Starting from Quirpini: The Travels and Places of a Bolivian People

7 Where Do You Go When You Go to Buenos Aires?

7 · Where Do You Go When You Go to Buenos Aires? On any given day, during my time in Quirpini, a good number of the community ’s inhabitants were elsewhere. Nearly one-fifth of them actively maintained households in other communities of the region and spent a good deal of their time there; others would be on short trips to nearby communities or toSanLucas.But,generally,people’ssojournsoutsideQuirpiniformorethan a few days were travels for work. Many households had one or more members absent at any given time, although absence was highest during the times between planting and harvest. Some people traveled every year, some went for years at a time, and others migrated for work only a few times in their lives. A considerable number of Quirpinis had left permanently and sold their land. In the early 1990s migration was a central fact of life for nearly all families in Quirpini, and for the community as a whole. The money that men brought back from their travels was necessary for many families to have enough food through the year; a substantial minority of the families in Quirpini farmed plots that were too small to feed a household. For others, wages provided the means to sponsor fiestas, to send children to school, to acquire store-bought food such as noodles and rice, agricultural and other tools, cooking pots, medicine, alcohol, and many other necessities of life in Quirpini. The entire community was implicated in, and partly constituted by, people ’s travels for wage labor. As I will detail presently, the local labor market was largely generated by migration, and the community as a whole depended on a constant influx of cash. The earnings of those who brought in the most 222 · From Quirpini cash were distributed throughout the community, either as their wives hired other men to work their fields in the migrants’ absence or as they entertained more lavishly than otherwise, particularly in corn planting. The social relationsofQuirpinihappenedpartlyindistanttownsandcities ,asyoungpeople abroad met and married partners from far away or as conflicts occurring abroad divided the kin of the antagonists back home. Inthemainpartofthischapter,IdescribethetripaQuirpinicompanion namedNicanorHuarachiandImadefromSanLucastotheimmigrantneighborhood in La Salada. The trip is just one aspect of the transnational circuit (Rouse 1991) connecting San Lucas to Buenos Aires. Other circuits connect San Lucas with various cities of Bolivia. The substance of these circuits is the movement of people (and money, goods, and news, but primarily people) as well as the relative immobility of people who do not travel the circuit. We will see how, on the one hand, Buenos Aires and the national spaces of Argentina and Bolivia have been produced in part by people in motion, and are constantly being re-created by the movement of people, money, and goods. The migrants I knew from Quirpini and other parts of the San Lucas area are part of this ongoing process of re-creation. At the same time the repertoire of spatial practices with which they navigate and create the world they come from are challenged as they move through worlds that have been created under different cultural, economic, and social circumstances. A recent series of events had a dramatic impact on migratory strategies for southern Bolivians. In December 2001 Argentina’s economy collapsed into the worst depression the country had ever experienced, the result of years of financial policies that undermined Argentine industry and all sorts of exports (for an account of the crisis and its causes, see Blustein 2005). In response to the crisis, the government put severe restrictions on bank withdrawals and defaulted on international loans, which temporarily cut the Argentine economy off from external credit; the currency lost more than half its value. Unemployment and poverty soared. All these shocks directly disrupted Bolivians’ ability to successfully seek work in Argentina. Without credit, there was no construction and no factory activity, so Bolivian men’s preferredjobsdisappeared;Bolivianstendedtoworkinformallyandgetpaid in cash, which was suddenly in short supply; should they get work, Bolivians (as well as other foreign immigrants) found that their wages were worth half of what they were a year before. Finally, rural Bolivians typically entered the labor market at the bottom, taking jobs that most Argentines found too Where Do You Go When You Go to Buenos Aires? · 223 poorly paid or too demanding; with so many people out of work, competition for available jobs intensified. All the evidence suggests that although BoliviansresidentinArgentinadidnotreturnhomeinlargenumbers,migration to Argentina essentially stopped. It...