As per usual, it’s been an interesting month, and I’m excited to share it.
I want to talk about street culture here, because much of the developing world, and Bolivia in particular, has an entirely different take on things outside the house. To employ an overused adjective, Cochabamba’s streets are ‘vibrant’. To say the least. As with many things here, I have a love-hate relationship with the streets—they can be dangerous, and it gets exhausting having to always be on the lookout for people who want to rob, jump, flash, grope, or otherwise impede your peaceful progress through the day. But the streets are so alive, there is life leaking out everywhere, and lovely little interactions taking place on every corner.So, let’s start with transportation. I live on my bike because it’s a lot more practical, but getting to work and back can be a colorful experience in and of itself, and I periodically really enjoy riding the bus through the market and watching a million small-scale dramas unfold before me. If you take any of the popular routes you have plenty of time to observe said dramas, because traffic is such that ‘gridlock’ doesn’t even do it justice.
Bus/trufi lines are franchised, so you have your own bus or car and buy into the system. If you’re like most trufistas, you’ll paint your vehicle wild colors and adorn its interior with all manner of dangly or colorful things, everything from CDs to crucifixes to inspirational quotes to pinup girls to stuffed animals to curtains that look like they’ve been ripped out of a bordello. To this day I’ve yet to see a woman trufista. You can flag public transportation down anywhere along the route and get off anywhere you like by yelling from the back for the driver to stop, and at the right times of day they stuff an unimaginable number of people into those busses (though not quite as many as the Dominicans do). Unlike the Dominican Republic, however, there are mechanisms for quality control that take the form of women or children sitting under tarps on various corners, getting paid a few cents an hour to punch timecards. I’ve often thought that punching timecards must be the most miserable job ever. Women take their young babies to work with them, and around many of the control points you’ll see a bunch of kids playing on the sidewalk.
There are two types of paros (blockades) here, paro de transporte, which means that the trufistas blockade and there is no public transportation, or paro civicos, in which groups or communities blockade for political reasons. If you try to drive your car or motorcycle around in either of the above situations you run the risk of having your tires popped, but bicycles and people are usually able to move fairly freely. The transportistas blockade when they feel that the government hasn’t been responsive to their complaints about road quality, and they feel this way fairly often. In their defense, the government has not ever been terribly responsive to the road issues…they seem to have other issues on their plate. I’ve heard stories that in the paros of the past people came out into the street and played soccer and hung out—like a snow day, for those of us from New England—but with all the tensions of the last year or so, they have been getting dangerous. Some men from a rural community on a cocaine route killed a few policemen in a town not so far from Cochabamba, and everyone is sort of holding their breath, waiting to see what happens…
Street food: I know I wrote a lot about food and food culture in my last blog, but street food, as most will agree, is different. A buck will get you greasy repast to last you all day from one of the millions of stands all over Cochabamba. Las Islas is one of my favorite places in the city, something between a park and a highway divider that comes alive at night with food vendors. They sell tripe and hamburgers and sausages and choclo and tacos, and people come and sit at the rickety tables and eat dinner and relax, and it’s noisy and companionable and reasonably clean (you don’t last long around here with a delicate stomach).
Used-clothing vendors also appear en masse in the evenings along the main streets, with piles of sweaters that they buy in bulk from US exporters who are making a mint (by the way, Planet Aid—those big yellow boxes in parking lots—doesn’t donate. It resells, to a bunch of aproned women trying to eek out a living hawking people’s old nightgowns). Informal commerce picks up considerably after dark—the market in La Paz is never more active than it is a ten o’clock at night. Prostitution is legal here, and women line Avenida Aroma selling their services, or stroll from beer den to beer den, pausing outside just long enough for the men playing dice inside to take a good look.
Bus stations are also favorite places of mine, because of all the activity at strange times. The country travels at night, because it just doesn’t make sense to spend twelve hours on a bus during the day, and the amount of food vending, diaper-changing, peeing in corners, laughing, fighting, and stealing that happens at bus stations in the evenings is enough to blow your mind. I love it; I love the chaos. Women appear with large pots of api (a sweet, hot, blue-corn drink) and fried pasteles, little greasy turnover things, and all kinds of unidentifiable things to eat and drink. Enterprising folks will climb aboard the busses at checkpoints and give very compelling schpiels about why we should buy this remedy or that lotion, or who will regale us with sad stories about how the truck importing their stock crashed in the mountains, and only these eighteen bottles of perfume survived and they are willing to let us buy one at half, ladies and gentlemen, but half of their normal cost! Speaking of performance art…
Public bathrooms, in bus stations and beyond, typically charge one Boliviano for the privilege of peeing in their overflowing holes. Not surprisingly, most people just squat wherever they can get away with it. Your one Boliviano will buy you a little fold of toilet paper and a paper ticket…perhaps if they did away with the paper tickets we could get in for fifty cents? Toilets in these banos publicos are the stand-up kind, with two foot supports and a large hole, and they are characteristically uncared for and smelly as shit, no pun intended. An artist could do a hell of an installation based on the graffiti found in bathrooms here, plenty of your typical Diego-I’ll-love-you-forevers, but a few that I have written down. My favorite: Paredes limpias, mentes en blanco (clean walls, blank minds). Walls, in bathrooms and all over town, are an accessible and much-used propaganda tool, and if I were to list the slogans…well, there are a lot of them.
Cleferos are children and youth who live on the streets. They are huffers. There is a huge number of them here, clef (glue) being the cheapest and most accessible drug and, one would suppose, the cheapest way to forget about hunger and thirst. Those kids are very sad cases, and often violent. They periodically attack in bands, and even adults can’t really beat of a dozen ten-year-olds bent on relieving them of their valuables. Clef is toxic enough to cause very severe brain damage, especially when applied to young bodies and developing nervous systems, and most cleferos, if they reach even adolescence, are suffering bad and irreversible physical and mental effects as a result of huffing.
In the same vein, but not quite as sad, are the kids who come from café to café at night selling candy, flowers, and or cigarettes. Most of them aren’t homeless and most of them are well-fed, but often their parents are sitting right outside. They send their children in because they think the appealing young faces will garner more business; it is manipulation of the worst sort, and it makes me furious. The kids create good relationships with the café owners and the regulars; sometimes they sit down and play cards with us; they don’t steal, and are typically just doing what they’re told, but they ought to be at home in bed. In my humble opinion, any adult who is healthy enough to prod their kids from café to café ought to be selling the damn gum themselves.
Also going from café to café at night are the mochileros, backpackers from Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile who make enough selling their jewelry to keep travelling. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful earrings in the world dangling off improvised screen exhibition panels, and these folks are easygoing and chatty. I guess you have to be, to survive in that business. You’ll also get musicians, who’ll come in and ask the café owners to turn off the music, and they’ll play a song or two and come around with a hat. As might be expected there’s a lot of terrible, fingernails-on-a-blackboard-and-ice-on-you-neck stuff, but a lot of really lovely, skillful playing as well. I’ve seen jugglers, fire-eaters, and belly-dancers all come through—it’s a pretty good system for everyone involved. Café owners rarely hire live entertainment, people can donate or not as they choose, and artists have can make as much as 300 Bolivianos in a night. Unfortunately, the kids don’t make nearly as much. Perhaps what I like about the artists is that there’s not the air of desperation that poverty lends the little children, or the air of manipulation.
And one last comment, related less to the street and more to the general state of affairs: the more I travel, live, or hang out in the world, the more I begin to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with how men and women interact, and a basic lack of respect and understanding between genders that I find very troubling. This month has included a few run-ins with flashers and exhibitionists, many more still with professional machismo, a couple with personal machismo, and some very interesting conversations with other women about their takes on it all. I have to remind myself to stay angry—that sexual and gender violence is not okay under any circumstances, that it’s not okay to let it slide as ‘part of travelling’, and cultural relativism be damned. How we deal with issues like these requires thought and nuance and cultural context, yes, but the result of a few difficult weeks has been my very clear understanding that things need to change here in Bolivia.
