Talking to Strangers
A Bolivian story tugs at the heart of U.S. immigration policies

By Valerie Brender

This article was awarded first place for the Personal Journey category of Abroad View's 2008 Writing Contest. It was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2008.

Pictured here is the guitarist in the early hours of chicha sharing. He salutes the camera before engaging in the tradition of pouring a sip of chicha on the ground as an offer to the Pachamama before drinking.

The hollowed-out gourd, swelling with chicha, came sailing into my surprised hands, and I had to tip the bowl away from my chest to prevent its alcoholic contents from slopping into my lap. I had been listening to the traveling tales of our table’s guitarist and hadn’t realized that it was my turn to drink from the communal carved-out cup again until the woman sitting to my right pushed the bowl into my hands. Tenga Valeria: Take it, Valerie. Finish it off.

Despite my best protests of un poquito, or just a little bit, the chicha, like a spring, kept finding its way to my lips. The thin air from Bolivia’s altitude was already enough to send my head spinning; the chicha only enhanced this sensation.

I sipped at the edge of the bowl. We had spent the entire morning and afternoon weaving in and out of vendors’ tables filled with coarse, hand-woven textiles and navigating the bulge of parade crowds during Festividad de San Severino, one of the biggest annual celebrations in Tarata, Bolivia, where I was doing my independent study with World Learning/SIT Study Abroad. My feet had landed at this table in Tarata by chance: a random invitation to the Peace Corps Bolivia U.S. Elections Party, an SIT assignment to do an independent study project for three weeks, and a run-in with a Peace Corps volunteer who was working with an alpaca sweaters exporting group in the highlands, about an hour outside of Cochabamba. Now I was reclining in a makeshift wooden chair at the table of the head knitter in town, Doña Celestina, surrounded by strangers whom I had just met and would probably never see again.

Bolivian men dressed in loom-woven traditional indigenous textiles follow the Bolivian flag as they dance to celebrate San Severino, Tarata's patron saint who is believed to bring rain to this increasingly arid part of Bolivia.

I weighed my options as I leaned back a little in my chair, gripping the wooden plank that served as our table between my thumb and forefinger. I was having cultural exchange guilt. I felt like I should stay to ensure that I had fully embraced all the festivities and to indicate to my company that I enjoyed chatting and listening to their stories; but hours into the night, my eyelids felt as heavy as anvils as I blinked away the slow stream of smoke that crawled over Celestina’s zinc gate.

The guitarist ran his fingers absentmindedly as he talked about traditional Andean religious worship of the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. I perked up a little bit and let my chair legs fall as I leaned my elbows onto the table. He described La Isla del Sol, the Sun Island, where indigenous Bolivian tradition indicates God was born. Having just visited the island, I reveled in the guitarist’s version of the familiar legend like a child listening to her favorite bedtime story.

 


Doña Celestina washing her feet and knitting in her courtyard a few days before the fiesta while she waits for the chicha corn to dry.

I looked around at our table. Determined to understand more cultural history, I kept up with the table’s lazy banter. As our guitarist’s voice sailed on, I let my eyes rest on each person around the table longer than would be appropriate for Bolivian etiquette. I counted a total of seven people, plus the flow of friends and acquaintances that sent Celestina’s gate flapping unceasingly as people slid in and out of the courtyard where we sat. The guitarist, with his long, onyx hair wore a wide-brimmed, black sombrero that looked like a cross between the bowler hats worn by Bolivian indigenous women and a Texan cowboy hat. He had become the center of our evening; our eyes moved around the table, but our ears were singularly focused on the rhythm of his stories and the stroke of his strings. He was a member of a modestly popular Bolivian folk music band and had spent hours in trains and clubs across the world, a life path that led to a slew of interesting tales.

The others at the table were probably my age; they donned the fashion of international cool: artsy t-shirts, jeans, collared shirts, and tennis shoes. Doña Celestina, the woman I was staying with, brought more chicha and then snacks and desserts. Her stomach was like a waxing moon—full and jolly, although she constantly complained of kidney problems.

Then there was the woman to my right who had offered me the chicha. She wore a mauve athletic pantsuit, the jacket unzipped. With a black shirt underneath and a large heart necklace that split her breasts, she looked like she was going to say something to me but hesitated. I smiled back with encouragement.

 

The women of Tarata dancing through the streets with enlarged knitting needles in hand. Like the rest of the parade participants, they spun through the streets to finally arrive at Tarata's Catholic church.

“De qué parte eres en los Estados Unidos?... Where are you from in the states?” she finally asked. Excited to talk about the United States, I replied with perhaps too much enthusiasm: “Texas! But I go to school in North Carolina.”

“I worked in California! I was a empleada (maid) there for seven years.”

“Oh, really? How did you like the U.S.?” I moved my chair closer so I could hear her over the guitar music and the chatter of people.

She sighed. “It was wonderful. The people were so nice. I loved my job there. I’d like to return.” We talked for a bit about U.S. culture, the difference between Texas and California, and movies we liked. She mentioned that her family still lived in Bolivia.

“Oh, so you went to the U.S. alone?”

“Yeah. The salaries are better there than in Bolivia. I went there to make more money so I could send it home to my children. For their schooling, for the extra things they need.” I noticed her shift uncomfortably in her chair.

“But you are all back together now? That must be nice.”

When she looked up at me again I saw that her eyes had filled to two unsettled ponds, ready to spill over. I didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, I didn’t have to think of anything; her words began gushing out so rapidly that I had to concentrate hard just to decipher what she was trying to express.

A hunger strike in front of the economic development ministry in La Paz in protest of difficult economic conditions. Their sign reads: "We want land, water and air."

Cuando llegé descubrí que mi esposo había estado gastando todo el dinero que yo envié de allá: When I arrived I realized that my husband had spent all the money I had sent from the United States.
She continued on to explain that she had left her husband with their children when she got a visa to go to the United States. She was sending remittances back to cover her children’s education and their basic family needs, with a little extra left over to allow her children to have a somewhat better quality of life. The news she received from Bolivia was that everything was going well, but when she returned seven years later, her kids’ schooling had not been paid for, there was nothing in savings, and it appeared that her husband had spent most of the money she sent back on alcohol and questionable diversions.

She wiped her face. “Now I want to go back to the U.S. to try to regain some of the money he has wasted. I still want my kids to go to school.”

Not sure what to say, I naively stated in my limited Spanish, “Why don’t you go back to the U.S.?”

“I want to. I want to take my kids and go. I want to go so badly, but I can’t get a visa.”

I sucked in my breath a little and waited for it to come. In my travels through Bolivia and several African countries the summer before, I had received an irritating number of requests for letters of support for host country nationals to gain a visa to the United States. In my visceral distaste for the feeling of being used and befriended for the sake of a plane ticket, I felt myself sit up a little in my chair.

Celestina's gate (right) open and welcoming to the numerous guests from Tarata and elsewhere who frequently paid her a visit.

But the request never came. All she dropped in the air was a heartfelt question that stung my ears.

“Valeria, why can’t I get a visa back to the United States? The consulate told me they tightened visa regulations after 9/11. But I worked so hard in the United States. I never caused any problems. My employers gave me good recommendations. I’m not a terrorist. I’m just a mother with two kids.”

The question sat between us in all its sadness. I saw she was right. I knew the United States couldn’t grant visas for everyone who asked, but for someone who had lived there before for so many years, who had contributed to the U.S service industry, who had gone there legally and wanted to return legally, shouldn’t that be the sort of person whom the consulate would want to give a second glance?

“I think...people are afraid,” I started, but I looked at her and knew this was a shameful answer. What was there to fear from a middle-age mom with wrinkles slowly sketching around her eyes, a woman who dreamed of returning to the job she had held for seven years? I was left shaking my head.

“I’m so sorry,” I finally managed.

She continued to cry softly; I reached out my hand and placed it on her knee. Doña Celestina came over to see if everything was all right, and another woman, whose name had already slipped my mind, began to recount her husband’s destructive behavior to my host. Celestina led her over to another part of the courtyard to talk more privately. I realized that I had lost all appetite for indulging in the night’s fiesta, said goodnight, thanked the guitarist and the young adults who had begun to sing Spanish pop songs along with the guitarist’s beat, and slipped into my bedroom.

I crawled under my mosquito net with the intent of writing in my journal, but all I could do was stare at the single incandescent light that splattered brightness all over the concrete cubicle where I slept. The pragmatic side of me said, “her story is moving, but mournfully common.” The United States certainly does not have the ability to grant visas to all those who, usually with just cause, plead for a fresh start in our country.

But then I remembered Emma Lazarus’s words etched at the foot of the Statue of Liberty; words that have embraced so many immigrants, my great-grandparents included, as they entered the United States: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

And thinking of that poem, I wondered how the United States could know that we have 12 million illegal immigrants, with the majority seeking and successfully finding work, without admitting that perhaps we have a far larger capacity for legal immigrants than what our consulate permits. I wondered why someone with a good record in the United States could not gain permission to do legally what so many do illegally. What were we so afraid of? I had no answers to these questions, but I became forever thankful for the stranger who forced me to ask.

Valerie Brender is a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama, where she works on community economic development projects. She was an economics major at Wake Forest University and studied abroad in Bolivia with World Learning/SIT Study Abroad (www.sit.edu) during her junior year. She can be reached at vbrender@gmail.com.