Word: aymara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Newton would pass through neighborhoods separated not by miles but by centuries. In the distance one walks to get from the McDonald's in Central Square to the Brigham's in Harvard Square, a Bolivian could walk from the luxury hotels of downtown LaPaz to the adobe huts of Aymara Indians who chew cocoa leaves and eat dried potatoes like their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Ill-clad Indian children sell two joints of marijuana for ten cents behind the 35-story Hilton Hotel in downtown Bogota, Columbia, and recently-arrived mothers from the mountains beg in the shopping...
...today, it is estimated to be close to 600,000. The annual per capita income in Bolivia is an astoundingly meager $200, the lowest in South America. The bulk of this poverty is concentrated in the wind-swept altiplano that surrounds La Paz. For centuries the Aymara lived here in isolation, speaking their own Indian tongue and showing a hostile back to any intruders. However, with each passing year, improved transportation and communication led to increased contact with the city, and the peasants became less and less willing to live, as their ancestors did, on a bare subsistence diet...
...through the crowds that moved in a relentless parade up and down the streets. A fat peasant woman, her small son sketching in a layer of flour beside her, looked up from her knitting and, as I passed, called out in the guttural Spanish that many of the assimilated Aymara speak, "Harina barata, muy barata"--Flour, very cheap. I looked at her and smiled. Sensing a potential customer with mucho dinero, she put down her knitting and tried to entrap me: "Solamente tres pesos por kilo. No puede encontrar mejor"--Only three pesos, you can't find better. I mumbled...
...from eucalyptus branches, a woman chatted away with a friend who carried a bag, on her way to buy some rice or vegetables for lunch. As she talked the seated woman smoothed out the shiny folds of her yellow skirt, long and puffy in the traditional manner of the Aymara. In contrast to the men, very few of the women have changed to modern dress...
...with the small leaves that the Bolivian Indians chew as part of a tradition dating back millenia. On the altiplano, where the nights are wintry and food scarce, the coca leaves, when chewed hour after hour, help to drive out the cold and to kill one's appetite. These Aymara no longer live on the altiplano, but it is still cold at night and food is far from plentiful. Shipped in hugh quantities from the jungle, the coca sells for incredibly cheap prices; a peso (five U.S. cents) will buy you a six-ounce bag. The women sit implacably behind...