In the morning, Susanne had a conversation with her teacher, Yadira, about the discrimination that exists here against black people, indigenous, the poor, Colombians, and many more stereotypes. Yadira concluded that her father had taught her that we must have respect for all people, because they are people. I think today was the first day I began to feel better (and also to eat a little).
Vincent worked on his alfabeto and pronunciation, and he is coming on very quickly. He likes Cuenca very much. When we broke for lunch, we walked home to Monica's house and took a short nap. When we awoke, torrential (and I mean cataclysmic) rain was falling, so we took a taxi to school rather than be drowned. It took longer in the taxi (40 minutes) than it does to walk there, but it only cost $2.50!
When we got there, Carlos took us to some shops which had three patios, remnants of the houses of rich Spanish landowners--the first patio (an indoor atrium) was for animals, the second for laundry, and the third for cooking. The whole house was built in galleries with balconies around these patios. One of the decorations was traditionally to make patterns in the stone with the vertebrae of cattle. As we walked around the city, he showed us the layers of the city beneath the modern shops, cars, trucks, lights. There are Spanish colonial buildings (never more than two stories), Republican buildings (since the early days of the Republic of Ecuador), building with Moorish influence, made from marmol (marble) or adobe, the colonial ones very simple, the Republican ones quite ornate. He related how the Spanish lived in ghettoes in the center of the city, afraid of backlash from the newly freed populace. Somehow that morphed and developed into the current social structure, which is that the descendants of a few families (of Catholic priests!) are at the top and the indigenous people at the bottom.
As he explained what the social structure was like in colonial times (extremely feudal, with the landowner owning all the indigenous who lived on "his" land and treating them essentially like serfs or even slaves with no basic rights. He noted that every two blocks in Cuenca, there was a church in the beginning of the city. I asked why. His reply: for control of the people. We forget walking around this rather modern, if old, city that it was once occupied territory, the possibility of revolt ever present.
Because of the church's teaching, there is no sex education whatever in Cuenca. As a consequence, the average age of marriage is 16-18. The teens know nothing about sex, experiment with each other until the girl becomes pregnant and then the shamed father forces the two into marriage. Two to three years later, after the baby(ies) is/born, they divorce. By then, the church's teaching has lost its force for them as they are now adults and no longer subject to their parents. Machismo is here, though not as strong as some places in Latin America. Carlos thinks it is losing its hold as Ecuadoreans are exposed more to people from other countries with less conservative ideas. It shows itself in things like domestic abuse (the plaza de la madre was originally set up to serve as refuge for battered spouses), inequality in wages and more. There are very defined roles, especially among the people in the country, where there is less education. The men do the heavy farm work, the women help with that work and do everything else. Carlos noted that although there is homosexuality here, it is not accepted, and always hidden. "You would never see two men holding hands here," he said. He is grateful for the diversity represented by the many foreign visitors, because it is helping Ecuadoreans look outside their "square minds." I myself think that repressive family structures may be logical (if odious) reactions to oppressive social structures which were created for purposes of controlling the subjugated.
On the way home we re-visited the Plaza of the Flowers just to take in all the colors and lovely, lovely smells. We brought some beautiful pink roses home for our hostess, along with a bit of peace in our hearts.
OUR minds were spinning at the end of the day with all the lessons, both in Spanish and local culture. We need to sleep to integrate it all. Buenas noches!
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