Danger, Fulfillment, and Responsibility in a Violence‐Plagued Society

Abstract

********** Something was not right about the bustling and vibrant market district of Huancayo, the commercial heart of the central Andean highlands of Peru. I had been away for several days, and my spirits usually soared when I returned to Huancayo's busy streets. Its streets teemed with ambulantes (street vendors) selling nearly every type of product and offering almost any imaginable service. Despite the dire material conditions of most ambulantes and the economic crisis and political violence that gripped Peru in the late 1980s, the colors, sounds, and smells of the market were infectious. I knew many ambulantes and savored the warmth with which they enveloped me. Although the streets appeared as crowded as always today, the air was dense with tension. When I turned the corner to Mantaro Street, I was relieved to see my comadre (relative through baptism), Quispe Colonio. (1) Her stand shimmered as the high-sierra sun reflected off a colorful display of tomatoes, peppers, onions, limes, and other fresh produce. We greeted one another with an embrace, but Mamita held me more tightly and longer than usual, her weatherworn face more somber than I recalled. She pushed the thin and worn cushion on which she had been seated to her side and patted it, indicating that I should join in her morning routine of peddling vegetables to the consumers hurrying by. Sitting down, I asked Mamita about her morning sales. Mala, muy baja, she answered. Sales for everyone were down. Certainly the national economy was in deep crisis as Peru was ostracized from the international financial community. It was also embroiled in a brutal civil war that was especially severe in the highlands. But then she pointed diagonally across the street to an empty stand. A tragedy had befallen the companera who usually sold low-cost manufactured items: toilet paper, shoelaces, toothpaste, and thread. During my absence her companera's two young children had pulled out a package stashed at an otherwise unoccupied stand. The package had exploded, killing the children as their mother and other ambulantes looked on. This tragedy occurred in 1987, while I was conducting fieldwork for my dissertation on the process of economic informalization in Latin America, drawing on case studies of street commerce in seven Peruvian cities (Figure 1). Lamentably, the tragedy was not out of the ordinary at the time. Unwittingly, I found myself conducting fieldwork among those who were living within a low-intensity conflict. In little time I was convinced that a painstakingly devised research methodology was inadequate to capture what I had elected to study. Today, as then, my work analyzes ground-level activity and related political-economic processes that operate at larger scales--neoliberal restructuring and economic globalization. By investing myself in the everyday settings and lives of women street vendors, at-home informal laborers, and war survivors, I have learned far more about the value of fieldwork to understanding political-economic relationships and the daily reality of those who live them. Writing about this current work and past experiences, I want to suggest how fieldwork informs important phenomena in ways otherwise impossible to see and survey. FINDING THE FIELD I found geography late in my student life--at the doctoral level. To my studies I brought passion for things Spanish (the language, art, literature, history, mythology, and landscapes of the Spanish-speaking world) and an especially deep concern for the social, political, economic, and environmental issues that plague Latin America. This was shaped by training in foreign languages and social sciences at Middlebury College and less formally through a junior year in Spain, a season teaching skiing in Chile, an interlude exploring the Southern Cone, summer research in a Mayan village, and a modest career teaching Spanish and history in college-prep schools. …