The Fuzzy Line Between Gringa and Cholita Paceña

Last night, I arrived home wearing a new wide-brimmed felt hat I bought to shield my gringa skin from the sun. Even for non-gringas, hats are an essential acessory here in the altiplano, where we live so close to the sun that sometimes it seems like it is reaching down and trying to touch us, the way you might try to touch fish swimming close to the surface of the river as you row along in a canoe. I climbed up the stairs to my bedroom in my smart coffee-colored hat with its wide ribbon tied in a bow trailing off behind it, and I found two hermanas sitting on the steps talking. They gasped with delight to see me in my new hat, and the hermana who guards the hospedaje grounds exclaimed, "I don't even recognize you! You've become Bolivian! Now you're my real hermana!" The hermana who is the caretaker of the hospedaje concurred and told me I looked right pretty. I laughed and said, "We're blood hermanas now," and they seemed pleased by this. Their assessment of my new Bolivianhood was similar to some of the comments I recieved after participating in the Easter parade last weekend put on by all the Methodist churches in El Alto, in which I wore the traditional pollera dress of city-dwelling Aymara women, which I had asked someone to lend me for the ocassion. Church men who passed shouted "cholita paceña!" approvingly (a chola, in the local vernacular, is a woman identified with indigenous Aymara culture but is not a country-dwelling campesina, in the sense indigenous groups are often identified, but rather a fully urbanized individual). I thought it ironic that they should shout this at me, considering that there were several hundred cholitas paceñas of greater authenticity all around me. The women, for their part, would beam at me with a bubbling, giddy confusion and say "Hola, hermana!"; some would add, "You look so pretty!", while others would just keep staring at me, as if unable to think of anything else to say but unable to leave the situation at that. I think many of them didn't understand why on earth I would want to look like a cholita paceña, but they were flattered that I did. For my part, I just think cholas have damn good fashion sense, and I fully intend to buy my own pollera get-up, if I can scrape together the money for the entire outfit, which is quite costly even by US standards.

Whether or not I'm actually becoming more Bolivian in a physical, behavioral or ideological sense isn't so much important to me as is my hermanas' sense of me coming to belong with them in some way. My exchange with the guard hermana about us being "real" sisters now reminded me of some articles I read on informal adoption and "child circulation" in the Andes, wherein children will be dispatched by their birth parents, or requested by the recieving family, to go to live with aunts and uncles, granparents, ritual kin (i.e., godparents), or, particularly in the case of informal adoption, simply acquaintances. This might be due to the family's poverty or rural location, when living with someone else might provide the child financial resources his or her birth family cannot, or a better education in the city. On the other hand, children might go to live with a widowed female relative, for example, who needs the extra help and company. Children can in this way become quite detached from their birth family, but by being nourished and cared for by their adoptive kin, they often indeed come to be seen as a member of the family even in a physical sense, through a sort of logic of shared substance.

I have, from the beginning, been sharing a lot of the practical substances of life, and particularly food, with my spiritual hermanas and hermanos (brothers and sisters) here in Bolivia. At least once a day, I knock on the door of the dorm caretaker and have her 14-year-old son or 10-year-old daughter come down and open the kitchen for me. Then I set up shop cooking my experimental meals combining Bolivian ingredients, a very high altitude, and my pseudo-cosmopolitan, Mexi-Italia-Japanese hippy-health-nut cooking expertise. I banter with the three or four 18-20 year old boys that are usually also present, and I often find myself explaining what my ideal man would be like, or why formulaically romantic Latin American courting strategies don't work on me. Once, much to my delight, I even had a receptive audience of one for a lecture on the importance of using protection when having sex. In larger groups, however, we often exhaustivally discuss the differences between Bolivia and the United States, including such hot button issues as socialism, machismo, drinking alcohol (a mostly forbidden act in the Bolivian Methodist Evangelical Church), and the comparative blandness of potatoes and fruit in my country. They might share their fried potatoes with me, and in turn I give them samples of my lentil soup or my meat/vegetable/chili-paste concoction. When the boys are tired and quiet, or absent, I busy myself reading daily newspapers or The National Geographic in Spanish as my food cooks.

The kitchen is, obviously, a great way to get to know other students in the dorm. However, I have been confused and frustrated by the almost total absence of women in the kitchen. One would expect it to be the other way around, but for reasons unknown to me, barely any of the women ever seem to need to cook, and I see them only in passing, in the hallway or entering or exiting the bathroom. I've speculated that perhaps they have family members they eat with here in the city, or perhaps it is easier for them to find jobs than boys (the informal service sector in Bolivia does tend to have more opportunities for women, particularly because of the gender bias in domestic service and street vending), and thus they have more money to eat out and less time to cook. It could also be that some of the newly arrived ones are simply too shy and timid to go out and find food in the busy markets and then figure out how to cook it, when some of them, as I know to be the case of two sisters who live here together, have yet to learn how to cook. Much to my delight, however, this past week one girl has started coming down and making her lunches, because her married brother with whom she was eating moved further away. She has shared her boiled yucca and fried plantains with me, and I have shared my fried sweet potatoes and toasted corn with her. I found that she immediately opened up to me when, on a whim, and despite the fact that I wasn't sure if she would understand it or appreciate it, I shared with her about my eerily sycnhronistic relationship with the number 11:11 and the age of 22. In turn, she told me about her struggle to get used to living away from her family and home when at the age of 15 she was sent to live with her older brother and keep him from taking to drinking or other distractions while he studied in Llallagua. Then she explained that she, too, has felt a fortuitous opening to possibility inside herself now that she is 22. She also told me stories of her disturbing struggle to distance herself from a mentally ill ex-boyfriend, as well as her dream of starting a non-profit organization to help young adults with substance abuse problems. It's amazing how far a few fried plantains and sweet potatoes and a little risking of your vulnerability can take you. Aside from the personal connection, I felt like it was some kind of research breakthrough to actually be talking about more personal and meaningful themes with a young woman my own age, particularly since one of my main research ideas was to focus on younger women.

I certainly developed deeper connections with some women from the start, however. Aside from the three FEFEME leaders—Hermana S. with her prickly cactuses and clever peeing techniques, Hermana M. with her reflexively natural kisses, back rubs and other physical affection, and Hermana J. with her devilish sense of humor—I have developed a very important relationship with the caretaker of the hospedaje and her two children. I have taken on something like a godparent relationship with the family, in the traditional Latin American sense of godparents who are, ideally, better-off than the real parents and help with practical needs for the children. The hermana, a struggling widowed mother, cautiously asked me soon after arriving if I might be able to give English lessons to her children, as she had been thinking of sending them to an institute for it but didn't have the money. I agreed, since I got along well with her kids and I knew what a godsend it would be for her and what a simple, small thing it really is for me. Since then she has reciprocated in every way possible. She sends her daughter to help me cut vegetables or she herself helps me with my food preparation, and sometimes she offers me food from their lunch or dinner, passing it through a window, covered by Health Ministry posters with cartoons promoting vaccination against rubella, that separates the big community kitchen from her tiny, closet-sized one. Her daughter also helps me with my Aymara, sometimes in the morning before school, and sometimes in the evening, along with her brother, after our English lesson. The kids' enthusiasm and dedication to learning English is reward enough for me, and I find myself buying them candies and cookies from street vendors to brighten their day.

Just two days ago, the caretaker hermana accompanied me at the last minute to go find a mini-refrigerator for my bedroom, after I discovered that the already problematic industrial refigerator in the kitchen had broken down entirely. She went into the shops while I waited outside, so that she could negotiate the best deal before they knew it was a gringa who was buying it. This new refrigerator was, in fact, the topic of conversation just before I had mounted the steps and ran into the hermanas with my new hat last night. The guard of the hospedaje grounds wanted to see for herself this beautiful mini-fridge. I unlocked my door and ushered them in, and they stood admiring the fridge as if it were an elegant evening gown or a pricey original painting. Once inside my bedroom, however, the guard hermana was dismayed at my lack of suitable furniture that she felt should be provided for me. She henceforth set out to drag up a coffee table from the common room downstairs to elevate my fridge, and provide extra space for the radio she was going to bring me tomorrow. As she had explained to me previously, the other hermanas might not realize what it's like to live alone, since they have their husbands or at least their children, and as a woman who has remained unmarried and childless, she understood the necessity of having a radio to keep you company. She also decided my little end-table-size desk was insufficient, and I needed a bigger table to eat and write at, which was also brought up from the common room. Then chairs with cushions were in order, because, as the guard hermana explained, the hermanas who wore polleras must not understand that those of us who dress in European fashions don't have so much cushioning for our butts.

Now, with my new hat, fridge, and furniture, I am feeling utterly settled in and satisfied here. I am recalling how I turned down the offer to move into a whole apartment of my own across from the hospedaje a couple weeks ago, when I was still more frustrated with the kitchen situation. Now I'm so glad I didn't give up having to ask my 10-year-old hermanita to open the kitchen or the shower for me, which she always does with the sweetest enthusiasm as she scuttles around in her bear slippers and thick woolen cap. Nor would I want to give up my chance encounters in the kitchen, sharing substances and dating advice with my young hermanos and hermanas. Most of all, I wouldn't give up for anything my perfect view of Mount Illimani beyond the colorful skyscrapers and green mountains of La Paz.

But because I am trying to be an anthropologist, I always like to relativize my own perception of things. For example, I was just thinking yesterday how for one of the ants that I mercilessly kill as they seep into my room through the cracks in my windowpane, my lace curtain might be their Mount Illimani.