Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to brothels, La Rinconada descends through every circle of hell. A deafening music pounds;
drunks reel through the open sewage; food vendors traipse through the phantasmagoria as if
it were a happy carnival, and small children flit past, laughing and falling into the toxic mud.
Downstairs in the brothels, the young girls are lined up against the walls, their faces resolute
and grim. Upstairs, by the light of a thousand flickering strobes, sex is traded, violence runs
riot, and buckets of urine are tossed from windows as the poor drink away their hard-won
gold.
It isn't a pretty picture. But so famous has La Rinconada become for its wanton nightlife
that village boys for miles around come to work in the mines, have sex with women, and
drink all the beer they can. A schoolteacher from Puno explained that often the boys are nev-
er the same after their journey to the frozen mountain: they drop out, leave home, and go on
to a life of profligacy and ruin.
AlifeofprofligacyandruinwaspreciselywhatJuanOchochoquedidnotwantforhischil-
dren.Hehadworkedallhislifetofeedthem,housethem,givethemwhathecould.Although
he was illiterate—although he had never stepped foot inside a school—he began to counsel
Senna, who was all of five when they began to cook together over their tiny ethyl stove, that
education was her only way out of the grind of poverty. How he knew it is anyone's guess.
TherewasnothinginJuanOchochoque'spasttosuggesthewouldvalueaneducation,except
for a vague perception he seemed to have about the prevailing power structure: the engineers
who ran La Rinconada read and wrote; they knew mathematics, physics. A hierarchy was at
work, and it involved knowledge and intelligence. He wanted his children to have that ad-
vantage. His wife, Leonor, did not necessarily agree. As far as she was concerned, the fam-
ily needed to make ends meet, and that meant immediate results—not the sort of long-term,
hard-won investment that education entailed.
By the time Senna was 10, her father was dead. His bloated body—shot through with chem-
icaltoxicity—hadreachedthecrisispointasheleftabusatthefootofMountAnanea,trying
desperately to find a cure. It gave out suddenly as Leonor helped him to struggle across the
road. Juan Ochochoque's long battle with La Rinconada's poisons was over, but the lesson
he left his daughter refused to die: it was he who had pointed out, as his little girl puttered
about alongside him, telling him stories, making up ditties, that she was good at words, good
at digging out the right ones, good at polishing them to a fine shine; she was a miner of a
different kind.
Which brings me to the crux of this story.
I had gone to La Rinconada precisely because of Senna's words. I had seen a video of her
telling the story of her father's illness and the wreckage it had left behind. Throughout her
story, she summoned allusions to the heartbreaking poetry of César Vallejo, using his words
to express what she felt. I had never heard, in all my years sitting at dinner tables with the
