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.