In parts of Bolivia and across the Andes in general, one can learn to see time as through a mirror. After spending your life ‘looking forward’ to the future, or ‘thinking back’ to the past, taking in the view of some of the locals here just may turn you around.
Rafael Núñez is a professor at the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He has spent years studying the languages and gestures of the Aymara – one of the two main ethnic groups in the Andes – in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. In a famous study carried out 10 years ago, he visited regions of rural Chile interviewing monolingual Aymara speakers as well as bilingual Aymara and Spanish speakers. Taking care to note physical gestures as well as use of language, he noticed a few interesting things about the way his interviewees communicated notions of time.
For one, when referencing the past, the Aymara speakers tended to gesture forward, extending their arm further and further in front of them as they moved deeper into the past. As they discussed the future of their children, they flicked their thumbs back, over their shoulders. The same notions are apparent in Aymara vocabulary. Nayra is the word for ‘past’, which can translated as ‘eye’, or ‘sight’. Conversely, ‘future’ is written as q’ipa, often translated as ‘behind’ or ‘back’.
Nearly all understandings of time are constructed using metaphors of space, in which a person moves forward, with the future approaching. In nearly all cultures, a person is perceived by moving in this way through time, with the past behind him and the future laying ahead. But here, high in the Andes, this may not be the case.
And this approach to understanding time makes a lot of sense. Memory is its own kind of vision, supplying us with a rich (though perhaps flawed) resource to understand and see what has happened in our lives. Meanwhile, the future may seem a dark, mysterious void, a big unknown.
Perhaps we are walking backwards through time after all.
In this issue of Bolivian Express, we thought about ‘time’, and how it affects ourselves and the places we inhabit. We wrote about people and places that, on the surface, it seems time forgot. We explored deep into Bolivia’s history, to a time before humans, to the age of the dinosaurs. And we visited more relatively recent times, writing of the rich history of Bolivia’s precolonial, colonial and postcolonial past. And we wrote about some of the most important histories being written today, as significant changes in the role of women are being forged across the country.
In June 2014, the Bolivian government famously reversed the clock on its congress building on Plaza Murillo in La Paz. It’s hands now turn in a counterclockwise direction, and its numbers are reversed, with the number 1 to the left of the 12. A political act for certain – serving as a bold statement of southern identity and seen by many as a big symbolic step in Bolivia’s process of decolonization. Here in Bolivia, it may just make sense. Time does mean something different here, and we hope this issue helps you see and enjoy this mirrored point of view.
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A trip back in time through the footprints of Torotoro
To best illustrate the terrain of Torotoro, my guide finds a small paperback book and lays it flat upon the bench. Then with one swift move he crumples it, leaving it a bumpy undulating sheet.
'Eso. Eso es Torotoro.'
This is Torotoro. And he is right. Torotoro, a rugged upland region in the heart of Bolivia, appears almost preternatural in its jagged contours. It is a hot, dry land of plunging canyons, vast subterranean caverns and serrated mountains. The scrub-dotted hills here are not gentle mounds, but sharp, splintered escarpments. Slopes jut irregularly out of valley floors like the tierra itself has buckled and broken, vast slabs protruding at 45-degree angles from the plains. The land of Torotoro appears to be shattered and crumpled, with pueblos and granjas eking out an existence in the hollows of a broken, frightening world.
The presence of pre-Inca cave paintings, along with towering stalactites, all nestled into hoary canyons 300 meters deep, implies this startling land is ancient – that it has looked this way since time immemorial. It is only the footprints, petrified into the rock of sharply sloping hillsides, that speak of a time when the book that is Torotoro laid flat upon the bench. These fossilised footprints, at their impossible angles and bizarre locations, are of dinosaurs, and they offer a portal into the fascinating prehistory of Bolivia.
The plaza in the sleepy centre of the modern Torotoro township pays homage to the region's extinct inhabitants. Where some plazas would sport a central fountain or monument to a military martyr, here a towering turquoise bull-horned carnotaurus, flanked by swooping pterodactyls and warily watched by a feathered velociraptor, dominates the view. From hidden speakers, deep growls and hoots of a prehistoric world reverberate off the ramshackle adobe tenements that ring the square. These creatures, and many more as captivating and fearsome, once called the playa that was Torotoro their home.
Sixty-five million years ago, the region that is Torotoro was not the dry, shattered land one sees now. This inland agricultural territory was once a vast beach upon the shore of southern America. It was a coast bordered by verdant jungles, steaming deltas and thick-flowing rivers and inhabited by the denizens of a Cretaceous world.
My guide Benedicto and I trek for hours across farmland, through dried rivers and up canyons in our search for traces of this lost world. And if one knows where to look, the stone footprints of ancient life can be found. Amidst the fractured slabs of rock, one can perceive great prints where once a herd of long-necked sauropods, tails whipping 35 meters behind their heads, would have waded through the tropical shallows. Close by, the deep-set tracks of an ankylosaurus show where long ago a heavy reptile with an armoured back and a studded tail would have lumbered across the beach, ignoring the small predatory dromaeosaurs that flocked about it. These feathered raptors would have been seeking out ornithopods, the duck-billed hadrosaurs which gathered upon the shores in huge herds to feed upon lush aquatic vegetation. These dinosaurs did not find protection in physical armour, but in sheer numbers.
Whilst numbers may have daunted the sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs, it had little effect upon the huge carnosaurs that stalked the seaside jungles and deltas seeking out prey, scattering the smaller predators before their advance. For the towering carnivores, potentially related to the carnotaurus that stands vigil in Torotoro plaza, the ornithopod herds made easy meals.
In other parts of the world, one can perceive the fossils of extinct animals and behold their fearsome, skeletal visages. Yet these remains of dead things speak little of how the dinosaurs lived. But upon the sharply ascending hills of Torotoro, through the petrified footprints, one is offered a veritable photo of prehistoric life. One can see through the tracks, now wind-swept and dust-covered, the dramas that played out daily in the lives of the extinct inhabitants of Bolivia.
My guide informs me that these fossilised tracks all stem from one day in Cretaceous Bolivia, whereupon certain conditions facilitated the incredibly rare process of footprint fossilisation. But what happened? A sudden deposit of sediment must have covered the beach and the ocean shallows and swiftly hardened, preserving the tracks beneath. An engorged river? A landslide? Ash fallout from a volcanic eruption? Benedicto and the other guides have a different theory.
'Un cataclismo.' – a cataclysm.
The footprints of Torotoro may be a snapshot of the final day of the dinosaurs. Sixty-five million years ago, a meteorite impacted with the Earth where the Yucatan Peninsula stands today, throwing debris into the atmosphere and triggering worldwide volcanic eruptions that would ultimately end the reign of the dinosaurs. Here at Torotoro, my guide believes one can see how the dinosaurs, oblivious to their impending fate, lived their final day, hunting and drinking upon a tropical beach, moments before a rock dropped from space. This extraterrestrial impact erased the dinosaurs from existence, but miraculously preserved their footprints – the stories of that ultimate day in the world of the dinosaurs not lost but preserved for millennia below sediment thrown up by the very asteroid that destroyed them.
Whatever the cause for the preservation of the footprints, they offer today’s travellers a unique snapshot of a time in Torotoro before the land was dry and high, broken and mountainous. A time when dinosaurs were not found in sleepy plazas as fibreglass figures, but upon a long-ago vibrant beach where they hunted, fed and lived.
Photo Credit: Nikolaus Cox
A Meditation on Timeliness in Bolivia
I come from a place of harsh deadlines and harsher sentiments on tardiness. School, the workplace, the dating scene: in many North American circles, tardiness is forbidden. This is a lesson I learned over many years of being late to catch the bus, which always came at the same minute, every day, for three years. After all, it was an American who coined the phrase ‘time is money.’
Since arriving in La Paz nearly three months ago, I have certainly done many things, but I’ve missed many others. I’ve missed Skype calls with my mother, dinner plans, classes: things I normally know how to make time for. The strange thing about punctuality is that everyone has the same amount of time in a day. We cannot control how fast the clock ticks (even if it ticks in the opposite direction), but we can control how we obey its rhythm.
Sociologist Hernan Pruden, who has lived and taught in La Paz for nearly nine years, says the human need for timeliness originated in agrarian societies. Many years ago, he explains, ‘food was money.’ The ability to grow, harvest, and feed one's family was the only way to make a living. Seasonal harvests paid the rent and determined social status, meaning no one was lower than the miscalculating farmer. Gradually, everyone began to pay more attention to the rotation of the earth. Everyone learned how to tell time.
Many Bolivians I have met, however, insist that timeliness is overrated. I am inclined to agree; in my experience, the lax ‘hora boliviana’ encourages tranquility amidst the many forms of chaos in La Paz. More than thrice, I have heard taxistas reference their job – which often involves inordinate road rage – as tranquilo.
While it may seem – and they will tell you this – that all Bolivians arrive late to everything, this stereotype can be a source of frustration for people like René Viadez Colmena, owner of the place where I go to get coffee, Mountain Coffee. ‘I keep a tight schedule,’ he says, ‘and I’ve got many engagements. Every time somebody shows up late to one of them, I can’t make it to the rest.’
Yet, in other ways, time – as a categorical, rather than chronological, concept – is important to La Paz. For example, if anyone says ‘buenas noches’ in the small hours of the morning, they have made a mistake, almost as grave as missing la siesta.
Where I grew up, ‘if you're on time, you're late’. But countless individuals in my country can’t seem to show up on time to anything. Meanwhile, in La Paz, I have nearly missed multiple flotas because they left exactly on time, despite what the ticket-sellers told me. I try to be somewhere in the middle – somewhere between taking my time to leave, and arriving on time.
As I sit at a gelato joint – because my breakfast place is closed on a Sunday – I contemplate the deadlines I have missed in my life (including that of this very article). I wonder how la hora boliviana might live on in my upcoming academic semester. Then, I realize I’ve deluded myself. I’m not in the middle. I've always been late. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Photo Credit: J.Q. Cooley
A Reclusive Religious Sect that Avoids the Rest of this Country
‘¡Mala gente, mala gente!’ a Bolivian peach vendor shouts at a tall, pug-faced, cocky man trying to buy things from her whilst speaking in a Germanic language. Near her, with another man not so tall, I speak in slow Spanish about Christmas. I hear them mumbling. Eventually, a shout: ‘You’re not Bolivians,’ the vendor catapults at us from an awkward distance, ‘and you shouldn’t be talking about Christmas!’ Sure as the summer sky is blue, we stop. But for all the things Bolivian that these Mennonites should not and do not participate in, Christmas doesn’t seem to be one of them. In fact, it might be the only thing these two people have in common.
With their holidays, their cows, and their fashion sense, this group of Mennonites came to Mexico not long ago from well-established communities in their European homeland. Though they are German in ancestry, language and custom, these Mennonites immigrated from the Russian Empire and West Prussia to Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, political disagreements soon saw 6,000 of them relocate to northern Mexico in the 1920s. Pedro Stein Salamanca, a middle-aged man of small words and big boots, tells me that his grandparents emigrated from Canada in the 1920s, and that many have since followed. It’s a sequence: from Europe or Canada to Mexico by boat or train; from Mexico, then, slowly, eventually, to Bolivia across the land and through the many years. Primarily, the 1970s.
As in antiquity, Mennonites practice community-based agriculture with a Christian agenda. Bolivian Mennonites are hardly different than their European, American or, for that matter, South American, counterparts. ‘I’d say 97 percent of all the world’s Mennonites rely on their cows’, Pedro cackles. ‘The same number probably uses their kids, too. For work, of course.’
Perhaps that’s why the kids scowl the hardest.
Though the majority of Bolivian Mennonites are, in fact, born in Bolivia, the question of their citizenship is complicated. And it doesn’t seem to interest many Mennonites. ‘I would estimate that there are at least 75 Mennonite communities here in Bolivia. They’re all over, but mostly here in Santa Cruz’, Pedro informs me. ‘I don’t give a damn about my citizenship. We give birth at home, we work at home. We only come here to buy what we can’t grow in the field.’
Walking through the market, I hear the familiar twang of my home, the American South. But it speaks a vocabulary I do not comprehend; this language, guttural and full of heavy inflection, is what Pedro calls alemán bajo. That is, an antiquated dialect of German from Saxony and the Netherlands. Twangy and slow, like iced tea. Or bratwurst. ‘It’s different from what those folks in the city speak. We’re different from Germans.’ Certainly different from Bolivians. Or anybody I’ve ever met, for that matter.
In my frenzy of trying to chat with these reticent individuals and taking unwanted photos of them, I get lost. So I take a taxi. The driver, amidst many warm-hearted bienvenidos and broad grins, tells me how keen he is on the Mennonites. ‘There’s plenty of Europeans in Santa Cruz, as you can see.’ He motions with his non-steering hand, and I see the pale complexions, the Western dress. ‘That’s not a problem. These ones just don’t even try to communicate with us.’
I ask him if he has Mennonite friends. He laughs. ‘Of course. They’re interesting people. They always laugh at my jokes.’ He pulls over and nearly punches the hazard button. He shakes with fervor, settles down and cracks a deep smile. ‘We believe in the same God. We walk the same road. I only wish more of them knew how to speak Spanish.’
Photo Credit: J.Q. Cooley
