Listen to this note:
?…[Racism] most of the time it is unconscious, it is born from a hidden self and blind to reason, it is sucked with mother's milk and begins to be formalized from the first moans and babblings 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, complex issue and at the same time is so rooted in our culture and ?being Peruvian?, has become normalized and is part of our ?unconsciousness? collective. Ending racism is a challenge that should have as its starting point assuming our condition (as racists).
melting pot
?Look boss, here is not like in the United States, there is no racism here, we are a melting pot; 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 the first trip I made to Peru after of a long eighteen years.
He expressed it to me like this, abruptly and defensively without us having even addressed the topic, as if he had those phrases repressed for a long time and finally believed that it was the best time to be able to get rid of them. I preferred to change the subject, I was well aware that this was one of the biggest denialisms 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, heir to some -apparently important- mines, invited me to spend "the weekend" in his house, which was on one of the most exclusive beaches, south of Lima. It was a splendid house, with large windows, with a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean, perfectly decorated with authentic funerary mantles from the pre-Inca era, with geometric figures and ocher colors that embellish the walls of its living rooms instead of being displayed in the National Museum.
My friend and I arrived there 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 limit of bad taste (huachafería would be what the people of Lima would say).
To get there we had to cross some sandy areas where the remains of a pre-Inca city and garbage deposits previously coexisted and which were now crammed with precarious homes that a high wall of bricks and cement separated them from the "well-off" part. of the 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 of his ?playlist? and he tried his best to sing at the top of his voice, "One of these nights?" of Eagles.
The wife was waiting for us at the house wearing a linen tunic - probably a designer - that covered - a fuchsia and tiny bikini, there were also their three children, eight, six and three years old and, I would be lying if I said they were all girls or boys, but that doesn't matter for the case. What I do remember is that each of the boys (girls?) had a nanny who took special care of each one.
The three nannies were dressed entirely in white, including shoes and stockings, and looked like they had taken their outfits from one of those classic horror movies with killer nurses; Each one scrupulously took care of the child that corresponded to her, meticulously following the schedule of activities for each child.
Apparently, when we arrived it was time to go to the sea and they, always dressed in their white uniforms, could be seen going down the steps that led to the shore of the beach and later they could be seen trying not to get their white shoes wet (that included white socks), building sand castles and at the same time exaggeratedly covering the entire body of the children with sunscreen, but always with a stern, almost anxious gesture.
This was watched out of the corner of my eye by the host couple and I while we were tasting an aromatic Pisco Sour abandoned on the armchairs on the large terrace adorned 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, surely they'll take a dip?"; The couple with extreme naturalness, almost suspicious, looked at me out of the corner of their eye, surely understanding that my question came from my condition as a practically "foreigner." progressive-almost subversive, they clarified to me: "they and all the service staff can use the beach after six in the afternoon?", it's because they themselves wouldn't feel comfortable, right? It's also a rule of thumb. the owners board and no one 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 a coffee in the kitchen, a space in the house apparently off-limits to anyone who was not part of the service staff. .
The nannies, the cook and the driver were sitting around a small table eating breakfast and talking animatedly, but when they saw me enter they immediately fell silent, they made the gesture of standing up - which I emphatically stopped - and none of them, except the cook, I wore their uniforms, while I filled my cup of coffee I tried to start a simple conversation and I only managed to make them turn into silent rocks, silent 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 of 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.
Throughout the long way back, now from the windows of a dilapidated bus, I observed the same sandy areas that I had passed the day before, sandy areas from which individuals with languid copper faces emerged, people with faces that expressed nothing but a submissive exhaustion, human beings just trying to survive another day, brothers loaded with packages and carrying their babies on their backs, Peruvians stunned by their own setbacks, for whom the melting pot issue had no meaning.
More from the author: Peru, pending problem: Education
