brief sentimental post

At some point I will write a more complete post about my investigaciones, which have involved various subterfuge techniques, hobknobbing with Paceño elites, and chasing possible interviewees onto buses ( all this mostly by Mechy, but I have been an enthusiastic follower). Anyway, here are some final fotos of the Evo Macy's-esque balloon at the election day celebration, me with Enrique and Marcela, and the collective. I already miss them very much.

Patricia visits, We travel to Machu Picchu, Isla Del Sol, and Coroico

I did miss Thanksgiving with my family but was lovely to be somewhere where you don't have to pretend that indigenous people put on a happy peaceful dinner for the conquerors before obligingly dying off.

Machu Picchu was incredibly beautiful, but also full of tourists and very expensive. Everyone had an angle--our cabdriver said he would take us to Aguas Calientes, the town near Machu Picchu, but instead dropped us off in another town considerable further away and was just like, "here you are!" I appreciated the incredible setting and majestic ruins but missed Bolivia terribly the whole time.

Being back in Copacabana and Isla Del Sol was so nice. People were incredibly friendly this time, and everything seemed so peaceful after the hustle, bustle, and hucksterism of Cuzco/Machu Picchu.

The Coroico trip was a lot of fun too. We went with Mechy and her lovely kids, Enrique and Marcela, and her brother Felix who was a bit controlling and obnoxious. Coroico is in Yungas, the area where the most coca production happens, so we got to see the cocaleros at work. There is also a lot of excitement around the elections, which are this Sunday. Evo is a shoo-in, so there's more focus on the local elections. This Coroico diputada, Mercedes Mamani, seemed really impressive.

In other news, the collective continues to have problems with the Germans, but on the bright side, Silvia asked me to write something about the experience for the magazine. She is finally accepting me as part of the group, which is so nice--she made me sign my name to the latest manifesto, etc. For my own project I've been interviewing old trotskyists (who continue to be relentlessly entrepreneurial and frustratingly reluctant to talk about their experiences occupying Peace Corps buildings etc.) and I have some interviews set up next week with indigenous feminists from this group, the Bartolinas. I'm feeling really comfortable and competent, finally--I can't believe I have to go home in 2 weeks, at least for a little while...

Hakima

Right after I got back from Sucre, we had a wonderful Las Ñatitas, which is Bolivian version of the Day of the Dead. Everyone goes to the cemetery and sets up their skulls (people are very cryptic about where they get them, but many people, including silvia, constantly have them on shrines) and brings all this food and alcohol and coca and cigarettes. All day people come along and put flowers on your skull and hang out for awhile, then people who can pray in Aymara come along and pray to the skull and you reward them with bread and candy and coca. You are supposed to pray for protection from thieves (which is funny because you have to think these skulls are all robbed from somewhere) but it's turned into a holiday in which mostly marginal people participate, asking protection from the cops. So there are anarchists, contrabandistas, and beautiful drag queens dressed like cholas.

Silvia's skull is named Hakima, and everyone in the cemetery knows her. Even early on when Silvia went off to buy candles and just me and Beatriz were there, lots of people recognized her and came by to give her cigarettes or wreaths. She was beautifully adorned by the end of the day, and we kept the wreaths when we brought her home.

Then there's music and dancing--Silvia asked for songs for water, since we seem to be entering a pretty drastic drought right now, and also the standard "coca no es cocaina." There are cops all around who are supposed to prohibit alcohol, but they weren't really doing anything. They do begin trying to kick everyone out at 6, commanding us repeatedly through bullhorns to "desocupar el cementerio," which seemed like a great beginning for a zombie movie (is there one like that already?). But we took a long time. It was a really lovely holiday. It showed, as one of Silvia's friends said, "la militancia de compartir." And it was cool how everyone interacted with the skulls. I do kind of miss the pan de coca, but that's okay. It was such a beautiful holiday.

Mechy and I Travel to Sucre, Encounter Archives and Undercover Cops

From the roof of the National Archives

Cool Graffiti. MAS=Movimiento a Socialismo=Evo's party

Mercedes is really good at posing in front of fountains

A beautiful town with a church built on a Waka, an indigenous holy site

The very famous Cerro de Potosí

The undercover cops. (Contrabandistas, take note!)

So I finally got to the beautiful but reactionary city of Sucre, home of the national archives and site of racist massacres in 2008. My friend Mechy (part of the collective) and I took the night bus, which was surprisingly comfortable, with all kinds of vendors passing through to sell tea and food and tell jokes. (Example: why can't North Americans play chess?

Because they don't have the twin towers. Readers? Feel free to opine.)

Mercedes is wonderful to travel with, most of the time, because she is friendly to everyone. We found our hotel and quickly made friends with the hotel worker, Wilbert. Then we went to the archives, where the people were fairly haughty until the last day, when I dropped Silvia's name and they became much more obliging.

When we weren't at the archives, we ate every meal in the Mercado Central, where you can eat very cheaply and well--there's this amazing tealike drink that's made from corn that people drink with buñuelos, muy rico--and where the vendors are incredibly friendly and lovely, keeping up a constant patter of "mamita linda, corazon de bonbon, ven, comprame," joking with everyone, etc. We also made friends (gracias a Mechy) with some guys who turned out to be police investigators who offered to drive us back to La Paz. They had this interesting scruffy Tarantino vibe, but they turned out to be creepy and reactionary (anti-Evo, supported by the U.S. embassy, big fans of the US prison system). They did get us back to La Paz very quickly, in time for the amazing holiday in the cemetery (pictures to be uploaded soon). We also learned a lot about the carceral gaze, which is turning out to be helpful now that we are auditing Silvia's Sociology of the Image class, for which we are reading selections from Discipline and Punish. On Monday, the first day, we kept giggling every time she mentioned Foucault.

More soon...

Back to the Land/More Praying

Finally, here are some photos of the land in Yuni, which we attempted to prepare last tuesday to finally plant potatoes. Unfortunately, I was recovering from a stomach ailment (which is now gone due to the magic of antibiotics) and spent much of the time feeling dizzy and periodically resting while Silvia and Maestro worked (Nico was planning to go, but threw a tantrum at the last minute to get out of it, later that evening returning and, desperate for attention, breaking a window in the house. Since then he has felt bad and repented, and he helped a lot with todos santos). Anyway, we got through the entire day of clearing the land--somehow we didn't bring food, just water, juice, and beer, which didn't help my condition any--and were completely exhausted, when this guy comes up over the hill and explains to us that the land we've been working on actually belongs to the neighbor. At first we tried to protest, but he showed us the property lines and we eventually gave in. I've been sore for nearly a week, despite my lack of productivity that day, and we have to go again and clear more this week in order to actually plant the potatoes. It is no joke, working with a pickaxe in the hot sun all day. But the spot is incredibly beautiful, with many birds and farm-animals stopping by also (not necessarily a good thing in the long run, since there will be no one watching the plants). We have to go again and plant--I'll end up doing so much work, I almost feel like I need to stay through january in order to actually see and eat the potatoes. Although we may be in a drought.

More recently, we celebrated Todos Santos, which is a very beautiful and serious holiday here. People spend days cooking for the dead people (you have to have died within 3 years to be eligible), then construct a shrine and feed them (later you offer the food to the ground) and give them alcohol and pray for them. Lots of people came to our shrine last night and we ate and drank and talked a lot. We didn't really pray much, but we did a little--Mercedes prayed in quechua and later, Silvia's amazing friend Elvira, an artist whose work will be featured in the Reina Sofia and who also, despite being my age, has a flourishing singing career and speaks both Aymara and Quechua, led us in Aymara prayers. They were principally praying for Olivia, a British anthropologist who died of a mysterious ailment and who was a vegetarian, and Nico's friend, who also died mysteriously, on a solo mountaineering trip. Anyway, I tried to join in, and added my own prayers--thankfully, I wasn't really close to anyone who made the 3-year deadline, but I prayed for the writers and theorists I was missing (Grace Paley, Eve Sedgwick, etc.) and the victims of U.S. and Israeli attacks, which I hope was allowed.

Maybe this is my newfound quasi-spirituality talking, but it was kind of nice to talk and think about dead people for awhile, to make a space for them, I guess. And the bread that Silvia made is pretty amazing; of course it's made from coca flour, which I don't think is traditional but which tastes wonderful. I didn't help make the bread, partly because I didn't know the dead people--you're supposed to be thinking of the person as you knead the dough--and partly because Silvia and Nico were actually getting along and they wanted to have some bonding time--but I guess there are huge public ovens where you bake all day. Each dead person gets a bread-doll. The other tradition is that you eat this really delicious stewed-peas dish, which is about both the roundness of the peas (they represent skulls) and they way you have to use dried peas and reanimate them, as you're reanimating the dead.

Everyone was very disdainful of halloween and the way they're promoting it like crazy in Zona Sur, the creepy rich part of town. And I do have to say that Todos Santos is much more social, solemn, and beautiful. It was nice to sit and talk around the shrine with everyone. Tomorrow we will bring a whole bunch of bread and fruit to the cemetery, where I guess people pray all day. Tomorrow I also have to figure out my archive schedule and take my friend Mercedes and her kids out for lunch, so more photos will follow.

Appropriation and Spirituality, Part III

These are pictures from a few weeks ago when we found this pacheta, which is a sacred hill or mountain. Often in Bolivia the colonizers would come in and put churches on top of pachetas on purpose. We found this one on Helena's last day, when we were supposed to be driving to look at colonial art and Silvia said, Wait, I think it's a Pacheta! and swerved off the road and started driving up this hill, where there were indeed sacred rocks, which we knew because they were shaped like animals (see the one above that looks remarkably like a frog.) So we made offerings there (threw alcohol around and burned some stuff). As we did the offerings, I did feel this incredible gratitude for all the people in my life and even for the world (or maybe the earth) in a general sense, a feeling I never have and am politically opposed to because the world is so fucked up and unequal that I've always felt that expressing gratitude for what I have would be tantamount to an endorsement of the geopolitical order. It was strange--I wouldn't say I'm a convert, but I have wished on the shrine a few times since then.

Afterward, we went to this festival, which was really beautiful. Silvia knew some people in the town, so everyone was extremely friendly to us and kept bringing us beer. The men in the drum circle were flirting with Silvia until she said "soy hombre-mujer" in Aymara. Which I thought was a cool way to shut them down. As we participated, she trained me and Helena in Aymara etiquette, which mostly consists of a lot of reciprocity: you always accept drinks from other people, and if you don't want it you throw it on the ground, to the pachamama; you always serve other people; you thank every person at the table after eating, etc. These things can sometimes be time-consuming, but they do create a certain amount of affection and community, which is nice. (Note also the 40s, which are very respectable here, so much so that Helena walked through a fancy museum carrying on and nobody batted an eye.)

I'm posting these old photos because my adventures have been basically the same as the aforementioned ones (writing, translating, being stymied at archives, cooking with Silvia, hanging out with the collective, occasionally going out dancing until 5AM and being exhausted for the next few days), I figured it was as good a time as any to continue our discussion about Indigeneity and appropriation. To help us out, here is an excerpt from the article I translated for Silvia, which is supposed to be published in the awesome-looking cultural studies journal Qui Parle ( http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~quiparle/ --they are supposed to give me the credit and pay me, but I haven't heard anything, so who knows) :

At the end of the nineteenth century the renowned liberal historian Gabriel René Moreno already celebrated this fate, imagining the Andean Indians pushed toward dissolution by the progressive impulse embodied in the elite entrepreneurs and landlords. Rough versions of the same fantasies cloud the vision of today’s elites and prevent them from seeing that Bolivia will be a colonial country as long as the dominant classes continue to be colonized, and as long as the mestizo, educated sectors do not proudly reaffirm their own cultural difference and establish equal and dialogic relations with the Indian cultures that inhabit the national territory.

This is interesting for several reasons. One (this probably will not interest others quite so much) is that it spurred Silvia to ask me to translate, because the original translator was so bad that he thought Gabriel Rene Moreno was a singer, translating her metaphor (she said he was "cantando" about the disappearance of the Indian, meaning celebrating or proclaiming) literally and not bothering to look anything up, even though he's like the most famous 19th century historian in Bolivia.

The other interesting thing about the passage is that she's talking, as she often does, about the idea of mestizos reappropriating their indigenous heritage. To me it seems like there are lots of ways that this strategy could go horribly wrong, from boston tea-party/minstrelsy-type adoption of Indian-face to act out; to the more enfranchised groups' packaging of Native cultures for the global marketplace without addressing the economic circumstances of the groups that have always been Indios; to the citing of Native traditions/orthodoxy to justify the oppression of women and gay people (not that the colonial/liberal/neoliberal culture is any better, but still). But it's really interesting, I think, this effort to make white and mestizo Bolivians substantively re-adopt their indigenous heritage. Generally Silvia celebrates this, even if the reclamation of indigenous heritage takes the form of consumption practices--of coca, for example. But it's possible that it's different when the whole country, even the elites, have suffered from tremendous colonial oppression, and other ideologies that might free them like Marxism have their roots in the same Europeans who created the systems in the first place and are quite racist besides, constructing them as "pre-capitalist" as if you have to go through capitalism. Then I guess indigenous traditions, particularly those of community and resistance, become something important to be mobilized against all the imperialist ideologies and systems. Though I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it would mean at an executive/ legislative level to indigenize the population. It would be nice if Evo gets a big mandate this november and actually uses it (unlike some other presidents I can think of), and I get to see the change in person.

In which I meet anarchists and revolutionary filmmakers and tangle with schemers and gringophiles

The poster for the famous Sanjinés film that I keep writing about.

I am skipping to this past weekend because I'm honestly not sure what happened to last week.

Helena left, I got some writing done (3 chapters more or less down!) , and Silvia vandalized her neighbor's car. She had told him three times not to block her in, and he did it again, so she spraypainted a design on the windshield. She was like, Molly, I did something muy anarquista. The design was really great-looking, like one of those celtic symbols that are on necklaces.

Friday night Silvia took me to see her speak before her anarchist/indianist collective, el THOA, on the topic of decolonization. It was cool to see all these Bolivian anarchist kids (or really, they were probably my age, hardly kids) out on a friday night. Her talk was fascinating but depressing: she explained that decolonization has become the latest buzzword, after civilization and modernization, that mestizo elites have used to justify intervening in indigenous communities. She argued very vividly and persuasively, using her characteristic mix of postmodern theory--in this case citing Barthes and Derrida--mixed with Aymara terms and punctuating everything with huevada, jodida, etc. She argued that mestizos are the ones who are really colonized, that the Bolivian population as a whole has to be indigenized while maintaining some degree of individual rights, which as an anarchist she holds sacred. She says she can reconcile these two ideals through a focus on work, a communal work ethic. To demonstrate her theory of work she told the story of the people in the market who were so excited that I wasn't floja (see previous post). I got a little embarrassed, but it was kind of nice to be introduced to the anarchists that way. I'm not sure if they bought it--they seemed a bit hard to please.

After the talk, Silvia took me to see Jorge Sanjinés, the radical neorealist filmmaker who made the 1969 movie about the Peace Corps volunteers sterilizing indigenous women. She had to bring him a package and she suggested that I give him a copy of my article that was just published in the global sixties book. She hadn't read it yet so didn't realize it was slightly critical of the movie-- I mean, the movie is wonderful, but as with so much revolutionary culture, its gender politics are less wonderful.

He has a cool apartment--a very tall and narrow townhouse actually--with movie posters lining the walls as well as exciting art and photos of his partner who died a few years ago. I guess she was an amazing filmmaker too, and she was also very beautiful and fought in the Cuban revolution. I was very scared, partly because his films brutally mock gringos, but he ended up being extremely laidback, warm, and welcoming; he also looks amazing--he is in his 70s but it's very hard to believe. I was thinking the whole time that Silvia should date him instead of creepy Diego. We drank wine and talked mostly about Silvia's problems with the Ministry of Culture (she is co-curating a colonial art exhibit at the Reina Sofia this spring, and they are giving her nothing but trouble as she tried to restore paintings and put it together).

He was very understanding and helpful and agreed to put some of his films in the show and pull some strings at the ministry, but he also talked about how proud he was of the movie's impact, and about all the insensitive and violent development projects that were going on in the 60s and his new plan, which is create a network of cultural centers in the touristy communities in Bolivia so people can control their own culture. At the end I gave him the article and called him "the hero of my dissertation" (shamelessly stealing the phrase Gillian used on John Waters, I think it was, and the whole thing was sort of ironic because I'm actually attempting a critique of the idea of heroism). He was very gracious and said he would read it, but I kind of hope he doesn't, because it is both sloppy and critical of his movie. It was amazing to meet him; as we were leaving, Silvia said to him, Molly's so giddy, look, and he laughed.

Silvia did read the article friday night, finally, and the next day was very excited. She called it "feroz," which was the best response I could've hoped for. Then she asked me to work on this translation of an article she wrote, which the original translator botched, translating every phrase and idiom completely literally so that it made absolutely no sense. I was fixing it for awhile, but then Silvia asked me to work on fixing it, and the journal has agreed to give me the translation credit, which is making me very happy. The article is about how the juridical frameworks of colonial and liberal rule excluded women and indigenous bolivians from their "rights" framework, and how the resistance then took the form of juridical challenges that excluded women and Indians. There are a lot of very complex ideas and long sentences. I'm trying. I'm nervous about making mistakes but it's also kind of fun.

The rest of my weekend was not as delightful. Saturday, these people I thought were my new friends (they run a literary magazine and are sort of glamorous) tricked me into going to this creepy party at Silvia's (now-ex) boyfriend's house; they said, "come to a barbecue with some of our friends," and then at the party he proceeded to hit on me and talk smack about Silvia, who hadn't been invited. Patricia pointed out to me that my life has become strangely like a Henry James novel (complicated expatriate living situations, ancient ruins, seduction schemes, and also I fainted in a cafe last week, but I'm alright, apparently I was just dehydrated). I agonized for a day but finally told Silvia the whole thing, and she was sad and angry for both of us but very relieved to know. She said it will be good for her next book on the Bolivian middle class, which she is going to call "clase a medias." She also said This may be terrible for you, Molly, you're such a feminist. She is really wonderful, much too radical, brilliant, and outspoken for that crowd.

Then sunday I went to a festival with the collective at this town famous for indigenous resistance to landowners and earlier governments. They had, I think, 12 communities represented, all in their own circles doing these beautiful dances where the men stood around the outside in a circle playing flute-type things and the women danced in pairs in the middle. It was cool, and the collective got lots of interviews done. As the only gringa I get a lot of attention at these things, more so as the day goes on and --lots of old men offering me beer, which Silvia says I am obligated to accept, and grabbing my arms and welcoming me to the town. This one was especially extreme--the younger guys in the band wanted pictures with me, etc. I guess I feel two ways about it: I guess since I am going to their festivals and taking pictures and talking about how beautiful they are, they have the right to do it back. But I also was surprised that in a place with such a history of resistance, they would still be so interested whiteness--several of the old guys explained to me how much they love white skin. And I worry sometimes that I am sabotaging the efforts of the collective, making them seem more like outsiders than they are. This one group of old guys kept asking if me and Marco and Eduardo were from Spain, and of course they are Bolivian. But there have been a few times that Silvia's told me I couldn't go so the group wouldn't look tan gringo, so I figure they'll let me know if they have to.

So the weekend was a little difficult, but generally I love it here. I feel so lucky to be part of a radical academic community that is also really connected to concrete political and cultural struggles; all the students the collective, and most of the hangers-on as well, are doing such exciting projects. And they are a lot of fun. I am really not sure I will be able to leave.