Voices from the Global Margin: Confronting Poverty and Inventing New Lives in the Andes

FIVE. Valentina: FROM BRIDE BY CAPTURE TO INTERNATIONAL MIGRANT

FIVE Valentina FROM BRIDE BY CAPTURE TO INTERNATIONAL MIGRANT “Comadre, you’re going to be in my book too. And so’s [your husband ].” “Don’t make me laugh!” “What would you like me to call you?” “Valentina! Yes, Valentina. I don’t know why but the name just came to me. I like it. And you’ll change the name of my husband? Let’s call him Roberto.” I first met Valentina Rodríguez in San Pedro in 1966, but she has lived in the United States on and off since 1991. When we first met, Valentina and I were friendly but not close. Mistakenly believing that there was some “authentic” Andean culture, I wanted to work with monolingual Quechua speakers, not an upper-status townswoman who spoke reasonably good rural Spanish. In San Pedro Valentina dressed very differently from most of her neighbors. In 1966 San Pedro had a stricter dress code for women than for men. An uneducated peasant woman had to wear huali, the characteristic blouse and long skirt similar to that worn by Claudia Velarde and Benjamina Enríquez. Educated townswomen and returned migrants, however, could dress intraje—a knee-length skirt, heavy stockings, a blouse, often covered with a light sweater—and could wear their hair short, without braids. Valentina could have walked unnoticed on the streets of New York. Valentina lived in San Pedro only occasionally in 1966, and I referred to her in my initial notes as “the woman across the street, la vecina.” I am not good at remembering names and often used descriptive tags attached to a key to refer to people at the beginning of my acquaintance. When she began living in San Pedro, she borrowed my kitchen implements and offered me food. In the evenings, she and Roberto sometimes visited my room, and she would sing 98 VOICES FROM THE GLOBAL MARGIN Ayacucho songs in a sweet, high voice. In 1983 I lived near her in Lima, and now she lives in northern Virginia, which has allowed us to come to know one another well. Valentina was born comparatively rich, but she has had a dif- ficult life and today relies on gifts from her children and odd house-cleaning jobs in Virginia. Nonetheless, by any economic measure , Valentina is considerably better off than is Martín Velarde (Chapter 4). Valentina’s Story I was a natural child, born out of wedlock, an hija natural.I couldn’t believe it when I looked at my birth certificate. My grandmother hated my father, Néstor, because he was from the rural area below the central town, the bajíos.She thought he was an Indian, a cholo.She was from ahigherlevel,afamilyofsocialimportance, delasociedad.Becausemy grandmother didn’t want them to marry, my mother and father escaped to Chancay on the coast, where I was born in 1939. They were married by the town mayor after I was born, but never had a church wedding because of my grandmother’s opposition. In Chancay, my father was boss, a mayordomo, of a work crew, and my mother cooked meals and washed clothing for the workers. My 23 Ayacucho market woman mother got tired of living so poorly, and when I was around two, we returned to San Pedro. After two or three years in San Pedro, my father died. “What did he die of?” I don’t know. Either typhus or typhoid, something contagious that hit San Pedro and killed my father and many others. There were no doctors, no medicine. My grandparents were very rich and my grandfather was very powerful . He was governor of San Pedro and also justice of the peace. They were hacendados and owned an hacienda and two large farms with about fifteen families of peons. Other campesinos also worked for my grandparents, but they lived on their own fields. Whenever Valentina speaks of her grandparents, she always refers to her mother’s parents, probably because they were richer and more powerful than her paternal ones. Knowing that haciendas monopolized land and water to capture the labor of peons who lacked one or both resources, I asked, “Did the peons on the estate have to work on your grandparents’ fields in order to receive the land they lived on?” No. My grandparents paid them for their work like everybody else. “Why would your grandparents give peons land if they weren’t getting people...