フェデリコ・エストル

Federico Estol

There are 3,000 shoe shiners who go out into the streets of La Paz and the El Alto suburbs each day in search of clients. What characterizes this tribe is their use of ski masks to avoid being recognized by those around them. In their neighborhoods, no one knows that they work as shoe shiners. At school, they hide this fact, and even their own family members believe they are going to a different job when they head down to the center of the city from El Alto. The mask is their strongest identity, making them invisible while at the same time uniting them. This collective anonymity makes them tougher when facing the rest of society and is their resistance against the exclusion they suffer because of their work.

For three years I have been collaborating with sixty shoe shiners associated with the shoeshiner newspaper ‘Hormigón Armado.’ During a series of workshops, we planned the scenes of a graphic novel, with the new Andean architecture of El Alto as the background. In this process, the shine heroes became both producers and protagonists of a photo essay protesting against a social stigma. Today this group earns more from selling the photobook and postcards of this project than from working as shoeshiners. This illustrates the potential of fiction to transform discrimination into a story of struggle and survival that could ultimately help promote social integration.