​I don’t recall exactly how it began, but I was “la gringa.” Somewhere during my first year in Iquique, Chile, my two best friends began calling me as such, and soon hearing my given name from them just sounded wrong. They were a gay couple, both trained in derechos (law). Guillermo worked for the national Consulario—the institution that oversees government finances, and Cristian for la Defensoria del Pueblo—something like a public defense organization. Cristian had lived in the United States during a few different stints, and both had plans to pursue graduate education abroad.
 
When I left Iquique after two years to relocate to Santiago, I was particularly sad about leaving them behind. Not only had they been dear friends, confidants, Chilean history lesson providers, and cooking instructors, but they had also opened their home to me several times when I either physically needed a place to stay, or was so emotionally wraught from fieldwork that I needed an escape. But within a few months, Guillermo, originally from Santiago, had secured a position in the central office of the Consulario, and Cristian was interviewing for jobs in the metropolitan region as well. By summer we were reunited.
 
And while I had been indeed the gringa in Iquique—even more-so in the marginal satellite city of Alto Hospicio where I had lived and done my research, suddenly in Santiago I easily passed as someone who “belonged.” Perhaps at first glance it was clear I was not Chilean, and certainly confirmed when I began to speak with my muddled accent, and overly forced slang. But there were so many of us foreigners around that I was finally breathing sighs of relief that I was unremarkable. Here, gringa made less sense, but the nickname persisted. While I had always taken it as a term of endearment, it was questioned more in Santiago. “Aren’t you offended?” my Colombian apartment-mate would ask. But slowly he began calling me “gringa” as well. As did my boss, who had also become something of a friend. I heard “oye, Gringa” dozens of times each day, and received social media messages and emails addressed as such in addition.
 
And then my time in Chile ended. Before taking that long flight back to Chicago, I went to visit Bolivia, the place of my Ph.D. fieldwork, and suddenly I went back to being Nelly, or “la doctora.” My friend Gustavo and I went from La Paz to visit Cochabamba for a weekend, and we met up with a large group of friends, most of whom I had known several years earlier in La Paz. But there were some newcomers, a group of young people from Santiago who were visiting as well. As we all paraded around a Cochabamba supermarket contemplating what to grill that Saturday afternoon, I heard a Chilean accented voice shout, “Oye, Gringa!” I instinctively looked up, only seconds later wondering how this man knew I would respond to that name. Is it just that Chileans all call people gringos? Am I so very obviously Estadounidense that calling me anything else doesn’t seem to be an option, at least to someone who does not remember my name? And as I looked around for the voice’s owner, contemplating these possibilities, I realized he was not speaking to me, but to the Argentine women who was traveling with them.
 
Over the course of the weekend I never learned the Argentine’s given name, because she was exclusively referred to as Gringa. She was tall and had half of her hair died blonde. The other half of her head was shaven to buzz cut. She had a deep laugh and bright colored Adidas high top shoes that complimented her day-glow t shirt. I could easily imagine her as the stereotypical Argentine traveler juggling small balls or doing gymnastics at a traffic light in another South American country. And the name that had for so long felt so singularly mine, suddenly felt cheapened. If any foreigner could be a gringa, just because her skin was light, maybe it wasn’t a term of endearment. I never questioned Guillermo and Cristian’s motives, but somehow that word no longer felt like home.
 
Mary Weismantel writes, “Foreigners—a category that includes Latin American visitors as well—are gringos, but they are members of the same race as local whites.” Gringa will always be special to me, even as I write about the politics of whiteness in places like Iquique, La Paz, and Santiago. But I also must remember, it is not just a name, but a positionality, and its meaning…like chola, indian, indigenous person, black, person of color, or any other racialized naming form…is always historically, contextually, and politically dependent. 

this fieldnote was originally posted on The Geek Anthropologist

Social media is no longer the geek domain it once was, with the Americas and Europe approaching a fifty percent penetration rate, and an overall global penetration rate of over thirty percent. But as these platforms and apps become more widely used, they also become more specialized to certain kinds of use intended for certain kinds of audiences. And as audiences shift, new types of communities emerge through social media.

In field Alto Hospicio, a marginal city in northern Chile, some of the most interesting ethnographic details have to do with the ways young people use collaboratively managed Tumblr accounts to create a sense of a community through language play and humor, extending beyond the local area to a nationally imagined community. This identification with a national community is actually quite an anomaly, because in many senses the people of Alto Hospicio often distinguish themselves from people in other regions of the country, considering themselves to be more marginal and exploited than the average Chilean citizen. The city is located in a booming copper mining area, but most residents are low-level workers in the industry, and watch as the massive profits end up in the national capital of Santiago or abroad in Europe, North America, and Australia. In general, most citizens envision themselves as economically disadvantaged and politically (and geographically) marginalized. While marginality is often used as a category of analysis within the social sciences, generally to describe the conditions of people who struggle to gain societal and spatial access to resources and full participation in political life, in the case of Alto Hospicio, marginality is incorporated into the ways citizens view their own position in contrast to those people the see as more powerful in the center of the country. In actively distancing themselves from cities such as Santiago – both in daily life and through their online activity – residents of Alto Hospicio see their marginalized city as part of the way they perceive them- selves – not as victims, but as an exploited community that continues to fight for its rights. Yet they strongly identify as Chileans, citing their cultural affiliations rather than political power.

​Please read the full blog on THE GEEK ANTHROPOLOGIST

“I joined a protest group!” Andres proclaimed proudly, knowing that I tend to be a loud proponent of the right of individuals to shake things up with collective action.

“What are you protesting?” I asked, and he pulled out his cracked Samsung Galaxy to show me. He opened Whatsapp and handed me the phone, where I read a brief manifesto in opposition to the construction of a parking lot for Bolivian trucks in Arica. “They’re going to spend 3.2 million dollars on a parking lot! And not for Chileans. For Bolivians. Do you think Bolivia has parking lots for Chilean vehicles? Or are there parking lots for us in Argentina and Colombia? No! With that money they could build homes, they could feed how many families for a year, they could fix the roads.”

Though a parking lot for Bolivian trucks may seem like a silly issue (and a strange one to those unfamiliar with Bolivian/Chilean politics), it cuts to the heart of much deeper issues of nationalism. The two countries are currently waiting for International Court of Justice at The Hague to decide if they will consider Bolivia’s claim to renegotiate coastal access, which was lost in the War of the Pacific in the late 1800s (see my Primer on the Bolivian-Chilean Maritime Conflict). Bolivia claims that, through they ceded the coastline in a 1904 treaty, Chile is obligated to negotiate coastal access based on Chile’s offers to sea access long after the treaty was enforced (see article in The Economist). 

While on the surface this is a dispute about trade and more than a century’s worth of lost GDP (not to mention the copper fields Bolivia lost in the war, which currently make up more than 30% of Chile’s export market). There are deeply nationalistic emotions that arise in these debates as well. Even for lower middle class Bolivians and Chileans—the type of people who would see little to no change in economic terms—are deeply invested in these issues. Many Bolivians see Chileans as arrogant local imperialists, publishing books such as Chile Depredador [Chile, the Predator]. Many Chileans, particularly in the northern region near the border with Bolivia, see Bolivians as backwards and uneducated, looking to get ahead by taking advantage of Chile’s resources, either by immigrating to work or trying to take a coastline that is rightfully Chilean. While for a few, solidarity across borders relies on class (see my blog on The Border: A view from Facebook), the grand majority of these national citizens have internalized their nationalism to the extent that their own lack of benefits from the arrangement and the similarities between lower middle class citizens on both sides of the border are simply overlooked.

This is particularly perplexing, given that northerners’ relationship with nationalism is rarely straightforward. Regional affiliation is usually much more important than national, as many feel disenfranchised from national politics and overlooked by the national government who simply extracts resources and money from the northern region’s copper mines, while leaving the people without social services. Yet there is strong identification with Chileanness when related to cultural forms such as food, sport, and heritage. This may be largly thanks to the process of “Chileanization” enacted in the territory when it was transferred to Chilean control in 1883. To mitigate resentment towards the military and new nation as a whole, the Chilean government launched a projects aimed at incorporating the northern population into the nation-state through religion and education for both children and adults, with mestizaje and modernization at the core of the country’s nationalist discourse. 

Even today, discourses of modernity undergird the tensions between Chilean and Bolivian citizens. The conflation of nation, modernity, and race means that for northern Chileans, they represent modern mestizo subjects, while Bolivians are poor, traditional, and indigenous (which is particularly amplified by Bolivia’s recent symbolic valorization of indigeneity under Evo Morales and the MAS government).

The border dispute, for these citizens that stand little chance of material benefit or loss from a renegotiation, is important because it cuts to the root of self-understanding. To cede a border to Bolivia would mean defeat by a country and people who not only are behind in terms of modernization, but use that as an excuse to extract resources that rightfully belong to Chileans (there are certainly parallels here with discourses about Mexican and Central American immigrants to the United States). For Bolivians, Chile’s unwillingness to open negotiations is simply evidence that the nation and its residents remain unrepentant (and at times racist) thieves.

So then, why is a parking lot so important? Not only, as Andres pointed out could that money, taken from Chilean taxes (and thus rightfully belonging to Chileans), be used for something to benefit Chileans, but ceding something to Bolivians admits that perhaps there is a need for negotiation. And those negotiations are not only about access to maritime trade, but are about what it means to be a modern mestizo citizen.

This belonging was closely associated with conceptions of social and economic class, which were almost always highlighted, claiming solidarity with working class and non-cosmopolitan lifestyle. At times this even led to cross-border identifications in which perceptions of common class and proletariat ideals superseded national identification. Similarly, differences in race and particularly indigeneity were often erased in service of highlighting a broader sense of marginality, in which most Hospiceños could claim a part, rather than compartmentalizing or hierarchizing forms of disadvantage.

Further Reading

A Primer on the Bolivian-Chilean Maritime Conflict
The Peruvian-Chilean Maritime Border: A View from Facebook

The Economist - Bolivia's Access to the Sea
The Economist - The Economics of Landlocked Countries

Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Cástulo Martínez, Chile Depredador (La Paz: Librería Editorial G.U.M., 2010, 3er ed).

I am something of a suspicious character in Alto Hospicio. First, I visibly stand out. As a very light skinned person of Polish, German, and English ancestry, I simply look very different from most of the residents of Alto Hospicio who are some combination of Spanish, Indigenous Aymara, Quechua, or Mapuche, Afrocaribbean, and/or Chinese ancestry. I am catcalled quite often, even while walking to the supermarket midday. These yells usually reference the fact that I am visibly different. “Gringa,” “blanca,” [whitey] and even “extranjera” [foreigner] are the most usual shouts. I hear. Even in less harassing ways, I’ve been pointed out on the street, as happened my first week in Alto Hospicio, walking along the commercial center a woman stopped in front of me simply to tell me “You look North American!” scurrying away before I could respond. 

maybe I look too much like her?

Beyond the striking impression of my physical appearance, I was untrustworthy as a single woman. Having no family in the area, not to mention a male partner or children was often a red flag for people. Even though many people I met had left family behind in other countries or regions of Chile when migrating to the area, they usually moved with a least one family member or friend. In a lot of ways, my solitariness kept me solitary.

As I got to know people, at times I felt I was being given a test. A colleague at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile had connected me with some politically active students in Alto Hospicio, and they invited me to help put up posters for a candidate for local representative before the elections in November 2013. I met Juan in the evening, outside one of the local schools where we made small talk before they others arrived. He asked me about my opinions on the Occupy Movement in the United States, and I spoke frankly, though keeping in mind his connections to Chilean Student movements. We continued talking about US politics and he asked if I had been very involved during my time in graduate school in Washington, DC. He asked about my support for President Barak Obama. And he asked very detailed questions about who I worked for, where funding for the research came from, and to what institutions the results would be reported. Eventually the other poster hangers arrived and we walked a few blocks to the home of his friend, where we were to mix up the paste for the hangings. As he introduced me to the group, he explained that I was “a trusted friend.” So I had passed the test.

Other tests of my trustworthiness took much longer. The first person I got to know outside of my apartment complex was Miguel, the administrator for the Alto Hospicio group I first joined on Facebook. Yet, it took over two months of online conversations before we met in person. Our chats at first were about the project, then about anthropology in general, while I asked him about his job at a mine in the altiplano and about his family. Later we conversed about television shows, movies, sports, and other hobbies. Eventually he told me funny stories about what his friends had done while drunk. I tried to reciprocate and realized my friends were far less rambunctious than his. Eventually, he invited me out with a group of friends to a dance bar in Iquique, and later I became friendly with his sister Lucia and her husband, often being invited to eat lunch in their home. Eventually one afternoon, sipping strawberry-flavored soda and finishing the noodles and tuna on my plate, Lucia asked Miguel how we met. He launched into a long story of seeing my post on the Facebook group site and being suspicious of it. He clicked on my Facebook profile and thought “What is a gringa like this doing in Alto Hospicio?” But his curiosity prevailed and he engaged me in conversation. As he recounted the story to his sister he eventually arrived at the night we had gone to the dance bar. “I was nervous standing outside the apartment, because I didn’t know what to expect. We had talked enough that I was pretty sure she was a real person, but I was still nervous. I thought maybe she wasn’t real. Maybe it was a fake profile. But then I saw her walking toward me and I just remember being really relieved.” 

a shorter version of this appears on the WHY WE POST blog at University College London

On 5 December 2013, Nelson Mandela died. At the time, I was reviewing about 50 different Facebook accounts of people living in my Northern Chile fieldsite to see in a systematic way, what exactly they posted about on Facebook. I noted that only a few posted about Nelson Mandela. Those that did made funny ironic references to actor Morgan Freeman, who portrayed the South African politician in a film biography, while more politically socialist users posted old photos of the politician alongside their hero Fidel Castro. Yet these posts represented only 6 of the 50 users I was concentrating on, or 12%.

That same week Paul Walker, a film actor of The Fast and the Furious fame, also died. More than 20 of the users whose activity I was observing posted about his death on Facebook. As with Mandela’s death, no one linked to obituaries or news articles, but instead posted photos of the actor, or at times posted photos of their own cars with quotes from The Fast and the Furious or other commentary suggesting that the films had inspired their love of automobiles.

From this, along with Presidential elections which had just taken place in Chile, I got a sense that people were much more likely to post something on Facebook when they felt personally affected by it. While people recognized the significant contributions of Mandela to peace and humanitarian efforts, he had not affected Chileans’ daily lives, while Walker had been an important hero for many people. One young man posted about both. On the day of Mandela’s death he simply wrote “QDEP Morgan Freeman” [Rest in Peace Morgan Freeman] in an ironic and humorous attempt to conflate the politician with the actor who had portrayed him. A few days later, when news of Walker broke, he wrote, “I’m watching The Fast and the Furious on TNT (television channel)…in honor of the movies that inspired my Honda, and more importantly in memory of Paul Walker.” Clearly this user had reserved the more sincere and personal message for Walker who he characterized as an inspiration.

My insight that personal connection was more important than world impact has been put to the test again with the unfortunate death of a local celebrity. Arturo Mejía Koo, the son of Chinese immigrants to the region, was locally known as the authority on chembeques—a kind of pastry made of corn flour and honey. Though chembeques can be found in almost any outdoor market in the region, Koo’s shop was something of a pilgrimage point for those who love the dessert. Perhaps then, it’s not surprising that Facebook has been littered with homages to Koo. At the time of this writing, about 1/5 of the posts that appear on my Facebook timeline are related to Koo’s death. People post links to the local paper’s story with a simple comment of a frowning face, or no comment at all. Others post links with the comment “Noooooooooooooooo!!!” Responses are lacking in eloquence, but the sheer number of them is impressive.

Among my highly educated, urban, middle-class friends in the United States, posting about the death of a highly iconic politician such as Mandela was an act of both proclaiming political stance and being “in the know.” Yet in Chile, it is much more important to be “in the know” about local events. While in both places I see memes that circulate with text such as “If you didn’t eat/watch/play [insert local favorite], you didn’t grow up in [insert local area],” Northern Chileans take to heart this mentality. They experience the death of world icons with a grain of irony, likely owing to the distance they perceive between that person’s life and their own. Yet a local hero’s death is experienced as a personal heartfelt loss.

This makes clear that for most Northern Chileans, Facebook is an outlet for performing personal and local affiliations, rather than a platform for interacting with global discourses. Mandela’s death was noteworthy for a few because he was a world figure. Yet lacking in a personal connection, emotions were expressed through irony or affiliations with other more regionally relevant politicians. Walker’s death was important for some because he had been a Hollywood hero, yet was still expressed at a distance through reference to his film roles. But in the instance of Koo’s death huge numbers of people in the region feel personally affected because eating his pastries had been an important part of local belonging. Facebook then was an appropriate place to express the very simple emotions of sadness and disbelief that emerged from the loss that felt so personal. The outpouring of public response to Koo’s death then demonstrates the ways that Facebook may reflect local affiliations much more strongly than global awareness.

Carnaval in northern Chile does not look much like images of carnivals in Trinidad or Brazil. Celebrations range from local fiestas to parades of folkloric dancers and music, to outdoor concerts featuring national pop stars. 

I describe here, a trip by city residents to a town of 500 people for a carnival celebration. Nicole’s father grew up in this small town and the whole family was returning for the celebration. As I met Nicole and her boyfriend at the corner between our nearby apartment buildings she was already filming with her brother’s GoPro camera. 

Nicole’s boyfriend Martin and I had decided to come along just the day before, and all of the hostels in the town were booked. So, when the three of us drove into town in Martin's Jeep, we immediately set about looking for a camping spot. We found one next to a small building labeled as the city’s Social Sport Club. We set up the tents as the sun was setting and ate some rice with tuna. After cleaning up the food we walked to the center of town.

Though the permanent population is only 550, there were several thousand people in the town that night. Like Nicole and her father, many people who grew up there or have family connections return for carnival. In this town, carnival takes the form of a rivalry between los Rojos and los Verdes (the Reds and the Greens). The town is filled with triangular banners, red and green on different streets depending on the residents’ loyalties. The only explanation I was given about the different groups is that it is a rivalry to see who has the best party, the best band, the best food, and the best dancing. “I have no idea how it started,” most people told me. What strikes me as interesting however, is that in describing this rivalry, people use he word ‘pelea’ (fight) rather than ‘competencia’ (competition). Nicole told me that some times individuals from opposing groups will get into fights, but this is not necessarily condoned. Indeed, mischief rather than violence, was the overwhelming theme of the event. Silly string, shaving cream, confetti, and colored powder were constantly being sprayed or rubbed in people’s hair and faces. Yet this was within the Verdes group rather than between Verdes and Rojos. 

In the Verdes’ party, there was a live band playing folk music to which everyone danced, and plenty of drinking. A few people wore Halloween-type costumes, but most people wore blue jeans and tshirts. By the end of the night, everyone was covered in silly string and colored powder.

A few days later, after we had returned to the city, Nicole, Martin, and I all posted our photos on Facebook. Most were taken while at the party focusing on people drinking, dancing, or covered in powder and confetti. Two very short videos Nicole took on her cell phone also showed the event as full of people dancing, yelling, waving flags, and throwing powder. Nicole’s family also tagged her in several photos. These all seemed to capture the experience I had somewhat accurately. Certain aspects were missing, such as the stack of empty beer bottles on the table, and the delicious rabbit stew, but they were pictures of the party.

Nicole also edited her GoPro video and posted it to Youtube. Yet, this video focused far more on the trip itself. She begins by announcing to the camera “We are starting our adventure!” Set to a club remix of a pop song, the 5 minute video reminds me of a road trip montage sequence from some sort of teen movie. Desert mountains cruise by the passenger window. Images of the passengers getting out to stretch show more of the landscape. Then the video cuts to preparing and eating food at the camp site. Finally, around the 3 minute mark of the video we arrive at the carnival celebration. We enter the dance hall, where the celebration is just starting. About 15 people are dancing. There is no confetti or powder flying through the air. In fact, many people at the tables look bored. And the video fades out while each of us begins drinking a beer.

When I saw this the first time I was struck by how different the party looked through these two different media. Comments from friends made it even more clear how the two functioned in different ways. While comments on facebook photos were generally along the lines “what a great party!” comments on the video complimented the beauty of the scenery and the style of the video. It seemed that Facebook represented the place to show off the great party atmosphere of carnival while Youtube was a place for more artistic expression, focusing not only on the party, but the trip in general. Nicole confirmed in fact that she knew pictures on Facebook were more fun, but more temporal. They would disappear to the bottom of her wall in a few days, but the Youtube video would be something she would go back to and share with people in the future. She took time editing it to make it look more artistically beautiful, whereas with the fotos on Facebook, she simply loaded all that she had taken with her cellphone. Facebook was for the quick and easy. Youtube was for lasting memories. 

Jaime and I thought Pica would be a good place to do some research, so after arriving on the afternoon flight to Iquique, we rented a truck and started driving. The truck, a red Toyota, was essentially the option provided by Hertz because most people around here who rent a vehicle are intending to go to the mines, and a truck is necessary. I’m not sure entirely why red, but as we drove around Pozo Almonte the next day, almost every truck we saw was red. Maybe it’s easy to spot in the desert dust?

We left the IQQ airport around 6:00pm, and as we drove up the highway leading from Iquique to Alto Hospicio, darkness set in. We continued up highway 16, through many spots of no phone connectivity (as we were trying to use the google maps app on his phone for directions, and his phone calls to his daughters got cut a few times). We drove through Pozo Almonte, then onward and arrived in Pica a little before 8:00pm. 

We made a lap of the town, then parked in the main square and had a look around. There was on one side were the municipality offices and the local radio station. There was a children’s playground, the church, and a few local businesses. We set out on foot looking for a place to stay. Just off the square there was a sign pointing down an alley to Casona de Don Diego. We started walking through the alley when Diego himself approached us from behind. He had been waiting near the square for the last bus from Iquique to arrive around 8:30. He showed us the rooms, which were less than impressive, and we decided against it. Instead we went towards the cabanas we had seen on a sign a few blocks away. There, the owner showed us a lovely little two bedroom hut. It came complete with couch, small television, refrigerator, stove, and sink. The only thing it lacked was hot water. We agreed to take it for the night, and then headed out to El Gato Rapido restaurant for dinner. 

El Gato Rapido was the site of my first Chilean mishap. The bill came and I owed something around 15000 pesos. I pulled out a 20000 and put it on the little tray. Except that it was actually only 2000. So many zeros. And these bills have no commas or periods on them. Seriously! But not without plenty of teasing from Jaime, all was settled, and we stopped at a little tienda for breakfast items before heading back to the cabana.

In the morning, we got up early, ate breakfast of yogurt and bread (without tea because we had forgotten to buy matches to light the stove), and then made our way down the street to the town government offices. We first spoke with a woman in the development office, trying to get an accurate figure of population (the last census was 2002). She said they were “working on it right now.” She directed us to another woman in the same office who maybe knew more, but she in fact did not. Then we went to the other side of the building to the technology office, where Patricio showed us the Pica facebook page, and explained how he used it. 

On our way back toward the cabanas, we stopped in the library, where the amazingly helpful librarian explained to us that mostly primary school aged children and adults use the computers there. Kids mostly play online games, and adults send emails. They recently offered a class on technology that was geared towards seniors, and after learning to email their primary question was how to use facebook. The library helped them take a profile picture with the digital camera, and create a profile, mostly so they could connect with their children or grandchildren. 

With this we left to have lunch in Pozo Almonte and have a look around there. Once again, when we arrived we failed at getting any figures of how many people are actually in the town. One complicating factor for both Pica and Pozo is that the 2002 census figures are not entirely accurate because they include everyone in the municipality, not just the town. So essentially the town’s population might be as low as only 1/3 of what’s reported on the census. And then the more current projections are based on those numbers with little information about who is in the city proper and who is in the area. Jaime called his old boss who works in a government office that works with census data and she suggested the 2012 projections were highly untrustworthy. Part of the problem is that Chile does not track any internal migration, so there is no real way to know if people have moved from one area to another.

During lunch in Pozo Almonte, the restaurant that was empty when we entered suddenly became over run with miners on their lunch breaks. It was a fascinating transformation, and dichotomous in nature with foreign-looking engineers on one side of the restaurant, and the more indigenous-looking miners on the other side. They were easily distinguished not only by foreign-ness-appearance, but by the amount of dirt clinging to their blue shirts. Jaime explained that most miners are local, or immigrants from Bolivia and Peru, while most engineers come from Santiago, Europe, or Australia. The engineers usually commute back and forth between Santiago and Pozo a few times a month.

After lunch we took a little walk, and talked about the two possibilities. Pozo, while it could make for a fascinating study on migration, work, class, political economy, etc. didn’t seem to be quite as quintessentially Chilean as the project needed. Pica, while beautiful, quaint, and wonderfully close knit community at our best guess seemed to be around 2,000 people. Again, it would have made for a great study on traditional fiestas (as explained by the older woman who helped to run the cabanas), but didn’t seem big enough to effectively be comparative for the other cities in the Global Social Media Impact Study. So what to do….

We sat on a bench next to the red truck and discussed. And after returning to the Pica library to take advantage of the free wifi, we sent off and email to other major players in the project and suggested that perhaps Alto Hospicio was the best possible location. We loaded up the truck with all our things, and drove back toward Iquique, only stopping to take pictures of the dinosaur statues outside of town that commemorate the excavation of paleo fossils in the area.  

After much bureaucratic negotiating, I finally got my visa and was ready to be on my way. Rather than taking a 30 hour bus ride back to La Paz, I decided to take Amanda’s advice and fly from Lima to Juliaca (about 2 hours from the border) and then take a variety of busses back to La Paz.

The trip should go something like this:

9:15-11:00-flight from Lima to Juliaca

11:15-12:15-bus from Juliaca to Puno bus terminal

1:30-3:30-bus from Puno to Desaguadero

3:30-4:00-pass through the Perú/Bolivia border at Desaguadero

4:00-5:30-minibus from the border to El Alto

5:30-6:00-minibus from El Alto to the Prado

Yes, I would be back in time for Tuesday evening festivities I thought.

And then there were blockades. Surprisingly, the Peruvian side was worse. This was how it actually went:

I exited the plane at the Juliaca airport and stood in line for what seemed like hours to use the restroom. Once that was finally taken care of, I went outside and found a small coach-style bus bound for Puno. I took a seat behind a young Venezuelan guy who had grown up in the United States and studied “Security and Peace” in Tel Aviv. I rarely agreed with the assessments of the world he was making to the British couple in front of him. I was also lucky enough to be sitting beside a man traveling on business who kept insisting I have lunch with him. While showing me pictures of his wife. I told him I’d have to check on a bus to the border first.

The bus made it to Puno easily and drove around the small town on Lake Titicaca dropping people off at their hotels. The bus terminal was the last stop and 3 of us got off, only to be told there were road blocks and busses to the border were not running. The three of us: a young Peruvian man, a middle-aged Argentinean woman, and myself, kept giving each other frustrated looks. The woman asked a taxi driver if there was any other way to go to Desaguadero. For 100 soles a piece he said he would drive us “the long way.” We haggled down to 50 each, bought some snacks and hopped in the back of the car.

“The long way,” he told us, would take four hours. I ate some of my Ritz crackers and nodded off to sleep. But with the 3 of us stuffed in the back seat (one other man was in the front with the driver, apparently having contracted him earlier), the complete lack of heat in the car (like all Andean cars), and the curvy mountain roads, it was not an ideal sleeping environment.

About 2 hours in, we were all awake and chatting a little. And then we rounded a corner as it started snowing. As we drove along, not far below the mountain tops (the road was at 4800 meters at this point) the snow accumulated and was beautiful. The Peruvian guy took out his cell phone and started snapping photos. I grabbed for my camera and got one of the mountain in front of us. I leaned back so the Argentinean woman (who had been stuck in the middle seat) could snap one out the window on my side. And then suddenly we slid. We crashed through 4 barrier posts. We spun in a circle 3 times. I thought to myself “is this how I’m going to die?”

We fortunately (and I mean that with all the gravity the word can have) flew off the road right where we did, because there was no steep embankment. About 70% of the road in that section of the drive did have a steep descent off to the side. But we were lucky. The car hadn’t been equipped with seatbelts, but no one flew too far out of their seat. The driver’s-side window shattered, but no on was cut. 

The driver’s door was dented and wouldn’t open so the man in the front got out to let him climb across. The car was badly dented in several places. Two tires were completely flat. And the engine wouldn’t start. I had been sleeping on and off, but had stayed awake enough to know that it had been at least an hour driving since we passed by the last lonely home along the road. With the engine dead and the window busted, the snow and wind were coming into the car. “No, this is how people die in the Andes, I thought: Stranded, and they freeze to death.” I’ve seen the movies about plane crashes and cannibalism….

Fortunately, not long after a man in a pickup truck came driving by in the opposite direction. The Peruvian man flagged him down, and tried to negotiate some sort of transportation. The man was refusing, but even before he left, a station wagon occupied by a husband and wife drove up. With only minimal convincing they decided they would turn around and take us to Desaguadero. The taxi driver stayed with the car and we promised to send police or a tow truck his way. The four passengers piled into the back seat of the station wagon, with all of our luggage in the back. 

We were on our way again, much less comfortably, and much more slowly. What added to the lagging time were the several police checkpoints we had to go through. Each time, the man driving would be questioned as to why he had a license and registration for a private vehicle, but appeared to be carrying strangers. Cause let’s face it. Nobody was going to believe this gringa was in anyway related to these kind campesinos. After explaining the story, the police were always kind and let us pass. Four hours after the crash, we stopped at the final checkpoint in which another man convinced the vehicle owners to let him ride in the back end of the car for 60 km. My feet and hands were numb from the cold. My butt and thighs were numb from the position I had been sitting in, unable to move for four hours. And I was nauseous from the curvy roads and probably whiplash from the crash. The Argentinean woman had to ask twice to pull over so she could vomit.

Eventually, after 6 hours in that position (making a total of 8 hours in transit) we arrived in Desaguadero. But of course, it was 7:30 pm by this time, and the border had been shut since 6pm. Alas, the 3 of us found a hospedaje with 3 beds in a room for 10 soles each. We watched some futbol, ate some chifa, and went to sleep. 

At 7am we awoke and went straight to the border. We got our stamps, I used my shiny (not really) new fancy visa de objeto determinado, and we found some minibuses headed for La Paz. The Peruvian man was hesitating as to which bus to take, and ended up getting separated from Luz (I now knew her name) and I. The bus got filled to capacity with the 2 of us, several local Bolivians, and some Colombian university students traveling on holiday. 

Ninety minutes later we made it to the El Alto bus terminal, and I helped Luz get with her 2 large suitcases to the Ralfbus office to claim her waiting ticket for her home country. I wandered over to Avenida 16 de Julio and looked for a taxi. None were passing so I eventually just hopped on another minibus headed for the Prado. We took to the Autopista and I thought perhaps it would all be smooth from there. 

But alas, it was late April in La Paz, and in the build up to May Day, the COB was protesting by blockading the main thoroughfare from El Alto to La Paz. So halfway down, the bus had to back up, turn around, travel the wrong way on the highway, make an illegal U turn to go the other way (but still the “wrong” way for that side of the road), and turn off onto a side street. I eventually did make it to the Prado, and went directly to Paceña Salteña for lunch. I sat down to eat at 12:15, 27 hours after I boarded the flight bound for Juliaca. So I saved 3 hours by not taking the bus. And the cost really wasn’t that much more than the bus. But I think, with all I went through, a nice full cama tourist bus for 30 hours would have been preferable.

I don’t really know who taught me the game, but I imagine it was some upperclassperson my freshman year of high school. We all learned: the nice, jenz, jb, bs, and I. And we, in turn, taught our fair share of freshmen as we got older.

The game of Euchre is similar to Spaids and Hearts, but to me is better. It requires more thought and strategy. And knowing how your partner plays can make or break a trick if not the game. It is a distinctly Midwestern game; I’ve never met anyone who knows the game who didn’t spend a significant amount of time in the Midwest. At least as far as wikipedia can tell me, it was brought by German settlers to Michigan and spread from there. And maybe, just a little, I like it because its distinctly Midwestern. It is to be taken very seriously. It is not a game of luck but a game that tests your stamina, your sharpness, your insight. It is not a recreational game. In fact, it reminds me of the way Chuck Klosterman describes Midwest Power Drinking:

People in the Midwest drink differently than everywhere else I’ve ever been; its far less recreational. You have to stay focused, you have to work fast, and you have to swallow constantly.

I once dealt the perfect hand of Euchre. I was playing on a bus to some nerdy interscholastic event with jenz as my partner. Jb and massman were our opponents. I distributed the cards and flipped over a 10 of spaids. Massman, who was sitting to my left told me to pick it up. Before I could even discard he had said he was going it alone and displayed his full hand: right bower, left bower, ace, king, queen. All trump. Otherwise known as a Ray Charles.

And not long after I went to college and the ubiquity of Euchre disappeared from my life. Now, those of you who know a bit of my history (or have read my cv) may note that I attended university in the heart of the Midwest. And yet, apparently, the student body had enough geographic diversity that Euchre never became a mainstay. I do remember playing it once, while camping on a Chicago-suburban living room floor after shooting a student film all day. But even then, the two of us that knew the game had to teach everyone else (from places like New York, Atlanta, and LA). I continued to play occasionally, usually only with high school friends while home for a holiday, or after a wedding rehearsal dinner. But these times have become so few and far between that the game rarely crosses my mind.

And then, Tuesday night, it popped into my head. Some of the Death Road guide guys were going bowling and invited me along. As instructed I walked along the Prado until I was across from the Post Office. I found the hotdog cart and squeezed past it. I went down the narrow staircase and past the scantily occupied lunch tables and found the two hand-set lanes. I was late and had to bowl five frames in a row to catch up. First bowl a gutterball. Second bowl 8 pins. Second frame, a spare. Third frame, a strike. Fourth frame, a respectable 8. After that I don’t really recall. The remainder of the game involved plenty of complaining that the pin-setting guys were setting like they were on acid, and sarcastic claims of being a “gentleman” when taking the lane that was less warped. The guys also did a fair amount of farting, sometimes directly on one another, and even on Tasha, the only other woman in attendance, but never on me. However, when one of the guys I hadn’t met before suggested to Justin that he shouldn’t fart so close to me, his comment strikingly reminded me of Steve’s 7th grade comment, “Yeah, but Nell doesn’t count as a girl.” Justin replied “Its ok, Nell’s one of the guys.”  

But that’s not important. That’s not the point of the story.

After finishing the game (in 4th place of 7, with 109 points), the three guides that had Wednesday off decided to go to the brewery with Tasha and I. We arrived, ordered fancy drinks (white Russians and long island ice teas), and settled down at a table with a deck of cards. It was Pete that suggested we play a game, and suddenly it dawned on me. Pete is from Indiana. Indiana is in the Midwest. People in the Midwest who play cards play Euchre. I could barely get the question out of my mouth without squealing: “Do you play Euchre?”

And of course he said yes.

So we had to teach Tasha and Justin the game while Rick put his head down and slept. And in the end we didn’t even finish because everyone was tired. This also kept Justin and I from officially losing (the score was 8-6 when we quit). So it was not any spectacular game of Euchre. It had been several years since I last played and I think I’ve lost a bit of my intuition about the game. I did, however, manage to take 3 tricks with the Ace, King, and Queen of trump by leading with a 10 of trump out of the gate—a highly unorthodox move. But in the end, it was just a slow learner’s game.

What was incredible about it though, was the fact that I was in Bolivia, playing a game that is generally confined to the Midwestern United States with 2 Kiwis. And I started thinking about the processes that brought us to this point. First, German immigration to the Midwest, and specifically Michigan, began around 1820 but intensified due to unsuccessful European revolutions around 1848 (which coincidentally is right around when ol’ Bernhardt Stroh set up shop in Detroit...See, I knew Klosterman’s thoughts on Midwestern Power Drinking were somehow connected).

Then there was the proliferation of the game throughout the Midwest. As the decades elapsed, farmers moved to cities. Children moved to university towns, and the Euchre players from Michigan radiated out across the Midwest due to no small number of economic and migratory processes. And by the 1990s (though probably long before), high school kids in places like Heyworth, Illinois and Carmel, Indiana were playing Euchre.

But that is only half the story. Bolivia is also important. Tourism in Bolivia is not a big business relative to many of its surrounding nations. Bolivia garners roughly 300,000 tourists per year, while neighboring Perú attracts more than 2 million tourists a year (Library of Congress 2006). This vast difference is attributed to Bolivia’s political instability and lack of first-class accommodations (Library of Congress 2006), but may also be a product of the fact that the government of Bolivia pays little attention to tourism, in contrast to Peru (Ypeij and Zorn 2007). So while Bolivia is a major stopping point between the Andes of Perú, Lake Titicaca, and destinations in Argentina or northern Chile (Ypeij and Zoomers 2006)., it retains a sense of being somewhat “undiscovered” for many of the travelers. Those travelers that do spend time in La Paz, tend to be those seeking outdoor trekking opportunities. Hyuana Potosi, “the world’s easiest 6000 meter mountain,” is nearby, as well as hiking opportunities on Chacaltaya Mountain, or treks to more jungle-like areas such as Coroico. And this market for outdoor, adventure, tourism is no doubt what created an opportunity for biking down Death Road. Ten years ago, a New Zealander who had been living in La Paz started the first company, the one Pete, Justin, and Rick work for. 

And all of these processes--different modes of Globalization since european Colonialism, Economic Migration, Revolution in europe, Urbanizatio in the midwest, "Instability" and Economic Sanctions related to the Drug Trade in bolivia, Neoliberalism in la paz, expat Flexible Citizenship, Cosmopolitanism of travelers and tourist companies, Flexible Accumulation of microbrewed beer, and the Friction of it all--come together in the most unexpected of ways.

I told you Euchre is a game that must be taken seriously.