Bolivian Express | Bolivian Express

August 19/2014| articles

CONSTRUCTING ALTERNATIVE WONDERLANDS

El Alto is one of the fastest growing city in Bolivia in terms of population, architecture and ideas. Lulu Shooter discovers that there’s more to life within the close-knit neighbourhoods than meets the eye. A storm is brewing.

Children and free-range chickens play in the front yard. Through a low, corrugated iron doorway comes the sound of a luthier’s workshop. Wood knocks against hollow wood, and someone is furiously sanding. Somewhere in El Alto, this is the entrance to a factory owned by the Orosco Claros brothers, Stiven and Gustavo. The building is also their home. Inside, it’s small and dimly lit; wooden skeletons lean against the wall and fretted necks are lined up along the workbench.

They are making guitars. The production line appears chaotic, but it soon becomes clear that the organization is in fact meticulous. It has been streamlined and improved over the past ten years, since Stiven and Gustavo started their business. It takes between 40 days and eight months to produce a guitar at their workshop: A top spec instrument can cost up to Bs. 5,000.

Regardless of price, even the cheapest instrument receives the same level of care and attention as the most expensive one; whether it is the three-quarter size model, popular with John Lennon-channeling travelers, or the full-size bespoke classical.

Across town, on the first floor of a red-brick house, René Acarapi Choquetarqui leans out of the window and waves me up. His family produce guitar cases, confining their chickens and dogs to the ground floor. René sketches out designs whilst his wife, Eleuteria Cuentas Herrera, works at the sewing machine. For seven years, they have produced a steady ten guitar cases every two days. They could make more – more cheaply and more quickly – but René and Eleuteria are proud of their handmade goods and value quality above quantity.

Neither household could run their business successfully without the support of the surrounding community. They sell their products in la Ceja, a central neighbourhood described by one of La Paz’s residents as the ‘Piccadilly Circus of El Alto’. They also rely on word of mouth. Although the Orosco Claros’ brothers have had internet access in their home for more than a year now, they only use it to source obscure machinery and spare parts.

So how do these businesses function within the community? Is there a lot of competition between similar enterprises? ‘No’, answers Maximo Quispe Ticona, conflict secretary of FEJUVE El Alto, the community organization facilitating life in the city’s 14 districts. When I visited the offices, he explained to me that El Alto is largely formed of migrants from the countryside who bring with them complementary skills in textiles, carpentry and machinery. The businesses thrive because they feed into one another.

Not only do urban businesses reflect rural skills, they also showcase a neo-Andean attitude to the work-life balance. René moved from the countryside to El Alto in the 1980s, and brought his work ethic with him. He and Eleuteria make no distinction between labour and leisure, working from eight in the morning until nine at night. From Monday to Saturday? ‘Lunes a Sabado’, he confirms. They occasionally take breaks to eat and watch TV. Work is their life. As you hear a guitar picking out the chords of A Hard Day’s Night, you realise the Beatles had no idea what they were talking about.

In El Alto, completing the family home is second to running the family business. If you walk down a road in El Alto, you’ll be struck by the number of half-finished buildings you’ll see, often without roofs. The initial installation of amenities, such as electricity, gas and water, demands a lengthy registration and taxation process. People often have little money left over to dedicate to further renovations. As a result, building is an open-ended affair.Who knows how big the family will get and how successful the business will become? Will it ever be finished? Good thing Beatlemania in El Alto provides a never-ending market for new guitars in new guitar cases.

Life in El Alto is evolving as the current crop of youngsters fuse the influences of rural life with the gritty experience of the city. Some, like Stiven’s ten and eight-year-old boys, have already started picking up their parent’s trade, learning how to make guitars. Others are part-time minibus drivers, shop assistants and construction workers. There are also those following an academic pathway, and René’s daughter, Laura, is not set to carry on the family business but become a teacher: ‘I like Physics’, she says. New skills + traditional skills + a good education = a whole new Wonderland.

CHILD LABOUR

August 19/2014| articles

A different sort of reality?

On Tuesday the 15th of July, surrounded by hundreds of children, Vice President Álvaro García Linera signed new legislation making Bolivia the nation with the world’s youngest legal working age. Children as young as 12 can now be legally employed, and those as young as 10 can be self-employed, as long as they are enrolled in school and have parental permission.

This new law has sparked international outrage and widespread criticisms of the Bolivian government—human rights groups are up in arms and the International Labour Organisation’s minimum age convention has been quite brazenly disregarded.

The new law comes as a shock to most of the Western world—it seems backwards, plunging Bolivia into some morbid Dickensian era where child labour is normalized and wide-eyed Bolivian children are exploited and abused, the entire cast occasionally breaking into heartfelt songs about la vida maldita.

From within Bolivia, however, there is a very different argument to be heard and understood before a chorus of shoe shiners can-can across centre stage. When signing the bill, the vice president announced that ‘this is a law that has the right balance between reality, rights, and international conventions’. This word ‘reality’ has been thrown about a lot over the past couple of weeks; it encapsulates a belief in the ‘Bolivian reality’, separate from the West and global policies, and this ‘reality’ is at the heart of the new law.

I asked 15-year-old bricklayer Eddy to explain this reality. ‘Bolivia is different’, he says. ‘It is a necessity for children to work at a lower age. Children are working all the time’. UNICEF estimates that between 500,000 and 800,000 children are currently working in Bolivia, and in a country where rural families earn an average of US$0.60 a day (as of 2011), there is logic in Eddy’s argument. But still, this seems to me a slightly fatalistic view on things, and Reid Maki, the child labour coordinator at the Child Labour Coalition (CLC), agrees. ‘The rationale that we should legalize child labour at young ages because a lot of children are working and will continue to work in Bolivia is a horrible idea’, Maki argues. ‘Bolivia should continue the difficult struggle to reduce child labour instead of waving a white flag and surrendering’.

Jenny Miranda, the former head of the Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (UNATSBO), explains that ‘society is always against children working because [society] is so far from the reality’. For Miranda, and many of her peers, child labour is seen as a necessity for the children to sustain themselves and their families. It is a choice between working or slipping further into poverty. At least by legalising child labour, children will (in theory) have the rights and legal support they need.

Jo Becker, the advocacy director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, spoke to me about the potential normalisation of child labour. She coins the new code as ‘legalising exploitation’ and argues that it ‘sends a strong message that child labour is acceptable’. She believes children who have refrained from doing so in the past will now work and this will ‘continue the cycle of poverty’. However, from what I learned about child labour, it’s about as normalised as it’s ever going to be. If you were to approach the average shoe shine boy on the street and ask him his opinion on the new law, in all likelihood you would be met with a blank stare followed by an enthusiastic offer to polish your unpolishable trainers. The very concept of child labour being detrimental to society is a nonstarter, and the legality of it is neither here nor there.

The question that remains is that of the future. Becker sympathises with the current situation of working children, yet she describes the new law as a ‘short-term solution’ which ‘in the long term is unsustainable’. Maki of the CLC takes a similar stance, arguing that working children will ‘lose more than they gain’ and that work ‘must be restricted to protect the education and development of teen workers’. The argument that resounded between both of them was about the long-term effects on working children and Bolivia as a country. The new law does mandate that children must be enrolled in school before they can work, but it is unclear how this will actually be enforced. ‘Studies show that children who work are less likely to do well in school’, Becker says.

I asked Miranda, formerly of UNATSBO, about how she thinks working from such a young age affected her education. Her answer shocked me.
‘If I didn’t sell as much as I was supposed to, I wasn’t paid’, she said of her experience as a child labourer. ‘I would get no breakfast, no money for transport; they wouldn’t let me go to school’. With the new law, employers have to ensure that children are going to school, and if not, those children will have legal support and the right to complain. ‘We are giving kids a voice’, Miranda explains. By working at such a young age, she says, children have a better understanding of the value of money and that of hard work. If anything, it is motivation to work harder, to provide a better future for themselves and generations to come. ‘It is a painful reality’, Miranda says, ‘but now with the new law our rights will be respected’.

It has to be kept in mind though that UNATSBO and its members, numbering around 15,000, comprise a minority within the child labour field. A homeless child who lives on the street is in all likelihood going to be more concerned about getting by day to day than going to school. However, according to a study by Human Rights Watch, one in seven children in Bolivia will not complete primary school, and in rural areas there is an average of only 4.2 years of education, so maybe the new law (if properly enforced) requiring children to be enrolled in school will prove to be beneficial.
It was an odd process talking to all of these people, as each of their arguments is so powerful and makes much sense. I spent the entire process swinging back and forth between the morality and rationality of Maki and Becker and the practicality of Eddy and Miranda’s harsh realism.

Only time will tell how effective the new law will be, as the Bolivian legal system is not known for its efficiency and it is still unclear exactly how enforcement will be carried out. But the new law signifies a change. Miranda says that ‘before we were invisible’, but now the new law at least recognizes child labourers and will give them legal standing and a support network within the framework of society. It is not necessarily a long-term, viable solution, but there is a bitter practicality to the law. Within Bolivia there is a hard reality of children working and this new law marks a change and a recognition of that reality, making the issue of child labour visible and real.

TIME DIFFERENCE

August 19/2014| articles

“The clock is just one part of a whole conjunction of themes. If you only see the clock going backwards you're not seeing anything.”

At midnight on the 21st of June this year, Bolivians witnessed the end of time as they knew it. In an unprecedented event for the country, they observed the reversal of the most visible clock in La Paz, which has since become known as the Reloj del Sur. The clock (stands tall), overlooking the Plaza Murillo from the legislative palace, and it is a symbol of a larger ideological project in Bolivia.

While standard clocks mimic the movement of the sun across a sundial in the northern hemisphere, the hands of the Reloj del Sur reflect the movement of the sun in the opposite direction. Simply put, this is a clock that runs counterclockwise.

According to Felix Cárdenas, who is Evo Morales’ Vice-Minister for Decolonization, the reloj exposes the way in which time, far from being abstract or universal, is a social convention; governed by history, place and nation. The Reloj del Sur, he says, proves that ‘Nada es universal. Nada es absoluto’.

Media outlets, however, in Bolivia and elsewhere, have covered the birth of the clock with some derision and several local politicians have been critical of the project. Norma Pierola, for example, who is a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Bolivia, accused the government of attempting to change ‘the universal laws of time’ with its novel clock. But this, it turns out, is not far from the government’s intention. In fact, the reloj is inextricably tied to the government’s programme of decolonization, which promotes the revindication of historically repressed Bolivian identities.

According to the Vice-Minister, the clock is not an innovation but a return to Andean values. ‘It is immersed in a movement that is not a creation of Morales or Foreign Minister Choquehuanca’, he said. ‘We are simply making visible what has always existed’.

The reloj, the wiphala, and the promotion of the coca leaf are all part of Bolivia’s decolonizing mission. This is why the Vice-Minister insists that the clock must be seen in the context of the broader political aims of the Morales administration. Cárdenas speaks of vivir bien, of Pachamama, and of dismantling patriarchal institutions. ‘The clock is just one part of a whole conjunction of themes’, he explains. ‘If you only see the clock going backwards you're not seeing anything’.

Cárdenas has a point. Perhaps there is more to the clock than the hands running backwards. ‘In the Aymara language there is no future', Cárdenas tells me, ‘Their language says that you have to look back to go forward’.

According to an anthropological study by Rafael Núñez, professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, the Aymara are the only documented case of a culture whose language conceives of the past as being in front of the subject, and the future behind, because the future is something that cannot be seen.

We teach children to ‘tell’ the time as if time were inflexible and rigid like the multiplication tables. There is clockwise and then there is counter-clockwise. On closer inspection, though, these distinctions are often completely arbitrary.

‘What cataclysm in the universe caused the 1st of January to be the New Year?’ Cárdenas asks, provocatively. ‘Time’, he concludes, ‘is a continuous discussion’.

Indeed, time has always had multiple meanings. It is a force whose complexity cannot be repressed by the imposition of one authoritative way of perceiving over another. The Aymara demonstrate that although time appears to surround us completely it is, at least partly, a subjective experience and a sensory illusion.

Pitting the Reloj del Sur against traditional, Eurocentric means of telling the time exposes how politics can determine our temporal reality. This is a view that Vice-Minister Cárdenas stands by as he passionately explains the political impetus of the clock project, ‘We have always been told that the United States is the world. Now we are thinking that the world might be Bolivia’.

This intersection of the political and the temporal, which goes some way to explaining the hostility to the government’s initiative, is not a uniquely Bolivian phenomenon. As Norma Pierola points out, it is possible to see the clock merely as 'a crude imitation of the Jacobin calendar'. The main difference, though, is that while Robespierre and his fellow revolutionaries imposed the use of a new system of time upon their countrymen, in Bolivia no-one will be forced to adopt the new system.

In the late 18th century, the leaders of the French Revolution declared the dawn of a new era in France with a calendar that began on the birthday of the First Republic. The goal was to produce a potent symbol of a regime that preached complete cultural transformation. But the new system of time failed in its enforcement, given the reluctance of the French to adopt the revolutionary calendar. Is the Reloj del Sur destined for a similarly tragic fate? Or will it have a lasting impact?

‘We don't need the liberté, egalité, fraternité of the French revolution’, Cárdenas says. ‘We're talking about our own constitution, which says Ama Sua, Ama Llulla, Ama Quella (do not steal, do not lie and do not be lazy)’.

Some people in La Paz share Cárdenas’ enthusiasm. ‘The reloj is a symbol of our difference’ one woman said. ‘It’s a symbol of Bolivia’. Others, however, as the chimes of the clock echoed in Plaza Murillo, were indifferent towards the Reloj del Sur, simply saying ‘no es importante’. For them, the reloj is a largely symbolic gesture.

And I would agree. However, sometimes symbolic gestures are important, as important though, the reloj is a testament to what is happening in Morales’ Bolivia. It is bold and controversial. It encourages non-conformist, creative ways of thinking; it is an interrogation of all that seems ‘universal’. For Cárdenas, as for Choquehuanca and for Morales, the reloj indicates that, in Bolivia today, plurinational, indigenous, ‘Nothing is normalized’.