Word: paz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first view of La Paz, Bolivia's capital and largest city, approached from the west, is perhaps one of the most spectacular moments in world travel. From the border with Peru the bus jaunts along a stumbly dirt road for three hours through the barren spaces of the altiplano, the 14,000-foot-high plateau that covers the western third of Bolivia. Above the tree line, this gaping wasteland is broken only by the occasional adobe huts and the surrounding protective adobe walls of the Aymara Indians, who have scratched out a living here for countless centuries. Soon the huts...
...fall away abruptly into a bottomless chasm. Black craggy walls slope sharply down into the bowels of this deep crater, where shiny steel skyscrapers beckon mystically in the clear sunny air. Spread out below and beyond, extending almost to the snow-capped Andean peaks in the distance, sparkles La Paz, a booming city seemingly dropped from space into a lunar landscape...
...review, Octavio Paz described Los Olvidados as "implacable as the silent march of lava." I can't imagine a more apt metaphor to convey its impact. Famous scenes: the gang of young boys tormenting a blind man; Pedro's dream (more powerful and more complex than any described by Freud); the "second chance" offered by the liberal reformatory...
...conflict of cultures demands a political choice on the part of artists, who help mold cultural change. The imitators of foreign art ally themselves with foreign exploitation, both cultural and economic. Octavio Paz wrote that Mexican imitators of the European novel presented "a rather sketchy and superficial image" of the Mexican landscape in contrast to the "somber, intoxicating grandeur" suggested in the description of Mexico by European novelists D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry...
0PPOSING the sterile Mexican novelists described by Octavio Paz is Paz himself. Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda--with Paz, the finest and most influential of the Latin American poet-politicians--are dead now, but younger writers are following their example...