As those of you who are attuned to international politics have likely heard, Néstor Kirchner, the ex-president of Argentina (who is also the husband of the current president, Cristina Fernández), died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 60, at a time when he was still one of the dominant figures in Argentine politics and was expected to be a premier candidate in the 2011 presidential elections.

This email is almost exclusively about politics, so if you are uninterested, you can read no further.

I happened to hear of his death while in San Miguel de Tucumán, a city located about four hours to the south of Salta, where I had gone to see a presentation by Eduardo Galeano, of Days and Nights of Love and War and Open Veins of Latin America fame. Galeano, an Uruguayan journalist, is one of my favorite authors, who has been a strident, poetic and political analyst and storyteller about Latin America, a sort of Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Howard Zinn. He achieved his moment of greatest international fame when Hugo Chávez passed Obama a copy of Open Veins during a pan-American summit. While seeking to recreate Zinn´s project of telling a popular history “from the bottom up”, he prefers to use a vignette style laden with elements of magical realism which gives his writing a profundity that is instantly quotable.

Examples: “Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.”

and

“Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

Galeano read from his newest book of vignettes called “Mirrors” and took some questions from the audience, the majority of which were largely softballs about his writing process and personal history. The presentation took place in a totally packed historic theater and there were hordes of people outside who were listening to him speak through loudspeakers. My impression was that folks were just extraordinarily grateful to have a figure of his prominence visit a provincial city like Tucumán, far from the big cultural centers of Latin America, and just came to see him. As one might expect from his writing, Galeano is a tremendously witty old man, with the humanistic populism of his writing standing in sharp contrast against the technocratic prescriptions of those he opposes and the violence he claims they provoke. While one may disagree with parts of his economic interpretation of Latin American history, his critique of the brutality state power and the lack of value placed on the lives and the struggles of the popular classes is a moral message that can resonate with almost anyone.

After dining at, no joke, a Galeano themed boho restaurant called “El Árbol de Galeano” (he did not grace it with his presence), I spent the night in the apartment of the Fulbright scholars placed there. We were just waking up when we checked the website of La Gaceta, the local newspaper in Tucumán and were greeted with the stark headline “Murió Néstor Kirchner”.

We swiftly surfed to other news sites, and found no confirmation of this, and for some moments we considered whether this might be a bizarre prank being played by the political opposition. But, within the next ten minutes, as the web-based editors of the national dailies got on their game, the rest of the sites shared the same message. The man of the post-crisis era of Argentina was dead, and a storm of uncertainty was looming.

The day this huge news broke also happened to be national census day, when all businesses must remain closed by law and people are expected to stay in their homes and await their local census worker. Argentina attempts to undertake the Herculean task of counting its entire population in one day in a ten-year period, during which the normally busy streets of its cities became deathly silent, trod only by confused gringos and the odd policeman. It is difficult to imagine that the results of this tally are all-inclusive, and are certainly not as detailed as that collected by the US Census Bureau, but I imagine it saves a lot of costs over spreading it out over a months-long period. But, at any rate, the lack of people on the street accentuated the sense that the day was far from normal.

When I had first arrived in Argentina, my image of the Kirchners was ambivalent. I was not familiar with the content of their policies, except for the facts that the Economist really dislikes them and that they like to present themselves as a non-neoliberal government. My understanding of their government was not further advanced by my being in Salta, which is a conservative city largely hostile to their policies. However, as I read more and spoke with more people, I became more and more a fan of the Kirchners – so much so that their government, along with that of Lula da Silva in Brazil, fills me with great hope for the future potential of the Latin American continent, a place where “Change you can Believe In” actually means something else than minor reformist tinkering with the existing structures.

And how this was accomplished was truly remarkable.

Kirchner came in to the presidency in 2003 as an obscure provincial governor who had garnered 22% of the vote. He finished second in the first round to former president and neoliberal icon Carlos Menem, who decided not to continue to the second round because polls showed that he would lose. He had scarce control over his own political party, much less the national political scene, and was coming in two years after the worst economic crisis in Argentine history, which was marked by a sovereign debt default, freezing of private bank accounts, factory occupations, pervasive street protests and pickets by the unemployed, some of which were repressed with deadly force, and a rotating cast of different presidents. The dream of Argentina as a wealthy country, which pervades the nation´s history and was alive for a couple speculation-filled years in the mid-1990s, appeared to yield violently to the realization that it was “just” another Latin American country, dependent entirely on economic forces beyond its control.

But, defying the expectations held by most people, the outsider had firmly established beliefs of his own. He presided over consistent economic growth that has been well above the Latin American average, and showed a keen desire to reassert the state, instead of merely the market, as an actor in the distribution of resources. With the growing reserves acquired from a consistent trade surplus, they paid off the entirety of the country´s debt to the IMF, assuring that they would have complete policy autonomy and not have to deal with any externally-imposed conditionalities. Together with Lula, Kirchner helped kill the Bush-era Free Trade Area of the Americas plan, which would have turned all of Latin America into a huge NAFTA zone for foreign products. A consistent inflation rate was the by-product of this economic growth, but for the first time in a long time, Argentina seemed to have both stable economic growth and the continuation of democratic institutional stability. 11 million people that had fallen into poverty during the worst of the crisis were brought out of it, a quarter of the country´s population.

There were also other surprises. Kirchner got the human rights organizations on his side by becoming a forceful advocate for the “desaparecidos”, and for reopening trials into the crimes of the brutal military dictatorship, many of whose leaders had been pardoned under the Menem government. He ordered that the portraits of the coup leaders be removed from the military academies. This was a huge symbolic move that prior governments had strayed away from with the aim of promoting “reconciliation” and social peace, which for them meant the peace of the graveyards – you can beat, torture and kill thousands of people who strive for a better future, and as long as you promise not to do it anymore, forgiveness will be yours. This alone merits the government a place in history, for Argentina has the meritorious distinction of being the only Latin American country which has really put a significant number of its military rulers on trial in a democratic context.

The Kirchner couple than renationalized many privatized companies (such as the postal service and the state airline), renationalized the privatized pension system to garner more money for the state, instituted universal welfare payments for children under 18, and passed a media law that would limit the control that any single media entity could have in a given market (an attack on private media monopolies). Oh, and in the meantime, they passed legislation to make Argentina the first Latin American country to permit gay marriage.

Not bad, compared to the pace that legislation advances in the US system. Not surprisingly, a president this effective, and whose policies challenge, albeit moderately, a host of established interests is likely to garner a lot of opposition. Although the Argentine right lacks the apocalyptic tenor (and looniness) of its US counterpart, it has had roughly the same electoral strategy – bash the Kirchners for all the problems of the nation and vote against the government´s legislation, no matter if the content of the legislation is identical to what they themselves were proposing years ago.

And, in order to pass all this legislation, Néstor Kirchner did not sit down and say – “Well, I only have 22% of the vote, while I need to be the president for all Argentines. I need to invite everyone to the table so that we can have a reasoned discussion about the best way forward for the country, instead of rashly imposing my own, scarcely legitimized, political position.” This strategy only works in university seminars on constitutional democracy and Barack Obama´s mind. He conceived of his role as a militant for a cause, not as a “great uniter”, and the advancement of this cause sometimes took precedent over established institutional arrangements. He made many decisions by presidential decree instead of seeking congressional approval and was very fierce at establishing his base of power and excluding or burying potential rivals. It was “you are with us or you are against us”, which is the classic populist formulation.

While this model is quite unsavory when it is used to justify the invasion of Middle Eastern countries, it works pretty well for effecting social change. Public opinion after the 2001 crisis was extremely nebulous in terms of policy prescriptions – the people wanted change, and they were glad to elect an unknown outsider to bring it (not unlike the situation in post-crisis US circa 2008). Instead of yielding to existing public opinion, the Kirchners pushed forward with an ambitious program that would be judged upon its merits after its implementation, and secured the allegiance of a good number of previously-apathetic youth with its human rights policies.

As with any government, there was also a dark side. Although they paled in comparison to the institutionalized corruption of the Menem period, there were incidents of the “government minister found with briefcase of US dollars coming from Venezuela” variety. It is also said that the Kirchners´ personal net worth had skyrocketed during their presidency, most of it coming from shady land deals with the local government in their home province in Patagonia. The evidence is also pretty strong that they instructed the national statistics agency to issue unrealistically low inflation estimates. People close to the government have done well, and certain businesses openly hostile in the government have been treated unfairly. Finally, they lost a lot of popularity in an ultimately failed attempt to increase taxes on large-scale export agriculture, which resulted in nationwide producers´ strikes.

But compared to the changes they have instituted, these are trivialities. The Kirchners have always been accused of being confrontational, aggressive, and divisive, and this is true. When you have political forces that are dedicated to protecting the interests of the same elite that benefited from a crisis that devasted your country, you have to attack them, methodically and ruthlessly. For politics is not merely a game of differing opinions, but of opposing interests. If you want to push forward a project that will benefit some sectors of the population, you will step on the toes of other sectors with a lot of power, both in terms of money and media exposure. Good for them for being aggressive, for attacking, for not seeking an ideologically vapid compromise, and for being sufficiently firm in their ideological principles to put into practice what they wanted to see happen. Good for them for being militants, for striving to generate the popular base for their politics that did not exist before, and for reinjecting the war of ideas into a politics that before (as in, say, Mexico) had served primarily for the enrichment of its participants.

And, now, we move to the great Nobel-Prize-winning “there is no red state America, there is no blue state America, there is only the United States of America” reformer-president, whose party is set to lose vast quantities of Congressional seats to a right-wing opposition whose representatives´ characteristics range from an irrational free-market fundamentalism nonexistent anywhere else on the planet to clinical lunacy. Because Barack, he believed that with His Charisma, His Popularity and His Innovative, Practical Policy Solutions, he would be able to get the Republicans to the table, negotiating a decent economic policy, health-care overhaul, financial system reform and, why not, get climate and immigration policy in line.

I hoped that this was some sort of clever ruse that he was just mouthing in order to get elected as a “uniter” that he would discard upon becoming president, due to the evident reality that the nations´ problems required stronger medicine, but it turned out that he was honest. He actually set upon the task of gutting his policy proposals in a vain attempt to convince “moderates” to vote for them, and ended up allowing the opposition to set the boundaries on fiscal policy, preventing a stimulus package of greater size, passing health-care reform without the public option and a tepid financial reform. He still hasn´t closed Guantánamo, despite signing the order to do so on his first day as President, and it seems clear that the nation´s undocumented immigrants still face a long road ahead to recognition.

Of course, had he said – “I was elected with a vast majority of the popular vote, and health care is a key priority for all Americans. We will pass the entire package by budget reconciliation if you don´t get on board immediately” he probably would have been painted as an anti-American confrontational authoritarian socialist. In other words, he would have been presented exactly the same as he is currently, except we would have a national option in our health care system. It is not clear that he would have succeeded beyond initial legislation, and it´s probable that the fact-free Tea Party mobilizations would have occurred just the same. But he would have shown himself to be strong and decisive, kept his base rallied and excited, and, in the best of all worlds, attracted people to him through strong leadership. And he wouldn´t have allowed what is considered to be center-right politics in Europe to be defined as “extreme leftism” in the United States.

But unlike 22% Kirchner, 53% (or whatever it was) Obama is not a militant. He gives the opposition (read: business interests) a chance to get on board with his political project. When they reward him with months of concerted misinformation, he invites them to a summit to seek out mutual understanding. And the country slouches towards the future, with a dysfunctional political system, leaving none of its largest questions resolved.

So this is a long shout-out to you, Néstor. Because of you, Argentina is starting out on the right path, has started to deal with its bloody past, has started to march together with its neighbors in the construction of a Latin America that is not just the back door of the First World, but a developing regional power. The thousands of Argentines that travelled from all over the country to pay their respects by your coffin have shown you their gratitutde for this, but it is also yet another “teachable moment” for the rest of the world from the emerging powers of Latin America, the only region that has not shifted to the right after the global economic process – that there is another way to economic growth except fiscal austerity, balancing the budget on the backs of the workers and shredding through decades of gains earned through social struggle.

The mourning in Salta, backwater that it is, has been quite limited, despite a somewhat sizeable demonstration in the main plaza the day of his passing and a sign put up in his honor there. Many (arguably most) of my students, regretably, do not have any conception of their own history which is so fascinating to me. This is not a peculiarly Argentine phenomenon (just look at the miserable level of history knowledge that some students have in the USA), but it is a major stumbling block in making informed decisions for their future. Certain teachers in the Profesorado actually give them some basic lessons about different periods in Argentine history, which is admirable, but is also perhaps too little, too late to influence their overall perceptions, saturated by a media hostile to progressive projects.

And my final thought is that the point of all this is not that Kirchner was a uniquely amazing figure and all should bow down to him. When he became president he was not known for being particularly progressive in his own province, had accompanied the neoliberal reforms in the 1990s without much fuss, and was elected primarily for being a blank slate. He did not run as Che Guevara. He just knew how to take advantage of the political opportunties that were presented him to reform a country in desperate need of it, and turn it into a more equitable place with more opportunities for its citizens, instead of a casino for foreign investors. Someone else could have done it, for the opportunity was there. But someone else didn´t do it. It was Néstor.

As a final note, as you can tell, this is precisely the reason why I enjoy living in Argentina and in Latin America in general. Here, as in Bolivia, ideology matters. Ideas matter. And, finally, after a veritably biblical history of suffering, the arrogance of power, constant setbacks and the seeming implacability of the global order, there is a constellation of forces moving the right way, together. It is a fragile project that could easily be destroyed by an unfavorable election or two in some key countries, but if it succeeds, it will have importance on a global scale. And it is nice to live in lands of hope and change and creativity, as for a few days in 2008 we believed we might have the privilege of inhabiting, then those of a bitter empire in decline. Even if in your heart, you believe that ultimately your responsibility is to return and work to help the inevitable victims of its spasms.

Some time in the eighteenth (or the seventeenth, or the sixteenth, depending on the source) century,  a young shepherd girl tending her flock in the Bolivian town of Quillacollo, located on the outskirts of the city of Cochabamba, saw a beautiful woman with a child in her arms in the mountains. The girl was able to speak to the woman in Quechua, the indigenous language of the descendants of the Incan empire in Bolivia, and they met for several days to speak. When she told her parents of this strange apparition, they did not believe her, and had to go see for themselves. When they arrived, they saw her up in the mountain, and exclaimed “Orkh’opiña!”, which in Quechua roughly translates to “she´s already up in the mountain.” A legend and a tradition was born.

Like many popular apparitions of the Virgin, the Virgin of Urkupiña serves to redeem an image of popular Christianity purified of its colonialist manifestations in the church hierarchy. For the Virgin Mary herself decided to appear and speak directly with the people, with a humble shepherd girl, and in their own language, not in that of the colonizer! As such, in addition to being a celebration of Mary and Catholic belief, it is also a celebration of Andean indigenous pride, and is characterized by traditions that have little in common with traditional European Christianity. The largest celebration is, of course, in Quillacollo itself, with multitudinous parades and dances attended by tens of thousands of pilgrims, but alternate celebrations are conducted all over the Andean region, including in Salta.

Last week, Cristian, one of my students at the Profesorado, invited me to come and participate in the celebration of the Virgin of Urkupiña that his friends´ family was putting together. Given my propensity for spectacle and the neverending attraction of the New, I readily agreed, and went over to his neighborhood, San Benito, on Friday evening.

San Benito can be said to be a poor person´s neighborhood. It is very far from the center of Salta(a 30-40 minute bus ride, on the other side of the city´s iconic mountain) and consists largely of dirt roads and self-constructed homes. Many people are migrants from the surrounding areas, including Cristian´s friends who hail from a town called San Antonio de los Cobres, where I had been before to see a ceremony of offerings to the Pachamama. It is an entirely different world from the center of Salta, which I find to be even more spatially isolated from poverty than most downtowns (but not suburbs) are in the United States. As most neighborhoods of the working classes in Latin America tend to be, it has a pretty vibrant street life, with children playing soccer on makeshift fields, riding bikes in the streets, etcetera. The one “modern” looking building I saw was a Mormon church, instantly identifiable by its distinctive architecture that would not be out of place in old Salt Lake.

We went to the house of his friend and found a large gathering of people outside the room where the icons of the virgins were kept (there was one main one that was quite large and then a variety of smaller representations). The room was beautifully decorated with several ceremonial arches draped in cloth of the colors of the Bolivian flag, fake money (pesos, dollars, and euros) and images of the virgin, some nice Bolivian cloth, and a whole lot of flowers. They were preparing to take the Virgin out for the nighttime procession around the neighborhood, on the eve of the main party which was to take place the following day.

As I made smalltalk with some of the younger participants in the festivity, a car pulled up. “That’s the slave of the Virgin,” Cristian told me. I laughed and asked if they called him that because he had to do a lot to prepare for the celebration, and I was told that, in all seriousness, the lead organizer of each year’s celebration (along with his family) is called the “slave”. All of the events are organized by an elaborate network of up to 100 “padrinos” and “madrinas” (godfathers and godmothers), who are selected immediately after the festivities end the year before and who are responsible for different parts of the ceremony (some for the food, some for the drinks, the gifts, the music, etc). For people that come from very humble economic backgrounds, this is a tremendous expense and requires saving for the entire year to be possible. More on this later.

Eventually, the procession, led by children bearing three flags – that of Argentina, Bolivia, and the Vatican – touched off. It was a solemn affair, with people praying or singing softly, although it was punctuated by the explosions of firecrackers and noisemakers around the route. When we returned to the house, there was a fireworks display which was fairly impressive given the circumstances, and the virgins were put on a table in front of the house.

At this point, all of the participants had the opportunity to ask the Virgin for a request for the upcoming year, whether it be health, financial success, or what have you. We did this by covering the Virgin with smoke. We were given a container which had hot coals inside, and an assistant sprinkled incense on the container as we gently passed it by the altar.

After this concluded, the Virgins were once again carried inside, and it was time for the ceremonial alcohol offering. As I mentioned in the prior email, the Virgin of Urkupiña is known as “the Virgin that gives you the most to drink”, and this would be just the beginning of her love of the sauce that I would witness in the coming hours. The task at hand was to drink three different types of alcohol – mint liquor, whiskey, and egg liquor. However, you had to do it in a specific order, first offering each one to the virgin, then (with the whiskey and the mint) spilling a little bit in a clay pot and flipping the glass after drinking it. The egg you are supposed to neither spill nor flip. If you mess up, you have to pay the “penalty”, which is having to repeat the ceremony again with more alcohol. In fact, that is always the penalty in all of the parts of the celebration – if you do something badly, you have to drink more. We completed the ceremony and then went home, having to wake up on time for the introductory mass which would begin at 9 am the following day.

The mass itself did not differ strongly from a typical Catholic mass, except that the songs were especially geared towards the adoration of the Virgin, and lasted only about an hour. However, as we exited the church, the real celebration began. The worshippers were greeted with a marching band from Potosí, a variety of indigenous dance troupes interpreting the frenetic Andean dances that are part of the Bolivian Carnaval in Oruro. This included the “battle-dance”Tinku, in which brightly dressed male dancers leap through the air  in an imitation of basically a city-wide fight which is supposed to ensure that is supposed to channel conflict between different forces in the community and ensure balance, the Caporales, which featured women in brightly sequined purple dresses and miniskirts twisting to and fro as their male counterparts in similarly opulent costume stare out behind bearded masks, made to seem like the cruel slavedrivers of the mines in the colonial era, and the Saya, in which older women in bowler hats move down the street, filling the streets with the twisting of their flowing orange dresses. This of course was followed with the procession of the statuettes of the virgins on the shoulders of the main participants of the celebration. The procession was also followed by a variety of cars and motorcycles decked out in purple cloth  (leaving only the driver´s portion of the front window open so that it is possible to see), with a host of different objects affixed to the front hood and the roof – anything from teddy bears to stuffed llamas to plates and other silverwa hre – with the goal of making them as bright, gaudy, ostentatious, and, for lack of a better word, shiny, as possible. Inexplicably, a group of Mexican-style mariachis also accompanied us, though I know not how these wayward troubadors found their way into these parts.

We processed from the church across Avenida Independencia into what is popularly known as “the Bajo”, a poor district in the southern zone of the city known for drug-dealing, prostitution, and petty theft. A significant difference in my life in Latin America from that of the United States is that here, I have very little experience of venturing into poor or either working-class neighborhoods. Thanks to the purchasing power of the almighty dollar, it is altogether feasible to rent a room in a central, safe, middle-class neighborhood for under 200$ a month rent. Due to the spatial segregation of poverty that I mentioned before, this means that unless I am invited specifically by one of my students or have some specific purpose for trekking out into the barrios, I have no chance of visiting such a neighborhood in my day-to-day life – whereas in the US, the fact that I am not rolling in wealth and that poor and working-class neighborhoods are interspersed quite close to the urban core place me in the role of a gentrifying presence in said communities.

So, accompanied by legions of dancers and prancers, it was interesting to walk for a good one-and-a-half to two hours through the “other” Salta. For the most part, I did not see signs of horrible decay and poverty – just humble, perhaps self-constructed houses coupled with vibrant local kiosk-type businesses and active street life, much like San Benito. However, as we rounded the curve to head to the party hall where the procession would end, I saw on the right side of the avenue a veritable shantytown – people living in makeshift constructions of plastic sheets and strip metal. It was small, and dwarfed by the size of the more-established working class zones around it, but it was surely an area of total material deprivation that should not exist in the supposedly “wealthy” city of Salta in one of the more developed countries in Latin America, and that does, nonetheless, exist in nearly every one of the cities of this country, most prominently in the place that agglomerates the most wealth, Buenos Aires.

At any rate, upon arriving to the party hall, Susy and I were placed into a position of unexpected authority – we were to hold the ceremonial arches, wrapped in tissue paper, Bolivian flags and signs of the Virgin, through which the autos and motorcycles would pass to be blessed, or “ch´allado”. Each auto was to drive through the arch which we would lift over the vehicle, after which it would be doused liberally with three one-liter bottles of beer, coca leaves, and confetti. The confetti would also be dumped on our heads throughout the ceremony, and we would “toast” the  owners with a beer at various points during the ceremony, making sure to pour some out for the Pachamama first. At first, I erroneously believed that we were expected to drink a glass of beer for every auto (almost twenty) that passed, which would surely lead to brief moments of bliss and glory but rapidly deteriorate into a dystopian scene from the Dead Kennedys´ great work of poetry “Too Drunk to Fuck” (key lines for scholarly reference: I had sixteen beers and I started up a fight, But now I am jaded, You’re out of luck. I’m rolling down the stairs, Too drunk to fuck).

Thankfully this was not the case, and we merely had an invigorating three or so glasses without diving into excess. We then got to participate in the “madrina and padrino” only procession inside of the party room, where around four hundred people applauded our well-honed arch-carrying skills.

At this point, it was probably around noon, and after some performances (regretably involving the misplaced mariachis, once again), it was time for the eats. Given that I was a gringo freeloader, Susy and I helped serve food, darting between the ladies of the miniskirt in attempts to deliver the chicken-and-potatoes unharmed to its intended recipients.

To set the scene again – these were mostly poor people that had been able to organize a party with four different dance troupes, unlimited wine and beer, food for 400 people, fireworks, prizes and various handouts, a huge sound-system, sumptuous decorations for the virgins, amongst a host of other things that I probably cannot imagine that went into the planning of the event. The neoliberals (or the stiff-upper lipped Protestants, which may be the same thing) among us would say – this is another irrationality of the masses. If only they would put their meager resources into the slow-and-steady construction of viable microenterprises, they could one day too achieve the dream of driving around in a station wagon in a monotonous suburban landscape.

To understand this, we must go to Georges Bataille, and by Georges Bataille, I of course mean the Wikipedia article on Georges Bataille (far be it from me to read dense works of avant-garde philosophy, harumph!). L´oncle Georges says that

the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system.

Furthermore,

an organism in Bataille’s general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an “excess” of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism’s growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism’s growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is “luxury”. The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. “The accursed share” refers to this excess, destined for waste.

Like most of what Georges Bataille writes (see, “Story of the Eye”) this is likely bullshit, given that these people´s lives are dominated by relative scarcity, and one could think of many “productive” uses of their capital that would not be characterized by warmongering, gang-banging and child sacrifice. However, the role that the celebration plays in creating and sustaining a sense of community solidarity is indisputable. An entire year of saving and planning goes into the execution of the event, which is preceded by almost a week of solemn ceremonies to prepare for the more lighthearted crunk-a-thon that is the actual party. Where these social ties non-existent or weaker, not only would these people´s lives be less texturally rich (or what we call “happy”), but all of the social problems of poverty would be compounded by those of social disintegration. Perhaps it is the Virgin, and by the Virgin, I mean the community, that keeps these poor neighborhoods functional, and not the rivers of blood that characterize other slums.

To continue, because of our noble efforts in arch-carrying and food-serving, we were allowed a part in the madrina-padrino only dance celebrations. Straw hats were plopped upon our heads and four different buttons and ribbons were pinned upon our breasts. The first act was to drink a beer, lock elbows with about 5 or 6 other people, and run back and forth. Easy. The second was to dance the “Cueca”, which can only be described as the “handkerchief dance”.  You place one hand behind your back, and hold a handkerchief in the other hand, which you flit around in a dramatic fashion as you twirl around your partner. In theory, I think the dance has origins in the olden times when you were not allowed to lay hands upon your damsel without prior authorization from the Holy Father, so you thought of elaborate ways to seduce her by waving a handkerchief. Surprisingly, if you are a swarthy gaucho dancer, it is actually possible to make this dance be quite sensual and appealing. Since I am neither swarthy nor a gaucho nor a dancer, my performance was more ridiculous than sexy, but thankfully those surrounding me were only swarthy and lacked the two other crucial attributes, so I only stood out by being half a foot taller than everyone and blue-eyed, not for outrageous feats of incompetence. Lubricated by the fact that we were required to drink beer between each song, it was actually fun.

The tomfoolery continued with the next dance, which involved, already in a tipsy state, to run around in a large circle with a piece of cake in your hand. The direction in which people were running in the circle would change abruptly, and if in the ensuing bumping you dropped your cake, the music would stop and you would have to drink a beer “seco”, which means without stopping until it is finished. When this occurred, the entire audience would chant “seco seco seco!” until the feat was performed.  It was actually quite easy to not drop the cake, so por suerte I did not have to face this public mockery.

Let me just say that we stayed until about 9 PM, about which time both I and the majority of the participants were pretty Christed. I was to go out with Susy later to some high-falutin lawyer function, but despite a shower and numerous bouts of teeth-brushing I was unable to get the smell of cheap beer and coca leaves off my person, although I was able to remove all of the confetti from my hair. It was a blast.

In my prior musings of the Russian German Mennonites of Northern Paraguay, I mentioned that there was a forthcoming email regarding my brief, but eventful time in Ciudad del Este. After getting back into the rhythm of Salta life, I reneged on this promise, but will now attempt to reconstruct my time there.

For those of you that don´t know, Ciudad del Este has a mythical space in the imaginary of South Americans as a place where you get stabbed/forced to smuggle cocaine or baby organs immediately upon entry. (Several Argentines told me obviously exaggerated tales that you can hire a Paraguayan assassin there for like 20 dollars).  It is a rapidly growing border town on the “Triple Border” between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, which grew from a small settlement named for Alfredo Stroessner, the former dictator of Paraguay, to a city of over 300,000 people. The city lives off of its proximity to a vast market of potential shoppers in far wealthier Brazil, and the seemingly complete lack of regulation/concern for international intellectual property norms in Paraguay.

In addition to generally being a complete shitshow, Ciudad del Este is interesting for its Third-World cosmopolitanism. A variety of largely Asian immigrant groups have made their home in CDE and its Brazilian sister-city Foz do Iguacu to find wealth in its unrestrained commerce, selling anything and everything, but mostly electronics. There are streets dominated by Chinese and Korean entrepreneurs which vaguely represent some parts of New York’s Chinatown along with several quality Chinese restaurants that top anything that can be found in the Argentine provinces. Many of the larger shopping malls are owned by Arab immigrants of Syrian and Lebanese extraction, and I saw at least one major mosque in the downtown area.

It is because of these Arab immigrants that Ciudad del Este is known in the Global North, because the city has been accused of being a major center of money laundering for Hezbollah. There are loads of banks that only operate in Ciudad del Este, and I obviously have no way of knowing what nefarious dealings happen in their bowels. I don’t know if these claims are only real in the feverish minds of our warpath neocons and their Mossad handlers, but they could very well be true. You don’t need to smuggle cocaine or babies or sex slaves in order to make it big in Ciudad del Este; most of the Arab-owned businesses are respectable malls that sell TVs and clothing and surely generate a tidy profit that could be invested abroad. The Argentine government also suspects that the 1990s bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was planned in Ciudad del Este.

At any rate, my friend RJ and I, with chipper attitudes and a commitment to attempt to get robbed at any cost, ventured into the heart of Ciudad del Este to discover its secrets. The first night, I arrived late on a bus from Asunción, and we went to a hotel with a decidedly non-Ciudad del Este name – “Mi Abuela”. There were no armed gunmen or prostitutes at the door, so we had an uneventful evening.

In the morning, we ventured to mingle with the masses. The downtown district of Ciudad del Este is actually quite small, a grid maybe of five streets that are jam-packed with vendors and shopping complexes up to the international bridge to Brazil. Armed guards are ubiquitous, patrolling not only the entrances of banks (which can be seen in other parts of Paraguay and Bolivia) but malls and jewelry stores with automatic weapons. The language of commerce is more often Portuguese than Spanish, because of the mainly Brazilian customers, but anything from Chinese to Arabic to Guaraní (the indigenous language in which almost all Paraguayans conduct informal dialogue) can be heard on the streets. It is sort of like that bar in Star Wars, the Mos Eisley Cantina, where all of the bounty hunters and questionable characters circulate. (http://www.starwars.com/databank/location/moseisleycantina/index.html, for the unlettered)

The masses of humanity that begin circulating through the streets start get there about 8 or 9 AM. In addition to established vendors with stalls, there are also itinerants who aggressively try to peddle just about everything from socks to marijuana to digital cameras. (For some reason, I was offered to purchase Taiwanese pen drives probably between eighty and one hundred times in a span of several hours. There must have been a massive shipment that came in.) And, unlike its similarly multitudinous Bolivian market cousins, you can actually buy guns on the street, although to be fair, most of the weapons I saw seemed to be more of the hunting rifle than the AK-47 variety.

It´s a shame that we did not take any pictures, because RJ and I decided that being one of the only gringos in town, it was probably unwise to start snapping photos of the nice arms dealer man. We decided that a worthy mission for the day was to find a place to smoke some authentic Arabic hookah. We had seen some being sold in various stores, but were unable to find a place where you could actually sit down and smoke, so we went to the official Ciudad del Este tourist office by the bridge.

The staff of the tourist office were two young, and incredibly bored Paraguayans that were delighted to see us. They asked us where we were from, and after we informed them that we were Yanquis, the male member of the duo pretended to take out an automatic weapon from under the desk and shoot at us. Such friendly informality was surprising, because it was directly adjacent to the official Paraguayan customs checkpoint, which, despite the fact that there were hundreds of people crossing the border with huge black bags on their backs, mysteriously had very little business. We talked to them for about 30 minutes about life in the United States, when our would-be assassin explained that he had lived in the US before, and pulled out his Social Security card. We left in high-spirits, with directions to an Arabic-owned mall that could satisfy our shisha habit.

Upon arrival, we discovered that the mall did not in fact have hookah-smoking facilities. Ciudad del Este malls vary widely in character, from super-luxury malls that would not be out of place in New York, to dark, ramshackle buildings with ladder-like staircases connecting the floors and 10-year old children offering to serve as your guides. This was one of the latter, and we were suitably convinced that we were in the wrong place when all we found was men frenetically opening boxes of merchandise. We did, however, receive directions to another mall, where we were to have better luck.

After climbing to the third floor of this mall, we found what we were looking for – a nook located between a wooden panel with several plastic chairs and hookahs for rent. The décor was, mysteriously, a mix of tapestries with Arabic writing, and several scenes of pastoral beauty that appeared to be set in Switzerland. At any rate, we puffed along happily, until we were joined by two young guys speaking to each other in Arabic.

The younger one, having moved to the area from Lebanon several years prior, only spoke Portuguese and Arabic, but the older fellow was a veritable internationalist, speaking English, Spanish, Portuguese, Guaraní and Arabic, and coming from mixed Paraguayan-Syrian extraction. The inevitable “where are you from?” question was among the first to be broached, and when we responded with “the United States” the younger one made some sort of comments about how he would like to kill Israelis.

The older one told him to cut out this youthful tomfoolery, and we actually had quite a fruitful conversation. He had been — basically everywhere. The United States, many countries in Europe, Syria, even in the Zionist entity itself. He said that many Arabic people in CDE did indeed support Hezbollah, at least rhetorically. The younger fellow had lived through the last war in Lebanon, so his hatred of Israel was quite understandable. The older one said that everywhere, people are “normal” – in Israel and in the United States he found plenty of people that were respectful towards Muslims – but that their governments did not share their predilections.

They did not live in Ciudad del Este, but they commuted daily from Foz do Iguacu to sell electronics and hookahs, respectively.  They said that Ciudad del Este was more or less fine by day, but became extremely dangerous during the night. Between 5 and 6 PM, all of the hustle and bustle of the day abruptly comes to an end and the streets become completely deserted, shuttered shadows of their daytime selves. It is not a normal place to live – although there is money to be made, it is also, for them, a sort of Hell.

At the end of the day, we made great leaps in cross-cultural understanding in the best time-tested way – comparing the relative physical beauty of different nationalities of women. We got along so well that they invited us to an Arabic dance party in CDE several days later. While this would have most likely been a tremendous experience, we were not to be around at that time, and also, the late night Arabic party scene in CDE might be a little bit too fuerte for my disposition.

CDE is, without a doubt, not a normal place. It can be fun to visit for a time, but its lawlessness and single-minded emphasis on commerce would make it impossible to fathom spending much time there. It is a stereotype of a certain type of Latin America that those who have never been south of Texas sometimes have of cities here – a carnival of fake goods, teeming crowds, rampant illegality, and orgies of violence. Many cities in the developing world do, in fact, have some sort of district that is a mini-CDE, but rarely is an entire place characterized by such an environment. It is, necessarily, a bad scene.

In my next email, I will tell you about the wonderfully extravagant celebration of the Andean Virgin of Urkupiña, which, while having its origins right outside of Cochabamba in the town of Quillacollo, is also celebrated by the population that has deeper Andean roots in Salta and northern Argentina in general. The Virgin of Urkupiña is known as “the Virgin that gives you the most to drink”, and I will tell you that she did not disappoint in my case.

As I boarded the bus in Santa Cruz, accommodating my stuff for the sure-to-be excruciating, mostly unpaved 24 hour journey through the vast alluvial lowland known as the Chaco rumbo a Asunción, I politely greeted the Bolivians and the Mennonites that were sitting across the bus aisle from me. For those unaware, Eastern Bolivia and Northern Paraguay have agricultural communities (known as colonias) of Mennonites, a religious group with very conservative, bordering on fundamentalist beliefs with origins in Germany. They speak Plattsdeutsch, which is a dialect of German distinct from the standard, and generally keep to themselves. As I was waiting for my Paraguayan visa in Santa Cruz, a family of them was in front of me in line, with all the women wearing Amish-looking dresses and all the men in identical matching overalls. The spitting image of the European peasantry from several hundred years ago.

This Mennonite family was unusually jolly however. There was something peculiar about their appearance. The headscarves that the two elderly ladies were wearing were unusually colorful, and the man was not dressed in the standard overall getup. Hablas Deutsch?, he leaned over and asked me. (I have been mistaken for French and German regularly, and impressively, for an Argentine on numerous occasions.)

While I replied to this particular question in the negative, I realized that he asked me this in a thick RUSSIAN accent. This man is a Soviet, I says to myself! A rare find in these parts. So I venture and ask him if he speaks Russian, and the suspicions are, in fact, confirmed.

After making amiable conversation in my native tongue with my three fellow-travellers, I find that they are Russian Germans that speak both Russian and German, and lived in Russia until 20 years ago, when they moved to Germany, before moving to Paraguay about 4 years ago. Two of their (ten) sons live in Eastern Bolivia, and they were visiting them and were now returning home.

Eventually, an idea starts forming in my head. Wouldn´t it be a fantastic experience to spend the night with these people, to get a totally interesting cultural experience? I ask them if I can stay the night, and they say yes, absolutely. Then, in the disorder that Bolivian busses usually entail, I am forced to move to a different seat in the back of the bus.

Late in the cold Chaco night, as I am covering myself with all the clothing that I have, the bus driver makes an ill-advised decision to drive into what was literally a bog of mud, and the bus gets stuck. P´ucha che, I think to myself. It´ll be half an hour before we get out of this. I was terrible wrong. It was about SIX or SEVEN hours.

First the non-frail Bolivian men were conscripted into going into the mud and attempting to push the bus, and when this proved to be impractical, the drivers made a fire by the side of the road and decided to wait till daybreak. Efforts to extract the vehicle resumed in earnest with the rising sun, but all the king´s horses and all the king´s men pulling on a makeshift rope were unable to defeat the Bog. Eventually, a different bus stopped to gaze upon our predicament with benevolent bemusement, and offered to take us as far as the Bolivian-Paraguayan border, where we could at least wait the border post.

The border post turned out to be a shack where several playful dogs were chasing around piglets as a woman offered to change Bolivian currency into the (hyperinflated, 5,000 to 1 dollar) Paraguayan Guaraní, and one bored immigration official sat. Needless to say, I had plenty of time to chat with my new Mennonite compañeros.

I learned from them that they attempted to live as closely to the Biblical way of life as was possible without falling into what they believed were to be some extremes of more traditional Mennonites such as the rejection of new technologies or the imposition of certain particular forms of dress. However, they believed that the modern secular world was conspiring to make it seem that what is bad is moral and what is good is immoral, and take God out of man´s life, with homosexuality, premarital sex, corruption of children by mandatory sexual education, etcetera etcetera. They also believed that evolution was a hoax, that there was a great coming catastrophe imminent, and that the Antichrist will come and implant microchips in our hands. Oh, and they had 42 grandchildren.

Remembering the great informational documentary Borat, I decided this was not the opportune time to inform them that I was an atheist half-Jew, preferring to impersonate a Quaker, who after all share the Mennonites´ pacifism if not their militant insanity. I did manage a spirited (although in somewhat broken Russian, as is unfortunately my wont) of the joys of premarital sex, to which old Walter (his name) counterposed an example of some 50 year-old Greek that he knew with syphilis.

Eventually, through the heroic work of the Bolivian transportation industry, the bus was brought to migration and we were able to board once more, and we rolled onward towards our destination, which was the improbably named Paraguayan provincial capital of FILADELFIA. (This was a source of mirth on both my part and that of my brethren.)

Upon arrival, I was greeted by one of their daughters in her Puritan dress and her husband, the delightfully bearded Andreas. She spoke to me in the pidgin Russian that she knew (having been raised in Germany) and he in a stumbling but entirely comprehensible Spanish. I believe the first phrase was something like Wilkom a Paraguay! If my memory serves.

We entered the home and after a healthy dose of prayer to the Lord, I was served some delicious homemade Mennonite bread with freshly whipped butter and I listened to quite a bit of incomprehensible German. Then we started talking about Pennsylvania, and they were all actually familiar with the Amish, the existence of Pennsylvania Dutch, and “my” Philadelphia. They then pulled out their laptop and showed me a somewhat fascinating, somewhat disturbing PowerPoint slideshow featuring all 42 of their grandchildren with their names coming up every so often, supposedly so that the 80-something grandmother could remember all of their names, with some sort of saccharine German Christian spirituals in the background. I was informed that the following day, I would have the chance to meet some of these 42 lucky young souls.

After passing the night, I awoke to find that the family patriarch Walter had gone to his job as a handyman at the local community hospital, and that their daughter and 5 of their extremely blonde grandchildren were awaiting my illustrious presence. I, as is well known, am not good with children, particularly Aryan youth that speak only obscure German dialects, so I smiled ambiguously at them and took some pictures.

Later, Andreas took me out to the “downtown” of the colony Neuland, which features a supermarket, a bank, a hospital, and a variety of stores selling tractor parts. Notable is the presence of decisively non-Germanic Guaraní, who apparently have migrated to take advantage of the Mennonite economic activity in the Chaco and are frequently contracted as day laborers. I made a point of asking the family what they thought of and what their relations were with the indigenous populations in the area. They said that the Guaraní there were migrants coming from other parts of Paraguay in search of work, so that they were not truly indigenous to the Chaco (which may or may not be true), and live off of the Mennonite presence. They do not seem to openly racist towards them, but have a certain soft paternalist attitude that it is their Christian duty to help out fellow human beings that do not seem to be able to help themselves progress economically, and even built a small house in their yard to house their laborers when they are needed for longer projects. They did not like the communalist nature of indigenous society, where they said any money or belongings that are owned by workers are shared by the community, which makes it difficult for any one worker to become independent by the fruit of his labor. Apparently, also, some of the workers have learned German so that they are able to communicate with the community.

During the time I spent with them, I was able to touch on a great variety of themes. The Mennonites, and Russian Germans in general, were persecuted in the Soviet Union for a variety of reasons – first for their religion and then subsequently for their ethnicity in the wake of the Second World War. Walter said that the entire country was a prison, and it was difficult to find a person who had not done some time in the community (he had himself served two years). They also suffered from the collectivization policies, that limited each peasant family to the ownership of one cow (they now have a healthy herd in Paraguay). I do not doubt that their persecution in the USSR was real, and that it can only have intensified their faith in the face of a “godless” government.

Furthermore, eventually I unveiled my partially Jewish heritage, and they were surprisingly accepting of it, viewing the Jews as a fellow-suffering religious minority more than Christ-killing heathens. The grandmother said that whenever religious persecution would start in Russia, it would begin with the Jews and then head to various non-Orthodox Christian groups. Walter mentioned that he had actually been to Israel, although I imagine this was to perform some sort of ablutions that would hasten the establishing of Jewish rule over the Palestinians so that Jesus comes back and ends this world of suffering and sin.

All in all, they were fundamentalists, and their views were quite definitely crazy from my perspective. Unlike US-based fundamentalists, however, they were not hypocritical – they did not talk of the Bible and then go around driving Hummers in the Dallas suburbs. They lived a simple life in an agricultural community in the middle of fucking Paraguay. They withdrew from the corruption and, fundamentally, from the increasing complexity of modernity into a retrograde utopia that was consistent with their ideals of right and wrong that were inscribed into their psyches as immovable, scripturally determined moral absolutes. (Indeed, if all fundamentalists made a communal decision to do so and stop participating in politics, the world and the US political system would be a much, much better place!)

And for me, this is what fundamentalism is – an ideology that, by reference to an external and unquestionable source, gives you an absolute code of right and wrong, of sacred and profane, of permitted and forbidden. If women are meant to wear bonnets, churn butter, and pop out the light-haired brood for later demonstration on eerie PowerPoints, life is quite simple. And innocent. You don´t have to worry about college exams, or drug abuse, or getting mugged, or anything. The path is chosen, and you just have to follow it.

And the path can be followed with love – contrary to their cultural depictions, these people were anything but stoic. The dinner table was full of everyone talking and laughing, everyone (but me, the eternal grump) played very jovially with the children, etc.

But because God is right, and you follow God, you are right. There can be no true argument with fundamentalists, because they occupy a realm of black and white, of sin and virtue, of right and wrong. This is not a premodern mentality exactly – rather, it is a reaction to modernity, and is the same we see as a reaction to the 60s movements in the United States as in the reaction to Western cultural influences in the Middle East. Whenever the hitherto straight and narrow path of cultural reproduction develops new and perhaps disturbing side-alleys dug out with the hands of people struggling for something different that promises liberation, those who are disquieted by the loss of the straight and narrow cling ever more tightly and invent new and more extreme forms of veneration of the old idols.

Anyway, I will bid you adieu for now, except to preview that there will be another long email coming in several days about my experiences in Ciudad del Este. Preview – the title will be “Smoking Hookah with Hezbollah”.

I´m currently in Puerto Iguazú, and just saw Iguazú Falls with my parents and my sister and her new fiancé today as we begin our journey back to Salta. It was greatly beautiful, but I could not conceive of more atrocious travel companions.

In brief summary, my time in Bolivia was great, if perhaps excessively relaxing (a vacation from my extended Argentine vacation). I stayed with my homestay family from two years ago, who welcomed me with open arms. Their gardening business is going well and bringing in more stable profits than it was when they had just begun, and their eldest son Bruno was doing very well in his second year studying Civil Engineering at the local university, and I was impressed by his seriousness and his intellectual curiosity, both of which he seems to have acquired after leaving the rather frivolous environment of his upper-middle-class Catholic high school.

I visited my SIT program director/filmmaker Ismael and his wife Lupe several times. I think when I was originally in Bolivia, I presented Ismael as a sort of picturesque lunatic, with his flowing beard, entirely tattooed body, crazed eyes, Taoist philosophy and penchant for swordsmanship and the bass guitar. And, indeed, he is a picturesque lunatic, but he is also much more, and it was good to be able to talk to him more about his life experiences.

Some background to the unversed: Ismael and Lupe live in the upper-middle-class Cochabamba neighborhood of Cala Cala, immediately behind the Electoral Court. However, when one opens the gate to their yard, one realizes that the house is in fact a Oriental-style pagoda, replete with bell tower and tai chi dojo. For unknown, but surely spiritually significant reasons, there are literally hundreds of statuettes of toads arranged around the entrance to the house. A woman with an ochre dot on her forehead comes out wearing a colorful sari. She greets you with a “Hare Krishna!”, waves her hands covered in Indian jewelry through the air, and invites you in. This is Lupe, who most Bolivians assume is, in fact, Indian, despite the fact that she is from La Paz.

Then, you take your shoes off, and go upstairs, sit down on pillows on the floor, and are treated to vegetarian curries and other Indian-inspired cuisine prepared by Lupe and Doña Máxima, their indigenous Quechua empleada. Unlike most empleadas, however, who have recently come from the countryside and show exaggerated deference to their employers, Doña Máxima is bien alegre and frequently makes jokes in Quechua and then giggles from the kitchen.

Then Ismael comes up from his subterranean film editing studio and joins you, expounding on the process of social change in Bolivia. Despite the fact that we largely agree on political questions in Bolivia, I generally find Ismael´s beliefs to be simplistic and lacking in nuance. On one side is the European monoculture, the oligarchy, the elite, and on the other side the social movements, the indigenous, the People. This is acceptable from a documentary filmmaker whose primary mission is to present a message compellingly, and his command of aesthetic and visual elements in the creation of meaning are phenomenal, but not so appealing from the perspective of a political analyst or of an actor that seeks to intervene directly in social transformation. I particularly find Lupe´s viewpoints – that economic development is a Western concept that is not desired but rather imposed on indigenous populations along with a variety of spiritual hodge-podge about the Mayan calendar and Pachakuti that I try my best to ignore – quite problematic. For after all, they live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle in Cochabamba, with an indigenous house-servant, and are free to devote their lives to whatever pursuits they feel are most beneficial for the spiritual self-realization. They work making films, running a program for visiting gringos like myself, and performing reiki massages for elderly middle-class ladies in need of an exotic experience. This, in the context of a desperately poor country where children die in their twenties, their minds eaten away by addiction to glue-sniffing, where toothless old ladies in ponchos from Northern Potosí sit on the street next to their grandchildren with outstretched hands, where great numbers of people live without electricity or running water, and all of the thousand daily travails of poverty, is solipsism.

However, while I find this objectionable in its U.S. Northern California hippie equivalent, Bolivian people and Bolivia itself are not untouched by history as we fancy ourselves to be. Ismael is currently working on a documentary on the military dictatorship of Luis García Meza, a particularly brutal military despot who took power in 1980 and held power for one unfortunate year. He was a stereotypical fascist who actually collaborated with the ex-Nazi Klaus Barbie and professional torturers from the Argentine military dictatorship, and it is estimated that over 1,000 people were killed in that year. Not even the newly-elected Reagan government, never shy in supporting bloodthirsty anti-Communists, wanted anything to do with him, because the government was enriching itself with drug-trafficking money and had ties to international criminal syndicates.

Well, Ismael was himself a prisoner of this military dictatorship, and the movie is based on his experiences and that of other prisoners, almost all of whom he knew personally, either from his political activism or his time in prison. One of the most jarring scenes is one in which he, with the aid of some actors, actually re-enacts a torture scene that happened to him thirty years ago, as well as some interrogations. He later learned that the space where he was recording these scenes – a former site for slaughtering animals that had been transformed into an art center in Cochabamba – had in fact been used as a detention facility under the dictatorship, a fact that he had not known when he made the decision to do it there.

His life story is both incredible and interesting. He studied law in university but decided to follow his father, who was a general, into the Air Force. He and his father were part of a left-wing revolutionary nationalist faction in the military that briefly took power in the early 70s with the government of General Juan José Torrés. While I do not know the details of his political activism during this time, I do know that he used to fly planes for fun and land them on the lunar Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flats in the world.  During this time, Ismael was taken prisoner for his left-wing activism and held with a variety of union leaders and other oppositional figures. He said that for a long time he did not know why he was set free, but later learned that his father, then a retired general, had gone to see the dictator himself and asked for him to be released into exile in exchange for being put under house arrest – a request which was granted and allowed him to go to Mexico and then eventually the United States, where he launched his filmmaking career and eventually traveled all around the world, embraced Eastern mysticism, etc.

This experience, I think, gives Ismael great moral credibility. The reason he is making the film about the dictatorship is, apart from the always laudable initiatives to maintain a country´s historical memory to prevent similar tragedies, that many of the right-wing opposition constantly call the Evo Morales government dictatorial or authoritarian, a call that wins adherents among middle-class youth with no personal memory of what a dictatorship was really like. For a former political prisoner and victim of torture, to see the government that you love and support, a government under which there are no political prisoners, an entirely free (and quite hostile) press and broader democratic participation amongst hitherto excluded sectors of the population than ever before called by the same names that you once called the brutal fascist dictatorships against whom you dreamed of rising up in armed struggle is insufferable.

After visiting Ismael, I also had the chance to swing by Tarata, a small town about an hour away from Cochabamba, to visit my infamous Bolivian ex-girlfriend Nelsi´s family. The town was in the process of its annual Sausage Fest  (Feria del Chorizo), so there was ample chicha being ladled out and hunks of meat being consumed. Her father was totally drunk and her 10 year old brother accused me of being a homosexual. At least Argentines are lettered enough to keep such thoughts to themselves  (as well as having legalized gay marriage! Woo!)

I also stopped by the Democracy Center, a mostly gringo outfit in Cochabamba that does reporting on Bolivia issues and helps out other activist groups around the world with their needs (for example, they are helping with a campaign against mining in El Salvador for which I was doing some translation work). If I had interest in going back to live in Bolivia, they have an internship program that I might be interested in exploring in the future.

While in Cochabamba, my current Argentine girlfriend and her mother were afoot, and she was able to meet both Ismael and my old family. I was however, forbidden from attending the literary conference that her mother was speaking at, because my presence would be scandalous in light of the fact that they were staying with her Bolivian ex-boyfriend, so tragically I had to stay away as exciting things such as the Salto-Cochabambino manifesto of unity were being presented, although I was given some booklets with their poetry.

And then, I once again left the city that so symbolizes Latin America in my imagination for new horizons, this time for Santa Cruz and then Paraguay. In Santa Cruz nothing of great import occurred, but, as you shall soon read, my time in Paraguay was full of what could only be termed Wild Adventures.   Finally, I am happy to note that Sam and Ricky will be visiting my in September! If anyone else has the ability and the druthers to venture to the South, I can guarantee that they will pass their time splendidly.

Hello, everyone.

As I was writing the most recent email, in a half-asleep haze in Tarija, it came to my attention that in none of the emails after the first month have I even commented about what I am actually *doing* in Salta – that is, what keeps the checks from Buenos Aires rolling in month after month, and my experiences at the Profesorado itself.

I have continued with the idea of doing thematic units around “cultural studies”/political topics of interest. For several reasons – the frequent cancellation of my classes, the time it took for many people to do their individual presentations, and personal laziness in thinking of new topics – with my most advanced classes we just started the second thematic unit relatively recently before the break.

In the fourth year, I was working with African-American culture and politics. We looked (of course) at the rise of Barack Obama, but then also at black liberation theology in the form of Jeremiah Wright, at different aspects of the civil rights movement, at poetry and music, and at Spike Lee´s “Do the Right Thing”. To conclude, each student had to pick a topic about which to do an individual presentation – and we had presentations on issues ranging from ebonics to the Black Panther Party to the Nation of Islam to Billie Holiday and Jimmy Hendrix.

They were, however, of widely varying quality. Some students evidently did a sizeable amount of research and gave good presentations, while others read wikipedia summaries in a monotone.

Currently, in the fourth year, we are looking at the Iraq War as a cultural phenomenon. We started with a brief discussion on Vietnam and I showed them John Kerry´s 1971 Winter Soldier testimony, without telling them who the speaker was until the end, when I revealed that John Kerry was in fact the 2004 Democratic candidate for president, and that he had voted in favor of the Iraq War despite his storied antiwar past. The focus was not to be on the war itself, but on the cultural particularities of the United States that made its citizens liable to support militarism.

We read some polls from Pew that specified that, unlike the Bush administration, the majority of the American people do not in fact share a millenarian conviction in the need to spread “democracy” and “American values”, although they are in fact convinced that the American way of life is superior to all other alternatives. While it might be difficult for people from Latin America to understand, Americans believe (delusionally, in my opinion) that U.S. engagement with the world in fact benefits others more than it does the United States, and tend to favor more isolationist positions, in part due to their lack of interest and information about world politics. (I do think that the statistically corroborated ignorance of large segments of the American population cannot be ignored in any analysis, although this is a problematic and potentially elitist attitude.)

Another concept that may be difficult to understand for those who (correctly) view the United States as a hegemonic power with a relatively privileged population, is the tendency of the right-wing “backlash”, which presents middle-class white Americans as victims of a variety of forces that can be described as subaltern – whether it be gays, hippies, radicals, immigrants, secularists, Arab terrorists, or what have you. So through this lens, we viewed the response to the attacks September 11th, reading Andrew Sullivan´s neoconservative warmongering the year after the attacks and then his feverish reappraisals (on the lines of “I supported the Iraq war like a teenage girl supports a boy band”) in the years that came. And, jacking the reading from the University Writing curriculum of yesteryear, I took Mark Slouka´s reflections on American exceptionalism and its original religious identity from the New Yorker (“A Year Later”) to explore the idea of America as a nation that “stands outside of history” – an ideological self-conception that is quite dangerous.

In the third year, after talking about different issues that surround immigration to the United States, groups of students had to make presentations about different immigrant groups in the United States, and participated in a debate about supposed “restrictions” that mimicked the Arizona immigration law being implemented in Argentina towards Bolivians and Paraguayans. We then went to talk about the role of religion in the United States, using as a base CNN´s highly informative series on the Christian Right called “God´s Warriors” – talking about this as a concrete political backlash towards the 1960s, and talking not only about abortion and gay marriage but deeper issues as to why backlash culture exists, and why there is resistence to multiculturalism and liberalism, both in their society and ours.

In all of these classes, my goal is to present the United States as a vibrant, multicultural society with deep cultural, class, and race contradictions in which coexist diverse and perhaps ultimately irreconcilable worldviews, all of which it is important to study and understand. These contradictions constantly erupt, these worldviews constantly struggle, and sometimes the outcome is beautiful, and sometimes it is absolutely terrible. It is a vision which is quite different from Obama´s discourse that there is “no Blue America and Red America, only the United States of America”. On the contrary, America is redeemed only by her heterogeneity, and by the fact that she is not some sort of aggregated monolith, but a site of continual tensions and resistances.

To those who are radically anti-imperialist, and thus anti-American in their worldview (of which there are not many, apart from my girlfriend), I say… not only the hegemonic image of the USA that arrives from Hollywood films has the right to sing America. Are the Latinos of the United States, who would conform currently the third-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, also reducible to either subaltern victims or brainwashed yanqui imperialists? Is the African-American population wrong to feel proud of the gains of the civil rights movement and to feel American themselves? Are all of the immigrants who wrap themselves in the American flag living a collective illusion? Are the progressives, the activists, those have dedicated themselves to serving the people any inferior to their counterparts in Buenos Aires and Córdoba? To not see these complexities and to view the United States as a sort of philistine imperialist suburbia is to play into the hands of the Right that wants the United States to be precisely this. Reflectiveness over reflexiveness, compañeros!

To those who are blinded by the shining lights of the material excess of North America brought to them through media images, and idealize that world I say – I slept with your mother, get your head out of Menem´s spiritual shithouse!

An intriguing issue is that I am a white middle-class person trying to make the argument that the United States does not in fact consist entirely of white middle-class people.

To continue, in my first and second year classes, the issues examined are necessarily much less complex. My first year classes consist almost entirely of different conversation games, and sometimes I raise some issues by bringing in songs and talking about them, a la Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. My second year classes have mostly been engaged in talking about and studying “Animal Farm” with me, and we have been able to talk a lot about the nature of power, corruption, and authoritarianism. Before that we talked about gender roles and dating culture, hipsters and other urban subcultures, family structures, among other issues.

Although this has served me well for now, I see several problems on the horizon. The first is perhaps that I will run out of issues to talk about, about which I can craft an engaging curriculum. I plan to avoid this possibility by cycling the existing topics between levels, which means that i will introduce the African-American unit, slightly modified for third year and the immigration unit for fourth year, and hope that I will be able to eke my way to November doing this.

The other problem is that this is a tertiary institution meant to train English teachers, not a sociology program at a University. There is a wide range of interest in the issues and participation in the classes that I hold. It is the obligation of the teacher to focus on the needs of the students, as opposed to merely holding forth in the way that is most interesting to him or her. I fall too easily to the temptation of directing the class to the few students that are most engaged, and ignoring the others´ passivity, and ineffectually encouraging them to try harder. One of the problems is that I see each class only once a week and do not have the right to give grades on assignments – so there is no real incentive outside of intellectual enlightenment and respect for my person that students really have to do the work. Sometimes I am extremely presently surprised, and sometimes sorely disappointed regarding the response that I get, but almost always there are very different levels of participation within a single class.

And now, a request. If anyone has any ideas for specific readings, videos, or other content that they think would make for an interesting class on the lines that I have been describing, I would love to receive suggestions. I sort of fly by the seat of my pants and search for good materials on the eve of the class that I am supposed to give. This is usually eventually successful, but I have to filter quite a bit. The readings cannot really be more than 10-15 pages, and preferably should be less than that (5-8), and cannot be in academese.

Bueno, I hope everyone is well. As I mentioned I would be in my prior email, I am in Cochabamba and will be here all next week before attempting my transcendental Paraguayan odyssey. I will send another email with more Bolivia themed thoughts before my departure, inshallah.

Andrew

As of today, I have officially gotten off Argentine soil and am back in much-beloved Bolivia, en route to Cochabamba to spend some time with my host family of yesteryear. I am currently in Tarija, a small city in the south of the country, about six hours north of the Argentine border crossing. It is an extremely pleasant little city, with very warm (verging on hot) weather and pretty little plazas. However, as it has less than 200,000 people, it is like a fifth of the size of Cochabamba and more than twice as small as Salta, and could thus be considered muy, muy tranquilo. Were I aware of the extent of its tranquilidad, I may have moved on today instead of staying the night, but given the length and ardous nature of my journey to Cocha, which involves taking two 13ish hour buses in rapid succession on cold mountain roads and passing through the highest city in the world to boot. Going to have to hit the coca leaf hard on the journey.

Crossing the border was quite fun. Although it seems illogical (but probably is so to sustain the small cottage industry of Bolivian boatswains), the 200 meters or so of river that mark the international boundary between Argentina and Bolivia at Aguas Blancas – Bermejo are not connected by any bridge, and you have to pass by paying one pesos to makeshift ferry operators. Immediately upon crossing into Bolivia, the Argentine accent disappears and is replaced with a totally different Bolivian variant (although I am sure it also exists in smaller municipalities in Salta and Jujuy provinces in Argentina proper).

There is a host of things to do in Cochabamba, including an international Latin American literature conference that my current girlfriend Susy (from Salta) and her mother will be attending, and visits to all the conocidos of the SIT program. However, the ultimate mission is to somehow get to Puerto Iguazú (Iguazu Falls) by the 23rd of July to meet my parents. The most direct, and of course also the most harrowing route, is to take the Trans-Chaco Highway from Santa Cruz (grr!) in Bolivia to the capital of Paraguay, Asunción. This route is liable to take up to 30 hours and goes through an entirely flat, semi-arid semi-wasteland almost the entire way. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to visit another country, and I hear the border city of Ciudad del Este (the largest black market in South America, where the US gov´t says Hamas is said to operate) is a very picturesque place indeed to get robbed, which has been a long-lasting aspiration of mine.

With regards to my life in Argentina, aside from a one-week gringo festival in Buenos Aires for our Fulbright Midterm Conference and another trip that I took during the Bicentennial celebrations to Córdoba, I have been living a pretty standard routine in Salta, with the predictable exception of the World Cup. As the stereotype would dictate, Argentines are quite mad for soccer and Salta became a complete ghost town during each and every Argentina game. Watching the games was mostly a family ritual, but all kinds of centrally located cafés and corner stores could also be found full of hooting and hollering fans adorned with blue and white jerseys (somehow, the colors of my highschool, my college, and this country are all blue and white…) I played my part, purchasing an extraordinarily fake Argentine jersey and a large Argentine flag from a man on the street and even painting my face on occasion. (It was particularly great to participate in this communal spectacle in one of the main squares of Buenos Aires, where they had set up a jumbo screen when I was in town for the game against South Korea).  After all the Argentine victories, the standard protocol was basically to pile into the plaza and jump around a lot for like one hour, or two if you are a preteen girl. I found that it was rather wearisome, except that there was a chant that went something like “él que no salta es un inglés!” (he who does not jump is an Englishman!) and since I try to emphasize my non-British nature at any occasion, I was obliged to leap.

And then, as you likely know, Argentina lost, in horrifyingly brutal fashion (although I would prefer to lose like that than the tragic way that Ghana lost to those Uruguayan scoundrels, who improbably find themselves to be Latin America´s last hope). I expected wide-scale marauding drunken hordes smashing windows and beating Germans, real or imaginary, but I was merely faced with depressed blue-and-white mopers.

Aside from soccer, I did enjoy spending time in both Córdoba and Buenos Aires. Both are very modern cities with a seemingly vibrant progressive culture – Córdoba because it is a city that has seven universities and thus a huge young population and Buenos Aires because, much like New York, it is a teeming nexus of everythingness. I saw more graffiti advocating for gay marriage and sexual equality in Córdoba than I have in any other city in the world.

It is interesting to be in a large Latin American city that, despite it´s lack of racial diversity in comparison to large U.S. or European cities, could reasonably be called cosmopolitan. Some of the emotional appeal of going to Latin America is precisely that of going to places that do have a strong sense of regional identity as opposed to the amorphous rootlessness of Northern modernity, and to have that regional identity not take on unfortunate imperialist overtones, as it sometimes does for me in American and European history. For, of course, it is one thing to be proud of your people´s history of struggle against injustice and for respect, and quite another to be proud that your people are economically dominant and have dominated other peoples for centuries. However, this sense of place (which is felt in Salta, but much more strongly in Bolivia), mixed with a deeply unironic patriotism and religiosity can also be hopelessly provincial for someone coming from where I do. And this same feeling is undoubtedly true for many Argentines as well, who flock to the hipster scene in Buenos Aires instead of singing the folkloric paens to the local women and their great beauty that are par for the course.

As such, a city like Buenos Aires would be very easy for me to live in. In fact, not only does it remind me more of New York City than any city in the USA does, living there would require literally no cultural adjustments except that the prices are lower, the city is (supposedly) more dangerous, and the folks speak Spanish. Of course, I would only consider doing so if there was something productive to do – just as visiting New York as a tourist or randomly hanging around for weeks is not necessarily fulfilling, I would need to find some field of study or job that I would truly enjoy.

There is a dual program between George Washington and the Universidad de San Martin in Buenos Aires which focuses on international development which would be one of the options I am considering for the future, along other Latin American fellowships to work with NGOs through Princeton Latin America, some magical scholarships that allow you to go to graduate school for free in the European Union, going to law school in the USA, going to some sort internatioanl development program in the USA, or siring a brood of illegitimate Argentine children and building a homestead here.

So the future is filled with many paths, some of which lead to Paraguay and other to even more exciting places.

The Arctic Rainforests of Jujuy and the Paris Commune

Hello, everybody. I wish everyone a happy Argentine Independence Day (25 de Mayo)! The country has gotten decked out in spectacular fashion for this date, seeing as 2010 is the 200-year anniversary of when some people in some Cabildo in Tucumán decided to cast away their allegiance to Spain (or, as my meager understanding of early independence history suggests, declared their loyalty to the Spanish king deposed by Napoleon’s army as a way of not recognizing the imperial rule). In any case, I celebrated in Córdoba, Argentina’s third-largest city located in the country’s geographic center, some 13 hours south of Salta, with some other Fulbright kids. I’ll speak about this in a subsequent email.

There have been several important changes in my Salta experience since the gringo imperialists (represented symbolically by yours truly) and their unwitting anthro-student local allies went to demolish campesino homes in the Quebrada del Toro.

The first major change has been a move to a different house. My prior house, about which I have not the occasion to write about, had a wide variety of unfortunate problems, and, in retrospect, my choice of lodging reflected severe weaknesses in my SqualorDar, as it made good old Mole Street seem like a palace of luxury.

Among the squalid conditions that I confronted daily were

• the fact that mice (or other unidentified rodent creatures) seem to have broken into the drawer where my food was kept on regular occasions, consuming some of the victuals and defecating on the remains

• the presence of three dogs, two of which were of a jovial sort, although they enjoyed humping each other, masticating their tails, and sometimes vomiting at my feet as I attempted to be intellectually enlightened by the stirring work of Ernesto Sábato drinking my yerba mate in peace, but the third was a blind 15 year old dog who would literally cover the entire house in feces and urine which I would have to clean daily when the owner would travel to Córdoba, which was frequently;

• the fact that my room was partially covered in a NOXIOUS FUNGUS, that made it smell humid all the time, and that I later discovered was EATING MY CLOTHING in the back of my closet

• a broken window, which allowed frigid winds to enter my room. Brr.

• complete gloom and lack of natural sunlight in the entire house

• two other Argentine tenants that I did not interact with – one a young man who worked in a hotel and one older man who worked in a restaurant, and who seemed to spend all their extra waking time watching television in a stupor in their rooms

　

The good parts of the house had to do with the fact that it was located four blocks from the main night-life district of Salta, and had a quite beautiful backyard with flowers and fruit trees. Nevertheless, it became rapidly clear to me that I would go mad if I were to live there until November. Furthermore, in Latin American countries I hear that it is customary to be bien alegre and disfrutar la vida, and here I was, unable to overcome the Slavic genetic disposition towards suffering and seeking to recreate nineteenth century English boardinghouse or Dostoyevskian Man-from-Underground living conditions for no apparent reason. I walked to the plaza, and saw not Kremlin towers but palm trees. So there had to be a change.

My new place is a beautiful house populated by 5 French kids and an Argentine. It is very nice, centrally located, and has a rooftop terrace. Like most French people, these folks enjoy drinking wine, cooking opulently delicious cuisine, and singing songs together. Unfortunately, they also share a tendency to speak their native tongue when they are together, which places me in the peculiar position of being the only one at the table who finds this barbaric yawp to be unintelligible. I do wonder if I will be able to learn French conversationally simply by being around them. My suspicion is that I will not, and perhaps will have to take proactive action to correct this, either by cajoling (or paying) one of them to give me classes, or going to the Alliance Francaise here in Salta.

Last weekend, I went up to the northernmost province of Jujuy once more and went camping in a municipality called Yala with a girl that I have been seeing. Yala is located in the “Yungas:” ecosystem, which refers to a series of verdant, semi-tropical valleys that stretch from Argentina to Bolivia. In Bolivia, however, the Yungas are exclusively low-altitude and thus warm during the entire year. Not so in Argentina, where the place we went to was at over 2,000 meters of altitude. Translation – in May, which is equivalent to October/November in the Northern Hemisphere, it is both wildly cold and very wet (because its almost a rainforest).

To make a long story short, although there was a high-quality lodge within eyesight of our meager encampment, we decided to rough it out in the wilderness, the only travellers to be so intrepid. As with any such expedition, we were aided not only by our internal fortitude but by a prodigious quantity of white wine, which warmed both our bones and our souls. We talked about the conservative nature of happiness, the limiting nature of a circumscribed local identity, que sea la de Philadelphia or of Salta, the pull of the cosmopolitan and the Interesting. Songs were sung in Brazilian Portuguese and, although memory cannot confirm it, I imagine that the Soviet National Anthem made its typical middle-of-the-wine-bottle appearance.

I awoke to a steady, continuous drizzle, low-hanging clouds over the lakes we were next to, a developing cold and the realization that we had to walk 12 kilometers through the rain to the bus stop. Luckily, the journey was both panoramic and entirely downhill, so we made it without extreme difficulty, albeit soaked to the bone.

As we descended from the park to the community itself, we heard the distinctive sounds of a good old Sunday afternoon northern Argentina folclórico party and were passed by a variety of horseback riding campesinos in traditional “party ponchos”. We arrived there just as the party was dying down (due to the rain), and thus had the unfortunate experience of being crammed in the bus with what appeared to be the entire population of Yala going back to their homes.

While the provincial capital of San Salvador de Jujuy is not particularly pleasant in general, on a rainy Sunday it can appear downright dystopian. I am generally critical of the sort of “this is a savage country! You can’t get a damn cup of tea in Zimbabwe!’ type of Western travelogue, but with my throat ailing and a fine, cold mist descending on Jujuy’s somewhat decaying outdoor bus terminal, a “damn cup of tea” is precisely what I was searching for. Unfortunately, on Sunday, almost the *entire* city is totally closed. After about 15 minutes of ambling,, we settled on the most bohemian scene we could find, which was the under-construction gas station across from the bus terminal, where about a half dozen jujeños sat at tables blankly staring at some sort of French medieval spoof-series on a television overhead. It was A Bad Scene, as one might say.

Coming back to Salta was like returning to a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis. There were people on the street, and open businesses, and life. Yet Salta, while passably bustling, is neither cosmopolitan nor a metropolis, and the more adventurous and progressive Salteños I know lament this. Cordoba (and, of course Buenos Aires) are said to be much more quite, quite different from Salta on the cultural plane… although I certainly doubt I will get any real perspective on this as a tourist passing through for three days.

And, in only a little bit more than a month, I will be off to dearly beloved Bolivia to the Cochabambino stomping grounds. Those with gambling inclinations can start placing bets on whether or not (or, for the morbidly minded, when) I will get a stomach infection during my journey north of the border….

Hello, everybody! I hope that the oil spills and car bombs menacing our coasts and our cities are not putting a damper on your existence in the North continent. Here in the South, things are looking up, both socially and in terms of unusually sunny (not Seattle-like, like some days are here) weather, and I will impart my experiences upon you in typically excruciating detail.

Last weekend, I went to El Alisal, which is basically a group of houses scattered through the Quebrada de Toro, a land of beautiful canyons located nary an hour and a half away from Salta. The trip was planned primarily by students of the Anthropology department at the University of Salta, and they were willing to take a yanqui on board, provided he was de buena onda, which I most decisively am.

The reason for the trip is that the region, which is located in a seismically active zone, was recently damaged by an earthquake that was in some way related (an aftershock, perhaps) of the one that devastated Chile. While it was not a catastrophe on that scale, it caused significant damage to the houses in the area, which are predominantly adobe-and-mud structures. In order for the province to be able to rebuild (or give the people materials to rebuild), the damaged structures need to be knocked down and removed.

Here is where the motley crew comes in. Obviously, we have no experience in constructing houses, or doing anything really except drinking yerba mate and performing cultural analyses. However, we are capable of knocking shit over, and then moving the blocks, and that is indeed what I spent the greater part of my weekend doing.

On my bus journey over to the Quebrada, I met a interesting fellow who may very well be my doppelganger. By this, I mean, he is also named Andres, has a similar build, is also a political activist, and, in fact, also an aficionado of the great bourgeois game of squash. The difference is that he is a Valencian independence activist, and was on the run from the authorities on the Italian island of Sardinia, where he was also promoting an independence movement, whereas I sometimes have difficulty distinguishing my ass from my elbow, which is to say, organizing Columbia University.

Anyway, the people of the Quebrada were an interesting and necessary shift from the urban life of Salta. Although their poverty does not approximate that of the depressed settlements lining the highland highways of the Bolivian altiplano, they are poor – most of the houses did not have bathrooms, and I am not certain if they had electricity. They did, however, have animals and crops, and did not seem to be tottering on the edge of subsistence. The greatest impression I received, however, was that it was a dying community whose days were numbered. The lure of the thumping nightclubs and modern conveniences of Salta are too strong to hold the younger generation in a traditional rural lifestyle, in all of its material want and daily drudgery. The people that stayed were the viejos, sometimes unaccompanied by nobody, and sometimes by one last child that stayed to help them. The Don Felipes and Don Antonios of the world may be a dying breed, at least in this community (and I saw the same phenomenon in Bolivia with rural-urban migration).

But, although these grandfathers (and perhaps even great-grandfathers) may resemble our aged relatives, there is an important difference. They leap. The physical fitness and generally spry nature of rural folk who have made their life from manual labor is well established, but these viejitos had no problem ducking under fences, jumping off of boards, and performing various kinds of contortions that may be difficult for some of our less physically inclined Manhattanite acquaintances. Also, I saw one of them with a bona-fide slingshot, a noble implement that I thought existed only in the imaginary of Huckleberry Finn and Bart Simpson.

To make a long story of the destruction short, we used a variety of implements, from impassioned pushes and kicks, to picks and rock bars, to the most fanciful tool of all, a sort of battering ram constructed from a tree trunk. The work was hard, although punctuated with plentiful intervals of yerba-mateing, and pleasant. I tried not to think of any IMF parallels as my gringo self helped to destroy these campesino houses with great joy and exultation.

The nights were filled with boxed wine and political discussion, mostly focusing on University politics with the new election. The old debates about abstention or participation in a flawed system were rehashed, with most of the students very disenchanted at the victory of the new president, who is associated with the Unión Cívica Radical and is said to be the more capitalist of all of the options. However, university politics is extraordinarily difficult to understand for me, because another person I befriended in one of my classes, who presents himself as a radically materialist Marxist who references Cuba positively on many occasions, is one of the main dirigentes for this new president, and claims that the other side is falsely posturing as the progressive alternative. Once again, the fact that university education is both free and allows all the participants to democratically elect their leadership is something to be valued greatly for the opportunities for democratic participation it gives people. In the 1990s, the neoliberal government wanted to establish fees for university education, claiming that the free system was an economically inefficient subsidy to the middle class. Some things, some ideas, cannot and should not be measured solely in terms of fiscal sustainability.

At the end of our work, I, the Valencian, and two other companions started walking towards the nearest town, Campo Quijano, in order to find our way back to Salta. The options were walking 15 kilometers (an unsavory fate, but something that prior groups have had to do) or get picked up by someone. We successfully stopped a friendly man who was there on vacation and had some space in the back of his pick-up. But, just as we were about to get on the back (me, preparing my vaunted Tigre story to tell to its occupants), another car stopped behind us. Its driver happened to be the 2^nd jefe de comanda of the gendarmerie of San Antonio de los Cobres, a highland town some hours down the road. He said that the driver could not take us, for this was a “CIVILIZED COUNTRY” where people cannot just ride on the backs of pickup trucks on his watch, and that he, instead, would graciously take us all the way to Salta, where he was going.

I have said previously that once you leave the city in Latin America, is where characters out of García Marquez novels begin to appear. This jefe proved to be a fitting complement to the aforementioned leaping grandfathers of El Alisal. He confirmed, and perhaps even doubled every conceivable stereotype one could have possibly had about a Latin American police/army officer. Among other claims, he repeatedly flashed his pistol at us while chainsmoking and making jokes about “protecting” us from bandits, called all women “rompepelotas” despite being in the presence of two women, enlightened us as to his sordid love life, which featured a pregnant girlfriend in another province to complement his wife and kids, made a variety of ethnic slurs against indigenous people and people from Northern Argentina in general, and advanced the claim that Argentina should have allowed the British to invade and colonize the country, so that everyone would speak English and be… like all modern and shit. Apparently he had been stationed in Kosovo on some kind of UN peacekeeping mission, and I can only imagine his conduct there.  I wanted to shoot myself on a variety of occasions during the ride.

In any case, it was a great weekend and I plan to continue going with this group whenever they go to the campo.

The Streets of Downtown Jujuy

Cemetery outside of Humahuaca

Streets of Tilcara

“We are a culture that walks in a globalized world” – Humahuaca

Humahuaca vista

Part of the Via Crucis Procession

Station of the Cross, Humahuaca

La multitud

The colors, the colors

Me and some other Fulbright becarios in Tilcara

Beauty

Turistas de Mierda