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.