A story:

Lake Titicaca is where the Sun and Moon were born. Ages ago before the first light, bizarre ugly animals without eyes roamed the earth in darkness. Then from the deeps of the Lake, a force that had been fermenting for an eternity exploded out of the water in the form of the Sun and Moon. The blinding light killed all of the creatures instantly and Pachamama was made inhabitable for humans. The Sun sent down a son and the Moon a daughter and together they populated the shores of the Lake with the Aymara.


A myth like this has evolved over the course of tens of thousands of years. It is an extension of the land, having sprouted from the soil with the people themselves. It has changed and adapted slowly from generation to generation, passed down orally from father to son, mother to daughter, on rowboats, around bonfires. The Aymara say they have been in the same place pretty much forever – and who am I to tell them otherwise? – but more likely there has been a succession of different civilizations rising and disintegrating and forming anew, and with each transition a myth such as this changes to suit its new people and provide them with a new narrative to live their lives.


When the Incan Empire conquered the region, they did not care what you believed or how you worshipped so long as you paid your taxes and did the jobs the Incans told you to do. The Aymara maintained culture autonomy for the most part, although the Sun – the Supreme God of the Incans – likely began to take a more prominent role in their mythology. The Spanish Empire worked a bit differently. They did care what you thought and how you worshipped, and they invested a lot of effort in gently convincing their new colonies to accept Jesus Christ into their lives. Among their tactics for conversion were torture and rape. The Aymara mythology began to evolve further, adapting to accept certain aspects of Catholicism and reject others.

This abandoned mining center is still owned by one of the richest mining bosses in the country and the Aymara are unable to develop the land; as our payment to the community for our stay, we donated $800 towards the cause of buying the land back

It is impossible to tease out which aspects of the Aymara stories are Catholic and which are Incan and which are whatever else. Sometimes Jesus in the son of the Sun, other times he walked out of the Lake. Sometimes the Sun floods Lake Titicaca to punish the people and thirty-six pairs of animals are gathered on a raft. Other times the Sun lights the whole world aflame or turns the people to stone. The stories differ from community to community, island to island, from one side of the lake to the other. In the end it doesn’t matter what is Catholic and what is Incan and what remains from before – it is all Aymara now.

Indigenous women in the Andes were forced to wear boulder hats under colonial Spain; now they wear them both out of imposed tradition and as a proud symbol of their liberation and perseverance

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We spent five days living in a small Aymara village on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world. I lived with a family of four about a quarter mile from the beach. I slept on a bed of eucalyptus leaves in a room that used to be the chicken coop. In the morning I ate barley powder mixed with hot celery tea. Lunch and dinner was potatoes, soup, and bread. Occasionally we ate bananas and one night my father caught a fish from the lake. It was more bones than anything else, but it tasted nice.


It rained every night, the loudest I’ve ever heard. There was no space between the drops on my tin roof. I tried to sleep through a deafening static. The lightning split the sky like a hammer to a glass windshield. It was the most apocalyptic five nights of my night; I actually felt closer to the sky.



My father Demetrius was a really solid dude. He had face carved by a lifetime under the sun and had a voice like Kermit the Frog. Once upon a time he built the house the family lived in. He played the flute like a madman. My mother Esmerelda was also a classy lady. She spent several hours a day peeling potatoes and making fire and boiling water and cooking soup. When I first shook her hand her skin felt like hard leather. I later realized why: the Aymaran women handle scalding iron pots and pans without oven mitts. But I never once saw her flinch. She didn’t speak any Spanish, like most of the women in the village, so we didn’t do a whole lot of talking, but she laughed at me as I learned basic Aymara words from Demetrius. Maya means one, Paya means two. Uma means fire, Nina means water. I thought I was saying these words correctly, but my gringo-ness was the source of endless hilarity.

My dad

I also had a brother and a sister. My sister never once looked at me, I’m not sure why, but she let me herd the sheep up the side of a mountain with her one morning. I felt slightly immasculated as this portly teenage girl jogged up effortlessly as I sat heaving between my legs every few minutes. My brother had bleached streaks in his hair and liked to play Rock Band on his PlayStation loudly every morning. When I told him I played music he brought me his out-of-tune bass guitar and I played him Day Tripper by the Beatles. My siblings were both around twenty years old, a rarity in a community where more and more the young people are leaving to find work in the cities.


Everyone in the community had a cell phone. Many of them had electricity and a few families had televisions. They mainly wore jeans and sneakers and wool sweaters, saving their traditional clothing for special occasions and ceremonies. Despite these industrialized luxuries, they still continue the culture of their ancestors.


They have their music, a mix of flutes, panpipes and drums. The music sounds like it came from the earth, having been chiseled slowly by weather and time like the mountains themselves. In the city we have our music that is modeled after sounds we buy on CDs and the blips and bleeps of the industrialized world. But on the shores of the lake music evolved as an imitation and extension of nature. Whoever made that first melody had only heard the lake, the rain, the thunder, the wind, and the songs of other animals.


They have their dance, although for them dance and music and not separate entities: one requires the other. Legs and arms and bodies twisting are just music made visible. Dancing is always done in a circle, perhaps the most sacred symbol of the Andes. The circle represents the Unity of the Diversity. All is different but All is One. In Aymara there is no word for “equality.” It is not a category that existed because, until the arrival of the Spanish, they felt no need to label anything equal or unequal. Everyone existed as a point on a circle, each point different but no point further or closer from the center than any other. To us the circle, as in King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, is a symbol of equality, because King Arthur was reacting against the hierarchy that already existed in society. But to the ancient Aymara the circle was the truth of the world in geometric form and it was never debated. No words needed to exist to describe it.


The Aymara also continue their belief of chachawarmi, a belief somewhat similar to Yin-Yang. Chacha is the female force and warmi is the male force, each permeating every facet of the Universe. It is an example of the Andean concept of the complementarity of opposites. Male and female, left and right, up and down, day and night; all these things only exist in relation to each other. They seem like opposites, but really one needs two opposites to make a whole, like two poles on a magnet. The Aymara do not see the world in black and white but different shades of grey; the terms “good” and “evil” did not exist until the arrival of the Spanish. This concept of 2 = 1 is another aspect of the Unity of the Diversity.



Chachawarmi is not just an abstract, philosophical concept. It is played out in every action the people take although they may not be consciously aware of it. I am only able to understand the most obvious instances, such as when the men and women drink in separate circles or when the men dance in an outside circle and women dance in the inside circle. But more than this the concept informs and reinforces the gender roles in Aymara society: the women cooking and cleaning, dancing and singing, the men fishing and building, playing the instruments. It would be easy to call this an example of inequality because that is the lens through which we are used to viewing relations in the United States. But remember that the category of equality/inequality is not an objective quality, but is socially constructed. For the Aymara men and women exist to complement each other, not to be equal and therefore the same.

Perhaps my favorite way chachawarmi is expressed in the culture is through Aymara music. The Aymara use a seven-note scale for all of their melodies. They use quenas (flutes), zamponyas (panpipes), and drums. I am simplifying this significantly because there are many classes and sizes of flutes, panpipes, and drums. Some of the flutes and panpipes are four feet long. Anyway, when a song includes panpipes, two people are required to play the melody with two separate panpipes, because neither panpipe has all seven notes. One might have four, the other three; one five, the other two. In order to play a fluid melody, the sound alternates between the two players. When one listens to Aymara music on headphones, the sound of the panpipes bounces back and forth between the left and right channels. While it is only men who play instruments, one set of panpipes is the female force, and the other is the male force. It is a beautiful way to look at the world: the interplay between opposites is needed to advance the melody of the Universe.

They have their coca as well. Coca is chewed by everyone in the community during rituals and during work. Men chew with men, women chew with women. One takes a handful of coca, makes the sign of the cross, and offers their coca to someone else. It’s all about reciprocity. The sign of the cross would seem to be a Catholic import, but there also exists an Andean cross which predates Jesus. Who knows how these two symbols play out in the minds of the Aymara? Coca leaves and many other herbs are burned as an offering to the Pachamama. When the fire is lit, one takes a bottle of extremely hard alcohol called aguardiente (fire water) and pours a few drops on all four sides of the fire, one for each direction. Nowadays cigarettes and weird plastic confetti are also burned. Culture always changes and adapts; the Aymara have come to accept Jesus, plastic, and cigarettes into the traditions of their ancestors, but in ways no one could have predicted.

And so culture perseveres and transforms. It is always staying the same and always changing, the interplay of opposing forces colliding to create new growth. I learned a ton from the Aymara and their way of living and looking. I am sure that they have changed me through their words and music and faces. But how did we, the tourists, change them? We taught them Frisbee and left one behind the community. Who knows what new games will be invented with this plastic white disc? Nothing we can predict. I played “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” by Bob Dylan on the charango for my family. Will this melody be lodged in the memories of my family in such a way that it effects the creation of future songs, if even only one or two notes? What other ways have we changed them that are completely beyond our ability to comprehend?

The idea of keeping indigenous cultures in a vacuum to never change is ridiculous and impossible. It’s like when ecologists try label every new plant in an ecosystem an invasive species and then eradicate them ferociously in the cause of ecological preservation. Seeds were carried across oceans in the feathers of birds or in lucky breezes long before humans set foot on this planet, and likewise indigenous cultures have always been in the process of change long before the colonists arrived. The idea of a pure, authentic, untouched native is romantic and condescending. The Universe is always changing, never in equilibrium, and anyone that tries to fight against that change is living in a fantasy world.

I even struggle with the idea of “indigenous” as a label. Indians, Native Americans, original peoples, whatever you want to call them... how many generations does it take to be considered “native”? I was born in the United States, am I not a native? Do I need to have a bloodline here 500 years old? 5000? Do my people have to be colonized first? Any attempt at definition is arbitrary. People talk about Europeans like an invasive species that came over and destroyed the beautiful untouched ecosystem that existed here since the beginning of time. And I’m not trying to justify the genocide that took place, but that’s just kind of the way the world goes, isn’t it? Destruction is necessary for creation. In fact they are one in the same, two sides of the same coin, chachawarmi, the complementarity of opposites.

Change is neither good nor bad. It is just the way things are. Now in some Aymara schools girls are being taught to play the panpipes, a break in tradition from the male-only custom. Many Aymara are leaving to work in factories in Brazil or Argentina. They leave their communities behind but they return with money and new ideas. Jesus, cigarettes and plastic confetti have destroyed Aymara culture, but they have also created it anew.

Of course, this does not justify the imposition of change in the form of death, rape, torture, religion, and labor upon the peoples of the Americas by the colonists. Change is inevitable, but that does not mean there is not a difference between internal and external change. If indigenous cultures are going to change, which they are, we should do all we can to ensure that they have the power to choose their own direction.

“He who is not busy being born is busy dying,” – Bob Dylan

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Anyway, my experience was amazing. I’m going back to live with the Aymara for my independent study project for three weeks in April. I’m going to make a movie about Aymara mythology with my friend Cameron. I’m super excited.

Also on the way back to La Paz our bus attempted to ford a river and got stuck in the mud. We had to have a tractor pull us out. Here are some pictures: