American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [51]
In my search to find out what I could about my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana, the haughty politician who, like Napoleon, crowed that he had no ancestors, I spent days in the mountain city of Ayacucho—cradle of Peruvian communism—searching through church records to find proof that he had been born there, as my family had always claimed. I found no trace of him—the Ayacucho story had been a decoy—but I did learn something about the history of Peruvian racism. It was a closely guarded institution, maintained scrupulously by Catholic priests. A very accommodating padre spent days with me in Ayacucho’s cathedral, taking one volume after another from the shelf lovingly, dusting it off, setting it down. Every birth in that mountain stronghold, dating back to the 1600s, is scrupulously recorded: Miguel Angel Barada nació el 17 de setiembre 1822, and then after that, in flowery script: Español. Or this one: Mercedes Elena Burgos—Mestiza, by which one could generally conclude the child was illegitimate. Or: Jesús Cristo Yupanqui—Indio.
It could seem, to the uninitiated, like an entry in a hospital log: race noted as biological fact. But other books tell the rest of the story. The indios and the mestizos, unless they could pass themselves off as white, were made to pay for having been born darker. The records on this are just as complete: Miguel Angel Barada, the one with the Spanish blood, becomes a landowner in Huancavelica. Mercedes Elena Burgos, the mestiza, makes a last payment, her tributo to the government, on her deathbed: 74 soles. The priest giving last rites marks it down. Jesús Cristo Yupanqui, the indio, owes the governor 1,320 soles. If the dark didn’t pay, they were enslaved by the state. If their children looked more sturdy than they did, they were taken off in their place.
Subtract the Spanish crown, take the taxes away, outlaw the slavery, and there are still citizens of the Republic who measure by color. Peru today is a salmagundi of races, infused over the centuries by slave shipments of Asians, Africans, and Caribbeans, but the specter of racism haunts it. Who are the forty families who continue to make up the moneyed oligarchy? Spanish-blooded whites. Who are the seventy percent of the national population who live in extreme poverty? The indigenous.
It was part of one’s political education.
I had, at a tender stage of my life, some experience in the huts of the poor. One day, my ama pushed me toward a chacra on the outskirts of Cartavio, on our way home from a quick trip to the bodega china. “Psst! Marisita!” she said. “Don’t tell your mother and father. I want a little blessing from my sister. We won’t be long, I promise!” I found myself stepping over a threshold of sticks onto the dirt floor of a one-room shack. It was fusty, humid, dark, and as my eyes adjusted, I could see that the walls were made of mud. Bits of straw jutted from them. I sat on the edge of the sagging cot with a hand-hewn cross above it and blinked at the scene around me. Two girls with long, tangled hair came out of the dark; they were giggling, their hands in front of their mouths. The older one wore a cotton shift with stains along the belly; the young one had nothing on at all. They studied me awhile and then approached me carefully, holding their hands out to touch my face. I marveled at their chatter. It was the first I’d heard Quechua, a language I didn’t understand. They patted my knees after that, smoothed my dress, pinched my cheeks, gave me a strip of wet sugarcane from a bucket in the corner. When I thanked them they laughed merrily, and then they squatted like stones, watching me suck on the cool, sweet stem.
On another occasion, I tagged along after my friend Margarita and her mother, the Lattos’ cook, following the two all the way home before