Mini-Adventures

Last week, with Silvia still gone, I traveled with Helena to the Isla del Sol, which is a 3-hour boat ride into the middle of Lake Titicaca. The Bolivia side of the lake is quite amazing. If you know Guatemala, it makes the Atitlan area look like South Florida or something: there are no high-rises, barely any hotels, and only a few restaurants, yet it's incredibly beautiful, with these spectacular hikes, Incan ruins (including a

labyrinth you can climb around in), and gorgeous beaches . Part of this is because people there are decidedly ambivalent towards tourists: do not want their pictures taken unless you pay them. One of the restaurants--really more of a beautiful room, with reggae playing and great food--supposedly served Bob Dylan 2 years ago. The co-proprietor, explained to Helena, and Melanie (this cool French woman we met who teaches high school literature in Marseilles and was explaining how neoliberalism has arrived in France, the left has collapsed, long vacations will soon be a thing of the past--she was as disappointed as I was that substantive changes may not have arrived with Evo ) and doing wood-carving the whole time while his kids did homework and his wife made us sandwiches, said that he had no idea who Bob Dylan was but that all the Latin American students eating there were really excited when he left, and then he checked the credit card receipt and it said Bob Dylan, and then they (the family) started listening to him after that.

We got back Wednesday night, as did Silvia, and Thursday morning she led us in yoga. She is very good and she does a lot of chants.

Then friday we prepared for Helena's despedida party. At the market, Helena and I helped carry Silvia's bags, and all of her Aymara caseras (market-women) kept asking her what was up with that, who we were and whether we were floja (translation: lazy/bourgeois). And when she said no, trabajan arto a pesar de ser gringas, the caseras were really excited and congratulated her on finding us. Silvia was really excited about the whole thing, and needless to say, I was thrilled that I had proven my lack of flojera.

Back at home we made a beautiful Lasagna de Coca. We actually made the pasta out of a mix of flours, including harina de coca. I did a lot of the pasta-making after Silvia showed me how, and we put the lasagna together with her brilliant student, Veronica. It was delicious--it's funny, all this coca has been speeding up my metabolism, but not doing much of anything, psychoactively. That's what they say (coca no es cocaina) but it's almost a little disappointing to have it do nothing at all.

After the dinner party we all went dancing at this club that plays Morenata, Bolivian traditional music/dance. Silvia and her boyfriend danced together spectacularly, until he got drunk and devolved into a slobbering mess. He is a very accomplished artist, a painter, but not really at her level. She is kind of a star there, as everywhere: the DJ announced her presence and seemed very excited to have her dancing there. It was generally a very late and crazy night. We ran into these guys I had met before, at this other bar (one of them is a poet in a kind of Jazz/modernist style, and the other, upon hearing about my research made up this whole story about how his brother had occupied a Peace Corps building in 1970, and I got out my notebook all excited. But at the end of the night he laughed and said it was all a lie). Anyway, I guess the artsy/scholarly scene in Bolivia is pretty small. And Silvia knows everyone.

Working

I spent much of the week (well, two long evenings and one long lunch) translating for these two European guys, Stefan and Merlin, who are on vacation and somehow found Silvia. But she is out of town, so Stefan, a German art-world person of some kind, wanted to talk with Eduardo and Marco about the collective and the political situation in Bolivia more generally. Merlin, Stefan's friend (Partner? Travel companion? They were both minimally expressive, so it was hard to tell), with very long blond hair and as Eduardo said, "de cara loca," barely talked at all. But they were clearly both hardcore Marxists and this looking-for-indigenous-resistance-in-paintings-and-festivals stuff wasn't really working for them. But we talked a LOT about the church, Evo, whether there is a sub-proletariat (which Stefan seemed fairly sure was a real term that people use but I just don't know: Subaltern? Lumpen proletariat?) in South America; the significance of the coca circuits; the campaign to legalize coca and what it could do to the economy; and lots of other things that I'm incapable of translating very coherently.

In any case, I was very excited to actually do a job for the collective, especially since they've taken me on all these adventures and insisted on paying for everything, and I did learn a lot about the current situation in Bolivia. Marco and Eduardo are fairly pessimistic that Evo is actually going to bring substantive changes to Bolivia. Basically, they said, it's neoliberalism with a new national self-confidence and slightly more of a social safety net: he is not going to really expropriate the natural resources or implement substantive land reform or even put radical indigenous people in positions of real power. He, like Obama, is really into cross-class unity. They explained that there was a really radical indigenous leader who talked about indigenizing the entire Bolivian population, but that he was pushed aside to make way for Evo. It was really interesting, but also extremely sad. I mean, I know Evo is not Obama, but to hear that they don't think he has, can, or will make real structural changes here was really depressing.

On the bright side, today I made pesto; Silvina taught me how to grind it outside with a big stone, which was pretty cool.

When I haven't been translating for the crazy-faced Europeans or making pesto with big rocks, I've been working at the Archives of Foreign Relations. It's a bit crazy: no one except the young assistant seems to know anything; it's freezing cold; most of the lights only work for a few hours a day so we are researching in semi darkness; there is only one table, which is nice and communal but sometimes gets crazy; they leave us alone with the documents all the time; and documents from entire years are missing. (I learned, talking to Lucia and Fernando one night this week, that basically all the documents from the dictatorship years have been destroyed. But they are really wonderful to me now that I worked in their fields for an entire day, and they gave me all these ideas.) Also, there was a guy putting together a shelf today, drilling and hammering pretty much all day right next to the research table.

I realize these are bourgeois complaints, except maybe the one about the missing documents. On the bright side, the archivists are really friendly: after meeting them once, we now have to kiss hello every day.

I am almost done there, due to all the missing documents. Next week Eduardo is going to take me to this other archive that he says is very nice and friendly. He got a bit weird when he found out my work was about masculinity (so much so that I thought maybe we weren't going be friends anymore and was very sad, but I think things are okay now), so then when he was explaining about the archive, he was like, "There's really a sense of fraternidad, uh, em, comunidad." Then I also have to go to the place Lucia and Fernando were telling me about, which is this small archive run by old radicals who are very supportive of people who want to reconstruct and think about the dictatorship years.

Weekend Adventures, or Ethics and Indigeneity, part II

Over the weekend, I (somewhat ironically, given the previous post*) participated in a coca-leaf-reading/offering-burning ceremony; accompanied Silvia's research collective plus these amazing but occasionally overly aggressive Mexican/Bolivian photojournalist to this beautiful ceremony and party with them in a small community called Caiquiaviri where we examined murals of hell in the church, interviewed a priest and various dancers/celebrants; then the next day, visited these incredible Incan ruins, again with the research collective and the aggressive photojournalists.

The ceremony was a coca leaf reading for Helena, a Colombian art restorer who is also staying with Silvia--in fact, now Silvia is gone, so it's just her, Nico, and me--followed by a pre-travel offering for Silvia. Marco, a student from the research collective, and I also participated. I was hanging out and talking with them when it began, and I didn't want to be rude by leaving. I also wanted to see what would happen, of course.

The Coca leaf reading was performed by two shamans, one man and one woman. They did it together. The man, Roberto, played the savant role, setting up some of the leaves in different patterns depending on the question, then tossing more leaves on top of them and making a few cryptic comments. The woman (whose name I can't remember, sadly because she was really lovely and funny) would interpret what he said and ask questions about Helena's life. Much of the reading process consists of identifying impediments to whatever goals the subject of the reading is interested in reaching, and then figuring out what kind of ceremony to do to overcome the impediment. Helena's impediment is her ex-husband, and so they are going to do a ceremony to rid her of him.

Next we made an offering for Silvia's travels, which was an extremely drawn-out process during which we were supposed to drink, smoke cigarettes, and/or chew coca leaves (Mom and Dad: if I did any of those things, it was only very moderately, for the sake of the ritual.) The whole ceremony, as Silvia explained, is supposed to be about enjoying luxuries and offering them to the gods. Roberto slowly constructed the offering, beginning with a paste of coca leaves, then he added raw llama breast, then we each had to solemnly add candies and cigarettes to the mix, then tinsel on top of everything, then they soaked it in alcohol, then we burned the whole thing on a pyre in the backyard. We had to circle the fire, blow on the woman's hands three times, and then hug and bless each other at the end. All in all, a very beautiful ceremony, although the sacrificial-llama aspect was not pretty.

That was Friday night, then Saturday morning Silvia left and we went to Caiquiaviri. The research collective rented a van, but it ended up just being Mercedes (my new friend, a very wonderful, warm, organized, brilliant single mother of two who is writing her dissertation on the museum commemorating the 1952 revolution); Marco (very interesting, a filmmaker who is documenting everything, supposedly Silvia's favorite in the collective); Eduardo (also very warm and brilliant, a photographer); Helena, me, and Alvaro, the driver, who hung out with us the whole time. Then Ximena (Silvia's friend, a famous Bolivian photojournalist), Rosa (Ximena's partner, a Mexican journalist who's been working in Bolivia for 4 years), and Lilliam (their friend, a Chicana photographer who lives in San Diego) drove in their own car, beating the rickety bus by about an hour. For us it was a 3 hour drive over a pretty nightmarish dirt road, during which we drove through at least two rivers and saw many sheep, cows, llamas, and beautiful farms.

When we got there the mass was happening in the church, so we went in and tried to film, but they told us not to and Marco politely desisted. The photojournalists, however, continued to film and take pictures, saying, "it's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission," which upset Marco a little because the idea behind making films is to establish a relationship with the people. Anyway, we were all able to take pictures later, and the images of hell were incredibly gruesome, lots of eating and regurgitating, certainly put there to scare the indigenous people into submission. The collective is trying to figure out how the indigenous people in the community actually related to these scary, gruesome, Christian images, so that was the subject of our interview. Mercedes took the lead in the interviews; she is a great talker, excellent at approaching people. When we interviewed the priest, Ximena came in late and began questioning him extremely aggressively--in the way of a journalist, I guess--about how Christianity subdued the indigenous people. It was complicated: of course she is angry about all the horrible things the church has done, but the group was trying to ask for permission from the priest and the community to photograph and possibly restore the paintings in order to think about indigenous subversive interpretations of them, and I think she set us back a little.

I almost forgot to say: the ceremony was great: they had a little figurine of Jesus, and fireworks, and marching bands, and they marched around the square in their beautiful fancy outfits to the perennial marching-band favorite, Simon and Garfunkel's " The Sound of Silence," saying prayers at every corner (station?) with one person running in front to set off fireworks when they finished the prayers and had to keep marching/dancing again .

The next day we traveled to Tihuanaku, Incan ruins by the lake which are much closer due to the paved roads. We were joined by Gaby, another member of the collective who apparently has done a lot of successful research already. She dresses slightly punk/goth and had us take pictures of her in the crucifixion pose wherever we encountered crosses. The day was a little more frustrating because the photojournalists were with us and they kept making us stop for specific foods so that we missed the priest in Tihuanaku and could not go into the church, and we also missed the museum next to the ruins. We did see the ruins, which were spectacular; pyramids, monoliths, and everything aligned with the sun.

I should get more pictures of the group soon; I was shy about taking pictures of people, which is why mine are mostly just scenery (full disclosure: the beautiful pictures of the church and the festival-goers below are actually Helena's). But I am so excited to have friends, and I really love it here . Last night and today I have also been working for the collective for the first time, interpreting meetings between Eduardo and these two European guys (one German, one British) who have this idea about transporting the murals to Spain to use in some kind of performance piece by, for, and, about Latin American domestic workers there. I will explain more about that, and my frustrating archival visits, in the next post.

*I mean , I participated very earnestly, but it's ironic that I participated.

Pop Culture Interlude: Racial Masquerade from Hollywood to Tel Aviv

While I will mostly be confining myself to narrative dispatches from La Paz and possibly other locations in Bolivia, TSD is also interested in the racial politics of U.S. pop culture. (see Janet's excellent post about Ugly Betty. Also, Janet, feel free to contribute! Our public misses you!) Also, I don't have anything to say about healthcare that hasn't been explained 20 million times, and I haven't delved extensively into Bolivian pop culture as yet. I suspect it'll be better than the U.S.-based drivel discussed here.

So I've been writing this paper about globalization and indigeneity, and it occurred to me that a disturbing number of summer movies (actually, all the ones I saw that weren't sloppily-plotted political thrillers) feature white actors performing indigeneity--either playing Native American roles or just performing Native ceremonies and rituals. In the late spring we witnessed X-Men Origins:Wolverine, with Lynn Collins playing Native legend-telling femme-fatale Kayla Silverfox. Granted, she turns out to be not exactly human, so perhaps we can understand a white actress in this role as a comment on racial impersonation, but I think that may be giving everyone involved too much credit.

Next we have Public Enemies, my pick for most disappointing summer movie: instead of the stylish outfits and snappy quasi-Marxist dialogue you might expect from a movie about 30s gangsters, Michael Mann and co. decided to go for boring misogyny and men limping around in the woods shooting at each other. One of the few actresses in the entire movie, Marion Cotillard somewhat mutely plays Dillinger's Menominee girlfriend Billie Frechette. She gets zero clever lines, and her biggest monologue, oddly given her whiteness, is when she tearfully recalls her childhood on the reservation.

But those were not even the scariest Native impersonations on film this summer. That honor goes to Betty White in the shamelessly and violently misogynist Sandra Bullock vehicle, The Proposal (which I swear I only saw for reasons involving blackmail by my 16 year-old sister), in which White, as the filthy-rich Grandma Annie (the joke is that Sandra Bullock has been bossing around her assistant Ryan Reynolds all this time thinking he is poor, not knowing his family has a ton of money and their own island in Alaska. Ha ha.), apparently does daily Inuit rituals out in the woods involving chanting and animal skins. While the movie mocks every other woman on screen for daring to open her mouth, Grannie's racial impersonation passes without ridicule. Unfortunately, I cannot find a still of the scene, but trust me that it's excruciatingly horrible and not worth seeing the movie for.

The final example is a little less offensive, but still worth mentioning: economic-collapse-inspired indie comedy Sunshine Cleaning, otherwise thoughtful; somewhat conscious of class and gender issues; and for the most part, quirky without being annoying, seems to harbor a Native American presence in strange ways, even beyond the Southwest setting and various Native accoutrements (see Alan Arkin above). For example, in the box of the Sunshine cleaners' (played by Emily Blunt and Amy Adams) dead mother's things, there is a seemingly sacred feather that the daughters take out and gaze at solemnly every now and them, leading at least me to believe for most of the movie that her mother was actually Native American. But no. We see a picture of her at the end, and she's totally blonde.

There are several conclusions to be drawn from this: a) Hollywood is as racist as ever; b) impersonating Native Americans is still okay; and c) these impersonations create a climate in which others can put on Native-face with impunity, like the zionist protesters at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv who decided to mock Palestinian refugees' claims to the land Israel stole in 1948, 1967, and today by painting their faces and jokingly calling for the return of Manhattan. Great to see Israel adopting on the quintessentially American combination of genocide, apartheid, and impersonation, the third of which bolsters the first two strategies by depriving oppressed groups of the ability even to represent themselves.

Breaking Rocks: Slightly More Fun Than I Thought It Would Be

Yesterday morning Silvia knocked on my door around 9 AM and said "Molly, quieres ayudar con una cosecha?" which I understood to mean that we were going to harvest something. I'm not quite clear on the seasons here, though I did sort of know it was spring and thus not harvest time. Still, I thought, it's a different climate, there must be something to harvest. I did ask "what are we harvesting?" and Silvia answered, something like "Oh, it'll be easy for you to learn, it's a beautiful spot." I'm still a bit anxious about her liking me so I didn't ask any more questions.

So we crammed into the (fairly small) car with her daughter Lucia (Nancy's description: moody, complicated, can't really deal with having a famous mother, but so far I've found her very cool and funny and lovely and tough in a good way); Lucia's very sweet and agriculturally adept husband; their incredibly adorable and well-behaved one year-old, Pauco, whom they call "el conejo"; Lucia's friend Jovi, who is part of a feminist theater collective and another collective that is developing a new feminist hermeneutic of the bible (not the project I would choose if I had a feminist collective, but okay); Jovi's 8 year-old son, a very cool kid whose name I also forget; and Silvia, driving. We drove waaay out into the country, with the 8 year-old talking the entire time, mostly listing off animal facts--he's very passionate about protecting endangered species--and Silvia periodically yelling at him to be quiet. Lucia was like, "Mami, this is exactly what you sound like with your students" and Silvia was like, "they pay me to talk" and then the 8 year-old got really interested and kept saying "how much? How much do they pay you?" Silvia is an extremely aggressive driver and was passing everyone, on every side, beeping the horn around curves.

We drove for a long time up this very rocky, remote mountain road, then parked and walked about 1/2 mile (carrying heavy farm implements and lunch, all in metal pots) to this remote, completely untilled field. It was one of the most beautiful spots I've ever seen, with cliffs all around and the snow-capped Illimani mountain right in front of us. I stupidly didn't take pictures but I tried to approximate above--it looked about like that, only there was a bit less snow on the mountain, no grass where we were (I guess that picture is from a rainier season), and cows and mules wandering around in addition to the sheep being herded.

So we finally arrived, Silvia got out her book and began reading, they plopped El Conejo next to her, and we begin tilling the field--turns out there is no harvest, but they want to grow potatoes. So we break up the soil, which is not sod like you might be used to if you live in the Northeastern United States. No. This is soil at 14,000 feet, which is dry, and full of rocks, some of which are relatively soft in which case you can actually break them with the scythe/pickaxe thing, and many more of which you just have to dig around or throw off to the side. The four of us worked for 9 hours, stopping to chew coca leaves, eat lunch, and drink iced mate which was really excellent, but mostly just hacking at this extremely solid ground until something looking like dirt appeared. Lucia and her husband were very skillful, but I would flail around with the scythe/pickaxe for about 10 minutes, at which point my arms would start shaking violently and I would have to wait until they calmed down a little.

There was something amazing about working so hard with this incredible legendary mountain so close, and I was trying, when I could actually think coherently, to take the correct attitude toward the whole thing. I happen to be explaining in my dissertation right now about the scene in On The Road where Sal picks cotton one day for the experience, romanticizes the day-laborers to the point of slavery-nostalgia, and then starts cursing god because he's not strong enough to do the work. All these stances (tourism, fetishization, whining) are equally inexcusable, so I decided to focus on perfecting my swing as much as possible just in case the revolution actually comes to Norteamerica. (Then at least I'll be prepared for a re-education camp, though of course a ministry-of-culture position would be my first choice.) So I began to really swing the pickaxe with my whole body, and improved my productivity somewhat, though the arm-shaking was still happening. We hacked at the ground until it got dark, probably creating a 30 by 30 foot space on which they will attempt to grow potatoes.

Jovi's son was very concerned with protecting the few plants that existed there--he would stand around them and cry when we got near, until finally he attempted to transplant some of them. On the way back home he continued to explain about yellow elephants, polar bears, komodo dragons, tortoises, sharks, and whales, listing off gloomy facts and then asking the whole car, "what do you think of that?" He is a very sensitive and driven kid, and I very much hope to see him on a Greenpeace boat or that Whale Wars reality show one day.

Today was difficult. My arms are a little less sore than I thought they'd be, but my back and legs feel extremely strange--twitchy, even. I went out to the bourgeois internet cafe where I secretly go every so often when our connection is down (I feel totally guilty: there's an armed guard at the door and elite lunching Bolivians who are probably anti-Evo mixed with sloppy gringo tourists; Silvia would probably kick me out if she knew I was there, but it's the only place that allows laptops, and I almost felt okay about it after my unsolicited day of manual labor), and I could barely walk in a straight line. I will try to go to the archives tomorrow, assuming my muscles have returned to their proper lengths and places.

Silvia

Un Diablo del Carnaval de Oruro

So I woke up Monday morning to Silvia and Nico screaming at each other--I guess Nico didn't even say hello to her, his keys are still lost, and a variety of other things. It's funny to be in Bolivia living with a spoiled art student. Although we're getting along: he brought me a really good salteña today (a Bolivian empanada with vegetables) which I'm pretty sure a) was one of the best things I've ever eaten and b) fairly close to vegetarian.

Then last night I sat in on the meeting of her research collective. Usually it's in the living room but she hurt her knee (something with a bus in Bogotá, she's in bed for a week) so we had the session in her bedroom. We sat surrounding her bed, and she just talked and talked while chewing mountains of coca leaves and smoking cigarettes--she constantly uses the words jodida, huevada, and carajo to mean great, which is even better when you remember that she's a famous distinguished professor her 60s.

First she explained all about this politics and performance conference she went to in Colombia, which seemed pretty wild and intense, especially the performances: a woman played a symphony with an instrument attached to her vagina, while another snorted cocaine onstage as the culmination of her performance. Silvia recounted this in very colorful detail. Then she announced that she had the idea in Colombia for the group to organize a big five-day conference called Coca Sin Fronteras, to combat Evo's "chauvinistic nationalism." She wants the conference to be at the end of october, so she delegated tasks to the research collective . She also wants them to do a graffiti project to promote it, with a tag for the collective. (She excitedly-yet-firmly gave them a huge amount of work, which made me stop salivating and remember the downside of the mentor-protege relationship for at least 30 seconds.) During all this she was intermittently passing books around and handing back papers and commenting on them, as well as chewing the coca and smoking.

They are all working on Sociology of the Image, which Silvia is convinced is the wave of the future but I'm a little fuzzy on still. Right now they're working on doing oral histories of diablos, these indigenous dancers who do these devil dances at carnavals all over and appear in early colonial art. So the students are going out and interviewing the diablos, but then they complain that they are expected to get drunk and dance with them. I guess Silvia also wants the conference to feature diablos from all over. The students seem very brilliant and friendly. Silvia invited me to do some kind of ceremony with them this Saturday, so I will definitely report.

Silvia was not impressed with my cooking (I mixed rice and quinoa, which in retrospect was a bad idea and really didn't taste very good, but there was just a little bit of quinoa left--she was pretty horrified by that), but she is going to teach me once she gets better. A few days ago she said "you're going to become like a daughter to me,"which was nice. She's pretty stressed out right now for the moment, with the injury, Nico, and the conference, and she's also had a parade of guests and students coming through, but I'm hoping things will settle down at some point and I can have more of a real conversation with her. In the meantime, I'm getting a lot of writing done, preparing to go to the archives, and still exploring the city. I'll post more pictures soon.