Andean Islands

This past weekend we left to visit Lake Titicaca, which is in Puno. This lake is the highest commercially navigable lake in the world and features several islands that are upwards of 13,000 feet in altitude. Interestingly, we are some of the first visitors to these islands since Puno has been reopened due to political unrest. I will begin with the story of Puno. A Canadian mining company, Canadian Bear Creek Mining, was given governmental authority to mine the area. This authority comes as a Presidential veto after the Peruvian congress had passed a law giving the right of these lands to the indigenous peoples of Puno. The people of Puno, dependent upon tourism as an economic resource, see this mining company as a threat to not only their land rights (capable of displacing communities), but also as an environmental hazard that will damage Lake Titicaca and ruin future tourism. After the government ignored their desire to negotiate, thousands of protestors literally shut down the city of Puno--preventing people from arriving or leaving. This, of course, stopped all tourism to Lake Titicaca and forced the government to respond. After the protestors tried to take over Puno's international airport, five were killed by government police, creating scandal on top of unrest. After this, exiting President Garcia decided to give all land rights back to the indigenous peoples of Puno and force the mining company to leave. It was a mere few days after the resolution of this crisis that we visited Puno.

Walking the tourist strip found the doors of international banks shattered, but otherwise, the city seems to have returned to normal. We saw no remaining protestors, signs of struggle, or any other indicators of unrest.

So, with this as the background, we boarded a boat and set off for a few days of living on islands. The first islands we visited are the floating reed islands, which were constructed by indigenous people hundreds of years ago as a way to escape the Inca, and then later the Spanish. Today these islands are mostly reserved for tourists, but many indigenous Aymara live there. Women from these reed islands are known especially for their handicraft work, large textile banners of intricately woven art, and their incredibly colorful dress. We were invited to the home of one of the women--Olga--where she showed us how she lived and made her clothes. In the group that visited Olga, I was the only woman, and interestingly, she would only say my name when addressing all of us. After sitting in Olga's house and conversing with her for some time, we then were invited to purchase her wares which had already been set up in a makeshift market outside. This was very reminiscent of Chinchero, where the women encouraged foreign participation in their cultural activities and then used this closeness to encourage purchases of their wares. We of course bought some of Olga's amazingly beautiful art, and she thanked us profusely, throwing in small gifts as if we were loyal customers.

The next island we visited is Amantani Island. Here we actually stayed the night with the villagers and learned more about their way of life and customs. Our host family was comprised of two sisters. Their parents had left that day to make the two day trip to Puno to purchase cheese and rice, which was not made on their island. Aside from that, however, people from Amantani grow almost all of their own food and make their own clothes. Tourism here operates interestingly, because they want to share the economic benefits of tourists with all citizens of the island, while giving each other breaks from hosting. Supposedly (it doesn't always work this way) tourist groups are rotated to different villages around the island, with each village getting at least one to three tourist groups per month.

Anyway, we were given a small dorm to stay in, but as it was cold, we chose to stay in the kitchen aiding the sisters to stay warm. The kitchen was removed from the main part of the house, it was made of mud walls, a dirt floor, with a clay oven that was constantly heated with a sage-smelling wood. On top of the oven sat a large cast iron pot that Gladys (the older sister, apparently in charge) constantly had water boiling in. She spent most of the day making rice, and then for dinner we had a scrambled egg with fresh vegetables along with cheese and the rice. As is custom throughout the Andes we also had a quinoa and vegetable soup. Before dinner we spent an hour or so helping her peel the most impossibly tiny purple potatoes I had ever seen. Afterwards, we washed dishes by pouring the hot boiling water into a large clay pot. We then shared muna tea (muna being the same herb that we were given in tea during our time in Chinchero--it is a very valued herb throughout the Andes, even here).

That night Gladys and her sister (who only spoke Quechua, so we did not learn her name), dressed us up in their traditional wear--thick wool skirts, a heavy woven belt, and a heavy wool shirt--and took us to their town hall to participate in local dances and festivities. This entire experience was a much more involved version of both the experiences with Olga and the Quechua women from Chinchero. Here we lived with, helped, and participated directly in the culture of the villagers from Amantani. We sat in their sage scented earthen kitchens, not only watching them prepare food that had come from hard, long hours in the fields, but we also helped prepare it. We not only saw their clothes, but wore them too. During the day we took a tour of their farms and fields, up to the top of the island where we visited the Father Earth temple, which was used as a holy place to bring good harvests during harvest season. This whole situation was, by far, one of the greatest examples of creative resistance, as espoused by Krogel, that I had experienced directly. These people were maintaining their traditional, indigenous ways of life while also generating profit at the expense of foreigners.

Author Alison Krogel articulates the concept of traditional identities, or any cultural identity, as not stable or static. Rather, identities are constantly in construction or reshaping. Krogel states that the "concept of identity as a process echoes Stuart Hall’s formulation of the cultural identity as “becoming” and it undergoes constant transformation. Instead of conceiving of identity as an “already accomplished fact,” he suggests that cultural identity should be thought of as “a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation." It was clear that on this island these identities were constructed, even if they were based on cultural norms and traditional behaviors. The people maintained an image that was most conducive to tourism, even as they lived their lives and survived in practical, culturally relevant ways. Tourism, even though the islanders try to maintain its influences by spreading tourists across different villages, has clearly shaped the culture and identity of many islanders who live on Amantani. Yet, at the same time, the islanders of Amantani retain their own connections to their culture and work to teach tourists about traditional indigenous ways of living. It is a tension that creates identities in constant flux, forging new paths as old ones are forgotten and emphasizing cultural norms in ways that they may have never previously been explored.