Title

From Political Prison To Tourist Village: Tourism, Gender, Indigeneity, And The State On Taquile Island, Peru

Abstract

In 1922, eight years before seizing presidential power in a coup, "The Macho" Luís Miguel Sánchez Cerro was exiled to Lake Titicaca's remote and frigid Taquile Island, 3,800 meters above sea level, following an unsuccessful armed revolt against the dictator Leguía. The sole role of Taquile, reachable only by an arduous trip in a very small reed boat from the Andean highland city of Puno, was as the Peruvian nation's most remote outpost: A political prison. Nearly eighty years later, "The Chino" Alberto Fujimori helicoptered onto Taquile while campaigning for reelection in 2000 and, wearing items of native dress, posed for photographs and television footage with authorities and residents in the community that had become the "poster child" for indigenous Peru. In the intervening decades between these two Peruvian presidents, many things had changed for the better for Taquileans. Unprecedented success in locally controlling mass tourism from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s had led to generally positive recognition for the island, which is now the key draw in southern Peru on the tourist route from Cuzco to La Paz. Taquilean successes in tourism has led to increased general prosperity but has also led to social change, particularly for women, who now participate more publicly in community affairs. Taquile has gone from being at the extreme margins of the Peruvian nation to being an iconic representation of it. By the turn of the twentyfirst century, Taquile and its colorfully dressed indigenous inhabitants had become visible in the Peruvian nation, through tourism advertisements, publicity from Fujimori's election campaign, and the modest celebrity of Taquileans, who frequently performed at regional and national folkloric events, traveled abroad, and won Peru's highest prize for artisan production: The Grand Master of Peruvian Crafts (1996). At the same time, the Peruvian nation-state was increasingly prominent in Taquile ans' lives, solidly manifested in the island's high school and health post, and embodied by Taquileans who performed in crafts and folklore events and sometimes served on regional government committees concerned with tourism. This points to the central paradox of Taquile's position visà- vis the nation-state. Taquile's status as the quintessential Andean community (it is a recognized peasant community or Comunidad Campesina Reconocida) is partly a function of its remoteness and marginality from the main currents of Peruvian life. At the same time, it is this status that has given it the ability to engage with the nation-state at quite a sophisticated level, negotiating rights and privileges not accorded its more cosmopolitan peasant neighbors. The increased wealth represented by the growth in tourism, although by no means evenly distributed among Taquileans, has nonetheless also had a significant impact on Taquilean lifeways. Cash income has given Taquileans the ability to travel off-island and obtain goods and materials previously inaccessible, such as cement and tin for house construction, and factory-spun and dyed wools for weaving. It has allowed Taquileans to invest in cooperatively owned and operated motorized boats and a cooperative store, as well as individually owned restaurants (Healy and Zorn 1982-83). In many ways, the wealth brought by ethno-tourism has ironically served to visibly change the Taquilean way of life, the very subject it seeks to freeze in an idealized indigenous "authenticity." Taquileans themselves have neither been passive bystanders in these processes nor fully autonomous agents, and the development of tourism in Taquile has not been without its conflicts. Whereas the Peruvian state is happy to exploit Taquile's image for tourism and domestic politics, it has done little to help Taquileans in their struggles to retain autonomy over tourism and access to the island. Starting in the mid-1980s, Taquileans faced increasing competition from outside tour agencies over transportation to and from the island, the key to community control of tourism. Governmental policies that occasionally favored Taquileans vanished by the 1990s as the neoliberal Peruvian state refused to intervene in conflicts or concede any special benefits to islanders with regard to controlling transit to and from the island. Occasional favorable decisions or aid obtained by Taquilean male authorities through sympathetic bureaucrats, sometimes through patron-client channels, became increasingly limited. By the turn of this century tourism had changed, and Taquile's early model of community controlled small-scale tourism hosting adventurous travelers had been transformed in the hands of outsiders into brief stops by tourists rushed up, over, and down the island's mountain, thereby eroding the goodwill of islanders and tourists, as well as Taquilean profits. As Taquileans desperately tried to compete with outside companies that recruited on the Internet and offered package tours, Taquileans became increasingly embittered by the Peruvian state's insistence on Taquile's need to conform to a "model tourist village" without providing any support or assistance for community control or even the modifications that the government and regional businesses demanded. The patron-client model of relations between indians and the state, which never had provided more than occasional handouts, no longer functioned in the neoliberal state. Taquileans continue to struggle to retain autonomy over their lives, balancing the demands of conforming to others' images of their island and indianness with their own desires to develop as individuals and a community in ways they see fit. What is clear is that the struggle on the part of Taquileans to retain control over the tourist industry and, more broadly, the way in which the island and its inhabitants related to the nation-state was, and continues to be, a highly gendered process. Not only did the economic and social changes have different implications for men and women, but also their strategies for coping with it were different. Indeed, the very images with which Taquileans, and in fact indigeneity in general, are represented are gendered too. Various scholars have noted that gender and indigeneity are conceptually linked and that indian women function as metonyms for a broader indigenous identity (e.g., Canessa this volume; de la Cadena 1995). In this chapter I explore the delicate interplay of tourism, gender, indigeneity, and the nation in Taquile. I examine gendered differences in women's and men's experiences and actions in the context of efforts to control tourism on their island. I also analyze some of the ways that indian identity is experienced and acted upon. The rise of tourism based on Taquileans' perceived authentic indigenous identity acts to mediate and change many aspects of that identity, which it paradoxically both undermines and strengthens.

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Publication Title

Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity, and the State in the Andes

Number of Pages

156-180

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

Socpus ID

34249899077 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/34249899077

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