The Licensing of Wind

July 2003

The wind started blowing, lifting grit and spinning it into odd shapes in the air before thrusting it against walls and skin. Normally August is the month of winds, but it started in July.  Everyone is talking about it.   The wind makes it feel cold, cold and gritty.
 

Nevertheless the morning sun shines through the grit, giving a strange, eerie look to everything.  Light bounces of the tin roofs and irregular, unfinished brick construction that dot the valley in which the city of La Paz is nestled, as I drop down into it. Illimani, the massive, snow clad guardian of the city stands proudly there, only slightly dimmed by the grit that steals light from its face.

They say that the other day a group of foreign tourists was killed in a sudden avalanche from off one of Illimani's glaciers as they tried to climb its 22000 foot peak.  In the summer clouds boil up from the jungle on the other side of Illimani's fastness.  They hide it for days on end as they cover it in snow, and bring daily rain to the highlands of La Paz.  But in winter, there is no new snow and no rain.  Every day the sun shines, although the temperature can feel only a few degrees above freezing at times.

Tomorrow is the day of La Paz, a holiday celebrating the founding of this city in a gorge.  Already people are setting up banners and marking space for the construction of bleachers along parade routes.  The county's president Sanchez de Lozada reportedly wants to push the holiday to Monday, for a three day weekend, like is done in the United States where  he grew up.  But the people are resisting.  From what I hear all plans are on for tomorrow.

Back in February Mr Sanchez tried to impose a series of taxes mandated by the IMF and the World Bank.  The result was days of rioting, scores dead, and almost two dozen buildings burned and looted, many of them government buildings.  People still talk about those days in February, precisely February 12th and 13th. “Where were you?  What did you see?”  They also talk about February 19th last year, when rains pummeled the city and the river that flows in its bottom, now hidden under the city's main street, refused to stay underground and cascaded in a rush of overturned vehicles, merchandise, and people down the city's main street.

I have been spending my days seeking information about the social structure of the city that will help explain the riots.  Why this year?  Why not last?  Of course the bigger issue is around the role of neo-liberalism and international economic pressure on fragile third-world states.   Last week I found the books, this week I am reading, sometimes at home in my room where at times it is cold and at times the sun fills the room with warmth, as the walls keep the wind at bay.   Other times I read while riding , crowded in minivans making the way back and forth between El Alto and the basin's floor.  And other times I sit in a cafe, with a glass of water in front of me, while I read. 

There are lots of numbers about poverty, employment and unemployment, the lack of expansion of the formal sector of the economy and so on.  But as I walk I see the people begging in the street, the Indians from Southern Bolivia, dressed sometimes in colorful clothes and sometimes in somber utilitarian dress, selling weavings and toasted grains.  All along the streets people hawk wares.  There are maybe a hundred thousand people making their living in this informal, small scale commerce.  Then there are the big stores and the high rise offices, from which the workers descend into the streets several times a day in high heals and makeup, or the obligatory dark suit.

Everywhere I look there are signs of the vitality of Catholicism and the stupendous growth and visible public presence of evangelicals.   The numbers come off the page and become the people among whom I move, a strange observer from another place.  

Things are starting to make sense.  I hope I will be able to write a good paper from what I am seeing and learning.  But there is something very unfortunate in all of this.  I come to get data and write a paper, but the people who have leapt off my pages are caught in this structure where IMF pressure can cause civil strife that lasts days.

Yesterday the city was congested by a couple of miles of older people, marching maybe twelve across and demanding improvement, not to mention simple honoring, of their retirement agreements.  They represented an older Bolivia, where there was a strong railroad sector, a national petroleum company, a strong national mining concern, and so on.  Those have all been privatized.  The ways of living and thinking of these people are supposed to be quaint, archaic fossils.  But they poured into the street to demand they be recognized and heard, and that the government honor its agreements with them.

After the march cleared and traffic started flowing again, I caught a van back to El Alto.  The wind was stronger and I found myself feeling suffocated in the closed and crowded fastness of the van.  I arrived home to spend the evening playing cards with Romy, Juan Carlos, Joaquín and their nephew Carlitos.

Carlitos, at one moment, said  “can we talk privately?” We went into my room, and he nervously asked me if I would consider being the godfather of his licenciamiento, his exit from his servicio militar.  In just a few days he enters the military to do his service and he is very nervous, because he is Mormon and he hears Mormons are marginalized and treated poorly, and because of all the negative things people are saying about how the military treats its recruits.  He is also nervous because this is a traditionally important right of passage for young men.  He stands before adulthood, with a gulf of the unknown and painfully difficult before him.  He asked me to meet him on the other side as his sponsor into a new life.

Wow what an honor.  How can you possibly turn it down.   When I said yes, his face broke into a grin that calmed the wind and defied the grit.  I started making plans to come back next year for the ceremony. 

Empanada and Ice Cream

July 2003

We waited.  Knotted around our belongings we huddled against the crowds pouring through the open aired bus station like an end of vacation flood.  Monday morning  all the kids in Bolivia have to be back in school after their winter vacation and we threw ourselves into the current in order to get back to La Paz.  Joaquín and I had come down early Saturday morning to afternoon the station was heavily congested and every company’s desk had a thick crowd clamoring around it. 

Our bus was supposed to leave at three pm.  Joaquín and I had debated which schedule to get a ticket for, whether at one o’clock, one thirty, two thirty, three pm or later.  Juan Carlos had told us he would be done by noon and for us to get the earliest bus possible.   

Luckily we chose three.  After a morning spent roaming the streets of Cochabamba, watching crowds, eating wist'upiku (an enticing combination of a spicy pastry and ice cream), and my spending far too much money and time in a great local bookstore where I could still spend more money and time, we arrived  at the temple at noon.  Both of us were worried they would not let us back in, even though all our belongings were inside, since neither of us carried the requisite recommend, but the guards had gotten to know us and just waved us in with a smile.

Inside we took a chair, among the pilgrims packing up to head home, and waited.  Juan Carlos did not show up, so we waited.   One of the temple workers sat down by me.  He is a jovial man who plays loud Bolivian music from his room in the temple's housing and whose laugh and sense of humor makes even the walls smile.  Originally from the ancient mining city of Potosí, he spent most of his life in La Paz where, according to him, he knew everyone.  We exchanged personal stories and he was intrigued with me. 

I asked him how Brother and Sister Leaño were doing, since I knew they were working in the temple.  I had met the Leaños when I was nineteen years old and trying to make sense of, what seemed to me, the strange and forbidding city of La Paz, a highly conflicted branch, and difficult companions.  Jorge Leaño was a prominent banker and one of the earliest members of the Mormon Church in Bolivia.  Soon I started to regularly visit the Leaño household just for the peace, calm and acceptance I found there.   

The days that, for some reason, brother Leaño and his family did not attend our little branch with dusty wooden floors and a tinny piano that required work every Sunday for other than harsh dissonance to sound, were days that seemed to have lost something.
Brother Leaño radiated peace.  For years he has been one of my heros.

Over the years when fate has brought me to Bolivia I have visited with him and his family, except for when he was in Colombia as a mission president.   I thought this would be the exception, since the temple seemed such a busy place and I did not want to bother with my secular concerns.  Instead of answering my question, brother Rojas said come on let's call him.   Woah!  I did not plan on interrupting.

Dressed in my Levis and travel shirt, I found myself being escorted into the temple, into a room to the side of where they check recommendations one last time to ensure that only bearers of that form can enter the holy place.  The room was like most temples decorated in high hotel, corporate style.  On one wall was a painting of an andean flower called Puye and behind where I sat was a copy of the Anderson painting of Jesus receiving the children. 

Shortly after I sat down, Brother and Sister Leaño, dressed all in white, entered the room, as if all the air rushed out of the place and came in again filled with fresh oxygen.   They looked older, after all it has been nine years since I have seen them, but they looked good.  When I told them about how I had demurred contacting them, they said it's a good thing you did.  Someone would have told us you were here and we would have been hurt.

We talked, telling stories of family and friends.  They asked about my life.  Never once did they show judgment.  I only felt love from them    I told them how much they had always meant to me over the years and how important it had been to visit with them.
They said, David it has always been recíproco, a word that in Spanish means fully shared or mutual.  I felt like crying.

I left the temple and went back to the couch in the waiting area.  There was a whole group of people from Tarija, who had made the more than twenty-four hours of very hard travel to the temple over horrible words and now were returning.  I told them about when I had gone to Tarija  in 1975.  You would have thought that I had lived there, by the way they responded.  One of the men, a thin, handsome man, with a magnetic personality, told how he had been a missionary on the altiplano and how hard it was to learn Aymara, but how he had.  He had worked in areas as a missionary where I have done field work as an anthropologist.  We exchanged stories about people we both knew.

Afterwards he had worked for an NGO involved in development and we shared stories of travel in rural areas of Peru and Bolivia.

Then it was time for them to leave to get to their bus.  They gathered their bundles and each gave me an abrazo while inviting me to visit them in Tarija.

By now it was almost two o'clock and still no Juan Carlos.  Uh oh, I though, we are going to miss our bus.  What to do.  So I went to brother Rojas and told him of the situation and asked if there was anyway of contacting Juan Carlos in the temple to hurry him up. 

So he called.  But Juan Carlos did not come.  I felt a little panicky.   Then I noticed Joaquín was no where around either and I thought oh my I will have to look for him too.

Finally around two thirty Juan Carlos, looking pale, came down the steps from the temple, his arm around Joaquín who had been at the temple doors waiting for him.  We grabbed our bags and a taxi and ran to the bus terminal.  Joaquín was reprimanding his father for making us wait.  Son, he said, you have to understand it was out of my hands.  They wanted me to stay until tonight.

While we were waiting in the terminal, we kept meeting people, including a white shirted young man from Las Vegas, who looked slightly lost.    Finally they had us board the bus, almost half an hour late.  I sat next to an elderly woman traveling with her two
grandchildren.

We pulled out of the terminal, as vendors streamed on board the bus to offer food, travel cups, newspapers, and salvation.  Just as it seemed we had left Cochabamba, the bus pulled into a station to load gas and we all groaned.   At the terminal, the representatives of the bus company told us the reason it was late was that it had stopped to get gas.  

Finally we pulled out of the city and into the mountains.  We climbed, fighting the western sun that occasionally would blind us, for the next five or six hours.

When Juan Carlos and I were discussing some item of Quechua vocabulary compared with Aymara, the lady next to me said, I speak Quechua.  So she and I conversed for the next hour, until the movie Water World made conversation impossible.  It was followed by Rambo III.  In both cases I decided sleep was more entertaining.

Monuments in the Valley

July 2003

The city nestled around us like a great big hen beneath the mountains that form this valley.  They circled it, making a three dimensional wall that bends and folds but always keeps the valley locked in like a very large nest.  

With almost half a million people, Cochabamba at around 8000 feet above sea level is the third largest city of Bolivia.  Alway before I have just passed through the city, on my way somewhere else.  It has always been an embarrassing gap in my knowledge of this country.

Joaquín and I, after having breakfast among the pilgrims to the white Mormon temple, gleaming hesitantly agains the hillside, in the city´s morning smog, threw ourselves into the city´s nest.  We went to the bus terminal to see about tickets back to La Paz.  

Because winter vacations end this weekend and on Monday all of Bolivia´s kids have to go back to school, we did not buy anything.  They were jacking up prices with abandon.   So asked around and found a way to get to this research institute named CERES, that I have always visited.  Poor Joaquín had to sit and read the news paper while I looked at their publications and walked away with a bag full.  Great stuff f or my research.

We then went to a park where a tram carries passengers up a steep hill to the top.  There an enormous, white Christ was built, like a crest to top the city with religious devotion.   We had to wait in line for an hour.  Despite the heat of the sun, it was enjoyable just to watch the people of all different social classes and ethnicities.  The line broke all discipline when an ice cream vendor came by with a cart of frozen treats.  ¨Helados, helados, de leche, de fruta.  Cómprese helados,¨ he shouted out.  People gathered around him and emptied his cart as the pushed and shoved for the ones they wanted.  Then for a while the line was calm, as most people´s lips changed color.

At the top there was a group of Menonites, from lowland Santa Cruz Bolivia, looking for all he world like southern Utah polygamists.  The give away was the dialect of old German they were speaking among themselves.

After descending in the rocking gondola, with a courting Bolivian couple, two Norwegian tourists, looking like they could not get any redder under the highland tropical sun, Joaquín and me, we went to the main plaza, where some kind of public health fair was going on.  The square was filled with booths demonstrating proper condom use and talking about potable water, as a group dressed like Indians from Potosí and playing the tarkhas--rough sounding fipple flutes--bobbed and weaved among the crowd. 

On the edge of the plaza, we found an art gallery with an exposition from three artists from Potosí.  It was interesting to mover from seeing the performers attempt Potosí song and dance among the crowd of mostly university age people, to a quiet gallery of older strollers looking at romantic and abstract rendition of Potosí scenes and people.

Then, as the sun light started getting long, we joined a tour at the massive and amazing palace built by the Bolivia tin magnate Simón Patiño, one of the riches men in the world in the early part of the twentieth century.  Created in Italian marble, Damascus silk, and Lebanese cedar, and lowland Bolivian mahogany, the mansion was a melange of quotes from some where else, as a very wealthy man claimed status and position.  He drew heavily on greek mythology, like the neoclassical columns that looked like marble, but like those in Brigham Young´s tabernacle are made of painted wood.  These are hollow to hide steel beams that really support Patiño´s massive construction.  One room I particularly liked was an amazing quote from the arabesque alhambra of Spains that contained a massive pool table, with what looked like gold leaf on its legs.  The table had only one hole.  We were told it was for playing carambola, a kind of pool that just uses a few balls.  The table sat under brightly colored, arabic arches, embossed with arabic script.  

As we arrived at the temple to meet Joaquín´s father, it was hard for me not to compare the massive robber baron construction of the early twentieth century, with the massive corporate, religious construction of the early twenty-first century.  Patiño quoted heavily from the vatican as a claim to legitimacy.  Interestingly the temple quotes corporate chic as its own claim to social, and spiritual correctness.  The relationship was too clear for me not to see.   Nevertheless it is a powerful building.  Even more powerful is the devotion of the pilgrims who come from all over Bolivia to undergo religious ritual.  

Today, we leave in the afternoon for La Paz.  We will climb out from the city´s nest into the mountains and slowly rise up to the fourteen thousand feet where La Paz sits beneath snow clad mountains that rise to twenty-two thousand feet in this very vertical landscape.  

Do Not Presume

La Paz, 2003

I am staying with the Escobar family in a beautiful home they have slowly built over years in a neighborhood called Santiago II which was founded with miners from other parts of  Bolivia who lost their jobs in the collapse of mining in the early eighties.  

Enchanted by the Lights

La Paz, 2003

We arrived at night, three hours late. From near the lake, an hour out, you could see the city’s lights at the plateau’s edge glowing like a jeweled coiled snake in the night. El Alto de La Paz, by daylight is a gritty suburban city, of unfinished brick constructions and urban works gathered on the lip of this high plateau, the altiplano, that stretches between the twin ranges of the Andes. With somewhere between half a million and a million souls it is the highest city on earth. At the lip, or to change images, the plateau’s eyebrow, as it is called in local Spanish, it is above 14,000 feet high and slowly drops downward from there until the houses become scattered and empty fields claim the night.

Salvation and the River of Bones

July 2003

At eight in the morning the streets of Cusco are usually almost empty. The city seems to start later than most, maybe because it lives at night. Its cafes and clubs are full till early in the morning, especially on weekends. Tourists and students keep the colonial section of the city dancing. There aren’t many tourists this year and you can feel their absence around the Plaza.

A Godson

July 2003 

Cusco, Peru

A thin shelf of shadow graced the side of the pavilion in the plaza’s center, across from a sixteenth century Catholic church. The rest of the plaza seemed almost empty, except for cascades of burning sunlight.