Last night, I reread my thesis. The decision came after lots of thought and confusion I've been having about Bolivia and the way I feel about the country as well as my experiences there. I hadn't read the entire thing since I turned submitted it in March 2018, more than a year and a half ago, and now I feel slightly more detached toward and less emotional about it. Interestingly, this detachment has led to me feeling more impressed with it than I did as I was writing it and after I submitted it. What especially struck me was that the ideas I discussed arose from conversations and experiences I had entirely in Spanish. Another thing that struck me was how much I still think about Bolivia even more than two years after I last set foot there, which makes it strange that I decided to spend an entire week this month not engaging in any discussions or reading anything about it for my own sanity and mental health.
For more than a month, Bolivia has been going through civil unrest. This unrest came shortly after its neighboring coastline-hoarding country Chile underwent similar mass mobilizations against the status quo, wherein people took to the streets protesting inequality and concentration of wealth. Unfortunately, Bolivia's protests were not for as noble of a cause, which bothered me. The peaceful protests started erupting on the day of presidential elections, when the votes suddenly stopped being counted without explanation, and after a brief period of time, Evo Morales was declared the winner. This meant that he would serve a fourth term and would continue holding the power he has held for more than 13 years. These results enraged a lot of people. All of my friends basically felt that their democracy was falling victim to fraud and corruption. People took to the streets and started blocking roads and marching in protest, halting all activity in major cities for weeks.
On the other hand, Evo–the world's first indigenous president–has been an international icon in terms of indigenous emancipation and empowerment whose accomplishments in Bolivia cannot be left unacknowledged. He cut Bolivia's poverty rate and grew the economy, which is no small feat when Bolivia was not a very wealthy country to begin with. He had humble origins and did not come from a powerful oligarchical family. In him, Bolivia's indigenous majority could see themselves represented. To people interested in people power movements around the world such as myself, he was proof that formerly colonized countries could overturn oppressive paradigms, eventually constructing a government that could work for all its people rather than serving a small, wealthy elite.
Nevertheless, and perhaps not unexpectedly given people's propensity for the abuse of power, there have been allegations of Evo using Bolivians' money to build fancy buildings for himself and his colleagues in government, and there has also been backlash against policies he implemented allowing land to be razed for farming, which arguably contributed to the fires that blazed across the country. There has also been controversy surrounding the TIPNIS, indigenous protected land through which Evo's government wanted to build a superhighway.
Meanwhile, James is a staunch believer in Evo, though his experience as somebody who has never been to Bolivia or knows many Bolivians personally only exposes him to progressive discourse about Evo that does not necessarily discuss his shortcomings in certain avenues. I tried to talk to James about how my friends were mainly bothered by Evo's "abuse of power" and feeling like their votes did not matter, which is valid, but that angle did not bother James. This in turn bothered me a little, because I could only think of what my parents lived through during the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and knew that they would sympathize with the Bolivians who wanted a new president. (Not that I am making a direct comparison between Marcos and Evo–to be clear, I am only thinking about what it means when people start feeling resentment for a government that they feel is not maintaining its power "fairly.")
There were many competing sides to the story, and I admit that since my friends are part of the more privileged, wealthy class, I wish I saw more perspectives that did not come from them or non-Bolivian opinion writers, but rather indigenous people themselves. I wanted to hear from indigenous people who were against Evo's reelection (I know they exist), and I wanted to hear from indigenous and non-indigenous people who still supported him. I feared that my friends were not sympathetic to the indigenous cause, which strangely began to feel like a personal attack on me, a firm believer in the human rights of people whom society has been oppressing and ignoring for so long. People on my social media began making inflammatory remarks about Masistas, Evo supporters. My stomach churned as I wondered, but never really found out, if those remarks were also directed towards indigenous people in general, perpetuating the perception that "uneducated," "rural" people could not possibly fathom what would be best for a country; thus, the violence they engaged in against peaceful protestors should be denounced, for it was borne out of a blind support for a president my friends accused of being a dictator.
Despite my restless thoughts, I still felt like I could ignore what was happening, or at least not let it get to me in a major way. Bolivia, like any other country, is complicated, and there's nothing I can necessarily do about it. It was easy not to be too personally affected when I was a whole continent away. This changed, however, when one of my closest friends from Cochabamba showed up out of the blue in Atlanta in early November.
The night of Saturday, November 2nd, I finally decided to make a post on my Facebook about James and I having moved to Atlanta. Later that night, I got a text from my friend Rodrigo asking if I was in Atlanta. I told him yes, and he sent me a cryptic picture which, James pointed out, turned out to be in the Atlanta airport. I texted Rodrigo back, asking where he was, and it turned out that he indeed had just arrived in Atlanta and would be staying for a few days while he met with CNN.
I was in shock. Fate had dealt a weird set of cards, and I immediately made plans to see Rodrigo the next day. More than two years since the day he bade me a quick farewell at the airport in Cochabamba, we reunited at a Dancing Goats cafe across Atlanta's Midtown transit station. I found out that he had been trying to report various aspects of the civil unrest in Bolivia as a CNN correspondent, but he and his team started receiving threats for what they were trying to investigate. The international reporters left soon thereafter, and Rodrigo deleted his social media accounts. Though Rodrigo didn't seem to really care about the risks and had a strong desire to be involved and on the ground, his family was concerned, and so they sent him to Atlanta, where he could meet with the CNN En Español team. And–thanks to his sister sending him a screenshot of my Facebook post–me!
Rodrigo ended up staying in Atlanta for almost a week. Throughout his time in the city, James and I spent as much time with him as we could. We took him to the international produce farmers market, which he was awed by, and James made pizza from scratch for dinner. Rodrigo and I discovered we both were huge fans of Trio Los Panchos and laughed about being old souls. We belted out a couple of their hits as they played on our little bluetooth speaker, though this was not without interruption from live news coverage he streamed through his phone of what was going on in Bolivia.
I admit that I did not really try to understand the footage I saw, though Rodrigo explained very clearly. I think I was afraid of interpreting it and falling to either one side or another, and I began to feel very self-conscious about what James would think, worrying that he might not like Rodrigo because of his position as a wealthy mestizo in Bolivia's current conflict and his opinions about electoral fraud and the (right-wing) people outside Evo's party rising to power in Bolivia. I began to spiral, confused about how to feel about Rodrigo and what that meant about my own ideology. Did not sympathizing with Rodrigo, a person very dear to me who has helped see me through some trying times in my life, make me a bad friend? If any of my friends in Bolivia knew of the conundrum I was going through, a conundrum that potentially involved me disagreeing with what they so firmly believed, would they think less of me?
One night, after seeing Rodrigo and hearing him explain Bolivia's conflict to some people who did not know much about Bolivia, and seeing the people he was talking to immediately pin Evo as an evil dictator while James sat across me clearly disapproving, I came home and had an emotional breakdown. James told me to reach out to the people I spoke to during my fieldwork, since they lived in poor neighborhoods and would might have a different perspective, but not only do I have no means of contacting them, they have wanted nothing to do with me and other foreigners ever since things turned sour between them and the NGO I was involved with. (A very long story, for which I do not fault them at all, that I will not go into here.)
We said good-bye to Rodrigo the Friday after he arrived. Two days later, on Sunday the 10th of November, Evo resigned. My friends were jubilated. Meanwhile, the "international community" I consider myself a part of became horrified at the implications of Evo's resignation, and the word "coup" started going around. I wished so badly that I could believe what happened in Bolivia was another evil instance of US meddling, and that it couldn't be possible that the protests my friends were participating in were inherently racist and classist. Alas, that was not the case.
It was then that I decided I couldn't take the starkly conflicting sides anymore, and I banned all discussions about Bolivia with James and with anyone else for the next week. The week after I serendipitously saw Rodrigo again, I ignored every post Bolivians made on social media, I read no articles posted by any of the Bolivians I knew, news sources, or left-wing academics, and I did not even speak out loud the names of any Bolivians or the name of the country itself. I did realize how extreme this was, but I also realized that I needed to take care of myself and avoid spiraling into a mental health crisis. Essentially, I needed a break to process things and release some tension that had been accumulating and stressing me out unnecessarily. James resisted the temptation of talking to me about the latest developments in Bolivia's civil unrest based on what he was seeing on Twitter, and I feel grateful that he respected my wishes.
But just because I refused to engage or discuss doesn't meant I didn't think about Bolivia. I thought about it a whole lot throughout the week I "banned" it. I thought of my research, I thought of my friends, I thought of the life I lived there, I reminded myself that it was the place where I even learned to speak Spanish, the language I use everyday at work, in the first place. My conflicting feelings came from a place of love and, I admit, from frustration that things in life aren't more black and white, simple matters of good versus evil (with me and everyone I care about being good).
Processing my feelings for a week without allowing further confusion and stress to muddle them helped me a lot. The Bolivians in my life mean the world to me, but so does my worldview, and I realized that I was stressed out so much thinking that I could either only have my ideology/self-righteousness or my Bolivian friends and not both. As it turns out, there is nothing that says I can only have one or the other. I can have friends I don't wholly agree with, whom I might not sympathize with in every single way, and I can continue believing in how I think the world should be and let that inform my own personal actions. Even though I've spent a decent amount of time in Bolivia, I can't fully understand how Bolivians are experiencing what is going on in their country because I haven't lived there all my life like they have. Sometimes things come into contradictions with each other, but that's okay, and sometimes in life I can choose one or the other, both, or neither. As I continue growing into myself and navigating the complexities of life, I think I'm going to find myself like this metronome a lot.
We are all undertaking our own personal journeys as individuals trying to make sense of the world around us. Nobody is perfect, and nobody will ever completely fit into my conception of an "ideal person," and that's perfectly fine. My desire to compartmentalize things sometimes makes me forget this, as does my social fear of confronting ideologies that might conflict with my own. I acknowledge that this is something I need to work on. How lucky I am to have a partner, family, and friends who really love me and support me, whether or not they see eye to eye with me on certain matters.
In the meantime, I will continue living my life and being curious about the world, dreaming of the day I return to mi querida Bolivia with a renewed understanding of who I am and my place in this exasperatingly, delightfully complicated world of gray.
For more than a month, Bolivia has been going through civil unrest. This unrest came shortly after its neighboring coastline-hoarding country Chile underwent similar mass mobilizations against the status quo, wherein people took to the streets protesting inequality and concentration of wealth. Unfortunately, Bolivia's protests were not for as noble of a cause, which bothered me. The peaceful protests started erupting on the day of presidential elections, when the votes suddenly stopped being counted without explanation, and after a brief period of time, Evo Morales was declared the winner. This meant that he would serve a fourth term and would continue holding the power he has held for more than 13 years. These results enraged a lot of people. All of my friends basically felt that their democracy was falling victim to fraud and corruption. People took to the streets and started blocking roads and marching in protest, halting all activity in major cities for weeks.
On the other hand, Evo–the world's first indigenous president–has been an international icon in terms of indigenous emancipation and empowerment whose accomplishments in Bolivia cannot be left unacknowledged. He cut Bolivia's poverty rate and grew the economy, which is no small feat when Bolivia was not a very wealthy country to begin with. He had humble origins and did not come from a powerful oligarchical family. In him, Bolivia's indigenous majority could see themselves represented. To people interested in people power movements around the world such as myself, he was proof that formerly colonized countries could overturn oppressive paradigms, eventually constructing a government that could work for all its people rather than serving a small, wealthy elite.
Nevertheless, and perhaps not unexpectedly given people's propensity for the abuse of power, there have been allegations of Evo using Bolivians' money to build fancy buildings for himself and his colleagues in government, and there has also been backlash against policies he implemented allowing land to be razed for farming, which arguably contributed to the fires that blazed across the country. There has also been controversy surrounding the TIPNIS, indigenous protected land through which Evo's government wanted to build a superhighway.
Meanwhile, James is a staunch believer in Evo, though his experience as somebody who has never been to Bolivia or knows many Bolivians personally only exposes him to progressive discourse about Evo that does not necessarily discuss his shortcomings in certain avenues. I tried to talk to James about how my friends were mainly bothered by Evo's "abuse of power" and feeling like their votes did not matter, which is valid, but that angle did not bother James. This in turn bothered me a little, because I could only think of what my parents lived through during the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and knew that they would sympathize with the Bolivians who wanted a new president. (Not that I am making a direct comparison between Marcos and Evo–to be clear, I am only thinking about what it means when people start feeling resentment for a government that they feel is not maintaining its power "fairly.")
There were many competing sides to the story, and I admit that since my friends are part of the more privileged, wealthy class, I wish I saw more perspectives that did not come from them or non-Bolivian opinion writers, but rather indigenous people themselves. I wanted to hear from indigenous people who were against Evo's reelection (I know they exist), and I wanted to hear from indigenous and non-indigenous people who still supported him. I feared that my friends were not sympathetic to the indigenous cause, which strangely began to feel like a personal attack on me, a firm believer in the human rights of people whom society has been oppressing and ignoring for so long. People on my social media began making inflammatory remarks about Masistas, Evo supporters. My stomach churned as I wondered, but never really found out, if those remarks were also directed towards indigenous people in general, perpetuating the perception that "uneducated," "rural" people could not possibly fathom what would be best for a country; thus, the violence they engaged in against peaceful protestors should be denounced, for it was borne out of a blind support for a president my friends accused of being a dictator.
Despite my restless thoughts, I still felt like I could ignore what was happening, or at least not let it get to me in a major way. Bolivia, like any other country, is complicated, and there's nothing I can necessarily do about it. It was easy not to be too personally affected when I was a whole continent away. This changed, however, when one of my closest friends from Cochabamba showed up out of the blue in Atlanta in early November.
The night of Saturday, November 2nd, I finally decided to make a post on my Facebook about James and I having moved to Atlanta. Later that night, I got a text from my friend Rodrigo asking if I was in Atlanta. I told him yes, and he sent me a cryptic picture which, James pointed out, turned out to be in the Atlanta airport. I texted Rodrigo back, asking where he was, and it turned out that he indeed had just arrived in Atlanta and would be staying for a few days while he met with CNN.
I was in shock. Fate had dealt a weird set of cards, and I immediately made plans to see Rodrigo the next day. More than two years since the day he bade me a quick farewell at the airport in Cochabamba, we reunited at a Dancing Goats cafe across Atlanta's Midtown transit station. I found out that he had been trying to report various aspects of the civil unrest in Bolivia as a CNN correspondent, but he and his team started receiving threats for what they were trying to investigate. The international reporters left soon thereafter, and Rodrigo deleted his social media accounts. Though Rodrigo didn't seem to really care about the risks and had a strong desire to be involved and on the ground, his family was concerned, and so they sent him to Atlanta, where he could meet with the CNN En Español team. And–thanks to his sister sending him a screenshot of my Facebook post–me!
Rodrigo ended up staying in Atlanta for almost a week. Throughout his time in the city, James and I spent as much time with him as we could. We took him to the international produce farmers market, which he was awed by, and James made pizza from scratch for dinner. Rodrigo and I discovered we both were huge fans of Trio Los Panchos and laughed about being old souls. We belted out a couple of their hits as they played on our little bluetooth speaker, though this was not without interruption from live news coverage he streamed through his phone of what was going on in Bolivia.
I admit that I did not really try to understand the footage I saw, though Rodrigo explained very clearly. I think I was afraid of interpreting it and falling to either one side or another, and I began to feel very self-conscious about what James would think, worrying that he might not like Rodrigo because of his position as a wealthy mestizo in Bolivia's current conflict and his opinions about electoral fraud and the (right-wing) people outside Evo's party rising to power in Bolivia. I began to spiral, confused about how to feel about Rodrigo and what that meant about my own ideology. Did not sympathizing with Rodrigo, a person very dear to me who has helped see me through some trying times in my life, make me a bad friend? If any of my friends in Bolivia knew of the conundrum I was going through, a conundrum that potentially involved me disagreeing with what they so firmly believed, would they think less of me?
One night, after seeing Rodrigo and hearing him explain Bolivia's conflict to some people who did not know much about Bolivia, and seeing the people he was talking to immediately pin Evo as an evil dictator while James sat across me clearly disapproving, I came home and had an emotional breakdown. James told me to reach out to the people I spoke to during my fieldwork, since they lived in poor neighborhoods and would might have a different perspective, but not only do I have no means of contacting them, they have wanted nothing to do with me and other foreigners ever since things turned sour between them and the NGO I was involved with. (A very long story, for which I do not fault them at all, that I will not go into here.)
We said good-bye to Rodrigo the Friday after he arrived. Two days later, on Sunday the 10th of November, Evo resigned. My friends were jubilated. Meanwhile, the "international community" I consider myself a part of became horrified at the implications of Evo's resignation, and the word "coup" started going around. I wished so badly that I could believe what happened in Bolivia was another evil instance of US meddling, and that it couldn't be possible that the protests my friends were participating in were inherently racist and classist. Alas, that was not the case.
It was then that I decided I couldn't take the starkly conflicting sides anymore, and I banned all discussions about Bolivia with James and with anyone else for the next week. The week after I serendipitously saw Rodrigo again, I ignored every post Bolivians made on social media, I read no articles posted by any of the Bolivians I knew, news sources, or left-wing academics, and I did not even speak out loud the names of any Bolivians or the name of the country itself. I did realize how extreme this was, but I also realized that I needed to take care of myself and avoid spiraling into a mental health crisis. Essentially, I needed a break to process things and release some tension that had been accumulating and stressing me out unnecessarily. James resisted the temptation of talking to me about the latest developments in Bolivia's civil unrest based on what he was seeing on Twitter, and I feel grateful that he respected my wishes.
But just because I refused to engage or discuss doesn't meant I didn't think about Bolivia. I thought about it a whole lot throughout the week I "banned" it. I thought of my research, I thought of my friends, I thought of the life I lived there, I reminded myself that it was the place where I even learned to speak Spanish, the language I use everyday at work, in the first place. My conflicting feelings came from a place of love and, I admit, from frustration that things in life aren't more black and white, simple matters of good versus evil (with me and everyone I care about being good).
Processing my feelings for a week without allowing further confusion and stress to muddle them helped me a lot. The Bolivians in my life mean the world to me, but so does my worldview, and I realized that I was stressed out so much thinking that I could either only have my ideology/self-righteousness or my Bolivian friends and not both. As it turns out, there is nothing that says I can only have one or the other. I can have friends I don't wholly agree with, whom I might not sympathize with in every single way, and I can continue believing in how I think the world should be and let that inform my own personal actions. Even though I've spent a decent amount of time in Bolivia, I can't fully understand how Bolivians are experiencing what is going on in their country because I haven't lived there all my life like they have. Sometimes things come into contradictions with each other, but that's okay, and sometimes in life I can choose one or the other, both, or neither. As I continue growing into myself and navigating the complexities of life, I think I'm going to find myself like this metronome a lot.
We are all undertaking our own personal journeys as individuals trying to make sense of the world around us. Nobody is perfect, and nobody will ever completely fit into my conception of an "ideal person," and that's perfectly fine. My desire to compartmentalize things sometimes makes me forget this, as does my social fear of confronting ideologies that might conflict with my own. I acknowledge that this is something I need to work on. How lucky I am to have a partner, family, and friends who really love me and support me, whether or not they see eye to eye with me on certain matters.
In the meantime, I will continue living my life and being curious about the world, dreaming of the day I return to mi querida Bolivia with a renewed understanding of who I am and my place in this exasperatingly, delightfully complicated world of gray.
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