Category Archives: travel

Missed Encounters in Pisac, Peru

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While in Peru, we spent more time in the small town (about 10,000 inhabitants) of Pisac than in any other place–almost three weeks, or just under half our time in the country. This was because originally we were thinking of using, and staying in, a facility run there by the Catholic University (the PUCP). We didn’t end up doing that, but Pisac turned out to be a great place to be, and to return to from elsewhere.

Pisac is not far from Cusco, and at the head of the Sacred Valley. As such, it is definitely on the tourist circuit, not least for the impressive Inca ruins, including serried ranks of agricultural terraces, that overlook it. It does a thriving trade in handicrafts, both in its Artisans’ Market and beyond, and has plenty of cafes and restaurants. On the other hand, most tourists don’t spend long: many, in fact, include the ruins as part of a day trip from Cusco that takes them up and down the valley in what must be a race against time to visit as many archaeological sites as possible before the sun sets.

There are, however, long term tourists (or perhaps they would call themselves something else: travellers or voyagers?), who have dramatically changed the town over the past few years. These are mostly “New Age” tourists, who often stay months or even years and run an almost parallel economy, including offering workshops on everything from yoga and womb breathing to ayahuasca, presumably mostly for and among themselves.

We, however, were among a small minority who were neither day-trippers nor long-term settlers. We briefly got to know the town and some of its rhythms, as well as establishing our own routines. And though it wasn’t completely sleepy–there were bars, and a regular market, and there was often activity in the central plaza, where most of us were staying–we found some refuge from the constant stimulation of Cusco, especially Cusco during Corpus Christi and Inti Raymi. To some extent, it was a chance to be in something like ordinary, everyday Peru, and to be ordinary and everyday ourselves. It was a good place to sit in café or patio and read without wondering if you were missing out on something going on outside, to take some time out to think and reflect on our experiences elsewhere.

One of the ordinary and everyday activities that caught my eye was the work of the street-cleaners. There was a small brigade of them, costumed in the red uniform of the municipality, who would come out especially in the early morning and then again as night was falling, often in pairs or more, assiduously sweeping the streets and pavements, and sometimes also cutting the grass or doing other minor town maintenance and public works. They were strikingly both visible and invisible: visible because of their bright uniform, and invisible because this same uniform, with wide-brimmed hats and facemasks, made it hard to pick out individual characteristics. I think, for instance, that they were mostly women, but couldn’t be entirely sure. I suspect that they were mostly mestizas, but this also was hard to determine. It was as though they strangely lacked either gender or racial identification. They reminded me a little of the Jawas on Star Wars’ Tatooine: faceless scavengers and tinkerers, clearing up whatever others leave behind.

In some ways, the street cleaners seemed to be classic subalterns in their apparent lack of identity, with their almost unacknowledged (but vital) labour at the margins. They literally left no traces, as their job involved cleaning up after themselves and others. In other ways, however, their facelessness was part and parcel of their absorption into the municipal administration: it was of course a uniform that hid them, embroidered on the back with the town’s name. They were not so much outside as so intimately part of the functioning of the place that they could not be seen.

I occasionally ventured a “Buenos días” (or “Buenas noches”) in passing, but this was rarely returned. No doubt I was part of the problem: one of those wandering the streets whose detritus would eventually have to be cleared. I felt that this was a classic case of what in Spanish goes by the name of “desencuentro,” poorly translated as either “disagreement” or “missed encounter” in that it is an encounter, but at the same time is not; its terms are not sufficiently defined to be sure that there is even disagreement. In a desencuentro there is some acknowledgement or recognition of some kind of relation, some kind of meeting or resonance, even if insubstantial (or perhaps, by contrast, solely material) and indefinite, incomplete and unnameable.

Sometimes I felt that our entire time in Pisac, and perhaps in Peru as a whole, was one long desencuentro.

Spectacle, Movement, and Impasse at Inti Raymi

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“Inti Raymi,” sings Q-Pop (that is, K-Pop in Quechua) pioneer, Lenin Tamayo: “Vamos a bailar. . . todos a cantar”; “We’re going to dance. . . everyone sing!” And the music video, in which K-Pop takes on Andean scissor dancers, is well worth viewing. . . 

But the Inti Raymi celebrations we saw in Cusco were not much like this, and not only for the lack of K-Pop beats. Above all, where Tamayo presents festivities in which everyone can (and should) take part, a collective, mass celebration that is diverse and hybrid, what we saw instead was much more a show with a clear division between actors and spectators. Whether in the city’s Plaza de Armas, which was first cleared of people early in the morning in preparation for the arrival of the dancers, or later in Sacsayhuaman, Inti Raymi was a spectacle to be seen, rather than a festival of participation.

Moreover, proceedings also followed a program, a script, whose key points or steps were announced in both Spanish and English. There was a plot and direction to the performance, as we prepared for the dramatic arrival of the Inca (preceded by the Inca Queen), leading ultimately to the symbolic sacrifice of the llama, whose entrails were read for what they may say about the coming twelve months. This was a performance of power and continuity: both the impressive display of fealty to the Inca from the various quarters of the Twantinsuyo, as it has been reimagined by twentieth and twenty-first century Indigenists, but also the notion that this sense of territorial unity continues into the present. Downplaying or even erasing the rupture that was the Spanish conquest, Inti Raymi claims a more or less unbroken link to a distant past, replayed now in all its vibrant colour and impressive coordination of exotic difference.

Indeed, it was a show: but what a show! The sheer stamina of the dancers and musicians, who began in the morning at Qorichancha and didn’t finish until almost sunset eight or so hours later, was remarkable, not least as we spectators started to wilt in the heat of the Andean sun. All around, there was movement and motion, albeit ultimately calmed by the hand of the sovereign as the dancers bowed to his authority. And if this is a fiction of state, as it surely is, it certainly has the power to attract and capture the crowds: not simply the foreign tourists who (mainly) were those who, like us, had paid for the privilege of seats as Sacsayhuaman, but also the cusqueños who also traipsed up the hill, and then beyond, to observe the performance from the more distant but elevated perspective of the surrounding outcrops.

As we then made our way back down to the city, via the narrow and uneven path that leads to the highway, the sense of coordination soon fell apart. As tourists and locals merged, there was a logjam of people and much frustration at the fact that we weren’t moving faster, or at times even moving at all. Apart from some who had sped off already in chartered buses (but I doubt the roads were much clearer), here the different audiences were now cheek by jowl, pressed against each other, with a common but frustrated aim of escape. There were a couple of police officers looking on, who received many insults from the crowd for the fact that they seemed unable to bring more order or get the flow going again. It was literally an impasse as the physical contours of the cliffs on either side prevented anyone getting around the crush of people. Eventually the traffic restarted (no thanks to the police), but it felt as though we were once more in a more familiar Peru, and (briefly, at least) all in it more or less together.

Later, there may have been a party, who knows? If so, it wasn’t obvious, and/or we weren’t invited. But we had already felt, in suitably (and literally) dramatic fashion some of the country’s tensions: the spectacular display of coordinated unity, on the one hand, and then a rather different commonality of a delayed and frustrated, but ultimately successful, line of flight, that the authorities could only observe from the sidelines, powerless to intervene.

T-3 to Peru

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My plane leaves Monday evening. so this is the last weekend in Vancouver before the trip. Arrangements continue… Just this afternoon, for instance, one of the museums we’ll be visiting (the Museo Larco) wrote to tell me that their charges are going up, but that we can still visit for the old price that we were quoted when I asked for a guided tour a few weeks ago, so long as we now pay in advance.

But paying in advance is not simple. This goes also for hotels and everything else. Peruvian businesses much prefer to be paid via bank transfer, which is a long and laborious process to arrange via the university. So I try to pay by credit card (I now have a university credit card precisely for this purpose), but this has its own complications, sometimes at this end, sometimes at the other.

At times the issue is the Peruvian enthusiasm for bureaucracy. Perhaps as a legacy even of colonial administration, as elsewhere in Latin America businesses like things written down and sealed with some kind of identification: National Identification Card (or DNI) for citizens, passport number for foreigners. The lettered city lives on.

But at times the issue is the various ways in which Peruvians try to get around these same strictures of documentation… in ways that make my university’s financial administration’s metaphorical eyebrows raise a centimetre or two. The real city endures, even as the formalities of the paperwork are theoretically respected. “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but I do not comply), as the old phrase has it.

In my experience, however, everything has a way of working itself out. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been meeting up with the students on a fairly regular basis. Our final get-together is this afternoon. These have been optional exercises in getting to know each other, and there have been varying numbers each time, but I think they’ve been pleased to meet each other, and maybe relieved to discover they have some of the same interests and enthusiasms. To me, they seem like a very good group, and it’s also been good to have a better sense of them before we go.

In many ways they are typical of students I have in other Faculty of Arts classes. They have a variety of different experiences and perspectives. The majority, but not all, are Canadians (mostly but not entirely from British Columbia), and yet even among the Canadians many are first- or second-generation immigrants. A couple have some kind of Latin American heritage. There are (by quite a margin) more women than men. Some have officially graduated, others have still to declare a major. Of those who have, they are studying a variety of different subjects–Latin American Studies, but also Anthropology, English, Sociology, even the Sciences. They seem to be fairly well-travelled, but few have been to South America, and only one to Peru before. Some speak at least some Spanish, but most do not. They all seem almost as excited as I am.

I will be there a day or two in advance, and meeting most of them in at the airport in Lima early in the morning on Thursday. 

Then after settling in at the hotel, our first activity will be a tour of San Isidro, the neighbourhood where we are staying, including the Huaca Huallamarca, a (mostly) reconstructed Indigenous pyramid, and El Olivar, a park featuring olive trees that are descendants of saplings brought over from Spain in 1560.