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.

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.