The 2010 poverty rate of Peru was 31.3% according to census authorities there. The US Census reports a 19.2 rate for Louisiana in the same year. Alaska is at 7% and Denmark, 13%. These figures may mean less than they appear to do.
It is a dark and stormy night, and silent too. After this I am going to post less because I think my family and research crises may have passed, and the new academic writing group has started. I cannot comment on Hattie’s blog because of Typepad issues but she has said her trip to Peru changed her, and now hints that it has to do with spending time in a country where most people are poor. Is that it?
I always thought it had to do with the non-Western and mixed character of the place. In that way the only place I have been that resembles it is Morocco and I suspect that for non-Westernness, ancientness and mixture Uzbekistan is the next most similar place (and you can get there from here, by the way, for $1600, Houston to Frankfurt to Tashkent, total trip time 18h25m, let’s go).
I read Vallejo outside of selections for class after, not before going to Peru the first time and the reason I got interested in him was that that Andean strangeness wafted off the pages as I opened the book and it was able to come through because of the cubist strategies. I cannot justify this statement but I soon discovered that many others had noticed the same thing without being able to justify it particularly well, either.
In any case I had a small grant for a quarter, after the M.A. exam, to do a research project and I invented a Peruvian one because I was interested in the location. It went very well and a great deal happened while I was there, such that three months seemed like two years. At that time I had already spent a lot of time abroad: three years studying in Europe, in Madrid, Barcelona, and that Nordic zone. I had had a summer internship in Paris and spent a separate summer in Europe traveling, and I had made several trips to Mexico. This was different personally perhaps, in that although I had an institutional affiliation and some contacts I was not part of any program, and it was different geographically because it was South America. I melted right in because I have that very good South American Spanish, and because the place shared so many features with Spain as it had been when I was a child — with the startling differences of Equatorial light and the tranquil poise of Native Americans relative to those choleric Spaniards.
As I say a great deal happened while I was there and I can count on one hand the number of foreigners I met. So those things are part of why I seemed to be away so long and to absorb so much, but I tend to think it was the force of the people and the landscape.
When I got home everyone seemed so protected and naïve somehow, and I seemed to look different, and it was my first experience of culture shock, really. I taught a double load so as to take the summer off, travel in Mexico, and write up my article and by fall I was balanced out and deep into the best phase of graduate school but I had seen something that did not leave; it was as though I had joined another team, so to speak, and was foreign now, and I am still that person who came back, as she was.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 