Black Spyder, Lady Blade, Tony Montana, Gran Mortis, and Big Man
When Super Catch wrestlers made appearances on morning and evening national talk shows, another kind of irony was present. Granted, Latin American talk show hosts are not known for being subtle, but the overacted excitement, fear, and horror these hosts communicated verged on the clowning Edgar was always so adamantly against. When Super Catch wrestlers made appearances on morning and evening national talk shows, another kind of irony was present. Granted, Latin American talk show hosts are not known for being subtle, but the overacted excitement, fear, and horror these hosts communicated verged on the clowning Edgar was always so adamantly against. In March and April of this year, Super Catch luchadores (including myself) appeared on the Univision morning program, Revista, five times. Though the show has four hosts, it was always Tony Melo who interviewed us, and sometimes even donned a luchador mask acting as a mark for the luchadores. The segment always featured a brawl between wrestlers, and often Tony would be pulled into the grappling. The peleas always ended with Super Catch luchadores ganging up on Tony, as he was flung around the sound stage and mock kicked after being thrown to the floor. He very much acted as the clown figure in these situations, flailing arms, and making exaggerated faces for the camera. He always wore a curly wig, and t-shirt that said “Soy No. 1.” Tony Melo is on the far right with his co-anchor. Super Catch luchadores are: Super Cuate, Big Boy, Desertor, Black Spyder, Lady Blade, Tony Montana, Gran Mortis, and Big Man In contrast, the luchadores seemed more serious. Our costumes were clearly better constructed. Our moves were more practiced and more effective in contrast to Tony’s. But much like Edgar’s worries about the cholitas luchadoras, Tony’s clownish acting gave an air of farce to the wrestling that happened on television. No luchadores ever commented on this except to roll their eyes occasionally when Tony was mentioned in the backstage area. Nor did I have a chance to ask Tony or the program producers what their intentions were with the way they presented lucha libre. But the audience for Revista is much larger and far more varied than the in-person audiences which actually attend events. There were viewers that phoned in to win free entry to the event, often saying they hailed from working class neighborhoods like Villa Armonía in La Paz or Villa Esperanza in El Alto. But this is also a television program which professional Paceños watch as they prepare in the morning for work as managers in banks, universities, and international organizations. Thus, the fact that Tony’s acting on the program reflects the ironic appreciation of lucha libre is not surprising. Though TV interviewers always treated all the luchadores with respect, their over-acted treatment of the segments seemed to stem not only from their television personalities, but from a deeper sense of irony they were communicating to viewers.
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One of the peer reviewers for my JLACA article suggested that I include more information about what “elite” Paceños think of lucha libre. I didn’t think this fit well into the article, but I do think the general public’s reactions to lucha libre are something interesting to be considered. This is part one of a short series on middle class interpretations of lucha libre. The luchadoras are “un orgullo Paceño en La Paz y El Alto” [A Paceño pride in La Paz and El Alto] David, a local LGBT activist told me. “Es una pasion de multitudes…la gente burguesa y popular” [It’s a passion of the multitudes. The elite and popular classes]. It was not exactly my experience that they were the “passion” of middle class people, but they were certainly within the realm of popular discussion topic. As I wrote about here, one night at a party I put on a pollera and braided my hair. Gonz was the only one there who knew my secret, so when Luis, shouted “Tienes que luchar! Como las cholitas en la lucha libre” I was caught off guard. Amidst much laughter we all started pretending to wrestle. To my friends at the party, the luchadoras are something of a joke that carries classed inflection. Like a monster truck rally or square dance might be viewed by urban elites in the United States, lucha libre is not disparaged outright, but seen with a certain sense of dismissal or ironic appreciation. Here they express an understanding of the preference for the genres of excess that has often been classed. As Linda Williams explains of film genres, those that have a particularly low cultural status—horror, pornography, and melodrama—are ones in which “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (1991:4). These films, rather than appealing to elite classes as “high art” are seen to be for the less educated, less “cultured” masses. A luchador's son performs as "Chucky" at the 30 March 2012 Super Catch Event And indeed, lucha libre combines aspects of all three of these film types. The enacted violence of the ring reflects the gratuitous violence of horror films. The intimate contact of bodies, and sometimes explicit sexually charged scenarios can be read as pornographic (see Messner, et. al 2003, Rahilly 2005). And several scholars have pointed to the melodramatic nature of the extreme good and evil portrayed in exhibition wrestling (Jenkins 2007, Levi 2008). Thus, for many of my friends lucha libre lies squarely within the bounds of that which is not to be appreciated—at least on an artistic or serious level. However, like North American young people, young Paceños sometimes have ironic appreciation for degraded cultural symbols like lucha libre. Irony often functions as a “frame shifting” mechanism (Coulson 2001) in order to express humor. When I entered the party wearing a pollera, Gonz shouting “cholita punk” shifted the frame from the representation of cholitas as traditional and thoroughly Bolivian icons, to something integrated with the international youth culture of punk rock. Even my own laughter at wearing the pollera and braids played on the disjuncture of a U.S. gringa in clothing with cultural meaning in the Andes. And most certainly, when Luis suggested I wrestle, irony was used to disrupt the usual interpretation of a mujer de pollera. Coulson, Seana
2001 Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, Henry 2007 The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press. Levi, Heather 2008 The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity. Durham: Duke University Press. Messner, Michael A,, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Cheryl Cooky 2003 Silence, Sports Bras, And Wrestling Porn : Women in Televised Sports News and Highlights Shows. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27:38-51. Rahilly, Lucia 2005 Is RAW War?: Professional Wrestling as Popular S/M Narrative. In Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. Nicholas Sammond, ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Linda 2001 Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. Film Quarterly 44(4):2-13. Monday was feriado, el Día de La Paz, so Alé and I decided we might as well have a drink. We both had the day off from the respective bars where we work. His a posh but thoroughly local night club. Mine a bar in a gringo hostel that caters to 20 year old Brits spending daddy’s money on vodka lemonades and drugs at the clandestine cocaine bar down the street. The local Paceña beer is cheaper at my joint, so we went there, and as we sipped on the second large bottle, Alé tapped my hand and motioned to the end of the bar. There stood Alec my boss. The first time I saw Alec was over a year ago. I watched a tall Eastern European man walk out of the hostel office. He was covered in tattoos, and had several prominent facial piercings. He carried a laptop case. I assumed he was in his mid thirties. I only later found out he was 22. The first time I spoke to him was my friend Amanda’s birthday party, when he kept several of us in the bar well after closing, forcing vodka and whiskey shots down our gullets. “No puedes obligarme a beber. No soy tu empleada” I shouted between Jameson shots. But then the next week I started working for him. Alec's usual pose And only then did I learn all the stories about Alec. The most famous was the night he stabbed himself in the cheek just to get people the leave the bar. The ladies who work in the kitchen also love to tell stories of “joven Alec” standing on the hostel stairs at 7am, naked and swigging vodka from the bottle. In any event, Alec is like family. He’ll take care of you to the full extent of his in-with-the-Bolivian-police ability, but there are obligations in return. And crossing him is most definitely not in your best interest. So, when Alé told me Alec was beckoning, I was slightly nervous. But as I walked over he asked if I would do him a favor. I assumed this involved washing some high ball glasses or getting more tequila from the storage room. But when I said “sure,” he told me he was sending me to Potosí. Potosí is not the type of place one dreams of being sent for a business trip. It sits at 4090 meters above sea level giving it an almost arctic climate. And most buildings have no central heat. Its principal (possibly only real) industry is mining, which is almost entirely unregulated. The local beer, Potosiña has a strange hint of burnt bacon in its flavor. There is no airport, so to get there from La Paz, one takes a 10 hour, over night bus ride. Usually the bus has no heat. But as many people will enthusiastically declare, “At least the road is paved the whole way!” my first daylight view of Potosí Potosí was not always this way though. Potosí was the principle supplier of Silver to Spain when most of South America was split into colonial provinces. During those days it was one of the richest and largest cities, possibly in the world, with a population of 200,000. In Spanish, there was a saying “valer un potosí”—to be worth a fortune. Today, the silver has disappeared, except in the imaginations of the poorly paid miners who hope they will be the lucky one to find a vein of pure red as they tunnel through the mountain. In my estimation it is the Flint, Michigan of Bolivia. And so, early Monday morning, I arose, despite the fact that it was feriado, and went off to buy a bus ticked. But of course, given the holiday, most tour operators were closed, and I had to go to the bus station in person. After finally acquiring a ticket and relieving everyone involved in the operation, I went back to the hostel for the real preparations. Strapping $50,000 in cash to my abdomen. It’s all the Central Bank of Argentina's fault. Potosí is (relatively) near the border with Argentina, and the company that owns the hostel is building a new one in Salta. When money is transferred into Argentinian bank accounts, it is automatically converted into Pesos. But most high-end purchases: property, building materials, the things that go into making a new hostel, are exchanged for dollars. So when the pesos are converted back to dollars, you end up losing around 10%. For sums in the tens of thousands of dollars, that’s a lot to lose. So instead, I was off to meet Carrie and 4 Argentines, who would cross the border with the legal maximum of $10,000 each in their possession. But to get there I had to sit for ten hours on a South American bus, driving through the freezing night, without heat, and unable to sleep—partially because I had was seemed to be a square pregnancy beneath my hoodie and down coat that occasionally pinched my skin if I moved the wrong way, partially because I was paranoid of being mugged. But I got on the bus and discovered the seat next to me was vacant. I stretched my legs diagonally. I took out the book a Dutch girl I met several months before had left me. I flipped on my light. Except it wouldn’t turn on. Of course, too much to ask for the seat lights to actually work. So I stared out the window at the black night. At the stars, at the car lights that passed every twenty or minutes or so. And finally, sometime around 3 am I drifted off to sleep. At 6 am we arrived. It was still pitch black outside, and my 3 hours of sleep left me disoriented rather than refreshed. But as I stepped off the bus, a bubbly, blonde Canadian girl called my name. She hugged me and told me how glad she was to see me. We had never met before, but she had been standing outside in the 14 degree F night to greet me. She worried I hadn’t bought the ticket or I had missed the bus. She worried I had run off with the money. She worried we’d miss each other in the night and I’d get mugged. Her imagination, like mine, was running wild with what could happen to $50,000 on a Bolivian bus. But we found each other and walked the 200 meters to the Alojamiento she and the Argentines were staying in. The doors had been padlocked for the night and it took about 5 full minutes of banging to wake the security guard. He finally let us in, as my ungloved hands were on the verge of frostbite. It was only marginally warmer inside. Carrie banged on the door of the room where Marc Antonio, the construction manager, and Ernesto, the driver were sleeping. We went up a flight of stairs and went into the room where Carrie had stayed with Marc Antonio’s two teenage daughters. The room, despite having no windows, felt only marginally warmer than it had been outside. But I removed my puffy layers and revealed the two money belts that covered my belly. I took them off and we pulled out the staples Alec had used to “secure” them. We unzipped them, and since they had already been full when I first saw them and put them around my body, I saw the most cash I had ever seen. And possibly ever will. outside the mines This city, which was once a mythical land of riches to Europeans, now appeared as a depressed hell hole. As the four of us young women stood around the bed looking at 5 stacks of one-hundred dollar bills, the irony was not lost. Here we were pushing the importation laws to their limit in a city with the highest poverty rate in South America's poorest country. All to build a pretty new hostel with a swimming pool and horse-riding trail, and bar with a fancy pool table so that North American and European kids could come drink themselves silly on their “exotic” South American “adventure.”
In the end, Carrie and the Argentines took their loot. And I slept a few hours before walking back to the bus station and buying a return ticket. So the Tito’s guys walk into the bar in their certain affected ways, dripping with meaning. But they are not naked fusions of heads and limbs. They are not just bodies. They are bodies that are covered in various ways. Gonz wears a black Pantera shirt over a black turtleneck. He has long, thick wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail. He has two lip piercings (of the sort I’ve heard my sister call “snakebites”), along with a few silver hoops in his ears. Alé often wears an Ed Hardy shirt with a tiger on it that he told me he bought at the El Alto market one Sunday. He wears baggy light colored jeans and black Adidas shoes that often have the laces untied. His dark brown leather jacket has a sweatshirt hood poking out the collar. He shaves his head to the second lowest setting once a week. He has small black flesh plug earrings, and his right hand has a tattoo in black and red of a rotary tattoo machine that says “calibración.” Edwin, the owner, in many ways looks the least menacing of them all. His medium sized flesh tunnel earrings are the most obvious visible nod to his career. He wears glasses that hover in the space between hipster and dorky. The night that Gonz surprised me with his energy, Edwin wore a white tshirt with the DC skateboarding logo on it. After 2 beers, he lifted it up to reveal the tattoo of a classic 1950s auto. He said, “and it’s a transformer!” I was puzzled. Then I started laughing hysterically as he puffed out the stomach and it resembled more of a VW bug than a long lean car. Diego, I always picture in his “Johnny Walked” shirt—with the Johnny Walker logo, only in a wheelchair. He has black spiky hair and fairly large flesh tunnel earrings. He almost always wears ray ban sunglasses outdoors. He has a goatee and tattoos peak out of his shirt on his neck and his arms. Their bodies, in some ways more than others,’ are obviously constructed. The piercings (many of which take time to stretch) and tattoos are visibly “unnatural.” But though the specifics might differ, their bodies are constructed through the same processes as everyone else’s. Donald Lowe (2005) lists, among other things, that processes of bodily construction include the work we do, the commodities we consume, and the politics of gender and sexuality to which we ascribe or aspire. In other words, these bodies (all bodies) flexibly accumulate markers through consumption, production, and identity practices. What they have accumulated, among other things, is the ability to perform as authentic tattoo artists. Much has been written on the ways that both dress (Adkins and Lury 1999, Atluri 2009, Halberstam 1998), and purchase of goods (Mort 1995, 1998, Tomlinson 1990) work to perform authenticity of identity. Because they rely on social scripts (the ones that tell us not to trust a barber with a bad haircut or a tattoo artist with no tattoos), over time these symbols congeal to produce appearance of naturalness (Butler 1999:44). (Well, of course my tattoo artist wears a leather jacket. What would you expect? A tweed sport coat?) As Bucholtz and Hall explain, authenticity (or as they say, “authentication,” to emphasize its active and processual nature) is about realness in contrast to artifice. Certain accumulations (clothing, tattoos and piercings for the Tito’s guys, or boyfriends from Travestis in India) provide validation for identities (2005:500). Often authentication of identity is achieved through connection to valued symbols (Bucholtz and Hall 2005:500). But as Lowe writes, “All body practices [production practices, consumption practices, social reproduction practices, practices of sexuality and gender construction, and practices of psychopathology] have become commodified to such an extent, that the satisfaction of our diverse bodily needs is reconfigured by the requirements of flexible accumulation" (1995). Thus the “valued symbols” of today are often connected to certain brand names: Ed Hardy, DC, Pantera (yes I, along with other more respectable figures, argue bands at times may constitute a brand in and of itself). Through juxtaposed images and signs, advertising connects product characteristics with prevailing social and cultural values. As a result, we no longer consume commodities to satisfy relatively stable and specific needs, but to reconstruct ourselves in terms of the lifestyle associated with the consumption of certain commodities. Much like the travelers at the Ekko bar, the tattooists flexibly accumulate symbols of their identities: t shirts that reference “alternative” subcultures related to music or skateboarding, piercings of various sizes, visible tattoos, and bodily comportment that indexes an atagonistic attitude toward the world (authority?). And like the tourists, this accumulation, though it relies on certain forms of consumption, is not simply about buying specific products, but includes the accumulation of non-commodified symbols. Alé’s image of the tattoo machine on his hand is a clear example. Even his Ed Hardy tshirt, which likely cost less than 5Bs (75 cents) in El Alto is a product that is purchased, but is important for its social capital rather than its economic worth. However, as Carolan (2005) argues, in this new era of conspicuous consumption, surrounding oneself with "nice things" is insufficient … rather we are striving to become the 'Nice thing" itself, to literally embody our consumption. He suggests this is visible in the ways bodies are dressed, fed, comported, and even their apparent "health.” The outward appearance of one's body is considered to be a window to one's inner worthiness. Thus we arrive back at the body, a vehicle for brands and symbols. Litterally punctured. Literally written upon. And yet, perhaps it is the (somewhat) irreversible nature of these two latter processes that provides the sense of authenticity. A gate can be altered. A shirt can be changed. I know that Alé has a suit hanging in his closet. But that “calibración” on his hand is still going to be visible. And is still going to reference a very specific identity. Adkins, Lisa and Celia Lury
1999 The Labour of Identity: Performing Identities, Performing Economies. Economy and Society 28(4):598-614. Atluri, Tara 2009 Lighten Up?! Humour, Race, and Da Off Colour Joke of Ali G. Media, Culture, & Society 31(2):197-214 Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall 2005 Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach. Discourse Studies 7(4-5):585-614. Butler, Judith 1999 Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Carolan, Michael S. 2005 The Conspicuous Body: Capitalism, Consumerism, Class and Consumption. Worldviews 9(1):82-111. Halberstam, Judith 1998 Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Lowe, Donald M. 1995 The Body in Late-Capitalist USA. Durham: Duke University Press. Mort, Frank 1998 Cityscapes: Consumption, Masculinities and the Mapping of London since 1950. Urban Studies 35(5-6):889-907. 1995 Archaeologies of City Life: Commerical Culture, Masculinity, and Spatial Relations in 1980s London. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13:573-590. Tomlinson, Alan 1990 Consumption, Identity, and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure. New York: Routledge. In Orin Starn’s 1991 article, “Missing the Revolution,” he chastised anthropologists for missing signs of the rise of Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path], the Peruvian Maoist insurgent organization. He suggests anthropologists were too absorbed in Andeanism, a term he borrows from Edward Said’s Orientalism, to mean depictions of life in the Andes that portray contemporary peoples as outside the flow of modern history (395). Because of their narrow focus, they missed the important politics and historical dynamics that fomented the rise of groups like Shining Path. As he wrote, for hundreds of anthropologists…the rise of the Shining Path came as a complete surprise” (395). Many anthropologists took this call to heart, and much recent work on the Andes has indeed centered on working-class and rural peoples’ protest, political work, and revolution. Scholars such as Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson highlight the “revolutionary spirit” of indigenous and mestizo Bolivians. Indeed, strong movements opposing neoliberal economic policies and multinational corporations’ ownership of many of Bolivia’s natural resources have been politically effective. One of the most heightened moments of this movement was the inauguration of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s (and the hemisphere’s) first indigenous president. In speeches celebrating his inauguration, Evo emphasized both his indigeneity and revolutionary ideology with statements such as “I say to you, my Indian brothers and sisters from America concentrated here in Bolivia, the 500 year campaign of resistance has not been in vain. This democratic, cultural fight is part of the fight of our ancestors; it is the continuity of the fight of Tupaj Katari, of Che Guevara.” In this small statement, he links himself and his supporters not only to leftist revolutions in Latin America of the last century, but also to a much longer lineage of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-exploitation that has existed since subaltern Bolivians resisted their colonial exploiters. Revolution then is not something that happened in the past, but something that is the continuity between “then” and “now.” These historical revolutions penetrate many citizens’ understandings of “Bolivianness” today. When I arrived in La Paz for the first time in July 2009, I did so on the eve of the annual celebration Día de La Paz. All over the city banners were hung in celebration of “200 Años Libre.” In 1809 several uprisings against royalist forces began in La Paz. Though insurgent troops did not succeed in a decisive victory over Spanish forces until 1825, it is the beginning of the campaign that is remembered as the year of freedom. On July 16, 1809 Pedro Domingo Murillo famously declared that the Bolivia revolution was igniting a fire that no one could put out. Though Murillo was hung in the Plaza de los Españoles that night, the plaza was renamed for him and he is remembered as a voice of the revolution. In 2009 banners around La Paz proclaimed, “Somos un fuego qué no se apaga!” [We are a fire that cannot be extinguished]. And so, to me, Bolivia lived up to its reputation as a hotbed of revolution. I had always (though self-consciously) romanticized Bolivian revolution a bit. [I've also written about Bolivian protest here and here]. I was continually impressed by the ways miners, teachers, and health workers could simply block off a road could and force the president into negotiations for salary increases, as had happened a few weeks after I arrived in La Paz in April 2011. I was awestruck at the “revolutionary pride” Hylton and Thomson had described, and always wondered why Bolivians were so effective at protest, while people in the US just seemed totally incapable. Well, now, perhaps, times…they are a’changin… Occupy Wall Street is now almost a month old, and cities like Boston, Chicago, Philly, and Madison, and Minneapolis, (and of course my beloved DC's Occupy K Street) have similar occupations afoot. I’m still my cynical self and despite my semi-sporadic presence at DC General Assembly meetings, I’m not 100% convinced the REVOLUTION is immanent. I’d still consider myself hopeful though. I’ve been taking fieldnotes on what I’ve experienced. I guess its just habit these days. But after reading a conference paper of mine on the representation [and/or imaginary] of Bolivian protest, my advisor suggested I develop it into a longer article for publication and incorporate some stuff on the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement. I’m still unsure if I will actually do that, but its made me think more critically about what is going on. But here, I’m going to take time to comment on what to me has seemed the biggest debate associated with occupations: Specific Demands vs. Problematizing the Status Quo. From big news outlets such as the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal down to small scale political bloggers all emphasize the major weakness of the(se) movement(s) being a lack of specific demands. And much of the grassroots organizing communities (though certainly not all) have countered that essentially, it is not their job to write laws, and if the government had been doing their job all along, we wouldn’t be in this mess [I saw this summed up in a photo of a man with a sign at some occupation somewhere and now for the life of me can’t find the picture]. I’m still unsure where I fall in this debate. But the most cogent examination of this I’ve seen thus far has suggested we must “Turn the Shame Around.” An unjust system’s first line of defense is shame. As long as we’re ashamed to admit that we’re victims, as long as we’re ashamed to identify with the other losers, we’re helpless. It would be great to have a 10-point plan that solves everything. It would be great to have a party that endorses that plan and a get-out-the-vote movement to put that party into office. But none of that is going to happen until large numbers of us cast off our shame, until we turn the shame around: We need to stop being ashamed that we couldn’t crack the top 1%, and instead cast shame on an economic system that only works for 1%. The people who defend that immoral system and profit from it — they should be ashamed, not us. He compares this movement to those of LGBT rights and Feminism, suggesting that before specific aims can be approached, a politics of visibility must emerge. He of course links to We are the 99%, which may be considered the first (or at least best publicized) online repository of shame shifting. [see also Matt Taibbi’s piece on Common Dreams] He concludes The old rules still apply. We’re going to need policies. We’re going to need agendas and lists of demands. We’re going to need leaders to represent us and armies of volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls and write letters to the editor. We’re going to have to register millions of voters and get them to the polls. None of that is going to happen automatically just because people lose their shame about being victims of an economy run by and for the 1%. But I don’t believe that stuff is going to happen at all — not on the scale we need — until people lose their shame about being victims and losers. It’s just a first step, but I don’t think we can skip it. And so, I bring us back to the materiality of representation. As Butler (1998) and Fraser (1997) famously (for nerds like me) hashed out, representation is not “merely cultural.” Representations carry material consequences. For the luchadoras, using the image of the chola not only exploits but also reproduces indigenous women’s vulnerability to physical and structural harm, at times furthing the cycle of violence and subordination. For Occupiers, representation either grants legitimacy, leading to increased attention and solidarity, or delegitimizes the movement as fringe. So, to use Spivak’s (1988) notion that representation may be conceived of in two senses, the “re-presentation” of a group deeply impacts their ability to be spoken for in political representation.
So, yes, we Occupiers must eventually demand specific actions. But given the states of visibility and representation at the moment, we must still work on building solidarity, and strength. If we narrow our demands too early, they will not be heard. At the moment, the Nation is Waiting for Protesters to Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them. see more of my pictures on J & M's "letter to an @narquista in the oven" Junot Díaz, author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (who incidentally I have taken to following in my constructions of "he was brian smith before brian smith was brian smith") has written an amazing piece on the social nature of "natural" disasters for the Boston Review, titled Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal. My intention with these fieldnotes is not to create a blog that simply links to good things I've found on the web, but I think Díaz does an excellent job of explaining what I briefly alluded to in my post that mentions the Bolivian landslides (but was really more about the global reach of Justin Bieber). So, I'm offering it up here, I suppose as a nod, not only to the theorists whose works I benefit from, but also to amazing writers who are brilliant with words, accessible, and poignant all at once.
I went to "The Strongest" futbol game yesterday. I suppose for a bit of comparative reflection. I'm not sure I really got much though. The reserved tickets were a mere 40 Bs. There was a 4 year old girl behind me that would occasionally be struck with the urge to yell "tigres! tigres!" which was rather cute and amusing (The Strongest's uniforms are yellow and black striped, and I assume this is why they are known as the tigres). There were fireworks and yellow smoke everytime they scored (4 times). And plenty of singing "Ole, ole ole ole, tigres. tigres." I suppose the most profound thing I can say is that I didn't see a single pollera inside the stadium. It seemed to be more of a Zona Central thing rather than attracting people from El Alto or Villa Victoria or the like. Of course there were far, far more people there than at a wrestling event, so I imagine there were some people from all over the city. But it seemed to be more of a middle class event than the wrestling. Of course this is based entirely on my assessment of people's clothing and thus, should be taken as simply an initial assessment. I was told on the way there that my friend (from the US) had heard the local team (los tigres) was a "working class team" and the other team was more a middle class team [according to wikipedia this is both the opposite and a "gross over-generalization"]. I didn't see any fans rooting for the opposing team, so it was hard to say if that was accurate. But almost everyone in the stadium was wearing team paraphernalia. I also hoped to see how the crowd would react when the other team scored, but the 4-0 score didn't allow such observations. Alas, I'll have to go back for another game sometime.
Two years ago, I saw Bolivian lucha libre for the first time live. I took a tourist bus and was fascinated by the conversation that ensued. The riders grappled with “knowing” that it “must be traditional” yet calling it “far too WW[E].” And while I recognized the tour company that leads the tours is probably the real culprit here (wasn’t it Ani Difranco that said “look at where the profits are/that's how you'll find the source/of the big lie that you and i/both know so well”?), I saw these young travelers as naïve, exploitative, and at times offensive.
And it was easy to write about that. To follow the age-old critique of colonialist/imperialist/orientalist travel. And I don’t mean I did so in a righteous way—in fact is was a matter of accidental convenience, but I ended up challenging those assumptions (and isn’t it Tom Robbins who said “You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous about risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés”?). So I stayed in the Ekko* hostel for two weeks, to get a better ethnographic perspective on the tourism in La Paz (and also to give me time to find a permanent place). And my fieldnotes are filled with an undertone of “OMG” and “What is wrong with these people?”, but I also met some really amazing people who I respect and at times admire. And so, amidst emails to tour companies and the Fulbright office, phone calls to friends of friends in La Paz, and no small amount of viewing wrestling, I find myself editing this paper/(hopeful)journal article on tourism and the Cholitas Luchadoars, and just can’t find the voice I want to convey. I guess that’s always the worry with ethnography. Maybe sometimes you get too close to be critical. Or you can’t find the balance between compassionate writing and dismissing wrongdoings. But I’ll end with a piece of fieldnotes that almost didn’t happen. I went to bed around midnight on Tuesday, and was sleeping peacefully, but around 4:30 some of my young Irish bunkmates wandered into the room, likely on some sort of substance, and talked loudly, turned the lights on and off several times, and giggled themselves to sleep. They giggled me out of my sleep, and when I was still staring at the ceiling at 7am, I decided I might as well go have some free breakfast in the bar instead of continuing to count the cracks. I had some breakfast, but by 11am was falling asleep while trying to type, so I went back to the room (still containing the sleeping Irish men) for a nap. I woke up just before 1pm, and was starving. I decided to go back to the bar and order some lunch while using the internet there. I was looking for a menu when I noticed that Vijay (an off-duty bartender) had one. I sat down next to him and asked what he was ordering. “Actually, nothing. We’re going to the factory for Amanda’s birthday.” I had learned about the factory earlier that week, when Mike, a bartender, was traveling to Cuzco to tend bar there. The factory, according to legend, had the best chicken wings in the world and he was taking about 15 dozen for the staff of Ekko’s sibling hostel there. All week the Ekko staff had been talking about “The Factory” and I pictured some sort of distorted Bolivian Perdue factory where they would sell you wings right off the line or something. Most of the bar staff at Ekko are travelers much like the patrons of the hostel (and thus of the bar). They simply agree to stay for a minimum of three weeks and tend the bar for four shifts a week in exchange for free housing in a room shared with the other staff, and one free meal per day. Many of them, like Mike start working in the Ekko hostel in one city and then transfer to another Ekko in Peru or Bolivia. Most other travelers stay in the hostel for only a few nights and spend their time at the city’s attractions like biking down the “most dangerous road in the world” (also known simply as “doing death road”) or climbing the Huayna Potosi mountain. I however, was simply trying to make contacts in La Paz, catch up with a few old friends, and start my “real fieldwork,” which meant I was in the hostel a lot more consistently and for a longer stay than most of the other guests. And so, people started recognizing me, talking to me, and I became friends with the bar staff. So when Vijay suggested I come along, I decided it might be good to get out of the building for a while and spend some time with him and Amanda. So the three of us hopped in a cab headed for Zona Sur, and eventually arrived at The Factory Bar and Grill, which I imagine is somewhat of a Bolivian Buffalo Wild Wings (though I’ve never been to a BWW, so I really can’t make that claim). But the important part of the story is what happened in the taxi. As we got further into Zona Sur, the upperclass part of La Paz, Vijay said “Being in posh places makes me uncomfortable.” Amanda, who grew up in the UK, concurred and told a story of meeting her family for Christmas in Ecuador (where her extended family lives). She had been backpacking for several months before that. “Its just such a different way to travel.” We stayed in these 5 star hotels where everything was taken care of and took private tours. It felt like being on a safari. Just seeing the world through rose-colored glasses….Then again, we are all staying at Ekko.” So, I suppose my (initial) conclusion is something like this: The relations between travelers from the “first world” (North America, Western and Central Europe, Australia, New Zealand, urban South Africa) to the people and places they visit in the global south (and yes, I realize the terminology here is highly lacking) are at the very least problematic. However, I don’t think that young people who travel are entirely to blame. Yes, perhaps they are in a way taking advantage of structures that maintain their ability to consume of other “cultures” “people” and possibly most importantly food and alcohol thanks to beneficial exchange rates. But they are also doing so to learn something about the world. They take language classes and volunteer at orphanages. And again, I don’t want to minimize problems of the NGO and volunteer vacation industrial complexes, but they have good intentions. For the most part they are making decisions to experience other places rather than stay in their home country and only read about far off places and people like a new generation of armchair anthropologists. And given that the options for travel tend to be very polarized between five star hotels with private tours, and the more adventure tourism of hostel hopping and death road riding, I find that I have a lot in common with the hostel guests and staff. Even anthropology (gasp!) is not without its colonial and imperial history and undertones. So in a way, we’re all just trying to find a balance of broadening our knowledge, making the world a better place, and working within the structures that are so hard to subvert. Both Amanda and Vijay have moved on to other South American countries now, and I do find myself missing them a bit. But don’t get me started on the gap years… I’m feeling less in love with La Paz today.
M asked me if La Paz is more like Abidjan or Buenos Aires. Having never been to either, here was my response: I’d guess Abidjan. Though maybe the part I was in today was more like Buenos Aires. I went to a party on the rich suburban side of town where people have houses and yards and it was really really nice to be somewhere that didn't feel entirely urban. Rodolfo says wealth in La Paz is directly the inverse of altitude. The rich people live in the lowest part of the city. The higher you get, the poorer people are. I remember riding back from Valle de la Luna in 2009 and coming back into town through that part. It seemed really nice and warmer and I especially remember seeing a big sign for Universidad Loyola, which obviously reminded me of home. So the taxi took me down down down. First past el Prado, and past the park with the ferris wheel, through Miraflores, around and around and down down down. I realized where we were going and got a little excited. We continued past the Loyola sign and headed back uphill. All the way to calle 29. When I got out of the taxi, I called Andres and he waved to me from the door. We passed through the big iron gate and there was a beautiful manicured garden. We passed one very nice house and entered a back house I suppose you could call it. It seemed to be a space reserved just for parties and entertaining. There was an indoor porch type area. A large dining room with several tables, a stage and a kitchen. There were also stairs to what appeared to be a small room above the kitchen, but the rest of the building had an atrium type ceiling. This was definitely not even something you’d find in SoHocachi! But the majority of the city has a lot of informal markets. A lot of street vendors. Lots of noisy busses with people hanging out of them and yelling. Lots of sketchy looking taxis. You occasionally get a good whiff of urine. The streets are paved with cobblestone. And there are a decent amount of plazas with grass and trees. Its easy enough to find some small green space if you’re craving some. His response: hm. Sounds like a fusion of the two. |
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