American Visa

A noir of the real altiplano capital: a provincial schoolteacher lands in the thin air of La Paz to chase a United States visa, gets stuck, and drifts down through the cheap hotels, pool halls, brothels, markets and cafes of the steep lower town. The map runs from the political heart at Plaza Murillo and the church of San Francisco down the Prado to the rough hostel quarter and out to the queue at the American embassy.

Mario Alvarez

The lower-town hotel quarter, Calle Illampu

Arrival

The schoolteacher arrives from the provinces and takes a room in a shabby hotel in the poor lower part of the city, and it becomes his base for the whole stranded stay. The district reads as the Illampu and Manco Kapac blocks, La Paz's long-standing warren of budget hotels near the markets and the old railway approach.

Opening chapters

inferred The novel's Hotel California is fictional; it stands in the real rough lower quarter of cheap hostels around Calle Illampu and Manco Kapac, so this marks that hotel district rather than a single building.

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