On November 25, 2019, Chilean feminist collective, Las Tesis, gathered in Santiago’s Plaza de Armas. Against a backdrop of anti-Piñera graffiti painted on government buildings, museums, and Catholic church properties, some 50 members of the collective wearing black blindfolds began to chant a rhythm now heard around the world.

The patriarchy is a judge
that judges us for being born
and our punishment
is the violence you don’t see…

The lyrics continue on to connect patriarchal state structures to femicide, disappearances, rape, the police, judges, the state, the president, and perhaps most importantly, impunity. The most powerful phrase, repeated twice, is:

The oppressive state is a rapist.
The rapist is you.

(lyrics from Women’s March 2020)

To read the full article, click here to go to Anthropology News
También se aparece aquí en español, después del inglés 

Baird Campbell and I have written a blog post, available on Platypus, the blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. The blog details the ways we see Chileans distrusting traditional media outlets and using social media as an archive...yet an archive that is already assumed to be unstable. 

This rift in the types of videos that we received privately, rather than posted publicly indicates a particular understanding of the uses of Internet-based communication. In fact, it seems to indicate an anxiety about digital communication related to its potential ephemerality, a shortcoming that can only be remedied by widespread sharing and archiving across diversified social networks across the globe.

To read the full blog post, click here to go to Platypus.
O haz click aquí para leer en español 

​Chilean Media Amidst Protest

I woke up Saturday morning with a direct Instagram message from my friend Mateo. “Share please,” it said, with a formatted text with the title “State of Constitutional Emergency in Chile, October 2019.” In the 3 days since, he continued to send infographics and then videos of protests, each time asking me to share them.
 
“The media here is making it seem as if we are violent delinquents, but we are mostly peaceful. And the media outside of Chile isn’t showing anything. Please help us share the message.”
 
As Chile has recently erupted in protest, police violence, and other sorts of chaos, from the Atacama to Patagonia, media is taking on a central role in the tensions. From 2013-2016 I lived in Chile, in both the capital of Santiago, and the far north region. Coincidentally, Mateo lived in the north while I did, though he had spent most of his life in Santiago, and has since returned. His use, as well as criticism, of media, along with dozens of other Chileans in both the metropolitan region and the north, provide important insight to many protestors’ grievances and tactics in this historic moment.


Chile in State of Emergency
 
On Sunday 13 October, Chile’s Transport Ministry announced that the Santiago metro would raise fares by 30 pesos (about 4 cents in USD). This seemingly small increase, however, must be placed in the context of the average Chilean’s monthly salary around $450.
 
In response students started organizing fare-dodging acts all over the city. Fare dodging is not uncommon in Santiago where late-night bus drivers are often defenseless against crowds of young people pouring onto the bus or jumping turnstiles without paying. This coordinated effort however far exceeded previous levels.
 
Soon the protest spread beyond students, particularly when politicians made poorly calculated comments in response (link to The Minister of Economy, Juan Andrés Fontaine, indicated live on TV that workers should get up earlier to catch public transport when the fare is lower).
 
But these protests are not simply about a fare increase. As many hashtags and memes attest, it is not about 30 pesos, but about 30 years of inequality.
 
Chile is classified as a highly developed country by the World Bank, but also consistently ranks as having the very highest rates of social inequality among such countries. A meme which was first shared with me on Sunday October 20th, depicts an iceberg with “Increased public transport cost” above water and a long list of other effects of neoliberalism below the surface: poor but expensive education, deficient healthcare system, pension system crisis, inadequate salaries along with high disparity between general public and the political elite, precarious employment, police corruption, corporate corruption and collusion, and even the privatization of water. 

These grievances are attributed to the last 30 years—the time since the “No” vote which ended the brutal dictatorship of Agosto Pinochet. While “neoliberalism” is often a catch-all phrase for economics associated with the free market, post-1985, in Chile it is directly connected to Pinochet’s regime, who specifically brought Milton Friedman to the country in 1973 to impose economic “shock” theories as a test case. His policies privatized companies and resources, deregulated business, cut social services, and opened the country to unimpeded imports. Inflation then spiraled to 374% and unemployment reached 20% per cent. The government almost entirely defunded social services, the social security system was privatized, health care became a pay-as-you-go system, and public schools were replaced with charter schools. Pinochet’s government maintained these policies until 1982 when the Chilean economy crashed – debt exploded, hyperinflation took hold and unemployment rocketed to 30 per cent. Pinochet’s regime was finally defeated in a democratic election in 1989. However, many Chileans feel subsequent democratically elected administrations have only intensified the export-oriented neoliberal reforms, though with less violent and totalitarian control. 


Chilean Media
 
While Reporters without Borders gives Chile a favorable score for press freedom, they note that “pluralism and democratic debate are limited” by media ownership concentrated among the elite who share interests with those in political power. Community media, particularly in radio, has a long history in the country, but its ability to spread information widely is not always adequate.
 
At the same time, about 78% of Chileans have Internet access and most are well-connected on social media. Yet as I found in northern Chile, many people shy away from discussing politics openly on social media, in part a lingering result of sixteen years of dictatorship. While many northern Chileans post funny memes about how politicians are disconnected from the lives of “real Chileans,” they shy away from direct criticism or analysis of politicians and policy. One exception I found was that during the April 2014 8.2 Richter scale earthquake in the region, northerners realized the world was paying attention and use primarily Facebook and Instagram as stages for calling attention to the lingering effects of the natural disaster and the national government’s slow and inadequate disaster relief.
 
Northerners also use social media to demonstrate the ways they differ from even regular people in Santiago. They see Santiago as a place of consumption, whereas the North, known for its rich copper deposits, is a place of labor. Santiago is a place of strangers and vulnerability to urban crime, while northerners watch out for one another. They see Santiago as the beneficiaries of their work, as wealthy and politically elite, even as they may know working-class people there. Overall, Santiago is framed as having very little in common with the northern region of the country.
 
Social media use in Santiago is more similar to the types of political engagement we see by those connecting online from countries in North America or Western Europe. Most people are forthright about their political stances and use social media as a space for criticism and at times, campaigning. While they do not take much time to compare themselves with those outside of the metropolitan region, northerners would use this fact as further evidence that those in Santiago hardly realize anyone else in the country exists. 


October 2019
 
Because Mateo has lived most of his life in Santiago, I was not particularly struck that his feed quickly filled with protest-related content. But just a day later I began to see photographs and videos of protests being posted by Chileans in the north of the country. People shouting in the street in Arica, Iquique, and Antofogasta appeared in my Facebook and Instagram inboxes with little comment other than “please share.” In my 18 months living in the region, I had only ever seen those sorts of crowds in the streets after the national football team won a championship.
 
This use of social media was a departure from the sorts of usual posts northerners shared. It reminded me of post-earthquake posts in the ways they attempted to address a global audience in order to bring an issue of injustice to attention. These posts differed from the somewhat apolitical posts after the earthquake. The social media content of northerners in the last few days has been highly political, often accompanied by hashtags calling for the president to resign.
 
Thus, it is clear that northerners see these calls as legitimate and possible. They are not apt to share such sentiments as a pipe dream, but rather save their political calls to action for moments in which they believe they are justified, possible, and aided by international attention. Essentially these posts demonstrate that northerners sense a real possibility of change. 

​We are united
 
On October 20, President Piñera, flanked by almost 2 dozen military leaders, declared on national television, “We are at war against a powerful enemy, unrelenting, that doesn’t respect anything or anyone, and that is apt to use violence and delinquency without limit, that is apt to burn our hospitals, the metro, the supermarkets, with the only purpose to produce as much damage as possible.”
 
In response, Chileans throughout the country took to social media, asserting “We are not at war, we are united.”
​
While nationalist discourses in Chile are common, they are usually colored by equally powerful senses of regional belonging, that may just as easily highlight difference among Chileans as call for unity. Yet, social media is now showing this slogan to be quite true. For a moment, Chileans throughout the country are seeing “the people” of different regions, including those of Santiago, as united against politicians, corruption, and inequality. If tweets demanding that Piñera resign or that Chile has awoken are any indication, Chileans from all over the 2600 mile long coastline are coming together with a common message, that they are united against the inequalities they have faced for the last 30 years. 
​

​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. 

“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).

This weekend I presented a paper at the Royal Anthropological Institute's conference on Anthropology and Photography, titled #Instaterremoto: Tracing Crisis through Instagram Photography. As part of the conference I was given the opportunity to showcase my own photography, and exhibited twelve photos under the same title. Here I reproduce that exhibit, which can also be found at the RAI's Flickr feed here. 

On the night of 1 April 2014, Alto Hospicio suffered an 8.2 earthquake. The city was without power and water for several days and many were left homeless. Because I am researching social media usage in the city, I have paid particular attention to the photos that (usually young) residents have uploaded to Facebook and Instagram. I began adding my own images to these websites with similar hashtags to contribute to the body of imagery by residents who were were many times calling for more attention and help from the Chilean national government. In many ways, the people of Alto Hospicio felt forgotten, and were using social media to speak to whoever would listen. I took these photographs, featured here, in solidarity with others who were using their smartphone cameras to claim visibility and call for attention to the disaster.

The text of my paper presentation at RAI will be posted soon. Until then, here is the narrative of my experience of the earthquake. 
part one
part two
part three
part four
part five

It has been exactly 10 years since I first attended the Iowa State Fair. It has been 7 years since I last attended. I am still adamantly in love with the ISF to a fault. Ten years ago the film crew I worked with spent hot, sweaty august days lugging cameras into refrigerated rooms filled with molding butter and accompanying Norma Duffy Lyons to her daily lunch of state fair Chinese food. We spend the nights sipping Stroh’s beer around a campfire and listening the The Hawk radio station 97.3. And by the end of the summer we had over 40 hours of tape (which, as far as I know is still unlogged and unedited). I joined this crew because I had loved the Buttercow in Illinois as a child, but by August 20, 2003 I was a true believer in the Buttercow of Iowa.

So you can imagine my horror when I learned yesterday that an animal welfare group poured red paint on the Buttercow in protest (read the story via NPR). 

I was at a baseball game with my parents when I received word via email on my phone. “Oh no!” I gasped, and my mother thought I had read that a friend was in some sort of trouble. I told her the news and my honest first commentary was “don’t they know they reuse the butter for four years?”

I think it’s important to contextualize my comments here and note that at the time of documentary making, I had been vegetarian for seven years. I was never vegan for more than a month (yogurt! goat cheese! honey! beautiful leather frye boots!), but I made it a full twelve years of vegetarianism before giving up during fieldwork in Bolivia. I now quite enjoy fried chicken, pork chicharones, cuy (roasted guinea pig), and anticuchos (grilled beef heart), among many other forms of meat. But I also still truly believe that vegetarianism is far more environmentally friendly and sustainable than regular meat-eating. That said, I ultimately recognize that one’s ability and desire to eat meat or not are substantially culturally influenced. Things like purchasing power, national location, regional location, local location, racial identity, gender, religion, subcultural affiliation or identification, and who knows what else profoundly structure not only what we perceive as desirable food but also what we are physically able to eat.

So my reaction is more complicated than it may appear. Though I don’t generally condone destructive practices as protest, I also don’t wholly disagree with the protestors’ intentions. Helping to thaw 600 pounds of overly cooled butter by running my hands through it may have improved it’s consistency for sculpting but also made me shun the stuff for more than a month. There is something foul and inedible about massive amounts of dairy product. But in the end, with my apologies to anti-speciesist friends, I have to conclude that the protestors’ actions were misguided. 

Back in 2007 I argued that the Buttercow was a symbol of citizenship in the sense that in it’s iconicity it represented pride and intimate knowledge, moving beyond citizenship as simply claims to rights and responsibilities. I returned to this argument when writing for the Food Culture Index blog, suggesting that Minnesota Dairy Princess Katie Miron connects butter art to Midwestern values using words like “hard work,” “dedication,” “wholesome,” and “nutritious.” Butter art for her is a way to both reinscribe these values within the community, and communicate the values to outsiders. Like the colonial map, it demarcates “us” from “them,” and acts as a logo, and becomes a “pure sign” or emblem for a certain kind of community affiliation.

And, like all icons, the Buttercow adapts to symbolize prevailing social issues and political perspectives. What was once a symbol of progress, now has come to be a nostalgic representation of a disappearing way of life. As family farms disappear and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations replace them, the Buttercow stands as a testament to the value placed on farmers who practice true animal husbandry and forms of agriculture that stand in opposition to the CFO’s that have become so ubiquitous. The 600 pounds of butter used in Illinois’s Buttercow comes from Prairie Farms, which is a farmer owned cooperative whose cows are free range and 100% hormone free. Put simply, to it's supporters, the Buttercow is a symbol of family farmers who intimately know and care for their animals, and is seen as oppositional to the forms of industrialized agriculture that exploit animals to their breaking point before discarding them.

Of course, many animal liberation groups see no distinction between large scale animal exploitation and that which is family owned. But that is precisely my point. In ignoring or misunderstanding the distinction, I believe such protestors are alienating those who could be powerful allies. And besides, pouring red paint on the butter only means that instead of reusing it next year, they’ll have to get a brand new 600 pound batch.


see my writing at food culture index or hit the "butter" tag to the right to see my earlier fieldnotes

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.

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"