From 24 January, the streets of La Paz fill with stalls selling everything in miniature — houses, cars, diplomas, bundles of tiny banknotes — to be blessed and given away in the hope that the real thing will follow within the year, under the smiling eye of Ekeko, god of abundance.

Buy from me

Alasita is Aymara for “buy from me”. The fair honours Ekeko, the Aymara god of abundance, and its heart is the miniature: people buy tiny versions of what they hope to have — household goods, food, computers, building materials, phones, houses, cars, university diplomas — and give them to others. It is believed that whoever receives a miniature will obtain the real thing in the course of the year. The miniatures can be blessed by ritual specialists, and at midday on 24 January the Catholic Church blesses them at the cathedral.

UNESCO, which inscribed the ritual journeys of Alasita in 2017, describes how people also exchange miniatures to settle debts symbolically, how the custom passes down within families, and how it brings together people of all social classes.

From stone coins to plaster gods

The fair’s roots are pre-Columbian: the Aymara held a celebration at which people prayed for good crops and exchanged goods, and Arthur Posnansky observed that in the Tiwanaku culture people offered miniatures of what they wished for. In the early years of La Paz, Indigenous people exchanged small stone figures and miniatures for stone coins. During the siege of La Paz in 1781, Sebastián Segurola moved the celebration from October to 24 January in thanks to Our Lady of Peace, for whom the city is named. Ekeko was first modelled in clay; today his figure is usually cast in plaster.

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