26 – Straw dolls

The buses to Huancor went from a road by the side of the market “a la izquierda del esquinita”, on the left by the corner, and like many such descriptions it proved to be both maddeningly inprecise and yet entirely accurate. A man with a clip board was marshalling the vehicles, a variety of private cars operating under some form of unionised framework: each car time of arrival and departure was recorded, and they followed the manager´s instructions. As new cars arrived they joined the back of the queue, when they reached the front they told the clipboard man where they wished to go and he shouted out the destination for passengers.

I asked the clipboard man for Huancor, and he found a taxi heading in that direction,who agreed to drop his other passengers and take me the rest of the way for an extra ten soles. Twenty minutes later I found myself in open countryside.
“Is this a village?”
“It is a caserito, of three or four houses.”
It looked like the dusty junction of two tracks.
It was in fact Huanco, only an ‘r’ away from Huancor, but on the opposite side of the river, and South rather than East. Rather than waste the journey I paid off the taxi and set out to walk back through the farmlands.

Broad flat fields spread out on either side, separated by bridleways and irrigation canals. The broadest canals were up to six feet wide, crossed by bridges made of half a dozen great trunks of wood.

Field by field, sluice gates (each one with a name painted on – Dona Esmerelda no 4) could be opened to let the water into deep but narrow channels running down the side or centre, from where lateral ditches took them to either side, and thus to simple hoed furrows in the earth irrigating the lines of crops.

But most of the fields were dry. Barely one in ten had crops. “We are waiting for the rains to come. Waiting to plant the seeds. We should have been planting cotton in October, and there is still no rain,” the taxi driver had told me.

The rain would come not to the coast, which is periannual desert, but to the mountain slopes of the Andes above which would drain into the rivers which watered the valleys and finally spread out onto the coastal lowlands where most of Peru’s food is grown.

The Rio Mala was a muddy brown torrent which I could not cross to visit the Piedras of Chinceros, but here, just 100 kilometres south, the second and third rivers to cross, there was hardly any water coming down. The first, the Rio San Juan, had a trickle in the broad river bed, whereas the second, the Rio Plata, was entirely dry.

Appearances can be deceptive however. The Rio Mala was also apparently dry where the Panamerican highway crossed it, as all the water had been drawn off into irrigation higher up. Here in the fields at the beginning of January, it was clear that not only was the river dry, but there was little in the irrigation canals to reach the fields.

Over Christmas, the papers had reported that 12 regions of Peru were in a state of emergency due to lack of water; there were 200 ongoing conflictos – strikes, demonstrations, road blocks (the same as there had been at the beginning of the previous year) – of which 60% were said to be basically disputes over water – water use, water contamination, water access, water shortages.

It was pleasant to walk through these fields, with occasional labourers clearing out the  ditches, tractors ploughing over the dry soil, and birds flying ahead along the bushes that lined the canals. The broad flat fields presented a very different prospect to the narrow strips by the river higher upstream, or the hillside terraces, andenes, where the villagers planted still higher up in the mountains.

Birds flew ahead of me from bush to bush – flycatchers, kestrels, wheeling hawks – and a troupe of 30 or 40 large healthy goats, bearded and horned, came past, leaping ahead of the goatherd  along the sides of the irrigation channels. “To eat?” I asked the goat herd who followed behind. “Para leche” he replied. For milk.

After several hours happy wandering I reached the front gate of Hacienda San Jose, a traditional Spanish colonial farming estate, having approached it from behind, catching glimpses of the archaic splendour of its painted mud mansion and porticos over the giant adobe wall that surrounded it.

Sitting in the shade of a group of molle trees outside were visitors waiting for the 11 am tour. A raspadilla seller with a cart was offering fragments of ice scraped from a giant block, and drizzled with honey and fruit juice.

“You should be careful walking round here, there are lots of  morenos (darkies)”  said a hard faced woman on the opposite bench. Her teenage daughter smiled happily, whilst their little dog, with a ribbon round its neck, scampered about;  “Lots of darkies here, they will rob you and kill you”. The intense woman it appeared, came from Chincha – though not from El Carmen. Now they lived in Lima, but they had come back to spend the weekend.

“I’ve been walking across the fields for two hours and had no problems” I replied. “This place is full of darkies. You have to be careful,” she repeated, as if I may not have understood.

El Carmen, the village a few kilometres away, is indeed full of darkies. In fact that morning as I passed through in the taxi it had looked like the film set for a movie set in Africa,  black women with headscarfs and brooms sweeping the dust from lanes with no cars but many dogs, banana stems by the roadside, Flamboyant trees, tall black men shirtless, in cut off denim shorts, striding down the centre of the road.

When I visited later I found a pretty main square, with twenty giant palm trees flanking a red and yellow bandstand, a few stalls selling black dolls made of straw, with red polka-dotted skirts and head ties, locally produced wines and spirits, and bead bracelets. The town was eerily quiet, as if the morning after a night of excess, and so it was.

El Carmen is the centre of Afro-Peruvian culture. One of the manifestations of that culture is “the longest Christmas party in Peru”, I was told by a local musician, who apologised for his slowness. “Four days of music and dancing , from the 24th through to the 27th, 24 hours a day for those that can”. He had to be there throughout, as one of the town’s iconic fiddle players.  I was reminded of Carribean carnivals, Nine Mornings, where the ideal, for young men with something to prove, is to party till dawn for nine days and nights in succession. And still turn up at work each day.

The reason for the little piece of Africa in Peru, simply enough, is that these people are the descendants of the slave plantation which had been at the nearby Hacienda San Jose. Slavery was abolished by law in Peru in 1854. Twenty five years later, in 1879, as armed forces from Chile invaded during the War of the Pacific, the slaves finally seized their chance to overthrow the plantation owners.

The Hacienda is now a hotel, charging 400 dollars a night and upwards to experience the ambience of an 19th century colonial slave plantation. It also offers guided tours of selected parts of the house and grounds, including the parlour with framed full length
portraits of The Compte and Comptessa of Monte Blanco (“a little village in Spain” the guide explained) dated to 1702; the dungeon where slaves were made to stand on one leg as a punishment (“a lot of them died”), and the chapel, built of adobe and roofed in cane, with a high ceiling and an ornately carved wooden altar piece, depicting several saints with their symbolic associations.

One of the principal attractions are the underground dungeons where the slaves, we were told, were kept blindfolded “so they could not escape”.

The hacienda had 1000 slaves, and was one of the richest in Peru. It was one of several here, and Chincha was a centre of the sugar industry, when it was at its most profitable.

The haciendas were broken up under a revolutionary government in 1968. Velasco repossessed many of the large and unproductive landholdings and handed them over to worker co-operatives. Though the timing of the radical change accords with changes elsewhere in the world, the difference here it that the goverment was a military goverment that came to power in a coup.

Returning to Chincha in the afternoon, the streets were strangely quiet, the road past the hostal closed to traffic, the incessant parping of the moto-taxis´horns sounding only in the distance. “They are reorganising the market,” the hostal manager told me, “removing all the ambulantes and tiendas informales, street sellers. You should not go there, they are angry, it will be dangerous”.

I paused just long enough to collect my camera before heading for the market. The street was in disarray. Officials were directing the loading of planks, roofing sheets, glass display cases and sheets of wood and card on to the backs of open trucks. But the mood was practical. The stall holders were dismantling their own structures and carrying the components to the trucks.

As the view cleared, it became apparent that what was a warren of stalls had hidden a broad street. The traders had built shops deep enough to park a car, and three metres high, out of wooden planking, sheets of cardboard, reed mats, and. whatever came to hand.  Here they had been storing their wares while in the daytime they erected extra tables and displays in front of the storerooms.

With these structures on both sides, what had been a two lane highway was reduced to a narrow passage through which moto taxis and pedestrians threaded uneasily. “Its a good thing” a chicha seller told me. She, like me and many others, was watching the scene unfold. “They have been here for years, blocking the street”.

The stall holders did not seem resentful or angry. Whilst some sat on their piles of card surrounded by bags of clothing, looking resigned, elsewhere there was a purposeful air as men climbed aloft to take down their roofing or hammered at the concrete bases into which steel struts were cemented. It seemed that their materials were being taken to another site, where they could re-establish their shops.

Back in Lima, I had seen at first hand, whilst walking through the historic centre of town, how the city authorities handled a similar move to cut down on street trading. A group of eight policemen in a sealed van circled the streets. They wore protective jackets, helmets, visors, knee protectors, and carried truncheons.

Reaching an old woman selling cups of jelly from a tray, the van stopped, the door drew back, and all eight avengers leapt out, surrounding the woman, snatching the tray from her and hurling the jellies to the ground. A bus going by stopped, and some passengers yelled at the police to stop. One of the policemen walked up to the bus, smashed the wing mirror with his baton, then attacked the bus window next to a passenger, showering him with broken glass.

A good day at work.

The following morning, I took a taxi to Huancor.

Go back to 24 – The place where Men became Gods

…Go Forward to 27 –  Huanchor and Chincha 2…