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

Introduction. A PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

Introduction A PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY “¡Su pasaporte, Señor!” It was 1965 and I had just landed in Lima, the capital of Peru, the first stop on my way to the Andes, where I was to live for two years among Quechua-speaking peasants to gather data for my doctorate in anthropology. Since then fierce economic and demographic forces have undermined the lives of the people I met and those of other peasants, transforming Peru from a rural to an urban country. Peruvian peasants have long been tied to the global system, forced to mine the gold and silver sent to Spain in the colonial period, then laboring in wool, cotton, and guano production, their sweat generating more recent exports. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, economic decisions made in international capitals, compounded by a rapid increase in population, have impoverished them further, fomenting profound social disruption and stark inequalities that have underlain other changes, including the brutal Shining Path war of the 1980s. Peasants and their city children have struggled against these forces, and their voices as they have done so illustrate the human dimensions of a crisis pummeling not only Peru, but most of the developing world.1 My flight to Peru in 1965 was my first foreign trip. Outside the Lima airport, I gawked at peddlers selling tropical fruits and barbequed beef hearts, scenes vividly different from the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of my Brooklyn childhood. Flat-roofed houses and occasionalmoonscapesofoil-stainedcarrepairpitsflickeredpastthe car window as I rode to my temporary Lima home. It was early November , springtime, but the winter fog that dampened and hid Lima had not yet lifted, and I could see little beyond the nearby streets. Peru was in the midst of enormous changes, but their scope, like the fog-enveloped city, was not yet readily apparent. Most Peruvians 2 VOICES FROM THE GLOBAL MARGIN lived in rural villages, the majority in high Andean valleys, where monolingual Quechua-speaking peasants grew food primarily for home consumption rather than for sale in the market. Many were peons on haciendas, large feudal estates. They dressed in homespun clothing, often walked barefoot, and most lacked electricity, potable water, and roads. I was headed to San Pedro and San José, two such towns in the Andean area of Ayacucho. The changes have been vast, beginning in the mid-twentieth century with a rapidly expanding population confronting an economy that squeezed the peasantry, processes taking place simultaneously throughout the developing world. To defend themselves, peasant farmers turned more and more to commerce, producing crafts for cash rather than bartering them for the farm produce they lacked. Most left their rural homes to work elsewhere. Some went to the nearby tropical rain forest to produce coffee, cacao, and fruit for national and international markets, then entered the coca/cocaine trade when prices for the legal commodities fell. Others became temporary laborers, sending remittances to family back home. So many migrated permanently to Lima that the city’s population had exploded from 591,000 in 1940, to some 2 million when I arrived in 1965, to 7.8 million in 2002.2 Some continued on to the United States, Japan, Spain, Italy, and other rich countries, looking for work and becoming part of the new globalmovementoflabor.IhavelistenedtoPeruvianandEcuadorian buskers, itinerant street musicians, play Andean music in New York 1 An Andean village City,Paris,Avignon,SanMalo,Amsterdam,andVenice,theirbeating drums and reverberant panpipes drawing large crowds. I have run across distinctive Andean pottery and sweaters in a flea market in New Jersey, sold by a man from La Paz, Bolivia. A community of Peruvians has joined other Latin American migrants near me in New Jersey, transforming my home locality as well, a few gathering once a week at a Chinese buffet to convert the clams and raw fish used for sushi into ceviche, the Peruvian national dish. To prepare for their new lives, rural farmers learned Spanish and sent their children to school. Many flocked to Protestantism, abandoning Roman Catholicism and changing the face of public religion. In 1996 my wife and I attended a rural Pentecostal church as some thirty people struggled to read Bible passages in Quechua. Most of the elaborate Roman Catholic fiestas I attended in the 1960s are no longer celebrated, but in 1996 I joined a circle around a pyre on the outskirts of Ayacucho City, the capital of the region where I have...