Right now, I am sitting in a sustainable ecolodge that runs completely off of sunlight and local donkey power, on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world and largest in Latin America. As I look out my window, my gaze travels across fields and hills that have held the same terraced stone walls since the Incan Empire, then across miles of the perfectly blue water of the lake, to the far golden and indigo rolling shores of the Altiplano, and finally stops at the incredible snow capped peaks of the Cordillera, one arm of the Andes Mountains. The Island of the Sun is simultaneously claimed by Aymara, Quechua, and Incan myths, as well as local Catholic mixtures of those, as the birthplace of gods and humanity. Sitting here, I can understand why; we are so high up and the distances so great around us that the massive dark cloud formations jump across the lake like a stop motion video, creating a constantly changing pattern of rain and shadows and brilliant sunlight on the water-scape.
The program ends the day after tomorrow, after which I will spend ten days travelling around as much of this country as I can, and then I will go home. Since this will be the last post I write about research in Bolivia, I decided to start it the same way as I started my first: full of the descriptors of a travel blog. We are in the evaluation week for the program, and as such our Director, Carmen, decided to send us to el lago for a nice send off. We have all now finished our Independent Study Projects, our papers, and our final presentations in front of the SIT community in La Paz. Last week I accomplished one of the most important and hardest things I have ever done: I wrote 42 pages in a academic Spanish, a language I could barely speak 4 months ago.
But that is a blog post about my research, and so I should talk about that process. I started the ISP period on November 5th, the date I wrote my last post. I spent the first week mostly as I planned, reading and archiving every news article I could find on Padre Sebastian Obermaier, and refining my methodology. I did not, as I said I would, try to quantify the opinions of him I could find in the articles; ultimately, they ended up providing better historical context of his role in El Alto than actual perceptions. I also spent the time contacting and interviewing various academics that knew something about the subject that lived in La Paz. Finally, I constructed a list of the people and organizations I needed to interview in El Alto, and did my best to find contact information for them.
The week after that, I did the bulk of my real research in El Alto, living with Marco Quispe, my mentor. He lives in Villa Adela, a wealthier neighborhood in El Alto (though not by any means the kind of wealthy we are used to in the United States), which was also, helpfully, the neighborhood where Obermaier has his base parish, Cuerpo de Cristo. After spending one day in the neighborhood, I realized that it would be impossible to count all of the churches of Obermaier in the city. I decided to focus on Villa Adela, which worked well because Obermaier has such a concentration of his churches in the neighborhood. I used his towers as landmarks, though I had no map and no idea about the layout of the streets, wandering throughout the neighborhoods from one to another. At each church, I asked people in the street, in haircutting places, in restaurants, and in taxis about their opinions of Obermaier, his work in their neighborhood, the church, and how old the church was. I also spent the week interviewing local leaders of radio stations, NGOs, human rights watch groups, neighborhood unions, and Obermaier himself.
As an interesting anecdote, at one point planned to do 5 interviews in one day - the day after the national census. My host dad is actually the director of logistics for the census, so I knew a lot about the event. Unlike in the United States, the census in Bolivia happens on one day, with thousands of workers going to every single home in the country and administering a survey. It is illegal to out on the road on this day, and so everything in the country, including schools and offices, are closed. However, what I didn't know was, most things used the event as an excuse to take a long holiday, and so were closed the next day as well. This gave me a lot of frustration and set me back by a day while I was in El Alto; as a result, I had to return to the city last week.
Before I returned, I had begun to develop a theory that connected my findings about popular participation in the city and how Obermaier didn't respect those traditions. However, when I returned to talk to people in the streets again, all of the perceptions that I heard of him were very positive, which contradicted my earlier theory. Realizing that was one of the most important moments I have had in my academic life so far; being able to recognize that the field work I collected was changing, and subsequently changing my models based on what I had found.
In my final report, I developed a model based on three levels of civic society in El Alto. There highest level, in which operate organizations for all of the city, including the municipal government. There is the lower level, which consists of the regular citizens. And finally between the two is the middle level, which has the neighborhood organizations, which operate as mediators between the two levels. El Alto is interesting in that each neighborhood is very much self-developed, due to the clientelism, corruption, and the shrinkage of the state apparatus that came from neoliberal policies in the 80s and 90s. I developed this model both from previous literature I read about El Alto and from how the people and organizations that I talked to related to each other. In this context, I found that Padre Obermaier primarily operated in the same role as the neighborhood organizations, as a mediator between the neighborhood citizens and an agent of development at the local level. I discovered this though the context I found from who he worked with and what his actions were in the city from the newspaper reports, as well as from the fact that the perceptions of him at the middle level were full of power conflicts, whereas at the other levels he was well respected.
I hope to possibly present this research in the spring university student research symposium. Beyond that, I'm not sure where it will go, but I know the process has helped me grow so much, academically and personally, in my abilities to conduct fieldwork and explore an environment completely alien to what I know. Doing qualitative research in another country and language, and producing results from that fieldwork, has been one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.