Migrant Flesh: Head-Choppers, Eye Pluckers and Foreigners

Abstract

In September of 1987, a panic peaked in the Peruvian Andes town of Huamanga, region of Ayacucho, when a young travelling salesman from the town of Huancayo was lynched by a group of shantytown dwellers. They accused him of being a ?ak 'aq, the Quechua bogeyman who is said to extract fat from human beings in order to use it as an ingredient in the making of church bells or in medicines. His companions barely escaped the violence meted out to their fellow pilgrim. Though the man tried to convince his assailants that he was. at bottom, just like them, without much money, a Peruvian, an Andes dweller, his exhortations were disbelieved. As in a folk tale gone awTy, the hero in peril didn't possess the magic phrase, the secret password. When they took him prisoner, the young man tried to move his captors by saying to them, humble like my parents are humble people like yours. His protests met with the following reply: you're like us, let's see you speak in Quechua. I don't know Quechua because F m from Huancayo, but I'm a worker, just like you. (Portocarrero Maisch 55) His linguistic mark of difference, his ethnic admixture, could not efface itself, and the traveler was beat to death with machetes and stones. Such is the fate of ?ak 'aqs, also known in Spanish as pishtacos, in innumerable Quechua folk tales, wherein the carnal but otherworldly being is seen not as a hero but as a villain and monster who. like the dangerous ancestor called gentil, must be destroyed at all costs. It made little difference that the physical appearance of the traveler was much closer to that of his assailants than to the monster he was supposed to be an incarna? tion of. When the social need for aliens is great enough, the metamorphosis will take place in the realm of the actual, the way it does in the oral traditions that delimit the extremes of what is possible. Belief in the ?ak'aqs existence is widespread. In the vivid distillation of tradition, his arms are powerful, his face purple, his eyeballs bloody, his violet beard and hair long and tangled, his robe flowing, his head wrapped in red cloth, and his long knife, used for purposes of swift decapitation, hangs from a stout leather belt. His terrific appearance is attenuated only by the fact that he is mortal, that he can, with an effort, be killed. If the gods of Quechua belief are fallible, all the more vulnerable are its supernatural beings, who forever wait to be dispatched into another form, either more or less animate. The ?ak 'aq propagates himself only through the single son he is able to have. The folklorist Efra?n Mor?te Best gives a succinct description of his habitual activities.