Ariel Dorfman
Ariel Dorfman
Exerpt from pages 12-13 of the article "Bread and Burnt Rice: Culture and Economic Survival in Latin America," published in Grassroots Development 8:2, 1984, pp. 3-25.
A few hours after I arrived in Rio-bamba, in the province of Chimborazo in Ecuador, a woman shared with me the following "hilarious" story. It seems an Indian boarded a bus and--rather than negotiate his way to the back loaded down with market goods--he decided to sit in the front. When the driver insisted that he move to the back, the Indian kept skaking his head, saying that he did not want to occupy the last seat. As time was being lost in the discussion, a passenger piped up and suggested that the driver tell the man that he was not being offered the last seat in the back, but the first seat in the last row. "And off he went," the woman said, chuckling. "Son tan atrasados estos indios." (These Indians are so backwards).
The woman was a high functionary of the ministry of Education who had just arrived from Quito to inspect the very literacy program that was trying to alleviate the situation she had just described with such amusement. She was blinder than Columbus. He had only mistaken the leaves on trees for silver. She was unable to see the treasure that was being unearthed in front of her very eyes. She did not realize that the illusory Indian she was potraying in her ancecdote was being replaice by a different sort of person. Instead of the underveloped children who could be tricked by a driver and a passenger and talked about as if they could not understand or as if it did not matter even though they did manage to understand, what I found in Chimborazo were fully grown up people who happened to be Indians and who refused to go to the back of any bus.
That same afternoon, at the feria (market fair) of Salerón, high up in the lush, green, overworked hills surrounding Riobamba, an Indian named Luis gave me another version of the same story. He spoke in slow, halting terms, without the relish of the woman I had spoken to that morning. Below the plodding monotony of his voice was a resulute stubborness and security. "They would always send us to the back of the bus," he told me. "Now we say no and we simply sit down. We know our rights. They can no longer swindle us when they weigh our produce or make us wait in line for long hours or make us sign documents that cheat us. Things are different now." His hand sweeps the air to include not only the magnificent volcano Chimborazo, which acts as a god and guardian of that valley, but also the 600 or so Indians who are buying and selling at the market fair, which they now manage themselves. "Before, the middlemen took all our money. Now we know how to do our own administration and accounting."
What has changed life for them substantially is the programa de alfabetización, the campaign against illiteracy. They have learned to read and write Spanish, which is of course, the language of power and commerce in that country. But first they began to tackle Quechua, the language in which they live their everyday life, in chich they joke and express their emotions, in which they organize and reason and elect their officials and educate their children. The means, as Carlos Moreno, the head of the literacy program told me, that "the campesinos first become literate with words that describe the situations they are suffering and that, reflected upon, contain possible solutions. The first word that is written is vacu (water) because it is the lack of campesino control over water that determines their powerlessness. By the time they have read the first 15 core words, ending with huañuj (death) and tsajama (farming), they have in a sense reinterpreted their condition from a critical point of view." By mastering the transcribed word that depicts the reality, they are advancing on the road oward making reality itself different.