The Irony of Traveling to Preserve Culture.
Instinct woke me an hour before the sun rose to pull the shades up in our lone cabaña and let the windows slowly welcome light into the room. Waking up in Purmamarca was one of the few moments I can remember feeling complete solitude. From my bed, I watched the bright white stars disappear under the orange and pink hued sky as the sun slowly washed over a hill made of seven different colored rocks. I sat on the wood deck with a cup of coca leaf tea and the only thing between me and the hill and the mountains behind it was the sound of roosters waking up in the distance. Soon the neighbor dogs that I named Roberta and Roger, who sensed my presence and came running from the main house in hopes that my pockets were still filled with jerky, laid down at my feet with their bellies to the sky and drifted back to sleep.
Purmamarca is a small village that sits in a deep valley at the foot of the Andes Mountains in the far northwest region of Jujuy. It is hard not to feel that there is nothing but time here. Sitting on the deck in the morning to observe the changing light, walking through rainbow colored hills to admire how the soft pink clay morphs into white limestone or scanning the hundreds of cacti that dot the landscape, almost cartoonish in their bulbousness.
In the Aymara language, purma-marca can be translated in a number of ways. The more literal translation is ‘desert city’ but a local musician explained that desert can be interpreted in a multitude of ways: uncivilized, virgin or untouched by humans. This is the second time that I have traveled to Purmamarca. The first visit was in 2008 when I was an exchange student and backpacked from Buenos Aires to La Paz and spent 6 weeks moving north along the Andes Mountains. To my eyes, the town looked nearly untouched.
According to Sergio, our host in Purmamarca, that first trip was at the beginning of a boom in tourism. In 2003, UNESCO proclaimed neighboring Humahuaca Valley as a World Heritage Site and the area began to flood with tourists. The sudden surge created a welcomed new market for hostels and hotels, artisans, who line the town plaza and the surrounding buildings, and restaurants that sell the area’s most emblematic foods, which include both pre-hispanic and post-colonization dishes: beef or cheese empanadas, tamales stuffed with jerkied beef or llama, a corn and pumpkin tamale called humita and thick stews made with corn, pumpkin or goat.
The adverse effect, according to Sergio, was the acceleration of a process of western modernization that had already begun to plague the largely indigenous population. Younger generations are increasingly disinterested in maintaining traditional farming methods built around historic networks of community farming, seed exchanges and bartering of eggs, meats, grains and produce instead preferring to pivot towards tourism or move to a bigger city to take on a professional trade.
“The younger generation is interested in the occidental version of wealth,” explained Sergio. From his patio he pointed out the three properties that surround him: one a swanky boutique hotel and two other properties where “the next generation is waiting for the parents to die so that they can sell the property to a hotelier.”
Tourism pumps the town with money but with a great irony. Commercializing pre-hispanic culture contributes to the watering down or gradual loss of the heritage that tourism is built to bolster. Hotels hog precious resources. Some are quantifiable, like water that is vital to a desert landscape; half of Sergio’s garden of roughly a hectare was left to dry because of the increasingly disparate distribution of water. I was actually drawn to Sergio’s airbnb because of the most common complaint on the listing: a 30L water tank that needed to be heated briefly before using the shower. Many understood the need to preserve water but still complained that it was unusual, uncomfortable and inconvenient even though their room provided a full view of a vegetable garden drying under the intense sun.
Other lost resources are less tangible until the impact is suddenly undeniable, like the gradual loss of knowledge passed from one generation to the next. When I spoke with Sergio’s next door neighbor, an octegenarian named Concepción, who continues to work as a farm hand with his brother Pastor, he told me that his grandchildren have no idea how to harvest and dry corn and select seeds for the following season.
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I find this difficult not to mourn yet who am I to judge children of the 21st century who want to move away from hyperlocal subsistence culture to embrace the realities of a globalized world? Who am I to impose that responsibility to maintain a culture that is not even mine? When I learned that my daily tamal was likely made with processed corn flour rather than the old nixtamalization method, I had to check my disappointment: to demand that they fuel my desires as a visitor is colonization dressed up differently. It would be absurd to pass judgement on a community of people who are simply reacting to the capitalist model that was imposed onto them.
I do judge, strongly, the mechanisms of tourism that market cultural appreciation while perpetuating the marginalization of already vulnerable populations. Like Sergio’s fight for water or the reality of tourism being an entire community's lifeline. Thirty kilometers north in Tilcara, I spoke with Valeria, who has worked as a street vendor for more than a decade. From the town’s central plaza, she sells woven goods that she sources from artisans from Peru and Argentina. “The people who try to haggle are always foreigners. Argentines rarely ask me to lower my prices,” she explained. “They must think that because we are here in the north of Argentina that the value of our work can be negotiated even though our currency is already incredibly favorable for them and incredibly unfavorable for us.”
Her reference to “north of Argentina'' points to the implications of being brown-bodied and indigenous in an environment that is more visibly ‘third-world’ and the way mostly white tourists perceive her deserved quality of life. Of course, it would be disingenuous to define this dependence on tourism as a trap of their own making. Tourism as a quickly accepted economic opportunity is dependent on years of imposed governance and legislation that neither contemplates thousands of years of indigenous culture and heritage or provides autonomy or opportunities to those communities.
One town over in Maimará, I met with agricultural engineer Javier Rodriguez, who for the last three decades has run a cooperative of more than 100 families that farm indigenous Andean maiz, quinoa and potatoes all across the valley. He lamented over the way that governance legislates and negates crops that have existed in this area for thousands of years. “There are political organizations that argue that there is no need to protect this area from GMO corn because according to them there is no native corn in Argentina, despite scientific evidence and cultural traditions that clearly prove otherwise.” Luckily, to Rodriguez’ knowledge, GMO corn has not yet successfully entered the valley because a strain has not been designed that could adapt to the valley’s unique growing conditions.
Not only is their an absence of protections but national food services demonstrate little understanding (or interest) in the biology of maiz. Maiz pollinates via wind, meaning that one variety can easily pollinate another and create a completely different strain from its parent plants. This might mean changing colors or number of rows of kernels although factors like starchiness, texture and flavor are more consistent and depend largely on the environmental conditions the corn is grown in. Think of the ways that altitude and climate determine wine production and change acidity and sugar levels. All of this, of course, runs counter to the food system’s desire for uniformity and predictability and thus is designed and legislated to encourage producers big and small to switch from native strains to ‘stable’ monocultures.
It is necessary that we really begin to consider what travel means: what is our impact on a place after we have satiated our desire to explore and do so with complete comfort? Humans simply won’t stop traveling — I wouldn’t want that either. Traveling is a basic urge and a great opportunity to understand humanity. But to truly understand humanity through travel requires us to be a little uncomfortable because discomfort is as much a human reality as our necessity to explore the world. This means bartering our experiences, foregrounding absolute comfort and giving communities the autonomy to determine our experiences as guests -- a ten minute shower is just one exchange for a desert vacation. Changing our perception of travel from an individualistic act to a communal one. Maybe then, places like Purmamarca can continue to remain untouched.