Para la versión en español, hacer click aquí. Every country maintains an official history—aspirational, inspirational, and carefully curated. It tends to spotlight achievements while glossing over contradictions, failures, or inconvenient truths. Beneath this polished surface lies a more revealing counterpart: the understory. This is not the same as a backstory, which precedes the main events; rather, it is the unofficial, parallel, and often underlying and overlooked narrative that emerges from lived experience and quiet testimony. If the official story tells us what a country wants to be, the understory shows us what it truly is. Political scientist James C. Scott referred to this as the “hidden transcript”—the fact-checking that operates beneath the surface of public discourse. As a traveler, I’ve learned that discerning and contrasting these dual narratives is essential to truly appreciating the complexity of any place. And at times, with some luck, one can experience an under-story of their own. During my first visit to Santa Cruz, Bolivia last week, I quickly began to notice signs of its under-stories. On my first day, I saw announcements for “Flag Day” on July 24th. Assuming it referred to the Bolivian national flag, I was puzzled to find that the flag on display everywhere was the green-white-green tricolor of Santa Cruz, while the actual Bolivian national flag was nowhere to be seen (The national flag’s official day is in August). This detail hinted at deeper distinctions. Santa Cruz stands in stark contrast to La Paz, Bolivia’s administrative capital located in the Andean highlands. While La Paz—along with its llamas, traditional Andean textiles, and the iconic bowler-hatted cholitas—represents the dominant imagery of Bolivia abroad, Santa Cruz embodies a different identity altogether. Situated in the tropical lowlands, it has marked geographic and cultural ties to neighboring Paraguay and Brazil. It is also Bolivia’s largest city and its most economically productive region. The indigenous groups of this area—Guaraní, Chiquitano, Ayoreo, Guarayo, and Yuracaré-Mojeño—originate from the Amazonian and eastern territories, and differ significantly from the highland cultures of the altiplano.
Each one of these indigenous communities of Bolivia’s subtropical region, between the Plata and the Amazonas, have distinct craft traditions that produce a wide range of ritual and utilitarian objects, from Guarayo hammocks (hamaca atada), which are famous worldwide, to ceramics and textiles of pre-Columbian tradition. Many of these are on display at the Museo Artecampo, an art institution founded in 1985 with the objective to display and support the production of native arts in collaboration with CIDAC ( Centro de Investigación, Diseño Artesanal y Cooperativa), a cooperative non-profit that ensures the sustainability and support of preserving this patrimony. The very first piece I saw at Artecampo was an intricate weaving with elements representing stars and other natural symbols struck and moved me. It was by Angélica Ibáñez, a guaraní-isoseño weaver from the town of Charagua in the Santa Cruz region, who in an adjacent text explains the origin of the piece: In dreams someone can come to teach you. I dreamt that I had a bag in my hand that turned into a large snake which had figures which I had never seen before. And the snake conversed with me and taught me. The statement made me reflect—perhaps counterintuitively — less on traditional crafts and more on contemporary art: namely, on how the artistic process depends not only on seeing, but also on listening—listening as an act of attunement. The more deeply one listens, the more a work can respond meaningfully to its context, allowing one to create work that is not only contextually specific but also less derivative—less beholden to the stylistic habits of others or the influence of canonical models. Yet as I reflected on this deeply personal and spiritual vision, I couldn’t help but consider how differently indigenous voices have been heard—or silenced—within Bolivia’s recent political history. The rise to power, two decades ago, of Evo Morales, who has Aymara heritage from the altiplano, introduced a populism of socialist bent that sought to empower the indigenous people of Bolivia, but who in practice benefitted the indigenous groups of the highlands at the expense of the ones in the eastern Bolivian lowlands. Morales, who resigned the presidency and subsequently (albeit temporarily) fled the country in 2019 amidst a contested presidential election that his supporters considered a coup, is universally reviled in Santa Cruz. These political tensions are even clearer at this moment when the country prepares for a contentious presidential election this fall and the city is about to celebrate the bicentennial of its foundation.
Speaking of which, the history of Santa Cruz reveals further layers of hidden transcripts. The artist Claudia Joskowicz, a native of the city, shared with me one such dizzying tale—one she often uses to open her artist talks. It centers on the Argentine colonel Ignacio Warnes, a key figure in Bolivia’s war of independence and a local hero in Santa Cruz. Warnes was killed in battle, and, in a grim display, his head was mounted on a pike. A monument was later erected in his honor in the city’s central plaza: his head was reportedly interred in the cathedral, while the rest of his remains—along with those of other heroes—were placed at the base of the monument. In the 1980s, during a plaza renovation, the remains mysteriously vanished, and the monument’s pedestal was destroyed. An urn believed to contain the remains resurfaced, only to be stolen again in 2016, recovered in 2017, and ultimately returned to local authorities in 2022. Today, the remains are reportedly held in the Governmental Palace, though their precise location remains undisclosed (ostensibly due to the fear and potential humiliation of them being stolen again). This murky and convoluted saga has generated multiple and conflicting narratives—yet, as Claudia noted, it powerfully captures the ongoing tension between the myth and the reality of Santa Cruz’s historical memory.  Akira Ishu and Beni Chan at La Federal; two 2021 drawings by Beni reconstructing the historical downtown of Santa Cruz as part of her project Santa Cruz Walk I came to Santa Cruz per invitation of an artist collective led by Akira Ishu and Benicia (Beni) Chan. They run an alternative space in downtown Santa Cruz ( with the irreverent name “Espacio CACA”) nested in a small but vibrant and cozy cultural complex of spaces aligned in single corridor named La Federal. The exhibition was in Manzana Uno, the leading contemporary art center in Santa Cruz located in the main plaza. Both artists are very interested in the cultural history of the city, exemplified in Beni’s work that tries to reclaim and retrace the history of some of downtown’s historic buildings — a history that is seldom preserved, and yet another hidden transcript. Also belonging to the category of semi-hidden or behind-the-scenes narratives, one of the local art world stories they shared with me is one about Roberto Valcárcel, considered one of the most influential conceptual artists of his generation in Bolivia, active from the late 1970s until his death due to Covid-19 in 2021. Provocative and controversial until the end, I was told that on a tribute exhibition presented at the Museo Altillo Beni a few months after his passing and titled “Cien motivos para recordarte” (One Hundred Reasons to Remember You) one of the works titled “Miedo de morir” (Fear of Dying) repeatedly fell from the wall on successive nights during the show, even after it was rehung and re-fastened. Which is one more thing to know about hidden transcripts: they sometimes surface by accident, by a brief lapsus in the folds of reality, and when they do, one catches a glimpse of something that upsets the pristine explanation of things. The glitch brings insights.  The wall behind the fallen pieces, and a 2015 Facebook post by Roberto Valcárcel And here is the understory of my visit to Santa Cruz: on the night of my exhibition opening, fifteen minutes before the event and as I was walking toward Manzana 1, Akira sent me a Whatsapp voice message to let me know that two framed pieces in the show had fallen to the floor (due to poor wiring by the framer). The opening took place on July 25th— the exact anniversary, to the day, of Valcárcel’s death. It also happened to be the case that on the other side of the freestanding wall of the exhibition from which the framed pieces fell there was an enlarged version of one of my early Artoons featuring an artist in front of a firing squad and a nonchalant curator telling him, “frankly, we prefer to work with dead artists.” I never met Valcárcel, but this week Beni emailed me to tell me that 10 years ago Valcárcel himself had posted, just by chance, on his own Facebook wall, one of the very Artoons that happens to be currently on view in the exhibition. I came to understand that the snake had spoken to me, and as a result this is what I have written, hoping to document and register what it has taught me.
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