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.
It’s Saturday, and I’m feeling alive again after a nasty bout with some brief illness. These quasi-tropical fevers are pretty incredible—for two days you have no sense of time or place and your mind wanders all over the place, and when you try to connect to reality it’s like trying to think through a sack of wet cement. Fever and puking leaves all your clothes too big and your wrists feeling weak, and I realize how lucky I’ve been to have been healthy all my life.
I started to make a list the other day of notable Bolivian expressions, that either crack me up or make me scratch my head or both, and it occurs to me that I should share them (skip this bit if you’re offended by the somewhat vulgar). Following are a few choice examples:
‘Medio gradecito’- literally, ‘halfway a little bit big’. People use this when they don’t want to say something is big, but it is. Ie, como la manzana era media grandecita, no pude comer todo…
‘carácter fuerte’-literally, ‘strong of character’. We use this one when someone is has strong opinions, is confident, doesn’t temper their comments with niceties OR when they are mean, abrasive, intolerable, etc. Confidence and meanness are connected (generally speaking, not only in this expression) which I dislike, however, this can also be used medio-admiringly. I am caracter fuerte, obviously.
‘Macha’-‘manly’, but used to describe a woman who knows her %&$^ and isn’t afraid to use it. You all know me well enough to be able to imagine how I feel about this one.
‘Digamos’-‘let’s say’, but used to fill space or make comments seem less direct, and mostly by women, presumably to avoid being called ‘macha’.
‘Que se yo’-literally, ‘what do I know?’, but used as ‘whatever’. See above.
‘Que macana’-bummer, drag, pain-in-the-neck. Suitable for use around the elderly.
‘Emputear’-To piss off. Literally, ‘to bitch off’. Vulgar, but that doesn’t seem to stop everyone ages six to sixty from using it.
‘Buena/mala onda’-literally ‘good or bad vibe’, but used as a noun. Ie, she’s a good vibe, meaning a good person, a sweetheart, a rockstar, etc.
‘Re’-short for ‘recontra’, slang in itself meaning ‘very’. I feel ‘re’ excellent this morning.
‘No mames’-Another favorite. Literally, ‘don’t nurse’ or ‘don’t suckle’, but used to mean, you’re joking, you’re kidding, come on, you don’t say, etc.
‘Casera, caserita’—used to refer to vendors or their patrons. Comes from ‘casa’, ie, those in charge of the house. ‘Que cosita quieres, caserita?’ ‘Tres limones, gracias casera’.
‘Andar a la mierda’-literally, ‘to walk to the shit.’ To indicate to someone or something that they ought to fuck off, though the expression is not nearly as vulgar in Bolivian Spanish as in English.
‘-ito, -ita, -itos, -itas’-diminuitives. Bolivians love their dimuinitives. These endings are used to make things smaller, ie, piecito (little foot), dedito (little finger), manzanita (little apple), and they’re used all the time with both nouns and adjectives, not just when something is physically little, ie, estoy resfriadita (I’m sick). These have the effect of making everything much more tender, which I very much like, but people hide behind them when they’re trying to make a point, which I don’t like.
‘Chango/a’-kid, dude, guy. They use it like we say ‘you guys’.
‘Chola’- Indigenous woman. Refers to dress, sobretodo.
It’s probably not lost on you that I’m a little hyped up by how that slang relates to women. Smith is ever with me—la Condicion Femenina is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially with respect to my friends and community here. Here’s a statistic to knock your pants off: seven out of every ten Bolivian women have been sexually abused. Seven! We also know that the number is probably a little higher than that, given the nature of statistics. Whether or not treatment qualifies as abuse, women’s lives down here are very hard; the closer I get to people, the more they trust me and tell me, the more horrified I am. The balance of something is off. A few illustrations:
A coworker of mine had a child at twenty-two (the child is now seventeen), the dad ran off and left them when the baby was a few weeks old, and my friend moved back in with her parents. Meanwhile, her own father beats up on both her and her mother. Her parents made her take the newborn infant and walk around in the streets all afternoon and evening whenever her aunts or the neighbors came to visit, because they didn’t want a visual reminder of the shame of keeping a fatherless baby in the house. And the thing that kills me is that Mr. Deadbeat Dad can just walk off and start a new life somewhere with no stigma whatsoever, which is probably exactly what he did. When my friend finally moved out of her family’s house, the parents kept her child and refused to give him up. There is no such thing as family court down here.
There’s a Bolivian tradition called Viernes del Soltero (Single’s Friday) in which men, coupled and married or not, go out on Friday nights and drink together and take young single girls home. The prevailing message is that those existing partners and wives should just accept this as part of the male character and deal. Not to mention the issue of STD´s.
My dear friend Claudia just moved out of her mother’s house. That’s still a very big, very risky move for women down here—you are expected to live with your parents until you get married, at which time you move in with your husband. When you move to a different city to study you stay with family or friends, and if you don’t have family or friends, well, people feel sorry for you. For some families this system works very well, and it counteracts this weird phenomenon of dispersion that takes place in the States. Claudia’s mother, however, is severely depressed, bordering on abusive, and Claudia decided that if she was ever going to have a healthy, productive life, she needed to be on her own. Claudia is twenty-eight, a licensed, experienced professional, and had never even moved house before, much less lived alone. So she found some rooms around the corner from me and two of us helped her move—her mother wouldn’t say one word to any of us while we were there, and almost two months later still won’t pick up the phone, hasn’t been over to see Claudia’s new place, and won’t answer the door when she comes over. Needless to say, no one makes nearly as much noise when men make similar decisions.
All of this puts me in an odd position. Just by virtue of who I am I break many of these prevalent cultural taboos, and they’re forgiven without exception because it’s understood that 1. I have no choice, and/or 2. Foreigners are weird and can’t be held accountable for their actions. My life, consisting of I-don’t-know-how-many moves, languages, countries, jobs, friendships, educational opportunities, living conditions, etc, is seen as simultaneously enticing and absolutely unhinged. When traumas occur my friends come to me because chances are good that I’ve encountered something similar, not because I’m intrinsically any wiser, just because life has dumped a different set of experiences on my lap. It makes me feel good that I can be a support a lot of the time, that I have something valuable to give, but it gets me thinking a lot about the nature of friendships. I ain’t a-gonna lie, it’s been a struggle for me to just relax and believe that people’s intentions are pure, that I’m not being taken advantage of, and then when I do relax and give myself over to a friendship, there are the ever-tricky waters of cultural context to navigate. Claudia can come to me when her mother is misbehaving, but I can’t really explain to her how restless I sometimes feel, like this is my home and I want to be here more than anywhere else in the world, but that I feel the same way about a handful of other places. Her reality is clearer to me than mine is to her: I know her mother and her brothers, I’ve seen the house where she has grown up, and all of those things help her make sense. I just don’t make sense to people, because I’m here out of context. I don’t want to be the gringa who is always talking about herself, so I’ve had to wait until we have enough similar ground, ie, almost a year of friendship, to reference. Additionally, it’s an odd balance to strike between foreign ideas, and just plain old supporting a friend. There are those who say that I shouldn’t encourage Claudia to move because I don’t fully understand the culture of family life, that it’s not my place to encourage someone to change, the whole dialogue on cultural imperialism, etc. But at the end of the day this is my reality and Claudia is my friend, so, culture aside, my first responsibility is to her. I’d be interested to hear what folks’ opinions are on all of this.
Todos Santos was yesterday, All Saint’s Day. I’m not sure how they celebrate this in the States, but here it’s a day to go to the cemetery and clean up the family plot and to essentially appreciate the presence of the dead in the lives of the living. Those families who have lost a relative within the year cook that person’s favorite food and collect their favorite things and make a little shrine to them within the house. Neighborhood children come singing–caroling?–to the homes of the bereaved, and in return for their songs get goodies and cookies and biscuits, similar to Halloween. The cemetery is like a big fair, flowers and bread and cookies and mariachi and chicha and colors everywhere, quite celebratory and not at all sad. I can count on two fingers the number of times I’ve been to my grandmother’s grave, and it’s nice that people here make maintaining that connection with the dead a priority.
Work is good. It’s very rewarding to see physical changes in a space (I’m building urban gardens with some local kiddos)—it’s been a while since I’ve had a job whose results manifest themselves visually, and I like it. The mARTadero just won one of MTV’s seven prizes for Agents of Social Change in Latin America, which got us a lot of good press internationally and hopefully will attract some funding. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I’m also consulting for the Andean Information Network, an informational organization who publishes on-the-ground news updates about Bolivia about three times a month—if you want to receive them go to www.ain-bolivia.org and sign up. They’re in English, they’re concise, and they boil very complex dynamics down into a comprehensible format.
I had a few backpackers staying with me this week, an Australian woman and a guy from Holland who are friends of a friend, and it was great fun to tap back into the vagabonding twenty-something set, despite the cramped quarters. I forget how easy and open that world is. I have very few expat friends here, which was a good, conscious decision because it allows me to be entirely part of this reality, but these two were so relaxed and fun; we had a terrific time. If you all have friends bumming around South America who need a place to stay, send them my way.
My temporary residency papers are in process, finally, which is a frightening, daunting task consisting of a million fees and stamps and tramites and signatures and notarized forms, and I just keep reminding myself that it would be twenty times harder if I were a Bolivian trying to go to the States. My mom is arriving in a little over two weeks, just in time for my birthday (how cool is that), and I’m really looking foreword to seeing her and showing her around. It’s spring here, the rains are beginning, the flowers are blooming, and the sun is fierce. I’ll be home for a few weeks in December and January, so I hope I’ll see those of you who are based in the northeast.
