Colla
A highlander — someone from the altiplano and the Andean valleys, and the other half of Bolivia's defining pair.
Related lesson: Bolivian Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Mi papá es colla, de Potosí.
My dad is a highlander, from Potosí.
Nos dicen collas pero somos de Cochabamba.
They call us collas but we're from Cochabamba.
Dicho con esa cara, "colla" ya no es un dato geográfico.
Said with that face, "colla" stops being a piece of geography.
What It Actually Means
A colla (also spelled kolla or qolla) is someone from the Bolivian highlands — La Paz, El Alto, Oruro, Potosí, and, depending on who is drawing the line, the valleys of Cochabamba and Chuquisaca too. It names an accent (the careful Andean Spanish with its intact final -s and its buzzing r), a landscape, and very often an Aymara or Quechua background. Its opposite number is camba, and Bolivians rarely say one word without implying the other.
Where It Comes From
Unusually for a slang term, this one has a clean etymology. It goes back to Qullasuyu — Collasuyo, the southern quarter of the Inca empire — and to the Qulla or Colla peoples of the Titicaca basin, whom the Incas named collectively and whose descendants are largely Aymara-speaking. So the word is a five-hundred-year-old demonym that modern Bolivia has pressed back into everyday service, complete with its old geography.
How Natives Use It
As self-description in the highlands, matter-of-factly. In the lowlands it does extra duty as a label for internal migrants — the highlanders who moved east over the last half-century — and there it is likelier to carry an edge. Politics attaches at the other end too: Qullasuyu is the name Aymara movements use for the highlands, which gives the same root a proud, formal register alongside the informal one.
Common Pitfall
Everything rides on who is speaking. For a learner the workable rule is to describe places rather than people — de La Paz, del altiplano, de tierras altas — and let Bolivians apply camba and colla to themselves. Note also that the cognate travels: in northwestern Argentina, coya / colla names indigenous communities and is charged in its own quite different way, so knowing the Bolivian sense does not license using it across the border.