Along the Bolivian Highway. Miriam Shakow
among elite Bolivians for several centuries (see Albro 2000).
Such cruel statements about Doña Cinda and his children seemed to express Edgar’s sense of uncertainty about his social standing; they also sometimes angered his sisters and mother. On Christmas Eve in 1998, as we sat in a state of semi-stupor after our enormous holiday meal, Edgar expressed misgivings about having recently brought his son to Doña Saturnina’s house. He exclaimed in a tone of mild irritation that he did not want Teo to hang around him because Teo would likely speak to him in Quechua in front of Edgar’s friends (presumably lawyers). His sister Deysi harrumphed and burst out to me in private a short while later, “It looks like he doesn’t care about his son! If I had a child, I would be working only for him.” His sisters Amanda and Deysi often rolled their eyes and grumbled angrily at what they saw as Edgar’s neglect of his family. He sent only Teo to Sacaba schools in the urban provincial school district. His other child, Claudia, attended the Choro elementary school in the rural, and inferior, school district. In exasperation, the sisters urged Edgar to either marry Doña Cinda or leave her definitively.
But they did not like her either. Amanda and Deysi often lampooned Cinda’s heavily Quechua-accented Spanish in falsetto voices, echoing racist television comedy shows from the 1990s in which middle-class male actors cross-dressed as cholas. The sisters laughed gleefully when Teo insulted his mother. Once, for example, when Teo was nine years old and had not lived with Doña Cinda for six years, they laughed encouragingly when Teo exclaimed scathingly, allying himself with them and against her, that he would never return to live with “that washerwoman” (esa lavandera). Sometimes they protested to me that, while they sympathized with Teo’s mother when Edgar insulted her as a cholita, Doña Cinda showed poor moral character and was not worthy of their respect. “She’s nuts [loquita]! She says bad things about us to other people,” Edgar’s sisters told me, seemingly in an attempt to justify their mockery.5
Deysi, Amanda, and Doña Saturnina explained that Doña Cinda had begun a campaign of malicious gossip about them after Doña Saturnina had visited Cinda one day to warn her that Edgar might never marry her. Doña Saturnina, in their telling, hoped Cinda would leave Edgar because he neglected her and their children. Cinda was young—nearly ten years younger than Edgar—and fair-skinned and pretty; she could find a better husband. But Cinda, instead of being grateful, blew up at her, raging that Doña Saturnina’s true concern was that Cinda was not a profesional like Edgar. She threw Doña Saturnina out of her rented house.
When telling me this story several years later, Doña Saturnina sighed and said in a resigned tone about Doña Cinda, “She is dying to marry him [Pay wañurisan casarinanta].” Cinda held on to Edgar because he was a lawyer, even as she was furious that he contributed only minimally toward her and her children’s expenses and spent very little time with them. Deysi chimed in with irritation that Doña Cinda often bragged to others in Choro, “My husband is a lawyer,” implying that this bragging was uncouth and demonstrated Cinda’s lower status. When I asked why Edgar did not finally marry her, given that so many years had passed during which he had never carried through with his threat to marry a professional, Deysi replied with a weak smile, as if discomfited at expressing snobbishness explicitly: “It’s that it’s not so acceptable [no es tan aceptable] for a profesional to be married to a cholita.” She continued that if the cholita were someone decente (morally upright) perhaps it could be done. But Doña Cinda was not decente: she was a gossip and had a child from a previous relationship. With this comment Deysi demonstrated how middle classes often assert distinction using a rigid morality, in addition to dress, wealth, language (a Quechua accent), and education (see Liechty 2002; de la Cadena 2000; Gotkowitz 2003). Deysi implied that Cinda’s moral failings as a gossip and promiscuous woman confirmed her rightful place in a lower class and racial category. By implication, in the relational logic of class and race in Bolivia, all of Edgar’s family raised themselves socially by criticizing Doña Cinda for being immoral and a cholita. And yet it seemed, if Doña Cinda was bound to Edgar, despite her anger, through her longing to associate with a professional and through her economic dependence on him, Edgar was also bound to her in ways that he could not bring himself to admit directly: his discomfort with fully adopting an urban lifestyle and professional status.
The occasion of Edgar’s daughter’s baptism brought to the surface Edgar’s conflicting hopes and anxieties about his middle-class status and brought to a head Doña Cinda’s unfulfilled aspirations for upward mobility through her relationship with Edgar. Both Edgar and Doña Cinda appeared to want earnestly to baptize Claudia but also appeared unsure about whether or not they wanted anyone to attend the event and the party afterward—usually an opportunity for joyful drinking and dancing with the parents’ friends and relatives. For example, while Edgar and I planned the logistics together, Edgar shied away from my suggestion that he have his daughter baptized in the large, ornate provincial church in Sacaba. All the other Choro families I knew, wealthy and poor alike, had baptized their children there. Instead, Edgar insisted on the rural church in the nearby village of Muyu. When I asked why, since the Sacaba church was only a few blocks from his office, he admitted sheepishly, “Because my friends are pains in the ass [fregados].”6 He explained that if they found out about the baptism, they could reproach him with the question, ‘Why did you wait so long [to baptize her]?’ His long delay would be taken as evidence that he lacked proper fatherly concern for his children. But, he added, he also worried they might tease him by saying, ‘It turned out that his wife is a cholita!’ His wife’s status, when publicized among other professionals, could unmask him as other than the upwardly mobile persona that he hoped to convey.
And so, the Saturday afternoon of Edgar’s daughter’s baptism found only four of us winding up the highway between Choro and the Muyu church in Edgar’s purple Mitsubishi, a car he had bought used to try to enter Cochabamba’s auto resale market as a sideline to his law practice. Edgar sat up front with his best friend, a cousin who hadn’t completed high school. I brought up the rear with my teenaged goddaughter, whom I had roped in to keep me company. The churchyard was deserted when we arrived, apart from Doña Cinda and six-year-old Claudia sitting huddled together against the wind and harsh afternoon sunshine on the church’s yellowed front lawn. Claudia seemed shyly pleased at the pale green dress I had bought her and gamely tried to wear the black patent-leather shoes that were clearly too big (I had never met her).
Only one other child was being baptized that day; in the Sacaba church on Sundays, by contrast, hundreds of babies routinely were baptized together. Claudia, my new goddaughter, was so much older than most baptized children that the priest-in-training who officiated did not realize that she was to be baptized and excluded her from the beginning of the ceremony until we called out urgently to him from a rear pew.
After the baptism, we returned to Doña Cinda’s rented house in Choro. We sat at a battered Formica table and ate chicken she had baked that morning. The wind blew bits of trash across the grey dirt courtyard and rattled the window shutters and doors. It was a desolate scene. Edgar and his friend quickly escaped to a party down the road and my teenaged goddaughter to a youth group meeting, leaving Cinda, Claudia, and me. Cinda looked sober. Trying to cheer her up, I invited her to my going-away party, which would be held in a few days at Edgar’s parents’ house. Cinda burst out that she would never enter Doña Saturnina’s house and began to sob. “They are all students!” she cried vehemently in Quechua. “I am not a student.” She told me about a recent fight in which Amanda, Edgar’s sister, had insulted Doña Cinda. “Kiss my ass [sik’iyta muchaway],” Amanda had told her in Quechua while accusing her of being unworthy of Edgar.
Claudia’s baptism revealed that Doña Cinda’s and Edgar’s shared ambitions for middle-class status were, in fact, incompatible. Doña Cinda hoped that marrying Edgar, a lawyer, would raise her social and economic standing. Edgar, however, worried that acknowledging Doña Cinda, a cholita, as his wife—rather than his mistress—would lower his standing. He had not come so far up in the world that he could afford to have a cholita wife. But he also worried that his lack of commitment to her and to their children, when made public, would threaten his moral reputation as a responsible—and middle-class—father and husband.
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