Dissertation-induced anxiety and the Everyday

Clearly I haven’t been sitting down to blog at quite the rate I did last year – I’m suffering from some blogging blockage I attribute to dissertation-induced anxiety. I am struggling to concretize the issues I’ll be researching next year, and it’s been a little paralyzing on other fronts as well.

What threw me into this tizzy were some significant shifts in the political “coyuntura” (context) that seemed to place some of my initial plans in doubt: many of the programs I was interested in studying appear to have reduced their operations in the wake of deteriorating US-Bolivia relations (The graffiti in this photo reads "El Alto Free from USAID"). But despite these institutional uncertainties, las dramas de la vida cotidiana siguen (the dramas of everyday life go on).

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I recently visited my friend, Erika at her home in Achumani. Achumani is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in La Paz, but like many cities in South America, it is ineffectively cloistered: modest homes like Erika’s abut grand manors, and naked-brick houses cling precariously to the unstable cliff walls that hover above manicured lawns. Erika’s three room, concrete-slab house is still ringed with the stains of last year’s flood; an adjacent canal of sludge and waste-water turned into a churning torrent during the rainy season, filling their home and washing away a neighbor’s.

As I mentioned in a post last year, Erika was sent by her mother to work for a wealthy family in La Paz when she was a child -- in exchange for an education. As she approached the end of high school, however, the mother of the family convinced her that a diploma was unnecessary. Erika has since struggled to find work, serving for a time as a secretary at a gym before returning to her post as a household servant for the same family.

That particular day – a Sunday, Erika’s only day off – I arrived to find Erika making my favorite dish, rellenos de postre (a relleno de postre is a thick ball of plantains, filled with a ground meat center and deep-fried -- and sometimes served with peanut sauce).

Erika’s hands moved swiftly, slicing potatoes and plopping the slivers into frying oil, peeling tomatoes and carving apart hot peppers, flowering chicken, and patting smashed banana into her cupped palm before filling it with hamburger meat and forming the lumpy globes of the rellenos. “Susan, I am so unhappy,” she flatly told me. As she spoke, she dipped the baseball-sized rellenos into egg batter and then again into frying oil.

She explained to me that after lunch we needed to go visit Tina, a mutual friend and one of the adult children in the family where Erika is employed. Tina is also the godmother of Erika’s son, Nicolas (it’s not uncommon to have wealthy patrons who also serve as godparents, and I have wrestled with clarifying expectations and the implications of such relationships as I have become a godmother to three Bolivian children myself). Erika explained “The pretense is for you to go visit too and for Tina to see her godson, but really she wants me to prepare lunches for the week, even though it’s my day off. So you two will visit, and I will work in the kitchen on her meals.”

Sure enough, when we arrived, Tina invited me in, had me take a seat in the cold, pristine living room, and ushered Erika and her 14-year-old daughter Alita into the kitchen to start cooking. Tina and I chatted a bit about my research and her job, as Nicolas raced around the expansive apartment.

Eventually Tina invited me into the kitchen, where she began correcting Erika’s cooking and commenting on Erika’s life, looking to me for agreement. Her tone was friendly but patronizing, that of a good benefactor who knows best: “Erika should leave her husband Hector,” Tina asserted, “He’s a good-for-nothing who mistreats her and controls her life.” “But,” Tina continued, “a person stays with a bad man like that because she wants to. Erika isn’t being strong enough. She should leave her controlling, abusive husband, but she doesn’t have the willpower. Who does he think he is anyway? They are living on my uncle’s land. It’s not even Hector’s house!”

As I sat there awkwardly sipping orange juice and rubbing my eyes for all the smoke and onions, Tina tried to get me to concur. When Tina turned away, Erika caught my attention and exaggeratedly rolled her eyes.

As we walked home, Erika began to vent her frustration at Tina’s interpretation of her decision to stay with Hector. “Yes, I’m unhappy,” she said, “but Tina doesn’t understand. You want me to leave him? When you pay me so little I can barely afford my bus fare?! Hector may be jealous and controlling, but we never want for food. How would I live if I left him? With what money? I need Hector’s salary to help put food on the table.”

Erika insisted that the real reason Tina encourages her to leave Hector isn’t so much about being protective; it’s because she wants Erika to work for the family full-time, to no-longer feel the tug to be home attending to her husband. But that, Erika told me, “would be the worst kind of prison.”

Erika longingly spoke of finding “meaningful work” and pointed to the offices of UNICEF: “If only I had something that filled me up – that was meaningful. I could handle Hector’s jealousy and controlling ways, the ways he prevents me from having any other friends. I could handle being poor. Even if it was just bringing people tea, at least people would talk to me. As it is all day I just sit [in the servant’s quarters] waiting for someone to call on me.”

Our painful conversation, Erika’s struggle with depression, and her ongoing decision to remain with her husband gave me a window into some of the criticisms I have been hearing about gender-based non-profit organizations and foreign aid in Bolivia.

Much of recent gender-oriented programming in Bolivia has been channeled into such things as amplifying political space for women, creating gender quotas for political parties and training women for leadership positions. It’s focused on changing laws and then getting women in power.

But friends in El Alto have regularly criticized what sounds like a wonderful objective – to get women into positions of power and leadership. They tell me that these programs do not really address women’s everyday experience of violence and curtailed opportunities. Moreover, they say, most of the gender-oriented NGOs have become résumé -fillers for middle-class women. Middle-class NGOs claim to be the protagonists of change and “speak” on behalf of poor Alteña women, my friends tell me, while continuing to ignore those same women when they encounter them in the halls of power (e.g. Congress) or when they find their approach to politics crude and unruly. That may be an unfair characterization of gender advocates who feel deeply committed to their work, but I am finding it to be a common perception among friends nonetheless.

One friend, who works for the municipal government of El Alto, has further criticized the proliferation of gender-focused programs for merely creating a new set of patronage networks. Clientalism and patronage systems are endemic in Bolivia. Now, my friends seem to be saying, the fight for pega (political appointment) has just extended through these new gender-based positions: it's about getting one’s “people” into the offices for gender relations in municipal governments and NGOs.

In such a context, one begins to wonder: “Does it make a difference to have a ‘new girls’ network’ – to restructure patronage networks around women’s and gender issues? Does it get different people (that is, women) in power?” What consequences do gender programs, nascent, gender-based patronage networks, and quota systems make in lives like Erika’s? And in that mix, What are the boundaries between patronage and friendship, and how are those relationships mediated by (fictive kinship) ties like godparenting? How am I implicated?