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Posters like the ones pictured here can be seen across the neighborhood. They take over businesses’ front doors and gates promoting the newest restaurants, clubs, or upcoming parties. Poster placement is marketing in El Alto.
There is a man that walks up and down the West 207th Street corridor between Broadway and 10th Avenue. He also covers terrain in the Dyckman Street area.
If there’s a wall, a rolling gate, or an empty wall, he’s probably walking past it, and scouting out new terrain.
On his travels up and down the blocks, he drags one of those rickety carts held together by bungee cords. The cart transports the tools of the trade: a few rolls of transparent packing tape and thin, flat and heavy boxes.
As he walks through El Alto, “Chino,” as he asked that I call him, looks for any open space.
Not real estate, not parks, not parking spots. He’s in search for much-coveted street space.
“This is good,” he says, pointing to one such wall space between two roll-down gates just about two feet wide.
Reaching into the thin boxes, Chino grabbed a glossy poster and with swift strokes rips the tape without the need of a blade. He fastens the poster to the wall within seconds. Then another one above it, and another one below it, until about six feet were covered in the posters.
It wasn’t easy getting Chino to talk to me. Much less to allow me follow him for a few blocks, and if you’re expecting a photo, I will disappoint.
I will tell you he was a man of about thirty, dressed in jeans and a blue t-shirt. He wore freshly cut hair and a well-kept appearance. His job might not have been glamorous, but he appeared proud.
I was curious to discover him because the posters, a common sight in El Alto, always appear to be in constant rotation, but we never see who changes them. When I was walking down West 207th and finally spotted him, I followed and approached him.
“I’m not doing anything important,” he said. “I just take the boxes they give me at the printer, and go around the neighborhood looking for walls. By now, all the posters look the same.”
The posters are something of a comic slideshow of sorts if you really look at them. The majority of them are printed to advertise upcoming concerts, promote parties at local clubs and restaurants, karaoke nights, and even some big name performances.
They feature headshots of the artists, women in red lipstick and big hair. Some of the images are clearly badly Photo-shopped, but the posters all offer valuable information: a time, place and venue where the party will be had.
The posters are advertising of the best kind, and according to Chino, there’s a strategy.
“Eye level,” he says. “No sense in taping the poster down by the sidewalk if your feet can’t see it. The best place is right in the middle of the wall, and then you repeat so people can memorize it in their head.”
Some might see the posters as a nuisance, a somewhat vandalistic attack on our walls, but I see them as just another thing that adds to our neighborhood’s character, as in the merengue concert advertised by a poster flanked by a tropical beach.
Chino told me that depending on his day’s assignment, he’ll be in charge of taking the posters down as well. As he described it, ‘It’s just a cycle, and just a job,’ that business owners pay him to do to make sure their events are well attended.
Marketing in El Alto, at its eye-level best.
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