Sprint to the end of the summer
This will be my last post for the summer related to my research activities. Since I last wrote I have been on the move quite a bit. From July 22-25 I was in San Joaquín de Omaguas for a few last days of work on the language dedicated to the elicitation and identification of flora and fauna terms. I ultimately decided no to take an anticipated trip to San Salvador de Omaguas, a nearby community where Omagua was historically spoken, as I thought that, to make the trip worthwhile (i.e., develop the relations with people there such that they would feel comfortable speaking with me about their past, families and language), I would need more than they one day that I could spare. I also wanted to prioritize the elicitation work I was undertaking, since it will affect the quality of the dictionary we will publish as an appendix to our Omagua grammar. The hike into San Joaquín was, apart from our entry in 2011, the hardest it's been, since there had been a strong rainstorm the previous night (unbeknownst to me in Iquitos), and I arrived in the community caked in mud (and already fighting a fungal infection on my feet!). My work was primarily with Omagua speaker Arnaldo Huanaquiri Tuisima, as he generally commands the most knowledge over Omagua flora and fauna terms, although I was fortunately able to spend the afternoon with speaker Lino Huanío Cabudivo for his 77th birthday. It was nice to be able to chat with him, his sister, wife and daughter over both Inca and Coca Cola. I was put up in the same room I have always had in the community, and was fed twice a day by the cousin of the owner of those lodgings. I was also able to catch up with some of the schoolteachers that had been my neighbors, and there is a new school director who is excited about receiving a copy of our Omagua dictionary (unlike the previous director)!
The day I left, there happened to be a fast boat in the community owned by the Ministry of Education, who was there delivering school supplies. As I wanted to avoid having to hike back out on the trail in a similar condition as when I had come in, I ingratiated myself with them until they offered to take me to Nauta. The typical four-hour peque-peque boat ride takes 50 minutes in a fast boat! I spent the night in Nauta in spare rooms at Radio Ucamara, the director of which is now a friend of mine, before spending Friday morning revisiting the parish archives to finalize some research on the history of San Joaquín de Omaguas. I heard rumors that morning that discontented local workers might wage another strike and close the highway to Iquitos, so I got out of town by around 12PM, since I couldn't afford to spend another day in Nauta, with a flight to Tarapoto from Iquitos on July 27. In the end nothing happened.
I managed to fit in several last-minute errands in Iquitos on Friday afternoon, and prepared for my flight on Saturday. I had originally planned to fly to Tarapoto (which is in the department of San Martín, not Loreto) and then take a car over the mountains to Yurimaguas all in the same day, but various individuals had warned me against taking that highway at night, some because of the danger its curves posed at that time of day (or rather the drivers' handling of them), some because of assaults. Since I was not immediately pressed for time, I decided to spend July 28 (National Independence Day) in Tarapoto, and take a car to Yurimaguas Monday morning, July 29. Tarapoto is located in the selva alta ('high jungle') and has a much more mountainous topography, although the climate is still tropical. Tarapoto has been linked to the rest of the country by road for decades, and has a much more "connected", urban feel, whereas the highway to Yurimaguas has only been in operation since 2008.
My purpose in going to Yurimaguas was twofold. First, it was an easier way to reach the mouth of the Urituyacu river (i.e., than from Iquitos), where I was headed back to in order to work a few more days with rememberers of Omurano. Second, I wanted to poke around Church offices to see if any Jesuit-era linguistic materials survive in archives there. On that Tuesday morning I visited the office of the Vicariato Apostólico de Yurimaguas, which, unlike its counterpart in Iquitos, is run by Passionists, another Catholic sect. The bishop was unable to help me in my search -- i.e., he didn't know anything about historical documents kept in Yurimaguas -- and pointed me in the direction of Father Carlos Murayari Amasifuén, who has taken the keenest interest in the history of Yurimaguas. Unfortunately, it seems that this has been limited to not much more than teasing apart a founding date for the city out of Jesuit records, and dispelling the myth that the name 'Yurimaguas' comes from the fusion of the "Yuris" with the Omaguas, the former a fantastical folk creation. We had a pleasant conversation over coffee on the terrace in the Vicariato that overlooks the Huallaga River, but ultimately I knew more about regional history than he did, and so decided to press on.
I left on a lancha for Nueva Alianza (the community at the mouth of the Urituyacu) on Wednesday, July 31, as I had a commitment to be in the community no later than August 1, and I was already cutting it close! The boat left around 2PM; I had expected to get in to Nueva Alianza around 5AM, but unfortunately we ran aground at about 6PM (not uncommon in the dry season when hard-to-see sandbars get much closer to the surface of the water), and the captain decided to spend the night moored at a community called Progreso, instead of progressing through the night as is customary. I had met a young Welsh guy and his Mexican girlfriend, and so was able to pass the time doing more than lying in my hammock bored!
Upon arriving in Nueva Alianza, I stayed with my friends Gilter Yuyarima Tapullima and Sonia Caritimari Huansi. Gilter is a community leader and Sonia is a local representative for several different regional health initiatives. They are both Kokama, although it is their parents' generation that speak the language still. Previous to this, I had arranged for Juan Macusi Nuribe and his son Rafael Macusi Inuma, who live further up the Urituyacu, to meet me in Nueva Alianza to work for a few more days on Omurano, the language I had originally been researching in June. I wanted to confirm the linguistic data I had elicited from Juan at that time, and also work at a slower pace so as to ensure that the data I had from him was (more or less) all the data there was to be gotten. Furthermore, I had not met his son, Rafael, when I had been on the Urituyacu previously (he was in Nauta), and, as he was the person who got the ball rolling with this work in 2010 by admitting to being ethnically Omurano (before I came to find out about the situation), I wanted to evaluate his own linguistic abilities, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ended up being less developed than his father's. I had agreed to compensate them for the gas they spent getting to Nueva Alianza and what they would spend getting home, as well as paying them each 20 soles a day for two day and gifting them a number of shotgun shells (otherwise known as a really good deal!).
Apart from a few lexical items, however, I was unable to collect any new linguistic data from them, although certain issues in the history of the region and their family became clearer after renewed conversations with them on these topics. They were in general more amiable with me than when I had first been on the Urituyacu, presumably because a certain level of trust was now established in light of my return (a sign of dedication). They were also happy to inform me that there is a word in Urarina, their dominant language, that closely resembles my name (in Spanish: Zacarías), namely 'sakarí', which means 'tree sap'. They liked to call me Professor Tree Sap (Sp. Profesor Resina). They left Nueva Alianza early Sunday morning August 4, but I was not able to catch a boat until Monday, August 5. I passed the time, in part, by showing the new Kokama language music video (Kumbarikɨra) to various people in the community on my iPad, a somewhat surreal juxtaposition of 21st-century technology in a rural Amazonian community. I had to replay it for my hosts four times! Ultimately I was able to give them a copy, as well as a copy of a documentary on Radio Ucamara, on a USB drive they had.
Instead of heading directly back to Yurimaguas, I decided to stop over in Lagunas, on the Huallaga River, arriving their late that Monday night around 11PM, right after the electricity had been shut off for the evening. I stayed at Hostal Samiria, a just-adequate place in what is more or less a frontier town. Founded in 1670 by Father Juan Lorenzo Lucero, a Jesuit, Lagunas was the seat of the Jesuit mission in the region until the final expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. Jesuits of the time had a practice or archiving two copies of all written work, one in Quito (Ecuador), and the other in Lagunas. Although the Jesuits were ordered to burn their archives upon expulsion (one of the greatest losses of documentation of Amerindian languages in history), I was hoping to find a trace of some surviving set of documents, as it is known, for example, that some Jesuits disobeyed these orders and smuggled some of their works back to Europe.
Early last Tuesday morning, then, I headed to the parish house, but unfortunately the parish priest, Róber Linares, was on vacation in Lima! However, the house sitter recommended that I go speak with Jaime Palacio Forcat, who is a member of a Spanish religious sect known as the Corazonistas, and is head of the local religious school. He was much more savvy about regional history than people I had met previously, but told me that, after seven years of searching himself in Lagunas, he had come up with nothing from the Jesuit period. Even the oldest baptismal records in the parish, which I was able to later see back at the parish house following some much needed coffee, only date back to 1913. Since I had the opportunity to catch a fast boat out of Lagunas the same morning, I hurried to the port, and after a brief few hours in the afternoon in which we ran out of gas, made it back to Yurimaguas by around 6PM.
Back in Yurimaguas, I had one day to follow up on a lead on a book 'about Samuel Fritz', the rumored founder of Yurimaguas (which is incorrect), held at the Municipal Library. My trip there was one of the most surreal experiences I've had in Peru. I went in specifically asking the two (batty) librarians if they had anything resembling old, unpublished manuscripts that might be a few hundred years old -- i.e., Jesuit-era linguistic materials from the 17th or 18th centuries. After rummaging on the shelves behind the desk for a few minutes (in Yurimaguas you can't browse the books in the library) they handed me a book published in 1946 on the first 25 years of the Passionist mission there, saying that 'this is more or less from those times'. Seeing as I was not going to get very far with them, I acquiesced to read through some of the materials they had given me, to be polite, but was in the end further astonished by the shoddy scholarship of some local "experts". During the process, one of the librarians came up to me with a large shell that had recently been found by a young girl who is a volunteer at the library, saying to me that this would surely help my research on the history of Yurimaguas! Sometimes it's hard in rural Peru to communicate exactly what (focused) research is, and many presume that you simply want to know anything about a place, no matter where you're from or what you're there to do -- even how big shells are in local lakes!
I got out of there as soon as possible, and spent the rest of the day at Hostal Naranjo, where I had been lodged before and after my trip to Nueva Alianza, doing my own work. Yurimaguas is a fairly unremarkable jungle city (essentially a mini Iquitos), and so by that time I had little desire to go out and explore the place further, despite it being the week of Fiestas Patronales, the week during which they do offensive things like getting locals to dress up in indigenous costumes and pretend to dance indigenous dances that are actually danced nowhere, all in honor of the patron saint La Virgen de las Nieves. Thursday, August 8, I headed back over the mountains to Tarapoto, in a car the driver of which was a crazy French expat who had come to live in this little town between Yurimaguas and Tarapoto because of her 'love of the forest'. Apparently she actually needs some money to live on and so has taken up doing taxi runs a few times a week.
In Tarapoto I went back to the hotel where I had been lodged previously, El Mirador, with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains from its rooftop deck, and spent the rest of Thursday and Friday working and reading, until my (turbulent) flight over the Andes back to Lima on Friday night. Since then I have been at Hotel España, a giant old mansion converted into a meandering hotel run by a loopy old limeña, again doing more work to wrap up things before I head to the airport in a few hours to pick up my friend Alex, who will be joining me on just under two weeks of vacation in Huaraz, Trujillo and Cajamarca. From there we come back to Lima and fly home on August 24. See you all then!
 |
| San Joaquín de Omaguas (Amazon River) July 2013 (good weather in the distance!) |
 |
| Nauta, Loreto, Peru July 2013 (view from Radio Ucamara, Marañón River in the background) |
 |
| Tarapoto, San Martín, Peru July 2013 (view from El Mirador hotel) |
I left on a lancha for Nueva Alianza (the community at the mouth of the Urituyacu) on Wednesday, July 31, as I had a commitment to be in the community no later than August 1, and I was already cutting it close! The boat left around 2PM; I had expected to get in to Nueva Alianza around 5AM, but unfortunately we ran aground at about 6PM (not uncommon in the dry season when hard-to-see sandbars get much closer to the surface of the water), and the captain decided to spend the night moored at a community called Progreso, instead of progressing through the night as is customary. I had met a young Welsh guy and his Mexican girlfriend, and so was able to pass the time doing more than lying in my hammock bored!
Upon arriving in Nueva Alianza, I stayed with my friends Gilter Yuyarima Tapullima and Sonia Caritimari Huansi. Gilter is a community leader and Sonia is a local representative for several different regional health initiatives. They are both Kokama, although it is their parents' generation that speak the language still. Previous to this, I had arranged for Juan Macusi Nuribe and his son Rafael Macusi Inuma, who live further up the Urituyacu, to meet me in Nueva Alianza to work for a few more days on Omurano, the language I had originally been researching in June. I wanted to confirm the linguistic data I had elicited from Juan at that time, and also work at a slower pace so as to ensure that the data I had from him was (more or less) all the data there was to be gotten. Furthermore, I had not met his son, Rafael, when I had been on the Urituyacu previously (he was in Nauta), and, as he was the person who got the ball rolling with this work in 2010 by admitting to being ethnically Omurano (before I came to find out about the situation), I wanted to evaluate his own linguistic abilities, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ended up being less developed than his father's. I had agreed to compensate them for the gas they spent getting to Nueva Alianza and what they would spend getting home, as well as paying them each 20 soles a day for two day and gifting them a number of shotgun shells (otherwise known as a really good deal!).
 |
| Omurano elicitation with Juan Macusi Nuribe and Rafael Macusi Inuma Nueva Alianza, Loreto, Peru August 2013 |
Instead of heading directly back to Yurimaguas, I decided to stop over in Lagunas, on the Huallaga River, arriving their late that Monday night around 11PM, right after the electricity had been shut off for the evening. I stayed at Hostal Samiria, a just-adequate place in what is more or less a frontier town. Founded in 1670 by Father Juan Lorenzo Lucero, a Jesuit, Lagunas was the seat of the Jesuit mission in the region until the final expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. Jesuits of the time had a practice or archiving two copies of all written work, one in Quito (Ecuador), and the other in Lagunas. Although the Jesuits were ordered to burn their archives upon expulsion (one of the greatest losses of documentation of Amerindian languages in history), I was hoping to find a trace of some surviving set of documents, as it is known, for example, that some Jesuits disobeyed these orders and smuggled some of their works back to Europe.
 |
| Laguna, Loreto, Peru August 2013 |
 |
| Catedral de la Virgen de las Nieves Yurimaguas, Loreto, Peru August 2013 |
I got out of there as soon as possible, and spent the rest of the day at Hostal Naranjo, where I had been lodged before and after my trip to Nueva Alianza, doing my own work. Yurimaguas is a fairly unremarkable jungle city (essentially a mini Iquitos), and so by that time I had little desire to go out and explore the place further, despite it being the week of Fiestas Patronales, the week during which they do offensive things like getting locals to dress up in indigenous costumes and pretend to dance indigenous dances that are actually danced nowhere, all in honor of the patron saint La Virgen de las Nieves. Thursday, August 8, I headed back over the mountains to Tarapoto, in a car the driver of which was a crazy French expat who had come to live in this little town between Yurimaguas and Tarapoto because of her 'love of the forest'. Apparently she actually needs some money to live on and so has taken up doing taxi runs a few times a week.
 |
| Tarapoto-Yurimaguas Highway August 2013 |
Comments
Post a Comment