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Abstract
Processes of subordination and racialization that legitimate social hierarchies are produced in everyday face-to-face interactions. In the southern Peruvian Andes, interactions among individuals whose linguistic backgrounds are Quechua, Spanish or both are permeated by evaluation of racial status. This article looks at the interactions between both Quechua-speaking villagers and Spanish-speaking city dwellers who board a combi (minivan) to travel and share the same space for over 180 days a year. In their everyday interactions they build up subtle shifting boundaries through the debasement of interlocutors. In this process, boundaries that organize interaction are not constituted through categorical labels (e.g. Indian, cholo and mestizo) or self-ascription, as Barth (1969) posited long ago; rather, boundaries are constituted through the ascription of racialized attributes to subordinate interlocutors and claim a superior position. Such a process shows how relations of social oppression are produced and are part of the interactional order.
Acknowledgements
This study was possible through research grants from the National Science Foundation, Mary Malcomson Raphael Fellowship, Inter-American Grassroots, Ford Foundation, and Presidential Fellowship at Rutgers University. I thank to Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Claire Insel, Bruce Mannheim, Andrew Shryock, and Tom Stephen; and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. Any errors remain mine.
Notes
1. As Coronil (Citation2000, 352, 370) pointed out, neoliberal globalization ‘polarizes, excludes and differentiates’ and leads to the ‘degradation of human lives’.
2. For example, the television show La Paisana Jacintta depicts Quechua-speaking women as stupid, dirty and ugly (YouTube Citation2009). See also Salomon and Niño-Murcia (Citation2011, 145, 196) for evaluations of villagers’ practices as backward, as well as linguistic discrimination. Further, according to some congresspersons in the Peruvian parliament, aboriginal languages are worthless, as are their speakers (YouTube Citation2008).
3. Kinzler and Dautel Citation2011 show that language can be a more salient (potent) marker of social discrimination than visual physiognomy.
4. Quechua is in italic boldface and Spanish in italic.
5. Perez et al. (Citation2008) explain that speakers are aware of the vowel systems only through conscious stereotypes; nonetheless, the stereotypes do not reflect actual phonetic differences between first-language speakers of the two languages (Quechua or Spanish) nor the actual social indices. They suggest that the conscious ‘folk’ representation is empirically wrong.
6. The nature of local (‘native’) categories, their links to broader folk theories of race and racialization, and the question of their appropriateness of their use by scholars as analytical categories are beyond the scope of this paper. Nonetheless, we must be wary of uncritically importing local categories to analyse how processes of subordination and ethnic racialization are produced.
7. I am using the ancient name of the village.
8. On trains, Quechua villagers were permitted to ride only in cattle cars (Kintner Citation1950).
9. Combis usually seat ten to twelve people, but are usually overcrowded during rush hour. The vans are about 1.40 m high, so commuters without a seat cannot stand up straight.
10. The law to segregate bus passengers in Alabama was passed in 1900 through a city ordinance. For a history of racial segregation of bus passengers and the fight against it, see Kelley Citation2010.
11. Agricultural production is not subsidized as in the USA or in France (e.g. in the Pyrenees farmers receive back almost 85 per cent of their costs (personal conversation with farmers, 2010)).
12. I sat behind the driver's seat during these combi rides so that I could observe all the passengers. One day a couple of maestros asked me to move because I was momentarily sitting on a reserved seat. I moved without saying anything and sat back in ‘my’ place. To them I was a stranger. By riding the combi I am participating in the system because I occupy a seat, but I did not intervene in the verbal interactions or discussions.
13. Villagers are viewed as either subhuman, or not deserving of life. Evaluating the deaths of two protesters against the mining corporation Xstrata-Tintaya, who were from Espinar (highland Peru), Congresswoman Alcorta said in a phone interview aired on television that they too deserved to die. And two protesters died at the hands of the police (YouTube Citation2012).
14. Machali stated: ‘ Pruphisurkuna apanaypaq dirikturwan parlarani, chayraykulla haykumuni ’ (‘I agreed with the school principal to transport the teachers, because of that I come to Cuzco’ (fieldwork notes 2009–10)).
15. Seeing Machali as an immoral person runs the risk of echoing nineteenth-century Liberal discourse in which ‘Indians’ were considered as minors unable to represent themselves (see Guerrero Citation1997). But Machali himself is treating his fellow villagers as minors, in that he is privileging his contract with maestros over the villagers.
16. In the village, the situation is different: Machali faces no social punishment; he works with his extended kin, and those who are not part of his kindred may at most choose not to work with him.
17. Malcriado means a poorly raised, uneducated and uncivil person.
18. For insights on the notion of civility and civilization, see Elias (Citation2000). For a discussion on how categories emerge during interactions, see Stokoe (Citation2008).
19. This ideology of inferiority attributed to native people reflects national images about the highlands. For example, the former prime minister Kuczynski under former president Todelo also argued: ‘Los Andes [son] lugares donde la altura impide que el oxígeno llegue al cerebro’ (‘The Andes [are] places in which the high altitude impedes proper oxygenation of the brain’) (El Morsa Citation2006).
20. Many women have experienced mistreatment while riding the combi and they now try to ride it in silence to deflect any possible complaint from agents. Even when villagers do not speak, they would be recognizable by the way in which they handle their body (which is synchronized by (and to) the rhythm of their language), or by visual cues such as q'ipi (bundles). A well-recognized finding of social psychologists and interactional sociolinguistics is that interactants converge on a single rhythm in (‘interactional synchrony’), which fits the rhythmic matrix of their dominant language. Because the rhythmic systems of Quechua and Spanish are distinctly different, it is sometimes possible to identify the primary language of an individual from their non-verbal behaviour. This is often accompanied by other non-verbal cues (physiognomy, dress, hairstyle, etc.).
21. Male villagers must also accommodate agents’ requirements, but these confrontations usually take place in formal and public meetings. Although men travel to the city of Cuzco, most do so alone: they are not in charge of taking care of children nor of retailing, and thus they return home by any means (e.g. trucks). Women travel to the city of Cuzco to buy or sell food supplies with their youngest child. If they do not catch the combi service the same day to return home, they travel early the next morning, in which case they encounter agents. I contend that women face additional discrimination because they are regarded as the sole party to comply with agents’ ideas regarding ‘civilized modes of living’, not only by (male and female) agents, but sometimes by their own husband and other male villagers. The role of gender in this act of discrimination deserves more space in another essay.
22. From my seat I could see the passengers (see ). Everybody could hear the shouting.
23. In public transportation during rush hour, it is unrealistic to expect the personal space that one otherwise maintains in many cities around the world.
24. She could have decided to challenge the man's complaint, but the collective experience that villagers have had in such interactions has shown an unpromising course of action.
25. Staring is unusual among Quechua-speaking villagers. It would be interpreted as disrespectful and an interference into another person's business.
26. In this context, looking straight at someone who claims a superordinate position is a challenging act.
27. Some female villagers told me: ‘ Millayta qhawakunku, mayninpi mana imanaykuta atinkichu ’ (‘Passengers give awful looks; sometimes you don't know what to do’).
28. Huayhua's (Citation2010) study (based on an experimental task – the matched guise test – shows that Spanish–Quechua bilinguals of all social backgrounds are able to identify the first language of a speaker from the relative aperture of the speaker's vocal tract, regardless of which language they are speaking.
29. V4 is a villager who travels to Uqhururu as a peddler.
30. In Spanish, the T (informal or intimate) pronoun is used by members of the upper class to address people whom they consider to be lower class. In turn, these people should use the V (formal) pronoun to address the upper-class people. In addition to class, the V form also signals distance among strangers.
31. Villagers’ spoken Spanish still carries some characteristics of the Quechua language.
32. Villagers have shifted from Quechua to Spanish since the 1980s; currently there are two villages in which Quechua is the main language of communication.
33. Even were the villagers to object to the mining operations in Spanish, the company would likely push the villagers off their land with the state endorsement.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Margarita Huayhua
MARGARITA HUAYHUA is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, with affiliation at Goldsmiths College, University of London.