A Road Trip to Bolivia in the 1920s
Join me as we explore the South American country and its inhabitants as they once presented themselves to the traveller from the "Old World"
One of the core features of my grandfather’s picture postcard collection is its eclectic nature: as I mentioned in one of the long-form postings (please venture to the “About” section), the overwhelming majority of postcards are from Cold War Austria.
Yet, meticulously ordered along Cold War borders (although not infrequently using “older” additional names, such as “Constantinople” written on the box bearing picture postcards from Istanbul, Türkiye), Erich Sonntag also compiled heaps of picture postcards from literally all over the world.
As an aside, now that I am scanning and indexing the picture postcards on my laptop, I am asking myself questions, such as “do I keep the collector’s system of ordering” and “wouldn’t it make more sense to use present-day borders for orientation”? The latter is particularly pertinent in the case of the quite substantial numbers of postcards from East-Central Europe, in particular from former Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR.
There is also the additional rub in terms of setting a kind of “date of departure” for the compilation and later analyses: if a postcard shows say, Sarajevo is concerned, would I file it under “Austria-Hungary”, “Yugoslavia” (as Erich Sonntag filed it), or “Bosnia-Herzegovina”?
I have not come up with a definitive answer, but I have settled for keeping the original Cold War “boxes” (now “folders”) but having the scanned files bear additional names, such as “Yugoslavia | Sarajevo_Bosnia” and the like. You see, the seemingly “easy” questions about categories are quite tricky to resolve, too, but I digress.
This and a few successive postings are about picture postcards from Bolivia, or tarjetas as they are known in Spanish. I found the below images in Erich Sonntag’s “Bolivia” folder, and I would like to share a few of them with you here.
A Boat and Road Trip to the 1920s, Bolivia Style
“La Paz with the Illimani in the Background”, as the reverse (see below) indicates. The Illimani (Wikipedia) is the highest peak in the Cordillera Real.
Given the prominent peak the Illimani—or “Yllimani”, as it is spelled in the below picture postcard—also featured prominently on another tarjeta from the 1920s or 1930s:
I’ve said this posting is a kind of a “road trip”, and here is why:
Shown is, as the reverse explains (sort of), a “road near a mine in Bolivia”, although I would add that the composition of the image is—awesome (and, to drive it home, cars definitely looked better then than they do now).
Finally for this first posting, here is a quite “timeless”, if not outright iconic or “canonical”, picture of a Uru man on a reed boat on Lake Titicaca:
The Uru people are indigenous to the Bolivia and Peru (don’t worry, we’ll armchair travel to Peru soon), and they also build “floating homes”; for the picture credit of the below colour photograph and other information, see here (Wikipedia) or here (BBC reporting from 2022):
To return to the picture postcards, here is the reverse of the above, fourth postcard:
It reads “reed boat (balsa de tortora [sic, it is spelled totora]) with an Indian on Lake Titicaca”, dated 5 June 1924.
More images from Bolivia a century ago to come soon.
My thoughts on your indexing system, for what it's worth, is to keep them as your grandfather filed them, with tags to new states. I'm finding your snippets of info and links to more detailed history very interesting, thank you.
Hey, I recently learned the word "tarjeta" because nowadays it is used for debit/credit cards.