What is a Colonial Legacy?

I want to talk about colonialism. Colonial legacy. History. From the outside, hearing MAS’s anti-colonialism discourse causes eyes to roll. That was the past. Get on with it. Your country would be doing better if you chummed up with the “imperialists.” And yet, after this weekend’s whirlwind through Uyuni, Potosi, and Sucre, I lie in rended state. We visited a small town just outside of the Salar (salt flat), where our day guide took us through a small, huddled building where a man next to a finger of flame, deftly sealing little plastic bags of natural salt for tourists. Deftly. Years of practice. A lifetime of selling little baggies to tourists, huddled over a chemical flame. It’s usually a familiar business. Son following father, daughter – her mother. Living off single Boliviano tips from gringos. That seems wrong. Is that wrong, or am I imposing my version of happiness upon them? I have questions about legacy and continuity.

In Potosi we learned more about colonial history. Potosi is the mountain of silver that, in large part, funded the Spanish empire. Thus, the amount of colonial wealth in Potosi, concentrated in the hands of a few, is boggling. We visited a convent where we learned about the social reality of its Catholicism and aristocracy at the time. Second daughters, if the family was able, would be married to Christ as she joined the convent. Along with this, the family of the daughter would give a fantastic dowry to the convent. The wealth we passed in that museum seemed impossible, and when I considered that possibly the same mining families were still picking away at Potosi in a game of odds, it hurt. We passed paintings and woodworks and textiles that demonstrated the religious, colonial syncretism conducted at the time period as a means of converting the local people. Mother Mary as Pachamama, them as the mountain Potosi itself, as if working in the silver mines somehow brought one closer to the Virgin’s embrace. Syncretism as a means to an end, yet an end with lasting consequences. The mountain Potosi today is beginning to collapse, unconscious of the poor who toil in its tunnels for scraps of silver. I was beginning to sympathize with the anti-colonialist rhetoric, with the patriotic vision of what Bolivia could have been, but was leeched of. Maybe I’m empathizing too much, going “native.” Does this mean I’m tainted? Can ethnographers and anthropologists be partial? How can they not be?

In Sucre, the final city of our trip, we finally sound warm weather and parrots (some kind of red-fronted/faced). We visited a couple of museums, but what struck me most was the tranquility of it. Monotone white, quiet streets, children playing in a well-kept park. It felt foil to La Paz, and historically, it in fact is. It has a politically tenuous relationship with the government, resulting from the partial move of the Bolivia’s capital city to La Paz. And so another part of the colonial legacy: politics. The fractured nature of Bolivia, both socially and politically, can be traced back to conflicts of interests such as these. Surely not all; history is rarely so simple, but certainly part.

So we arrive at my well of muddy thoughts. There’s poverty and inequality in Bolivia. There are so many regional patriots and disparities. Potosi is still mined by those with no other alternative, yet its wealth has largely left. Maybe that’s an appropriate metaphor for Bolivia’s colonial legacy: an empty Potosi. Actually that's probably ridiculous, and I should simmer down. More calmly, the reality of then's Bolivia created the cultures we find today. Bolivia’s Carnival, its political fractiousness, its syncretic Christianity, its policies, its Evo Morales. I know that I haven’t put forth anything constructive in this post, but I’ve only just left the spin stick on the ground and am oh so dizzy from the dance. Bolivia has so many dances (literally). Can they step to the same beat?