Listen to this note:
“…[Racism] is most often unconscious, it is born from a hidden self that is blind to reason, it is absorbed with mother's milk and begins to take shape from the first cries and babbles of the Peruvian.”
‒ Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian Nobel Prize winner.
This time I prefer to approach this topic in a different way, narrating a real episode that occurred on one of my trips to Peru.
Racism, because it is such a vast and complex issue and at the same time so deeply rooted in our culture and “being Peruvian”, has been normalized and is part of our collective “unconsciousness”. Ending racism is a challenge that should start with assuming our condition (as racists).
melting pot
“Listen boss, it’s not like the United States here, there is no racism here, we are a melting pot of races; look, here there are cholos (native/Spanish mestizo), Indians, Chinese, blacks and whites living in total harmony,” the taxi driver who picked me up from the airport on my first trip to Peru after a long eighteen years told me out of the blue.
He expressed it to me like that, abruptly and defensively, without us even having addressed the subject, as if he had repressed those phrases for a long time and finally thought it was the best time to get rid of them. I preferred to change the subject, I was well aware that this was one of the greatest forms of denialism and, what's more, it was a source of pride almost on the same level as ceviche and pisco.
But those forceful statements from the taxi driver continued to echo in my head throughout the weekend in which an old friend rich man, heir to some - apparently important - mines, invited me to spend the weekend at his house, which was on one of the most exclusive beaches south of Lima. It was a splendid house, with large windows and a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean, perfectly decorated with authentic funeral shrouds from the pre-Inca era, with geometric figures and ochre colours that embellish the walls of its rooms instead of being on display in the National Museum.
There my friend and I arrived in a very elegant Mercedes Benz and of course, we were also accompanied by the driver who drove soberly dressed in a dark suit and a perfectly ironed white shirt; and I think that if they didn't make him wear white gloves and a hat it was because, surely, they didn't want to cross the line of bad taste (huachafería, as the people of Lima would say).
To get there we had to cross some sandbanks where the remains of a pre-Incan city and garbage dumps once coexisted and which were now crammed with precarious housing that a high wall of bricks and cement separated from the "well-off" part of Lima society that, trying to escape from the peripheral districts, had built their "Beverly Hills-type" mansions there.
I watched everything through the car window while my friend turned up the volume on his playlist and tried his best to sing along at the top of his voice to “One of these nights” by the Eagles.
At home, the wife was waiting for us, wearing a linen tunic – probably designer – that covered a fuchsia and tiny bikini. There were also their three children, aged eight, six and three, and I would be lying if I said they were all girls or boys, but that is not relevant to this case. What I do remember is that each of the children (girls?) had a nanny who took special care of each one.
The three nannies were dressed entirely in white, including their shoes and socks, and looked like they had taken their clothes from one of those classic horror movies with killer nurses; each one scrupulously took care of the child assigned to her, meticulously following the schedule of each child's activities.
Apparently, when we arrived it was time to go to the sea and, always dressed in their white uniforms, you could see them going down the steps that led to the beach shore and then you could see them trying not to get their white shoes wet (that included their white socks), building sand castles and at the same time covering the kids' entire bodies with excessive amounts of sunscreen, but always with a stern, almost anxious expression.
This was being watched askance by the host couple and I as we sipped an aromatic Pisco Sour, abandoned on the armchairs of the large terrace decorated with giant glass bottles with pirate galleons inside. At that moment, surely motivated by the effects of the Pisco Sour, I said hesitantly: “poor girls, it’s so hot in those uniforms, they’ll surely take a dip”; the couple, with extreme naturalness, almost suspicious, looked at me out of the corner of their eyes and surely understanding that my question came from my condition as a practically progressive-almost subversive “foreigner”, they clarified: “they and all the service personnel can use the beach after six in the afternoon”, it’s because they themselves wouldn’t feel comfortable, right? Besides, it’s a rule of the board of owners and nobody wants to break rules, right?
The next morning, I got up early and, taking advantage of the fact that the couple was jogging along the seashore, I went in to make myself a coffee in the kitchen, a space in the house apparently off-limits to anyone who wasn't part of the service staff.
The nannies, the cook and the driver were sitting around a small table having breakfast and chatting animatedly, but when they saw me come in they immediately fell silent, made a gesture to stand up - something I emphatically stopped - and none of them, except the cook, were wearing their uniforms. While I was filling my cup with coffee I tried to start a simple conversation and all I managed to do was turn them into silent rocks, mute stones, like those giant stones with which Machu Picchu was built, witness to the greatness of an empire that was subjected to blood and fire.
I saw them there, distrustful and fearful, very similar and at the same time different from the faces in the “portrait huacos” where the pre-Hispanic natives used to capture, on ceramic utensils, the faces of their clan. Right there I could feel the resignation of a people who had been robbed of their former splendor and who today felt like foreigners in their own land.
I left a note for my friend justifying my surprise farewell and asked Paco, the driver -until that moment anonymous-, to take me to the Pan-American Highway so I could take a minibus back to Lima.
All along the long way back, now from the windows of a rickety bus, I saw the same sandbanks I had passed the day before, sandbanks from which emerged individuals with languid copper-colored faces, people with faces that expressed nothing but submissive exhaustion, human beings trying only to survive one more day, brothers laden with bundles and carrying their babies on their backs, Peruvians stunned by their own setbacks, for whom the matter of the melting pot had no meaning.
More from the author: Peru, pending problem: Education
