25 febrero 2003
| 25 febrero 2003 |
The Street Signs of Downtown Lima: Memory and Identity in Peru - V |
William W. Stein |
Peru has been transformed from a country with 35.4% of its population urban and 64.6% rural in 1940 to one with 70.1% urban and 29.9% rural in 1993 (Sandoval 2000:297). Most of these rural migrants have been, as I’ve indicated, people called “cholos.” Walter Twanama (1992:221) employs the term “choleo,” to refer “a la discriminación ejercida sobre alguien considerado racialmente como inferior debido a sus antecedents indios, pero que es evaluado también en función de aspectos socio-económicos, educativo-lingüísticos y de la condición de migrante.” In a study of a people’s library in a poor neighborhood of Lima, Ana Lucía Cosamalón (1993:279-280) writes that “ser llamado cholo es motivo de silencio, conflicto, vergüenza y evasion, es una palabra que ofende y duele. Sobre la situación de pobreza de la juventud se superpone la realidad de ser cholo, generándose una doble para el joven, transformar las condiciones económico sociales y valorar la propía identidad étnico-racial.” Her survey of the first five words associated with the word “cholo” reveals these characterstics: geográfica (peruano, serrano, provinciano), identificación racial (indio, mestizo, criollo, moreno), ubicación social (pobre, ambulante, campesino), cultura (música andina, chicha, raíces históricas, no uso del castellano), aspecto físico y estético (fuerte, mal aseado, mal vestido, feo, simpático), valorización intelectual (sin instrucción, inepto, inferior, animal, bestia, incivilizado), valorización social (despreciado, discriminado, delincuente, mal educado, aceptado, trabajador), reacciones frente a la palabra (desagradable, ofensa, orgullo, agradable), and personalidad (alegre, triste, conformista, ingenuo).
Then there is a phenomenon that Elisabeth Acha (1993:319) calls “‘cholo’ a la limeña, es decir, [...] un ‘cholo que cholea’ y que aspira a no serlo.” Portocarrero (1993:182) points out that “muchos en las clases medias y altas ‘choleen’ a los de abajo aun cuando sean más oscuros que quienes desprecian. En la práctica se discrimina más la cultura que el color pero en la conciencia ello no aparece necesariamente así. La raza no sería sino un fantasma que solo sobrevive en nuestra mente.” However, this misrecognition has consequences in the social field of power. Juan Carlos Callirgos (1993:162) describes techniques employed to rise socially, including dying hair, whitening skin, changing names, and even changing eye color. Wishing to be white and favoring whiteness constitute an identification with the oppressor. Wilfredo Ardito Vega (n.d.:1-2) reports on a recent Lima television program which focused on racism:
Cuando alguien pretende ingresar a la discoteca Teatriz, en Larcomar o Traffic, en plena avenida Larco, es sometido a una evaluación física instantánea. Si es una persona de rasgos europeos, peruano o extranjero, ingresa libremente o paga 20 soles. En cambio, si tiene rasgos andinos, mestizos o negros el hostil vigilante señala un monto mayor, como medida disuasiva y si insiste en pagar, le indica que es un evento privado o que el ingreso es sólo para socios. La televisión mostró como, al mismo tiempo, otras personas que cumplían los requisitos raciales seguían entrando libremente. Como The Piano, en el Centro Comercial El Polo, estos locales sostienen que son asociaciones sin fines de lucro, con derecho de escoger a sus socios. En realidad son empresas comerciales que adoptaron esta figura para burlar la Ley 27049, que prohibe impedir el ingreso de los clientes por motivos raciales. [...]
Muchos extranjeros se preguntarán: ¿por qué los demás peruanos permiten esto? La respuesta es que muchos creen que es correcto: asociar status, decencia, belleza física a la raza blanca está presente en todos los sectores sociales. [...] De hecho, los vigilantes y administradores de las discotecas o restaurantes mencionados, no suelen ser blancos. En un centro comercial o una clínica, los vigilantes dejan pasar a cientos de personas, pero solamente registran pertenencias o piden el DNI a las personas de piel más obscura—los que más se parecen a ellos. Ellos han interiorizado los estereotipos negativos hacia sí mismos, lo cual revela una escasa autoestima.
Cecilia Salgado (1999:202) points to “nuestro eterno drama, de la mayor angustia y crisis afectiva que vivimos cuando se trata de mirar nuestras raíces, nuestros cimientos más profundos y a la vez reconocer que aquello que es nuestro pilar, es aquello que más rechazamos, despreciamos y/o criticamos como se entiende a los que ocupan el nivel más bajo dentro de la cultura nacional.” But one of the greatest Peruvian problems is the country’s polyglossia, and the difficulties it creates under conditions which make Spanish necessary to move socio-economically. One needs to know Spanish in order to break out of the confines of one’s hamlet and clientist situation with local power-holders, mestizos who know both Spanish and the regional language. At the same time, since “Indians” are so despised, Quechua- or Aymara-speaking upwardly-mobile migrants to Lima tend to deny knowledge of their first language (Montoya and López 1988:12-13). Not only do they discourage their children from speaking it, but they punish them for it. It is unlikely that these processes will be reversed in the near future, if ever.
León (1998:70) asks: “¿Por qué pues nos negamos a reconocer los problemas raciales en el Perú? ¿por qué evitamos tratarlos?” We might rephrase this: why are Peruvians so afraid of themselves?
The implications of this rhetoric are serious, profound, and complicated. It is not simply a matter of a conspiracy of parents and peers to pass on frightening and spectrally-charged language to children emerging from the mirror stage, or of helpless schools which do nothing to demystify such language but, rather, reinforce it. David Nugent (1997:176) has effectively documented how the Peruvian “state expanded its apparatus in the countryside, absorbing many powers and privileges previously enjoyed by regional elites. In the process, the state sought to undermine the position of these elites as mediators, controlling the flow of local resources from region to state and dominating subaltern classes within their spheres of influence.” One of the greatest of state projects has been the construction and staffing of schools. The assumption has been that greater access to Spanish meant greater access to civil rights and social mobility. This may be an optical illusion. Flores Galindo (1999:57-58) reports:
En 1890, en el país funcionaban 844 escuelas. En 1907, existían más de 2 mil con 162 mil alumnos, los cuales, en términos étnicos, eran en su mayoría mestizos (43%) e indios (37%). En los años veinte, la escuela primaria cuenta en el Perú con más de 300 mil estudiantes. La expansión de la escuela fue sinónimo de difusión del castellano. En 1940, sólo 35 por ciento de la población nacional ignoraba esta lengua. En 1972, el analfabetismo comprende apenas a 27 por ciento de personas. En el Perú se considera analfabeto a quien no habla castellano. [...] En 1985, llegarán a 3 millones 500 mil los “escoleros”—expresión de José María Arguedas--; “quien estudia triunfa” reza un lema repetido por todo el país. Algunos lo tomaron literalmente. Luego veían que no: los egresados de los colegios y universidades de la República se encontraron con un mercado de trabajo restringido y con pocas o nulas posibilidades de triunfar. La educación abría expectativas que luego la sociedad no podía satisfacer, con un desempleo total de 14% en Lima y un subempleo de 52% en todo el país, cifras correspondientes a 1978
One can easily see how “spectrality” applies to a situation in which young people ponder the question: “who is to be blamed?”
Many Peruvians see a “double-bind” in education. Patricia Ames (2000:365) conceives of a
Debilidad para los pueblos indígenas porque impone valores y pautas de conducta ajenos a su cultura, produciendo desindigenización y convirtiéndose en la punta de lanza en la liquidación de la cultura andina. Pero al mismo tiempo es una fuerza para los indígenas en la medida en que les abre nuevas perspectivas, ensancha su universo, les da mayor seguridad y conciencia de su valor, destruye la humildad semiservil, permite conocer las leyes para no dejarse engañar y permite “igualarse”, es decir, ponerse subjetivamente en las mismas condiciones que el misti, para ser capaz de enfrentarlo.
Andean people think of nonliteracy as “blindness”, and literacy as “light,” which means that Western “white mythology” that privileges lightness over darkness, including “white” (really shades of beige) skins over dark ones, and values enlightenment (see Derrida 1982:207-271) prevails there. Virginia Zavala (2001a:237) has studied slogans painted on walls and rocks in Quechua and Spanish by the schoolchildren of Umaca, a Quechua-speaking community in the Department of Apurímac, urging their parents to support their schooling, for example: “Papá, no me des tu vaca sino mi cabeza”, “Mamay ama qarkawaychu, yachaywasiman rinayta/Mamá, no me lo impidas, tengo que ir a la escuela,”, “Papay ama llamkachiwaychu, yachaywasiman churaway/Papá, no me hagas trabajar. Mándame a la escuela”, and “Compañeros hay que estudiar para triunfar.” Zavala (242-243) notes that the dominant discourse represents that “literacidad tiene el poder de transformar los sentidos de la gente.”:
Así los iletrados son percibidos como ciegos que necesitan aprender a leer y escribir para abrir sus ojos al mundo “real”, ya que mientras que son iletrados seguirán viviendo en el mundo de la noche. Además de ser conscientes y de avergonzarse de ello, los iletrados reciben insultos de aquellos que sí saben leer y escribir en la comunidad, quienes suelen afirmar que los que no saben hacerlo son ciegos como los chanchos. Es por esto que los maestros sugirieron a los niños que escribieran “Papá, ayúdame a progresar, no me dejes quedarme ciego”, frase donde el no saber leer y escribir implica la ceguera y donde además se establece una vida con progreso. Lo que llama fuertemente la atención es que estas creencias sobre la ceguera y el analfabetismo no se limitan solamente a la población campesina. El mismo Estado fortalece este discurso tanto a través de afiches que ilustran al analfabetismo como ceguera, como de prólogos en textos de programas de alfabetización de adultos donde se felicita al usuario por haber decidido despertar de la oscuridad al mundo de la luz.
Aunque no se muestra en los escritos, la literacidad también se percibe como una tecnología que reestructura la personalidad y el carácter de los individuos. Como uno de los campesinos alguna vez me dijo, la gente analfabeta no es decente porque no tiene control sobre la manera como se expresa oralmente.
In this way, education is seen as the route to success and power, a myth of “progress” in which rural poverty becomes the fault of those community members who do not go to school and become literate.
In her study of a bilingual education program in the same community, Zavala (2001b:32-33) says: “The view of literacy as the solution to blindness constitutes a hegemonic myth that the state constantly reproduces in explicit terms through a variety of means. When I went to Umaca, I discovered that the Peruvian Ministry of Education together with UNICEF had distributed posters that contained this Discourse. Illiterates were presented as blind people who walk at night towards a precipice and ‘new’ literates, as people who discover the sun and a happy life. In addition, I found out that the text book provided by the Adult Literacy Program had an introduction that had written down the following: ‘we are glad that a Peruvian is ready to leave the darkness and reach the light of knowledge’”. Zavala (111-112) has some acute comments:
Although within the dominant Discourse literacy is thought of as a fundamental good, conducive to a better life, the very existence of literacy engenders suffering for those who do not have access to it. If literacy did not exist, people would not suffer for it. Suffering exists because literate people within a position of power make illiterate people feel inferior, blind and incapable of happiness. This shows that literacy is not a neutral phenomenon but one embedded in socio-cultural beliefs and power relationships. [...] [L]earning to read and write in terms of acquiring basic mechanical skills will not necessarily result in empowerment or happiness. This is because people’s power does not derive from literacy itself but from a combination of factors related to ideology, wealth, class, race, ethnicity and gender. Like other technologies, literacy is not a good in itself. Neither is it power or “progress.” Literacy is social practice and it is embedded in habitus. Hence, it is not the technology but the social and cultural practices attached to it that benefit or disadvantage the user.
Moreover: “Within this ideological strategy--of deriving individual and social consequences from being literate per se--, a material situation directly related to the production and distribution of wealth in Peru (poverty, for instance) is subtly transferred to a literacy issue . [...] Instead of critiquing the system and themselves for the way they conduct the country and allocate the capital resources, powerful economical sectors and the state itself wash their hands clean and position peasants as responsible for both their poverty and the country’s crisis.”
In the city, the conventional “racial/ethnic categories” seem to be dissolving. Víctor Vich (2001:79) points out: “Las migraciones del campo a las ciudades no solamente transformaron un conjunto de dinámicas económicas de honda raís histórica, sino que admás comenzaron a destabilizar las identidades sociales de sujetos que comenzaban a ser mucho más multiples y heterogéneos.” If the binary “rural-urban” ever was real, it has now been deconstructed by events.
There can be no doubt that Spanish gives access to a greater world than that of the Andean village, and Peru’s future appears to be a Spanish-speaking one. For a time, during the early 1970s, the military government tried to implement a policy that would have made Quechua and Aymara official languages, equal to Spanish. It was impossible to write and publish books that could be used in the highly centralized educational system, though, because while Aymara is more homogeneous, Quechua is not only separated into the two main languages, as noted in the foregoing, but each of these is segmented into a large number of local and regional dialects with differences in phonology, lexicon, and syntax. The project, of course, failed. Vich (2001:163-164) introduces the conception of “una identidad que se comienza a articular a partir de fragmentos.” In his analysis of the performance of street comics in Lima who mix Quechua with Spanish, he adds: “Desde la sociolingüística podríamos preguntarnos qué función discursiva está cumpliendo esta alternancia de códigos (quechua/castellano) en terminos no sólo de la coherencia del propio discurso sino también del tema, del productor, de los oyentes y de la propia situación comunicativa. [...] Estamos ante una aliteración bilingüe, actualizada en un momento clave del discurso [...] producida por un migrante en la capital, dirigida básicamente ante un público migrante y, finalmente, situada en un contexto de diglosia donde el quechua continúa siendo aún un idioma devaluado socialmente.”
In the rural community, bilingual education is not working as well as planners hoped. Zavala (2001b:183) reports:
The stereotypes that have been constructed around the notion of writing in Quechua tend to dissuade people from practicing it. According to both adults and children, reading and writing in Quechua is more difficult than in Spanish because the words are longer. Although I clearly perceived that children were both faster and more creative in Quechua than in Spanish, they claimed they could not read and write in Quechua. Many of them declared the same thing: “In Quechua, I can’t. It’s easier in Spanish.” Everybody has a reason for believing that Quechua is a difficult language to write: “the symbols in Quechua are incomplete,” “there are lots of ‘w’ symbols in Quechua,” “there are only three vowels,” “the word endings are not as complete as in Spanish,” “the ‘q’ at the end of the words is difficult to pronounce,” “in Quechua you need too many symbols, to many long symbols.” [...] The Quechua alphabet is not officially used by the state. People, thus, think that it is invalid and inferior to the Spanish alphabet. Since the Spanish alphabet is the “correct” and accepted one, everything from the Quechua alphabet that deviates from Spanish is perceived as deficient or imperfect.
The trouble is that speaking, reading, or writing Quechua, or any other, Andean or neighboring language is the equivalent of symbolic death, because those who do so are immediately placed among the excluded. Symbolic death is a metaphor of a metaphor: of death, the unimaginable non-condition in which neither subalterns nor anyone else can speak. Death, which haunts people, yet is nothing. We might translate all the questions that have been asked into The Question. Even though it is unanswerable, Derrida (1978:79) is fearless enough to ask it: since we’re all going to die, is there a future? His answer is:
A community of the question, therefore, within that fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question. A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question. This is very little—almost nothing—but within it today, is sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision. An unbreachable responsibility. Why unbreachable? Because the impossible has already occurred. The impossible according to the totality of what is questioned, according to the totality of beings, objects and determinations, the impossible according to the history of facts, has occurred: there is a history of the question, a pure memory of the pure question which in its possibility perhaps authorizes all inheritance and all pure memory in general and as such. The question has already begun—we know it has—and this strange certainty about an other absolute origin, an other absolute decision that has secured the past of the question, liberates an incomparable instruction: the discipline of the question. (80.)
Spivak (1999:309-310) reflects on the subaltern, “defined as the being on the other side of difference, or an epistemic fracture,” but moves on to consider the question, “Can the Subaltern vote?” In a country like Peru is presently, where everybody votes, subalterns have become something else: “Access to ‘citizenship’ (civil society) by becoming a voter (in the nation) is indeed the symbolic circuit of the mobilizing of subalternity into hegemony.” She adds: “Unless we want to be romantic purists or primitivists about ‘preserving subalternity”—a contradiction in terms—this is absolutely to be desired. (It goes without saying that museumized or curricularized access to ethnic origin—another battle that must be fought—is not identical with preserving subalternity.)” There is no evidence that ex-subalterns, or emerging ones, vote in their own best interests—in Peru or anywhere else. But if they are alive enough to go to the ballot box, they are alive enough to have a future.
In an article entitled “Las mujeres son más indias”, De la Cadena’s (1996b:198) writes about gender differences in a rural community, Chitapampa.7 Her chitapampinos provide her (and us) with a new “dense word”: “proceso”—
En Chitapampa solo una parte muy pequeña de la población tiene identidad definida, ya sea como Indio o como Mestizo. Cuando se le pregunta a cualquier chitapampino por el status étnico de otro habitante de la comunidad, la respuesta más común es “está en proceso”, con lo cual se enfatiza la cualidad gaseosa de la identidad étnica campesina. [...] [L]a mayor parte de la población no es ni “india” ni “mestiza”; está en “proceso”. Para los chitapampinos, el “proceso” consiste no sólo en cambiar de ropa, comida o lenguaje: lo más importante es que tal cambio es el resultado de “aprender a trabajar” y/o de “estudiar” y luego adquirir poder con respecto a otras personas de la comunidad.
To be “en proceso” in Chitapampa is another metonym that we can use to understand the whole of Peru and its changing vocabulary: we might say, that language too is “en proceso”. Gaston Bachelard (1934:24, 28, quoted in Samuel Weber 2001:xi) suggests:
The essence of a mathematic notion is measurable in terms of the possibilities of deformation that permit the application of this notion to be extended [...] Mathematical thinking comes into its own (prend son essor) with the emergence of the ideas of transformation, correspondence, varied application.
One might say to the mathematical entity, “Tell me how you can be transformed and I will tell you who you are.” [...] The keystone of all evidence is thus the algebraic form. In sum, algebra amasses all the relations and nothing but relations. It is only in terms of relations that different geometries are equivalent. It is only insofar as they are relational that they have a reality and not through the reference to an object, to an experience or to an intuitive image. (Elipses in Weber’s quotations.)
Weber makes this comment which is most relevant to the theme we are exploring:
This process of “algebraization”—of “deformation” and “transformation”—affects not merely the “object” of scientific inquiry, but also its subject, or rather, the relation of the two, as Bachelard’s discussion of Heisenberg’s celebrated “uncertainty principle” indicates. By demonstrating the impossibility of establishing simultaneously the position and velocity of an electron; by showing that the instrument of measure, the photon, alters the object in the very process of measurement, and similarly has its own frequency modified in the encounter, this “principle” strikes at the founding premise not only of traditional science, but also of the intuitive thinking that it sought to systematize (and to legitimize). This premise Bachelard designates as the “absolute of localization,” a belief, he adds, that also lies “at the bottom of language” as it is generally used and construed. (Emphasis mine.)
One might rephrase the question: “Tell me how your words for yourself can be transformed and I will tell you—not who you are but whom you might become.”
Of course, Chitapampa is only a small, poor rural settlement near Cusco, and it is in no way the “community of the question” which Derrida writes about. Poor people do not have the choices that are available to those who are not poor. Chitapampinos are, like most people in Peru, poor. And Peru is a very poor country, so poor that Peruvian specialists in Poverty, according to Enrique Mayer (2002:320), have devised a conceptual system to order categories of poverty: “the extremely poor, the merely poor, the chronically poor, the indigent, the temporary poor, the structurally poor, and so on.” Poverty, however, has not managed to keep deep dish television out of reach in the most isolated Andean communities. Penetration by the media, as Fuller (1997:57, 62) points out, is influencing all Peruvians by presenting “discursos que con frecuencia se oponen y canalizan diferentes mensajes” These contain “un amplio margen de posibles perspectives—incluyendo la posibilidad de discursos opuestos y contradictories.” I’m grateful to Fuller for citing and quoting John Fiske’s (1987:15-16) emphasis on television’s necessary polysemy “if it is to be popular amongst viewers who occupy a variety of situations within the social structure.” Fiske (18-19) views this medium positively:
Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital reveals the attempt of the dominant classes to control culture for their own interest as effectively as they control the circulation of wealth. The consistent denigration of popular culture, such as television, as bad for people individually and bad for society in general is central to the strategy. [...] The circulation of meanings and pleasures in a society is not [...] the same as the circulation of wealth. Meanings and pleasures are much harder to possess exclusively and much harder to control: power is less effectively exerted in the cultural economy than it is in the material. [...] Popular cultural capital is an accumulation of meanings and pleasures that serves the interests of the subordinated and powerless, or rather the disempowered, for few social groups are utterly without power. Popular cultural capital consists of the meanings of social subordination and of the strategies [...] by which people respond to it. These meanings of subordination are not made according to the dominant value system, they are not ones that make a comfortable sense of subordination and thus work to make people content with their social situation. Rather they are meanings made by a value system that opposes or evades the dominant ideology: they are meanings that validate the social experience of the subordinate but not their subordination. [...] There is a power in resisting power, there is a power in maintaining one’s social identity in opposition to that proposed by the dominant ideology, there is a power in asserting one’s own subcultural values against the dominant ones. There is, in short, a power in being different.
What will be the result of the internalization of such alternatives in a generation? Manrique (2001:425-426) writing on the “Internet revolution,” presents statistics which demonstrate that the distribution of computers is much more unequal than that of television: in 1993 “el 76% de hogares con computadoras se encontraba en Lima Metropolitana”; by 2000, “el 11.2% de los hogares de Lima Metropolitana dispone de, por lo menos, una computadora.” It’s a middle-class thing, but it is difficult to predict the consequences that instant information, even confined to that small but influential social sector, will have on Peruvian world view in thirty or fifty years. Brunette and Wills (1989:175) comment that “the technological media certainly accentuate the idea of a work’s [read also ‘text’s’, “television program’s’, “internet message’s’, or even ‘subject’s’] detachability from its supposed original context.” Even more, “the structural necessity of non-arrival or adestination” means the end of “a teleological concept of sending” messages (180-181). Thus, intended messages may get lost and unintended messages may arrive. If you’re under the age of 30, or perhaps 40, you’ll be lucky enough to see the results.
El Perú of the future is not likely to reproduce present or past structures. With a deft control of bibliography and ideas, Rafael Tapia (1997:347-349) writes of an emerging cholo sector, “a su vez indígena y moderna,” which we have called Peruvians “en proceso”, and in which “el individualismo ascético altamente motivado por el logro no liquida la matriz cultural de origen andino, sino, por el contrario, se nutre de ella:
Los elementos de la configuración individualista de la cultura empresarial chola serían los siguientes: (a) una disposición abierta al aprendizaje y al dominio de los lenguajes y técnicas de la modernidad occidental, inculcada en la escuela rural y en la vida urbana y expresada en una alta inversión educativa, y en una suerte de propensión por la novedad tecnológica; (b) una acentuada ética del trabajo de origen campesino andino, movilizada por un marcado asceticismo individualista [...] ; (c) un asceticismo reforzado por una alta motivación de logro . [...] Y; por último, (d) una actitud cosmopolita en el consumo cultural [...] , en la religiosidad [...] y en la producción musical . [...]
This individualism is complemented by structures from Andean culture, not lost in the urban struggle, which include an “ética de la reciprocidad que permea las relaciones sociales básicas entre las personas y las familias dentro y fuera del mercado [...]” ; “cooperación [...] ; “la dinámica de oposición y complementariedad asimétrica de la pareja andina [...] ; and “la movilización del imaginario religioso.”
Flores Galindo (1989:150, as cited in Hurtado Suárez 1997:86, n. 1) observes “una cierta andinización de las ciudades o una recreación de los elementos culturales de las urbes. Todo esto tiene que ver con el hecho de que la cultura andina es, en realidad, una creación colonial, que desde el siglo XVI absorbe una serie de elementos occidentales y, al mismo tiempo, crea otros. Gran parte de su vitalidad radica en dicha capacidad de asumir cosas nuevas e incorporarlas en su universo. Entonces, lo andino ya no se identifica sólo con lo rural o se constriñe a la sierra. Ahora lo andino se encuentra también en Chimbote o en Lima. Además, en el Perú se vive un proceso de ebullición cultural y están apareciendo cosas nuevas.” So the “cholificación del Perú” turns out to be only the “Peruanización del Perú,” a process recommended by José Carlos Mariátegui three-quarters of a century ago.
The “desborde” of migrants consists of millions of persons detached from their original contexts. Unable to make a living, squeezed from the land by ecological deterioration and population growth, such people opt for life in the city. Carlos Franco (1991:195) states their decision most dramatically:
[U]na vez conocida su decisión uno puede inferir que entre la desconfianza en su capacidad y la confianza en sí mismos se decidieron por sí mismos; que entre el hábito y el cambio se inclinaron por el cambio; que entre la seguridad y el riesgo optaron por el riesgo; que entre el pasado y el futuro eligieron el futuro; que entre lo conocido y lo desconocido se aventuraron por lo desconocido; que entre la continuidad y el progreso, prefirieron el progreso; que entre permanecer y partir, partieron. Al optar por sí mismos, por el futuro, por lo desconocido, por el riesgo, por el cambio, por el progreso, en definitiva, por partir, cientos de miles o millones de jóvenes comuneros, campesinos y provincianos en las últimas décadas se autodefinieron como “modernos”, es decir, liberaron su subjetividad de las amarras de la tradición, del pasado, del suelo, de la sangre, de la servidumbre, convirtiéndose psicológicamente en “hombres [sic] libres”. Y al hacerlo, sin ser conscientes de ello, cerraron una época del Perú para abrir otra.
But many of those who escape rural misery are defrauded of their hopes and plans. Arroyo (1994:78-79) writes of the arriving migrant:
Su bajada aluvional recordó la caravana de colonos desesperados en busca de la tierra prometida, que había imaginado en sus parajes andinos. La propaganda recibida los había hecho suponer que aquí encontrarían ventajas comparativas, frente a las desgracias del campo. Prácticamente, dejaron su tierra en un último intento por sobrevivir. Los que ya radicaban en Lima los alentaban a migrar, la misma clase dominante le pintaba Lima como una isla de fantasía: al hacerlo estimularon la llegada de provincianos, a los que no podían recepcionar, ni dar trabajo.
Thousands of these new urban dwellers end up as hawkers of assorted junk at traffic lights, petty thieves, prostitutes, gleaners of garbage, or street people. Some survive under better conditions. But here is a postmodern idea: deliverance from exploitation, oppression, poverty, short lives, misinformation-misunderstanding-misrecognition, non-literacy is the same as deliverance from symbolic death. When Peruvians cease being indios, then everything changes and there are no more blancos, criollos, mestizos, and cholos either. Impossible? Yes, but alsopossible. If the people of another century living in the region now known as Perú ever read this, they may smile. Why smile? Because they are free to find their singularity as they choose, without reference to nation, ethnicity, race, gender, or any other frame in which they are confined.
What is impressive now, at the beginning of this century, is the hopefulness of so many Peruvians in the face of such great odds: limited opportunities, fearful rates of underemployment and unemployment, scant public services, incompetent politicians, corruption, a brutal state apparatus, impossible debt, and restrictions on the imagination of creative national leaders (if such were ever elected) imposed by arrogant bullies in North America (whom I repudiate). Yet so many Peruvians are “en proceso,” alive and looking ahead toward the future. Yes, yes, they decide, there is a future.
Isn’t there?
7 In her title, De la Cadena’s point is that in the community women are more india then men; and she indicates the reason: “por su incapacidad para desarrollar una carrera urbana, y, por lo tanto, por su incapacidad para amestizarse independientemente” (199). De la Cadena’s work may fruitfully be compared with Andrew Canessa’s (n.d.): “My husband calls me ‘india’ when he beats me: Reproducing national hierarchies in an Andean hamlet”, a study of gender differences in the community of Pocobaya, Larecaja, Bolivia. In his preface, he notes that when he asked a women if she and her husband fought: “She nodded matter of factly and explained yes they did, her husband even beat her up once with the metal tube she uses to blow on the fire, she said with a laugh. We talked on and I asked her what kinds of things her husband said when they ‘fought’. She said he often shouted in Spanish and said ‘Carajo’ a lot and things like ‘india sucia’ and ‘maldita india’. Bonifacia shrugged when I asked her why he said these things but I was not surprised as I had heard people recount similar things before” (3). Later, he adds: “All the people of Pocobaya may be indians as far as Bolivian society is concerned but within the community some symbolize indianness more than others: namely the monolingual women who rarely move beyond the ambit of the Aymara-speaking world. Many of the men, in contrast, speak Spanish, do seasonal work in mines and large agricultural concerns, and have done military service which gives them a familiarity with the country most women do not possess.” In Canessa’s terms, the men are “whiter” than the women.
© 2003, William W. Stein
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