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July 09, 2005
Canto Grande
As this is an AnthroBlog, and as I am a studying Anthropology, perhaps my introduction to the discipline is fitting. Having completed a degree in English Literature and had my fill of existential philosophy, the Kafkaesque murmurings in my head suddenly began to be replaced with a song I heard by the Gypsy Kings: Me voy caminando a la montaña donde nací. The song invoked a vision of walking along a mountain, perhaps not a mountain where I was born but one where I could be reborn, a mountain where I could breath clean air in the solace of its heights and hear its stones trickle down the splashing rivers. Yet the mountain of my vision was not in Andalusia but in the Andes, so I gave away most of my things, bought a backpack, and climbed aboard a plane to Peru. Without knowing anyone, I asked around and came upon the school district of Fe y Alegría, located primarily in squatter settlements, and a teacher in one of the schools graciously invited me to live with her family in Canto Grande—a community called Great Song.
By day, I taught in the local secondary school Fe y Alegría and coordinated with members of the school youth for a mural project funded by the Fulbright Commission. By night, the multi-generational family with whom I lived described the rich oral histories of their community. But the Peruvian media consistently reinforced negative associations of the squatter settlements with gang activity, crime, ignorance, poverty, and violence—each article and newscast bringing into sharper focus the political process of “writing” history. Thus, when I first glimpsed the old and yellowed pages of the Manuscrito Quechua de Huarochirí, I searched desperately for an alternative approach to writing history in one of the oldest ethnographic accounts of Andean oral tradition after the fall of the Inkan Empire. Over four hundred years after its writing, I huddled in delight under the alpaca blankets of my room each night to read the Manuscrito, squinting at its weathered pages beneath the moonlight that escaped through the cracks in the ripple tin roof above me.
The Manuscrito begins: “If the ancestors of the people called Indians had known writing in former times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now.” The introduction brutally reminded me of the power of written traditions in history, perhaps determining whether certain people and their life stories will “fade from view.” Each night, as the chapters unfolded new descriptions of life in sixteenth century Huarochirí, my interest in the family’s descriptions of their own community broadened as well. During the intimate moments of the traditional evening meal of café con leche, fresh bread, and cheese or avocado, I heard about life in the squatter settlements.
The grandparents, eight brothers and sisters, and their children described the settlements called pueblos jovenes or “new towns,” communities that burgeoned during the height of political violence in Peru less than fifteen years ago. Since then, over three million people had migrated from the Andes Mountains and Amazon Jungle to Lima, nearly doubling the population of the capital. They described how entire towns were inaugurated overnight through what has been termed as invasions, when individuals and families would stake and claim plots of land on the outskirts of the city. In contrast to the negative images for which the pueblos jovenes were seen and “remembered” through the Peruvian media, Lurigancho members described their community to me as a complex tapestry of Andean and Amazonian beliefs and experiences, dynamically juxtaposed with urban culture and social life of Lima. For two years, we chatted and discussed alternative versions of their oral histories in the family’s home of estera or woven straw, nestled in the barren and dusty hills of the vast metropolis of Lima.
But when I finished reading the story of the Manuscrito, I felt conflicted. One of the central themes of the Manuscrito surrounds the relationship between the female deity of the coastal valley, Chaupi Namca, and the male deity of the mountains, Paria Caca. In the end, the coastal Yunca people and the Yauho mountain people come together and intermarry, and the event is portrayed as a collective strengthening of the people because the powers previously distinct to each group could now be articulated in the unified traditions of all. At first sight, the ending appears to have a happy resolution, but some have argued that the author’s writing was an attempt to justify the Spanish conquest in order to encourage their reception among the people.
I wondered, though, for the three million people in Peruvian squatter settlements, who will determine how history will be “written” and what will “fade from view?” How will the constructed characters of Lurigancho, as depicted by the media, influence future historical manuscripts and their place in the collective memory of Andean history? The Manuscrito didn’t leave me with any answers or solutions but reminded me that the storytelling process is political. Yet beneath the ripple tin roof in Canto Grande, I realized that anthropology offers something that I had not found in religious studies, philosophy, or literature. Although the storytelling process in each of these fields is situated politically and historically, anthropology surfaces as an intimate gaze into the living history of human experience. The actors are not fictional characters but people who have invited me into their homes, and I am one of the actors.
Posted by Jennifer at July 9, 2005 01:05 PM
Comments
first off, major points for mustering up the courage to go to peru like that.
also, yay for the beauty of anthropology and the lived experience. :)
Posted by: Aayesha at July 21, 2005 07:52 PM