Saturday, September 6, 2008

La Isla and inter-racial friendships

I did my final independent study project with a partner (not so independent after all), an awesome girl named Sierra. Our interests merged at Lago Titicaca (yes, that is what it's really called) and the lake's relationship with the people who live around it. A broad topic, we knew, but, excited by our adventure (which is what we thought of our whole project, an excuse for adventure), we decided to travel there and then narrow our focus. We spent a good part of our time in Copacabana, a resort town/hippie mecca, interviewing people (mostly elderly people) and seeing what issues surrounding the lake were most salient.

Our research led us to La Isla del Sol, an island on Lake Titicaca. The people who live there are indigenous Quechuas, but speak a fair amount of Spanish because many work in the tourism industry.

Doing research as a dark skinned South Asian Indian girl with a blonde haired, blue eyed white girl in rural Bolivia proved to be more difficult than expected. Many people would look at Sierra and think, "hippie", and then see me and think, "guide". A conversation with two little girls running a small snack stand revealed their absolute incomprehension that Sierra and I could be friends. It dawned on me that they had never before witnessed an inter-racial relationship that was free from an economic agreement. For them , it had always been the dark one selling to the white one.

Interesting how that works out, huh? It made me realize that almost all of the interactions we had had with Bolivians involved some sort of financial transaction. Our host families were paid, our instructors, etc. The SIT program didn't really enable a lot of interaction with Bolivians outside the program/outside an economic agreement. We'd have to be super outgoing and trustful (which I felt like were qualities I did not possess while abroad) in order to make friends, which is complicated anyway, when you are probably exoticized and there is a certain power dynamic going on between native and foreign and white and dark.

As one of many uncomfortable situations to be in, the one on the isla surpassed all. I had grown up where having a friend with the same skin color as me was a novelty, not the norm, and I had, in fact, grown quite comfortable with it. But the feeling that I was an outsider persisted within the group of American students. This had been a pattern repeated over and over again throughout my time in Bolivia, but finally surfaced in full form in our conversation with the little girls. Children are so unabashedly honest, we have a lot to learn from them.