Two Introductions Personal and Political

Before I left for Bolivia I read newspapers, blogs, and asked around for information about Bolivian history and current events. After my research and bearing experience in other areas of Latin America I felt sufficiently aware of the general social situation in Bolivia. My passive understanding of Bolivian politics was catapulted to in-your-face awareness yesterday with two drastically different introductions to two figures who will play important roles in my time here. The first, our landlady at the store, introduced me to one side of Bolivian politics and my neighbor provided balance with an opposing perspective.

Yesterday as I was closing up the store, my boss Mario called to remind me to pay this month´s rent. I grabbed the money and ran up to the office of our landlady, the misnomered Doña Lili. She was in a meeting but assured me that she would be down to the store "prontísimo," or "really, really soon." 30 minutes later she walked in, knocked over a couple of displays and looked at my co-worker Alex as if to say, "you gonna get that?" She then proceeded to introduce me to old-school Bolivian racism and elitist politics. After showing disappointment that I would voluntarily move to Bolivia, she lamented the current state of country and waxed poetic about the "old times." I have to at least give her credit for not mincing her words in her explanation of those times; things were much better when the "indios" (a pejorative term for indigenous peoples) knew their place in the country and didn´t meddle in politics or economics. She asked me if the "indios" had given us any trouble in the store (apparently those wily folks can strike at any moment) and because the universal rules of etiquette regarding landladies apply here as well, I told her only, "No, I don´t know what you´re talking about."

This unsettling interaction was followed by my introduction to my neighbor Raquel and her family. I went over to introduce myself and within minutes found myself on the family´s couch with a bowl-full of fresh strawberries in my lap and her 2-year-old son playing with toy trucks at my feet. Where Doña Lili maintains an us-and-them outlook on Bolivian society, Raquel shared a much more nuanced and pragmatic ideology with me. She´s excited about the increased emphasis on multiculturalism in the country, distrusts international organizations but concedes the importance of foreign investment, and hopes Evo creates positive change even if she doesn´t like him (a sentiment completely lacking in the US at the moment). She didn´t make any assumptions about my political opinions and openly questioned my misunderstandings and her own.

These two meetings in the span of only 2 hours provided a pretty accurate, if condensed, round-up of the current political situation in Bolivia and much of Latin America. In this example I´m missing the hard-core leftists who have dominated the scene in recent years, but the dramatic differences in worldview between Lili and Raquel highlight some of the problems faced by Bolivian citizens and politicians. As long as a certain percentage of the population insist on the continued existence of two Bolivias, one which has and one which hasn´t, one rural and one urban, one mestizo and one indigenous; whatever hopes for improvement either side harbors will fail. I´m looking forward to talking with Raquel more in future to better understand how she keeps her cool when settling into one of the political poles seems like the much easier and acceptable option. My conversations with Lili will also continue, not only out of necessity, but because on some level I need to be able to empathize with her, if not sympathize.