The Jesuit Reducciones

Last week a big group of us are travelled to the Jesuit reducciones in Eastern Bolivia. If you have seen the movie The Mission, you know what they are. They were an experiment in community established by the Jesuits partly as a way to protect the indigenous of the region from the horrible violence and enslavement perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadors.

They were successful early experiements in socialism that worked until the Spanish king, feeling threatened by the power that organized indigenous folks had (and the Jesuits armed them as well), kicked the Jesuits out of South America. The reducciones in Paraguay are in ruins today, but the ones in Bolivia have been preserved and are still functioning towns, with vestiges of their founding principles still present.

The most interesting thing to me about the reducciones is that apparently, according to an article I am reading by the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, the reducciones influenced the thinking of Marx, whose writings appeared somewhat after the Jesuits were thrown out of South America. When I was reading Marx, Engles, and Lenin in university, I never saw the Jesuits mentioned, but I am sure all three would have been embarrassed to admit that some Catholics influenced them, since they had no use for religion.

What is interesting about this is that the birthplace of modern socialism is not Europe, but South America, and that it was not designed according to scientific principles, but in fidelity to the Gospel.

My own pilgrimage to the Jesuit reducciones was exhausting but worthwhile. We visited 6 different missions, all built in the later 17th or early 18th century. The Bolivian missions were the last of the reducciones to be built and were functioning as part of the Jesuit experiments for only about 75 years before the Spanish king became jealous and kicked the Jesuits out. But the Bolivian missions remained active even after the Jesuits were expelled and are still functioning villages.

A Swiss architect came here in the 1970s to begin restoration work on the Bolivian missions, all of which were functioning but in poor repair. The restorations were finished in the late 90s. In the process of restoring them, this architect found the music archives. Some of the Jesuit missionaries were also composers, some of them well-known in Europe. They composed music in the reducciones, taught the indigenous to compose, perform it, and even to craft their own instruments.

The music archive, which is now housed in the basement of one of these churches, contain 5000 original pieces of music that were previously thought lost. According to the story, this architect found it in the bathroom. They are painstakingly restoring and cataloging each piece of music, and have finished with 1700 of them.

The choirs in the missions are still performing these pieces of Baroque music. We went to a concert and were awestruck. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, in a village of no more than 3000 people, and listening to a choir of local children singing Baroque music like I had never heard it performed. Some of the pieces were written in the native Chicitania or Guarani languages.

There are so many interesting things to tell about these missions, but I will restrain myself and just mention a few more. Over 100,000 native people were housed in the reducciones at their height. The native people of this region were nomadic, but willingly moved to the reducciones to escape the slavehunters, who were capturing them to work in the Bolivian silver mines. The silver was all sent back to the Spanish crown. Slaves from Africa were also imported for this work, but the story goes that most of them died, which is why there are so few Afro-Bolivians today.

The reducciones were idyllic communities in many ways. Community members worked 6 days per week--three days on communal land and three days on their own. Communal land was used to grow the herb tea they exported in order to pay their taxes to the Spanish crown. When the head of household died, the private land reverted back to the community for redistribution. In this way no-one was able to to inherit wealth and all had what they needed. It seems that often when poor people are empowered, the elite became concerned about their own wealth and put a stop to it.

Adventures with Coffee and Colonialism

I have had lots of adventures with coffee. Bolivia is a coffee-producing country, so there is no shortage of good coffee here, and the one brand that I really like is also organic. But Bolivians do not tend to drink their own coffee; they drink Nescafe instant coffee. That's what they put in front of me in my house when I arrived, and many conversations with many people have confirmed that Nescafe instant is what almost everyone drinks.

Of course, when I travel, I always carry my little one-cup Melitta coffee maker, the kind you just have to pour boiling water through, and a supply of filters, so after one day of Nescafe, I introduced the real thing to my host family. They have fallen in love with their own coffee, and now I will need to leave my little coffee making device with them. Luckily, I have some friends who are sending replacements, because I prefer not to do without real coffee, and I have a feeling I will be needing to leave them all over South America.

I had an interesting, and revealing, conversation with the family I am staying with about their attachment to Nescafe. I said I could not understand why they would drink Nescafe when they have their own, much better, Bolivian coffee. Not only that, but Nescafe is more expensive. I said that Nestle is a multinational company, and they are...they are...I couldn't come up with the right word in Spanish. Lupe jumped in with ladrones, the Spanish word for thieves.

Yup, that's the right word. How else can you describe businesspeople who pay the producers next to nothing, pay the factory workers who process it next to nothing, and keep enormous riches for themselves?

But the bottom line is Bolivians think that North American and European products are better than their own. It is this weird sense of inferiority that connects with the race issues I mentioned in my last letter.

I just finished reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, and he talks about the same thing. He says that Africans struggle with a sense of the inferiority of their own culture, and even of their own abilities, when compared to the European occupiers, and only when this is conquered can Africans really be liberated from colonial oppression. He says that he struggled with it himself, always assuming that what was British was better. I recall that Gandhi said the same thing in his autobiography.

What I say in response is, how can a culture whose main export is war, be superior?

On a lighter note, we are preparing for Carnival here. In some parts of Bolivia it is just an excuse to drink for 24 hours straight, like anywhere else. But the main Carnival festivities take place in Oruro, in the heartland of indigenous culture, and where I will be going with other language students. There the celebration is a big dance fest that depicts a battle between good and evil in a mixture of Catholic and indigenous religious symbols.

A main feature of Carnival is throwing water balloons at each other. I don't think this has much to do with religious symbolism; it is just an excuse to cut loose. The water balloon throwing started at the beginning of this month. People just randomly throw water balloons, called globos, at unsuspecting pedestrians anywhere in the city. In Cochabamba they use a Spanish verb that means to throw water balloons, globear. I have been hit a few times, but most times they miss. I am trying to have fun with it, but mostly it feels like dodging bombs in a war zone. Harmless bombs, but bombs just the same. It makes me wonder why people think this is fun.

Morales and Social Division

Today Bolivia inauguerates its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, who is Aymara. The Aymara make up less than half of the indigenous majority in Bolivia; the Quechua are more numerous.

Yesterday I watched on TV as he was installed by the Aymara first, before the official government installation today. A crowd of tens of thousands of the Aymara people gathered at Tiahuonaka, an Inca holy site just south of La Paz. They believe that Tiahuonaka is a portal of the sun. They vested him with poncho and staff, and he wore a four-cornered hat to signify the four corners of the Inca empire. Such an installation has not happened in more than 500 years, since the Spanish occupation.

The family I live with is middle class with Spanish ancestors, but Lupe, the head of the household, supported Morales. Lupe explained to me that Bolivia has had 5 presidents in four years, and it seems that Morales was able to win over some of the middle class because they believe that something needs to change. Her family suffered at the hands of left-wing guerrillas, and so originally supported the right-wing dictatorship of a man whose name I cannot remember right now. She had a conversion after she left her husband and read about all the abuses of the government.

In speaking with others, it sounds like many in the middle class share her views. They are wary of Morales and his socialist ideas, but anything is better than what they have been enduring. In the last 5 years there have been several major uprisings over gas and water rights. However, I have noticed that the middle class seem to spend a lot of time worrying about how Morales dresses! They want him to wear suits and not sweaters.

In my little household live Lupe, divorced and in her fifties, her daughter, Gringa (more about that below), her daughter's two sons, Francisco (4) and Leonardo (7), Elena, the housekeeper, who is indigenous, but I don't know if she is Aymara or Quechua, and Rodrigo (13), Elena's grandson who is chief babysitter to the two boys. Elena's daughter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's two younger sons are also often at the house.

So what we have here are five grown women, including me, and five boys. Half of us have European ancestors and the other half are indigenous. None of the boys have a father in their lives. It seems that most middle class household retain servants who are indigenous. In most cases the servants go home at night and maintain a distance from the family. They do not eat at the same table, for example. In our case Elena and Rodrigo live with us and we all eat together and the boys all play together. However, in no way are Elena and Rodrigo equal to Lupe and her family. There is a hierarchy, and they are at the bottom.

Last Sunday I went to the cemetary with Lupe and her brother to visit their parents. They do this ritual every Sunday. At the gate to the cemetary stands a group of 20 or more indigenous people waiting for someone to buy flowers from them or hire them to clean up the gravesite. Lupe and her brother did both. They paid a girl a single Boliviano, about 15 cents, to sweep around the grave and pick up leaves by hand.

I was thinking that these are the same people who are desperately trying to get in to the U.S., but when they get there, they end up doing the same kinds of jobs. I think the difference must be that they get paid more in the U.S., and there is much more hope for the future of their children. Morales brings some hope that Bolivia's poorest, all indigenous, can find a sustainable future in Bolivia, because he promises to pursue policies that are in their interests.

I understand that the average salary in Cochabamba is around $200 per month, but that is for people who are working. Unemployment is high and jobs are scarce. There is a lot of begging, mostly women and children, and I have also seen many men passed out on the street from alcohol. They are just left there. There is also a problem with addiction to glue-sniffing, because there is a shoe factory and it is easy to get. This leads to a problem with homeless children, because their parents succomb to addiction.

Gringa, Lupe's daughter, sells overpriced and overrated vitamins to rich people and seems to do well. Lupe told me that the job requires long hours and travel, but that jobs are scarce, even for people with European ancestors, so she had to take what she could get. Gringa's real name is Luz Maria. They nicknamed her Gringa at birth because she has blue eyes, reddish hair, and fair skin. Gringa loves the name and will go by no other. In short, Gringa loves being white and chooses to advertise it as best she can. Her kids are also white. She is very right wing and wants nothing to do with Morales. Somehow, it seems to go with the whiteness!