Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn

FIGURE 3. Flower stall, El Agro, Arica, 2014. Photo by author.

      PARCELAS, ARICA

      The fertile Valle de Azapa, which spreads out to the southeast of Arica, provides much of the produce that is sold in El Agro, where people like Isabela and Antonia work. The Valle de Azapa itself is also home to places of uncertain citizenship and has a long history of being so. Arica and the Valle de Azapa were part of Peru prior to the War of the Pacific, after which they became Chilean territory. For many centuries before the conflict, the Valle de Azapa and parts of what is now southern Peru were agricultural heartlands of the Viceroyalty and then the Republic of Peru. Until abolition in 1854, much of the agricultural work was performed by African slaves.

      The history of slavery in the area is today memorialized in the “The Slave Route,” a thirty-kilometer trail through Arica and the Valle de Azapa established by Afro-descendants in the region, officially recognized by the Chilean Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales (Ministry of National Heritage) in 2009. Viviana Briones Valentín explains that, rather than the large plantations and haciendas of other areas of southern Peru, the Valle de Azapa was characterized by smaller units of production worked by fewer slaves than on the large plantations. Of the slave population in the region, she says: “Attempts to marginalize them from all social, official and economic recognition, from cultural and religious duties, had an immediate and everyday effect (Mellafe, 1964). But, on the other hand, we know that in spite of these measures, the black community managed to reinvent itself time and time again from this ‘no place’.”²⁶ Today in the Valle de Azapa, the ghost of the colonial slavery regime seems to linger on in more than just the memorial sites along trail. So too does the legacy of racism that was a product of the “Chileanization” of the region following the War of the Pacific.

      The model of small units of production as opposed to large-scale industrial operations continues to predominate on what are known as parcelas in Azapa. Here some of the crops of colonial times are still produced: olives and cotton, to give just two examples. Tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, cucumbers, avocados, and mangoes, among other fruit and vegetables, are also cultivated. Many parcelas are chiefly worked by migrant laborers. In general, those who work there also live there. As with the bodegas or working puertas adentro, the provision of accommodation is part of the work agreement. Each parcela is run by one owner, referred to by the workers as the patrón, a term of address with its roots firmly planted in colonial times. Beneath them are overseers. On the parcelas, workers I spoke to labored for nine to twelve hours per day and often had only one half-day off per week. They earned less than the minimum wage, did not have contracts, and were encouraged by their employers to remain on tourist visas, which exacerbated their job insecurity. The very long hours worked meant that they were cut off from society and had few means of accessing information about labor rights, health services, or education. The living conditions were also extremely poor.

      One evening in March 2014 I went to interview Luisa, age twenty-five, from rural Oruro, on the parcela where she lived. We walked down a long driveway shaded by mango trees to get to the shelter occupied by Luisa, her husband, their two boys, aged six and five, and Luisa’s sister. It was built of plywood and corrugated iron and had a dirt floor. There was a bedsheet separating the two “rooms,” where they slept on mattresses on the floor. A covered area outside served as a kitchen, where Luisa did the cooking squatting beside a small camping stove. They shared a bathroom, a fifty-meter walk from their shelter, with the twenty other workers on the parcela, using buckets of cold water to wash.

      Curious about this stranger talking to their mamá, Luisa’s boys peered at me around the corner of the entrance to the shelter. Egged on by his elder brother, the youngest, barefoot, eventually ran over to where Luisa and I were sitting on a low bench. He reached his hand out to stroke my face and looked straight into my eyes. Luisa laughingly explained to me that he was intrigued “porque tienes los ojos muy claros y eres tan blanquita” (“because your eyes are very clear [blue or green] and you are so white”). Rarely have I felt so acutely the many power imbalances in my relationship with the migrants with whom I work or such an emotional response to the injustices to which I was bearing witness.

      In addition to awareness of my own positionality, I was deeply cognizant of the ways in which migrant workers’ positions within racialized hierarchies of power played a fundamental role in their exclusion from spaces and places of citizenship. Nearly all the workers on the parcelas were of Aymara or sometimes Quechua descent. Some, particularly the women, spoke limited Spanish and had not finished their schooling. Nearly all who lived on parcelas were originally from rural communities in the departments of Oruro and La Paz, which they said were very poor. Racial and class-based discrimination certainly seemed to contribute to making participants more vulnerable to living and working in such harsh conditions, as an overt example of racist talk indicated. The patrón on one of the parcelas that I visited—who, according to the Asociación, was one of the more responsible employers in the Valle de Azapa—told me about his trials and tribulations employing migrant workers. He explained that Aymara Bolivians were “medio lentos, y nunca toman la initiativa” (“pretty slow and they never take initiative”). Perpetuated by centuries of discrimination, places of uncertain citizenship remain a hidden feature of the Valle de Azapa.

      PLAN 3000, SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA, BOLIVIA

      Uncertain citizenship is embodied in place not only on the Chilean side of Lago Chungará, but also on the Bolivian side. Roughly a thirty-hour bus ride east from Chungará is Plan 3000, in the city of Santa Cruz. Many cruceño (resident of Santa Cruz) migrants I interviewed had originally come from here. When the Amazonian River Piraí, on the northwest side of Santa Cruz, burst its banks in 1983, three thousand people were left homeless. They were relocated to the southeast of the concentric circles that form the center of Santa Cruz, and Plan 3000 was born. This peri-urban area is now home to around 300,000 people, the vast majority of whom are first- or second-generation internal migrants from other areas of Bolivia. Most identify as indigenous, principally Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní.