commercial classes won’t stand for, it’s a pleb who plays with fire. (Understandable enough). In burning down much of the centro to protest the 1948 assassination of their presidential candidate, the swinish multitude lost a country but gained a neighborhood.
Apart from several beautiful square blocks of majestic 18th century government palaces, the centro is a vast grey swamp of rotting concrete blocks, shiny, pink, plastic trinkets and homeless amputees. If Lady Fugly and Sir Chernobyl had a lovechild, it would look something like the centro. During the week, of course, this mix is brightened by a few government-employed suits and the occasional French tourist. Not enough, however, to distract one from the legions of unfortunate young men sleeping on most park benches and beneath every shit-stained, spray-painted statue of a mediocre conquistador (the latter a particularly widespread accouterment of the modern Latin American metropolis).
Yet when the rest of this 8m person metropolis slumbers away the weekend, the centro stays alive. Rather than run off to the country-home they haven’t got, Bogotá’s humbler families come to the city center to mingle, sample the curbside vendors’ yellowy fried-and-sizzling fare, and marvel at the various street performers. In a way, the range of entertainers offers something of a (sad, partially cracked) window on the world: while one block plays host to little indigenous Peruvian men playing the same minute-and-thirty-second flute riff echoing throughout suburban strip malls the world over, the next one hosts a travelling troupe of white-clad traditional folk dancers from deep within the Colombian frontier.
A country caught between its recent peasant past and urban pauper present, no one quite knows the tune the countryside children dance to or if they’re any good, but they’ve got adorable little green-and-white outfits and seem to be enjoying themselves, so everyone pauses to snap a shot on their cell-phone before moving on. (Someday someone will write a cultural history of the millions of shitty, uninspiring photographs taken around the world each day. As another Midwestern sage once said: “Everyone should be encouraged to make art, but 99% of them should never be allowed to show it.”)
Last Sunday, however, the largest musical crowd was amassed around a skinny, black adolescent making a very half-assed attempt at Billy Jean. Though Afro-Colombians make up a significant proportion of Colombians (estimates vary between 10-20% of a total population of 47m), they are all but absent in the capital. As racist as any other Western Hemispheric country – if not a little more – Colombians are fascinated by, if institutionally unwelcoming toward, blacks. When one of them dances in the street free of charge, the people appear in droves.
Struggling to keep the rhythm, the adolescent is now surrounded by 300-400 young mestizo families and couples; he has little choice but to continue. If he hadn’t brought this upon himself, you’d almost feel bad for him. Strangely, just up the street are two older, more muscular black men doing Thriller in perfect synchronization. Though far more talented, they have only managed to attract 8 or 10 ageing men and women to their circle.
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Though a family-friendly environment, there are signs that something different was in the air that Sunday afternoon. The first clue was a much larger manwoman, suggestively dressed as Cruella de Vil and posing for photo-ops with passers-by. Though Bogotá has its share of tranny hotspots, one doesn’t always see this demographic in great concentrations in the centro. Several feet later, a fat little man in nothing but white coochie-cutters and a pair of angel-wings lingers against the cast-iron gates of a 17th century church. His companion, chubby, winged and likewise nearly naked, pulls the yellow Colombian national soccer jersey down from a nearby woman’s chest to make gurgling noises into her bosom. A homeless man and myself stop to exchange glances. “You know anything about this?” He seems to prod. “Me neither.”
The closer I got to the Plaza Bolívar, the city’s most prominent square, the more surreal the street became. One 6´4 transvestite dressed as Tarzan became two, and before you could say, “Somebody’s got a talented knack for Nair,” all of Seventh Avenue had become a runway from one of Berlusconi’s pre-trial nightmares. There were 7-foot Little Miss Piggy’s in miniskirts and on stilts, robust young men in Marie Antoinette undergarments, and very busty old women twirling about as Amazonian Tinker Bells.
I stopped to take a picture of an attractive group of giant samba-queens. “Meeester! Meeester! I want you to meet my grandmother!” The ladyman in the middle of my shot, evidently the ringleader, stepped out of the frame, only to come back a moment later with a stylish, graying man in black-rimmed glasses. They were old friends – and grinned at each as such. “Now take my picture with grandmother!” As far as the eye could see – which, given the distractions, wasn’t very far – boys had become girls and girls had become dancing little goblins. Never have I seen so much skin outside of Budva.
The most intriguing aspect of this sartoro-sexual free-for-all was that at no point did it cease to be a family-friendly environment. The taller the tranny and the gigglier her bojangles, the more eager the families lined up to have their children’s picture taken. Nor are we talking about sexual-ghetto voyeurs: from all the evidence, these were young families out and about on an otherwise sunny Sunday afternoon, content to eat bitter mango with salt and lime (a favorite local delicacy) and marvel at the wonders of Colombian architectural incompetence. When a high-heeled troupe of 7-foot men with gasmasks and unruly breast implants came strutting around the corner in nothing but lace and black-leather loincloths, not a family thought twice before asking them to pose with their 8-year old daughter. The myth of “facho-conservative Catholic Colombia” was gone with the same wind that lifted the frumpy old man’s little pink skirt.
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Once in the plaza, there were thousands more. A stage and DJ had been set up at the far end of the square: all the classic anal-thumping ballads were blasting from the publically-funded speakers. There were police, of course, but not to excess. (Outside of Belgrade, one needn’t worry about anti-gay skinheads spoiling all the fun). Colombia had defeated Uruguay in the past 24 hours, so the ebullience of the crowd was viral: old and young alike were still spraying each other with the ubiquitous foam canisters that have become a hallmark of Colombian soccer victories.
Your correspondent even saw one reveler approach two officers of the law and spray them directly in the face with foam, laugh and walk away. Of course, they were only “auxiliary police” – conscripts from the lower sections of society who complete their two-year military service as impotent, unpaid foot-traffic wardens: with no guns and no prerogative to hand out so much as a ticket for jaywalking, they are more like bodies in uniforms to remind you who’s who in society. (And it’s not them: taken from the countryside and the slums, these “auxiliary” conscripts are often made to spend their “military service” guarding the entrance to chichier grocery stores in the north of Bogotá. But even if you steal a baguette, they haven’t the jurisdiction to stop you).
Meanwhile, little old ladies went up and down the crowd hawking lukewarm beers. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of contented adolescent emos, sucking away at Marlboros and sipping Poker (beer) as if it were the night before their arraignment. Never have I seen a happier crowd.
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As the sun began to set, people started trickling out of the plaza and down to the somber, ashen avenues built to shuttle them to and fro the furthest reaches of the sprawling, grey metropolis. Apart from two divas peeing against the side of City Hall, it was surprising how few of the event’s main attractions could be spotted beyond the plaza in the dark. Did they live in the neighborhood? Or change their attire before getting on the bus? Or was it all a figment of my imagination?
Dusk set in as I waited for the bus on 10th avenue. Gone were the families, the princesses, the fairies and goblins and monsters and lions and tigers and bears. I could have done without the tutu-and-gas-mask donning dominatrix, but otherwise the afternoon was a shining success. People paint Bogotá as a staid, sprawling, daunting, monstrously unequal, classist and conservative city – which it is. But at times, in select moments of inspiration, it becomes the happiest, most democratic and enlightened of them all.
