An Indian among Los Indígenas Read online

  The training group’s luggage sat in a heap on the floor. My backpack, which had seemed so big in the REI outlet store back in Portland, now looked ridiculously small. The tiny straps and water-resistant pockets held two years’ worth of tightly packed clothes and supplies. As the other volunteers pulled their luggage from the pile, I tried to recall who everyone was. Even after icebreakers and introductions, I could not remember anyone’s name.

  Bursting leather suitcase—the athletic girl from California.

  Floral-print handbag—Latina chick from Texas.

  Worn North Face backpack—blond guy from Minnesota who had been smiling nonstop for two days.

  The woman from Texas pulled another suitcase and more floral-print bags from the pile. Her name was Laura. The impracticality of her luggage choice made me love her. I had found my first friend. I hadn’t known what to bring, but had assumed everyone else had it all figured out. Laura must have brought everything she owned in case she needed it. She was an interior designer from El Paso, which sounded exotic to me, but she assured me it wasn’t. With a Marilyn Monroe figure and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen, she was glamorous and the opposite of what I expected a Peace Corps volunteer to look like.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not fluent in Spanish,” she confessed over beers in Miami. Her mother taught her to speak English without an accent. We’d both been raised by mothers who taught their children to be proud of their heritage without appearing too “ethnic.”

  “I won’t, if you don’t tell them I’m too fat,” I said. She laughed long enough to erase the embarrassment attached to the invitation letter informing me that I was three pounds above the acceptable weight for my height. For months, I worried there would be a scale at the airport with a trap door underneath ready to whoosh me back home if the wrong number appeared.

  We followed the blond volunteer with the smooth southern drawl who was leading the way into the main part of the terminal. Round faces and short women wearing bulky skirts were everywhere. Long, dark braids hung down from black bowler hats that sat askew on their heads. They were Aymara women, Indigenous celebrities. Like the immigration official, none of them gave me a second look. I hoped that once I was apart from this gaggle of North Americans, I would be noticed.

  In the parking lot on the high plateau where the airport stood, the sun felt a few miles away. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted to see a rumbling school bus waiting to take us to the Peace Corps offices. That’s when I saw Mt. Illimani. The mountain’s triple peaks loomed over the valley beneath us. It peeped over the rim of La Paz like the Abominable Snowmonster in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. The wind pushed into the side of my face, whipping my hair from the barrette holding it down. Between the sunshine and the frozen wind, I was now fully awake. My heart beat faster from a combination of altitude and excitement. I was finally standing in Bolivia.

  Seven months earlier, I called the recruiter in Seattle during my coffee break. The college degree I worked so hard for hadn’t led to any jobs beyond temporary positions in offices that were as depressing and bleakly corporate as this one. The file clerks on the seventeenth floor shared one hideous black phone, and although I wasn’t supposed to use it for personal calls, I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to know whether the Peace Corps wanted me. After eighteen months of filling out forms, begging forgotten professors to write reference letters, and doctor’s exams, I was almost ready to give up. Almost. Outside the windows, a line of gray clouds made it impossible to see Mt. Hood, the lopsided beauty I had been looking at for most of my twenty-five years.

  The phone rang, and I finally had the recruiter on the line. We had never met in person. I didn’t want to sound desperate, but I really needed her to tell me something positive. When my boss told me there might be a future for me at the insurance agency, I knew it was time for me to move on. I didn’t want a secure position moving pieces of paper around the seventeenth floor. The Peace Corps had been the next step I had counted on since high school. Adventure, travel, and service in one government-funded package seemed too good to be true. Why didn’t everyone join? But with an economics degree from a low-ranked state school and experience wiping noses at the college day-care center, I was not at the top of the Peace Corps’ recruitment list. My boyfriend submitted his application the same week I did. His physics degree from a private college gained him acceptance with such speed that he barely had time to pack his Moosewood cookbooks into his VW van before departing for Africa. I wasn’t sure what was more heartbreaking: that he had no qualms about leaving me or that the Peace Corps welcomed him into its ranks with such haste.

  “Do you have any news for me, maybe?” I asked the recruiter. I had no time for small talk. There had been so many rejections from other volunteer positions in Africa and Asia. Each time, I was told I was not qualified. I had the wrong degree, the wrong experience, and the wrong life to pursue this dream.

  “Why yes I do, and I think you’re going to like it.” I could tell she was smiling. I was too nervous to smile. “You’re going to Bolivia.” I almost dropped the phone on the desk when she said this. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening.

  “What was different this time?” I asked her. Was it the two years of Spanish I took in college? Or maybe all the hours I spent in the library studying to bring my GPA up?

  “To be honest, it was…” She hesitated. “It’s because you’re an American Indian,” she said in a rush of words. It wasn’t the answer I had expected. Gratitude and resentment mixed in my throat. I swallowed.

  “Peace Corps needs more minorities.” Her voice was cheerful but forced. If I had known that was the key to an invitation, I would have tied a burning bundle of sage to my application or sent it wrapped in a Pendleton blanket months ago. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Break time was ending—this life-changing moment needed to end in less than five minutes.

  “I remember when I first went to El Salvador,” she said. Then she began telling me a story about plantains, or it might have been children. Honestly, I wasn’t listening. I had the information I wanted; I was ready to get off the phone. And I couldn’t forget what she had said. Peace Corps needs more minorities. I could have told them that. In eighteen months of attending recruiting events, every returned volunteer I met was white. Most of the potential volunteers getting recruited at these events were white. They needed me as much as I needed them. But, of course, I couldn’t say that. Any reaction other than impossible-to-mistake gratitude would be seen as bad form. I thanked her and told her how excited I was.

  “I’ll be honest—this is probably the only invitation I’ll be able to get for you,” the recruiter said. Her voice was flat and breathy; maybe she was trying to keep people on the other end from hearing what she said. Bolivia was my one chance. By the time I hung up, my hand was wet with sweat. I slumped onto the table with relief.

  The simple story I told my friends and family that night did not include everything the recruiter had said. I wasn’t quite sure how to tell the complicated truth. But the overnight flight to La Paz wouldn’t leave for another six months. In that time, I would still have to pay for rent, food, college loans, and a $400 credit card bill. Six more months of retrieving files and pushing carts full of paperwork between office cubicles awaited me. I wasn’t sure what Bolivia would be like, but I couldn’t wait to begin the adventure.

  2

  Cochabamba

  Bolivia was isolated—isolated by mountains and expanses of sparsely populated, rugged terrain. It was a landlocked country that lost access to the Pacific Ocean in 1904 after a war with Chile. In Bolivia, the Andes Mountains broke into two separate ranges and continued bumping along South America into Chile and Argentina. There were vistas of snow-capped mountains with tranquil llamas silently chewing in the foreground. But Bolivia also had mountains of jagged orange and slate jutting toward the sky. Centuries of wind and rain erosion had revealed layers of red and gray minerals. Roads were
built around the treeless, steep mountains because there was no going over them. In Potosi, the high-altitude, bone-chilling city whose silver deposits inspired the hot greed of Spaniards, the hard brown shape of Cerro Rico (literally, Rich Mountain) could be seen from every narrow street and open plaza.

  Bolivia was also home to the world’s largest salt flat, Salar De Uyuni, an expanse of horizon-skimming whiteness that stretched for mile after barren mile. An Aymara Indian story explained that the mountains surrounding the salt flat were once giants. One of the giants deserted his wife for another woman while his wife was breastfeeding their child. She cried and cried. The tears mixed with the milk and ran down her chest in white streams, covering the vast area between them. When it was dry, the sun reflected off the salty whiteness. Light-skinned tourists were burned to a shade of pink not unlike the flamingos that flocked there to mate every November. During the rainy season, a thin layer of water accumulated on the surface and turned the salt flat into a giant mirror that reflected the sky and erased the horizon.

  Tourists were drawn to the remoteness, to the myth of Bolivia’s savage purity. It let them prove they were travelers and not tourists. Tourists ordered frozen blue drinks from the hotel bar. Travelers, by contrast, rode buses without shocks for fifty cents while suppressing their explosive diarrhea, proving their heartiness. What about the grandmother seated next to the traveler? She had been riding the same bus for twenty years. The bus was luxurious compared to the back of the truck she had ridden the previous twenty years. Would she see a difference between a traveler and a tourist? Or would she simply see a gringo riding through her country as though it were a roller coaster?

  The eastern border of Bolivia pressed up against the backside of Brazil. The rivers from that region flowed into the Amazon basin, and the jungles were full of the world’s largest rodents, thick vegetation, and piranha. By the 1990s when I was there, the Eastern Lowlands were one of the poorest regions of Bolivia. Giant cattle ranches with few cattle remained. Many hid processing operations that turned the coca leaves grown nearby into cocaine for North American snorting. We were told it was a dangerous, messy part of the country, thick with yellow-fever-infected mosquitoes and no volunteers. But the tribes in these lowlands had built causeways that stretched for miles, controlling the water and enabling large communities to exist well before the Spanish showed up.

  The mountains, the Salar, and the thick jungles all made Bolivia a difficult place to explore. The isolation and remoteness helped the Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, and other tribes maintain their culture and language for centuries. Some of the tribes managed to stay hidden until the twentieth century. But the riches in the ground itself worked against their efforts. Gold, tin, rubber, mahogany, cocaine, lithium, and even the water drew Westerners who did what they do: explore, infect, desiccate. But those Natives were still there, speaking their languages, dancing, and feeding themselves and their children.

  On the fifth day, we flew to Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, and another snowy peak on the horizon reminded me that we were still in the Andes. Cochabamba reclined across a broad valley, dipping her toes in Lake Alalay on the southern edge of the city. An enormous white statue of Jesus stood firmly on a low hill, reaching out to the city with his arms open and eyes staring forward. It was still winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but the valley was warm enough that I could relax my shoulders instead of hunching up against the cold. For the first time since arriving, my breathing was full and deep.

  I was eager to get out, ask people for directions in Spanish, and crinkle a Bolivian dollar between my fingers, but was led onto a bus heading to the training center. Out the window, I saw women walking down the street in flouncy pollera skirts that shifted with each step, and the chubby babies they carried in bright fabric tied around their shoulders. I learned that these were cholitas, women who wore traditional clothing such as the ruffled skirts, hats, and shawls. They were Indigenous or, like many Natives in the US, had mixed Indigenous and European background. In La Paz, cholitas wore the tiny black bowlers; but in Cochabamba, their hats were white with wide brims. The way these women took things brought by colonialists and made them their own reminded me of the tobacco lids that North American Natives used to make jingle dresses.

  Quechuas were the largest Indigenous group in Bolivia, and this valley was their home. “Only a small percentage of Cochabambinos are of pure Indian extraction,” my guidebook told me. International travelers preferred the familiar version of Indian—brown faces framed with long, dark braids—because it matched their ideas of how Indigenous Bolivians were supposed to look. The same thing happened in the US, where curious people asked me, “How Indian are you?” as though I were a breed of dog they were considering buying if my lineage was pure. Native people in Bolivia had skin tones from deep brown to pale and wore both traditional clothes and whatever their mother bought them last Christmas. In Bolivia, almost everyone had some Indigenous blood.

  The bus turned into a wide road with more cars. We passed rows of low brick houses topped with corrugated tin roofs, lining unpaved roads leading up into the mountains on the edge of the city. Dust and pollution floated above the city in a thin brown cloud. Every other vehicle was a minivan packed with people who bounced when the tires hit a pothole. The bus stopped, and a willowy man waved his hand above his head, then pulled the tall metal gate open onto a small, treeless courtyard, where we were greeted with handshakes and hugs by the staff. On the other side of the sunbaked courtyard was a large, bright room with a row of windows revealing a small garden, trees, and a volleyball net. I wanted to learn everything, to speak the language, to understand the culture. Most of all, I wanted the Bolivians in this room, the instructors and the staff, to see me as someone who was like them. I didn’t want to look like a grinning fool, but it was too late, and I smiled so wide my cheeks bumped into my eye sockets.

  The Bolivian family who would host me for the next three months came forward. “Mucho gusto conocerte” (Nice to meet you), said Bonnie, the mother. As she stepped in close to kiss my cheek, I smelled wood smoke and soap. My first attempt at the traditional Bolivian greeting—shaking hands, then air-kissing each cheek, followed by immediately patting the outside of the person’s shoulder—was imperfect, and I might have shaken her hand too vigorously. Bonnie’s nine-year-old daughter, Rosa, and her teenage daughter, Morelia, looked at the ground or around the room as they shook my hand.

  “Listo para salir?” (Ready to go?), Bonnie asked. I wished I knew how to say “After you” in Spanish, but I didn’t, so I simply said yes and followed them out the door. As we walked on the narrow dirt path between two empty fields, I tried to memorize every rock and dog turd because I had to find my way back there the next day. The powdery dust on the path turned my boots the same color as the earth. Morelia pointed out roads that led to a nearby restaurant, but I struggled to carry on a conversation.

  How different this was from being in a classroom and repeating dialogue from a book. In college, I learned Spanish during the day from glitchy videos, while in the evening I attended student-organized meetings where stories of massacres and revolutions happening in real time in Central America were translated in front of me from Spanish to English. The speakers were often Indigenous women imploring us to get the US government out of their country, to explain that millions of our tax dollars were being spent to keep dictators in power. During these presentations, I was usually silent, but wondered whether there was a way for me to help communities like theirs, to show them there were people from the United States who respected their humanity.

  Bonnie and the girls led me across a wide two-lane road where minivans with barely functioning mufflers sped by, and suddenly we stood in front of an unimpressive adobe building.

  “Bienvenido.” Ernesto welcomed us into the front room of the house. His smile was reserved, a reflection of the smile on the face of his older daughter. He rested his hand on the fleshy shoulder of their son, an almost teenage boy stan
ding in front of him. Inside the house was a one-room store where pocketbook-sized bags of detergent, individual rolls of purple toilet paper, coils of pasta, and stacks of red sardine cans lined the walls. We passed into a dimly lit room, and my eyes took a moment to adjust. Rooms surrounded the courtyard at the center of the house in a style I had seen in Mexico. I loved the interior courtyards of these homes because, like any good introvert, I preferred to be somewhere hidden.

  “El baño…,” the father said as he motioned toward a door on the far wall. Outside, I saw a small outhouse, just big enough for a toilet and a roll of paper. It was new and had smooth cement walls. The smile on Ernesto’s face widened, and I knew I was supposed to be impressed. I had been in enough outhouses to know this was a good one. The seat was still white, and the smell was hardly noticeable.

  “Qué bueno,” I said, looking the structure up and down. The family had built the latrine specifically to be able to host volunteers like me. We volunteers required special places to shit. Each host family had to agree to a minimum of accommodations, but a sit-down latrine like this was more than the bare minimum. He gently touched the side of the wall and invited me to sit down and take it for a test drive.

  “Todavía, no” (Not yet), I said, hoping that the word yet would convey my enthusiasm for using it when I had a need. Later I found out that others in the group only had a hole in the ground to squat over, and my appreciation for the little outhouse grew.

  Rosa showed me to my room, which contained a bare mattress, a small empty table, and a wooden cabinet. It was stuffy but clean, and when she closed the door, I spread out on the bare mattress, relieved to be alone for the first time in over a week. Outside my window, chickens scratched and Bonnie spoke to her daughter in Quechua. Not one word was recognizable to me. A Native language and a mosquito net; it was all so exotic and just as I had imagined it would be when I first heard about Peace Corps ten years earlier. I couldn’t help but smile.