Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (56 page)

MESTIZAJE

Dona Maria and don Roberto, and the community they serve, are usually
called, and call themselves, mestizos, mixed people. Mestizaje-being mestizo, de sangre mezclado, of mixed blood-is a complex identity, a form ofhybridity, contradictory and ambivalent. On the one hand, to be mestizo is simply to
have a particular tribal identity; one can be mestizo in the same way as one can
be Shuar, or Yagua, or Ashdninka, or Shipibo. This mestizo identity is defined
by such features as speaking Spanish as one's mother tongue, but often bearing an Indian surname; living by hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture; not sleeping in a maloca, or large communal house in the jungle, but,
rather, in a smaller, open, thatched single-family house on stilts by the river's
edge, often clustered in a caserio, riverine community, with an inevitable soccer field; cutting one's hair in a European style and wearing mostly Europeanstyle clothing. The boundaries of this identity are porous; these features could
apply, more or less, to any other tribal group in a process of acculturation. On
the other hand, the mestizos are haunted by their hybridity, and they often
define themselves specifically in opposition to the nativos, in the process borrowing and applying the terms of European colonialism.

The concept of mestizaje emerged from a colonial discourse that privileged the idea of racial purity and justified discrimination by a complex
quasi-scientific taxonomy of racial mixtures.3 In 1825, W. B. Stevenson, in
his Narrative of Twenty Years' Residence in South America, produced a chart with
twenty-three entries, detailing "the mixture of the different castes, under their
common or distinguishing names," including creole, mestiso, mulatto, quarteron,
quinteron, and chino.4 Here we learn, for example, that the child of an Indian
father and a white mother is one-half white, but the child of a white father
and Indian mother is three-quarters white-testimony to the potency of white
fatherhood.

The geography texts used in Peruvian schools sometimes estimate that io
to 15 percent of the country's inhabitants are "white"-lighter-complexioned
members of the middle and upper classes.s Generally circulated population
figures indicate that Peru's population is 45 percent Indian, 37 percent mestizo, 15 percent white, and 3 percent black and Asiatic.'

For Amazonian peoples, mestizos are the descendants of marriages between immigrant white men and local Indian women. This interaction is conceptualized as the taming-the verb used is amansar, tame, calm downof the wild natives through the attraction of white manufactured goods, and
the seduction of the whites through the potent pusanguerfa, love magic, of
native women.? Unlike North American Indians, Amazonian Indians are not
conceptualized by the dominant culture as having been conquered but, rather,
as having been seduced. The terms of this mutual seduction are compellingon the one hand, manufactured goods; on the other, sexual magic. It is at this
intersection that the mestizo stands.

The idea of mestizaje quickly disintegrates into its social components.
Mestizos and Indians can be visually indistinguishable; some Indians have
European ancestors, and many mestizos do not. The criteria defining these
two groups are cultural and, increasingly, socioeconomic. In general, mestizos are persons of varying degrees of Indian ancestry who are accepted as
participants in the dominant Hispanic culture. Indians, in contrast, adhereor are perceived to adhere-to a different way of life, by their language, their
style of dress, and their outlook, and are assigned a subordinate position in
society. Hispanic whites and Hispanicized mestizos publicly worry from time
to time about the presence of a large mass of indigenous people who are not
assimilated into the national life-most notoriously novelist Mario Vargas
Llosa, who argued that eradication of Indian culture was the sad but necessary
price to be paid for their living a free and decent life.'

Indeed, pervasive social discrimination in Peru is explained and justified
not in terms of race but in terms of cultural differences. This social convention is at the heart of Peruvian racism. Peruvian intellectuals define race with
allusions to culture, the soul, and the spirit, which are claimed to be more important than skin color in determining the behavior of groups of people. This
discourse legitimizes discriminatory practices against indigenous people by
claiming that the discrimination is based not on innate biological differences,
such as skin color, but on cultural ones.9

At the lower levels of the class structure, transition from Indian to mestizo
status is readily accomplished by speaking Spanish and dressing in Western
clothing. In the colonial period, it was basically a matter of language and place
of residence; now, the transition from one culture to another is facilitated by
financial and professional success.'° That such transitions are considered economic rather than racial is evidenced by a saying that is pervasive throughout
South America: El dinero emblanquece. Money whitens.

Nor should we assume that travel across this porous boundary is only in
one direction. While mestizos can be Indians, or the descendants of Indians,
who have shed their ethnic identity to enter the mestizo class, or they can be of Hispanic descent but land-poor, non-Indians can often just as easily become Indians as the reverse." In fact, with the advent of governmental and
NGO assistance for Indian groups, ribereflo communities with predominantly mestizo families have also had reason to present themselves as "native."
One troubling example comes from the Pacaya-Samiria region, where, in the
early i93os, a group of mestizos attacked a native village, killing and driving
away the indigenous inhabitants, and then established a new community on
the same site, which persists to this day. In the early iggos, they successfully
applied, with external assistance, for formal status as a "Native Community"
in order to secure tenure of the lands around their village.12 Such dissimulation is not unknown, in the age of casinos, in North America.

RIBEREIVO CULTURE

There have been relatively few works dealing specifically with the shamanism
of the mestizos in the Peruvian Amazon. The reasons for this lie in the nature
of the ethnographic enterprise. Amazonian history has largely been written
by anthropologists, who have shown little interest in people who are not, in
some obvious sense, indigenous. To the extent that anthropologists like to
construct their subjects as pristine, primitive, and ahistorical, mestizos are
considered acculturated and therefore uninteresting.13 There are other reasons as well. Unlike people who are categorized as indigenous, mestizos have
lacked political and economic organizations to represent them in regional,
national, and international forums.14

If the term mestizo is a social classification, the term ribereflo-derived
from the noun ribera, riverbank-is a cultural one. The term ribereflo, meaning something like "riverbank dweller," is often used interchangeably with
mestizo;15 ribereno culture is the culture of the Peruvian mestizo. But ribereno
culture has spread beyond the social class of mestizos, and includes as well
the descendants of detribalized Amazonian Indians and the descendants of
early immigrants from different areas of Brazil, Peru, and other Andean countries.,' When indigenous people of the Upper Amazon acculturate, they become riberefos.

The term ribereno refers to a distinct rural culture of smallholder farmers,
fishers, hunters, and forest managers.'? They are characterized by Spanish
language; monogamous marriages; lack of overt tribal identification; singlefamily thatched houses on stilts by the water's edge, either singly or in small
village clusters; a subsistence economy of shotgun hunting, net fishing, foraging, swidden-fallow agriculture, small animal husbandry, and wage labor activities; local transportation primarily by dugout canoe; and a religious life
made up ofnoninstitutional folk Catholicism, ayahuasca shamanism, and belief in a wide variety of other-than-human persons inhabiting the jungle and
river.,'

The majority-85 percent-of the rural population of the Peruvian Amazon are known locally as riberenos. Even official native communities have a
mixture of ribereno and indigenous members, all of whom speak Spanish,
wear European clothing, and engage in similar subsistence activities. In such
villages, Spanish is quickly replacing indigenous languages.19 In one such
village, on the Lower Ucayali, the inhabitants all considered themselves riberenos, spoke Spanish, engaged in the same combination of agriculture and
foraging, and were descended from families that had lived along Amazonian
rivers for many generations; yet these riberenos traced their heritage to at
least five different ethnic groups."O In another ribereno community, located
two hours down the Amazon River from Iquitos, the population was descended from three indigenous groups-Cocama, Napo Quichua, and Lamista.21

Riberenos who live close enough to Iquitos, Pucallpa, or any of the larger
villages carry jungle produce-fish, game, turtles, caimans, fruit, cassava,
plantains, hardwood, surf grubs-by dugout canoe or motorized peque-peque to trade for money to buy manufactured goods, primarily clothing, shotgun
shells, cigarette lighters, and batteries for radios and for the flashlights used
for night hunting. A few hours in the vast and crowded Belen market in Iquitos makes clear the tremendous variety and quantity of food brought in from
the jungle to the town.

FIGURE 13. Medicinal plants in the Belk market.

Ribereflos are fond of their own culture; displaced riberenos in Iquitos
think of their jungle riverine environment with nostalgia. I was living with
don Romulo in his jungle hut, and his son had given us a ride in a pequepeque to the mestizo village of Indiana, where there was a rural tavern that
sold distilled fermented sugarcane juice. I was sitting on a log on the bank of
the Amazon River, nursing my glass of aguardiente, when one of the patrons
came and sat beside me, somewhat the worse for wear. He put his arm around
my shoulders and made a grand sweeping gesture, taking in the mighty river,
the amazing sky, the wall of jungle. Ese es paraiso, he said, and liked it so much
he said it again: Ese es paraiso. This is heaven.

The river is of central economic and symbolic significance to the ribereflo.
The river is the major source of food for local people and the main means of
transport. All long journeys, and most short ones, are by dugout canoe; all
settlements are on navigable waters. While there are paths that connect villages on the same side of the river, these tend not to be used for visiting between them; rather, they are an incidental product of hunting trails spreading
out from the villages.

Peque-peque

The term peque-peque refers onomatopoetically to a dugout canoe with an old
Briggs and Stratton outboard motor, which goes pekepekepeke. . . . The outboard motor has a long shaft, five or six feet; when the propeller gets fouled by
weeds, it can be lifted out of the water and turned around into the boat to be
cleaned.

The rivers of the Upper Amazon are filled with a great variety of watercraft,
from dugout canoes to speedboats to co(ectivos, public water taxis. These colectivos can be quite large and, in addition to passengers, haul cargo and livestock
up and down the major tributaries, stopping frequently at tiny ribereno villages, where prospective passengers wave at them from the riverbank. There are
places onboard to hang your hammock, which is a necessity for journeys lasting
several days, as going from Iquitos to Pucallpa. And there is every kind of boat
in between-speedboats with ioo-hp outboard engines, balsa-wood rafts, and
passenger boats with outboard motors, a canopy of canvas or thatched palm
leaves, and benches for twenty or thirty people.

Suri

Suri are the grubs of the palm beetles, Rhynchophorus pa(marum, which grow
in the stumps of chonta palms, primarily Euterpe and Bactris species, that have
been felled to harvest their edible palm hearts. The grubs are fat, pale, curved,
and large-up to five inches long. They are eaten by first using the thumb and
forefinger to crush their mahogany brown head, which has a nasty pair of pincers; slicing the thin skin of the body with the thumbnail and opening it up
lengthwise; plucking out the brown thread of the intestinal tract; and sucking
out the white gelatinous contents. This is considered a great delicacy.

These internal contents are very greasy; I myself do not relish raw surf. But
surf can be readily cooked in a pan, where they fry in their own fat, like bacon.
Fried surf with ajo sacha, wild garlic, can be quite tasty. In markets throughout
the Upper Amazon, vendors with small charcoal barbecues offer surf-on-a-stick.
Famed ethnobotanist James A. Duke says, "Cooked, they are a great treat; better
than fried oysters.",

Duke has proposed the development of renewable suriculture in the Amazon.
Approximately 62 percent of the surf grub is protein. Insect fatty acids are highly
unsaturated. Suri are rich in thiamin, zinc, riboflavin, copper, iron, and niacin.