Lidia Limachi in memoriam
January 20, 1983 - November 1, 2008
By Wilson Garcia Merida
November 2, 2008
Translated by Scott Campbell
[Spanish original]
Homage to Lidia Limachi
Born on Saint Sebastian Day, January 20, 1983, she would have turned 26 in two months. Her complete name: Lidia Sabasta Limachi Choque.
She was born in the indigenous village Chucarazito, a Chipaya district on the border with Chile, in the Saucari province of the Oruro department. She used this diminutive because Chucarazo is very small, with few inhabitants, the majority of them elderly who make their living raising llamas and alpacas, taking care of their "chullpas" (Inca mummies that date back several centuries) and Tiahuanacan treasures that are part of their polytheist religion, still practiced there. Lidia's grandmother was an elderly priestess and her father is the "jilakata" (the community's top authority) of Chucarazito. The Uru-Chipayas are a pre-Columbian ethnic group that speaks Aymara-Puquina, who resisted the Quechua invasion during the reign of Inca Wayna Capac in 1430 and survived the Spanish colonial era with their culture and religion unharmed.
Lidia emigrated from her village like the majority of indigenous Bolivians, searching for better living conditions in the cities, generally working as domestic workers or in urban stores. She came to Cochabamba in 1996 at the age of 13, together with her siblings, to finish her schooling in a city school and worked in her aunt's factory in the southern part of the city, making blue jeans. After graduating she returned briefly to her village to receive a dowry from her parents, of llamas and aguayos (textiles) according to their customs, and returned to Cochabamba to work on her own, which is when I met her. She was working in a hair salon making her culture's beautiful braids, which is where I met her. We married at the end of 2000.
She came from her village with hyperthyroidism, which caught me unaware at my worst moment, both economically and employment-wise. She didn't treat it sufficiently because she preferred to prioritize the budget we agreed on for her treatment for the needs of our children: Sofia Alejandra, who is eight, and Paul Huascar Alejandro, who is six.
The doctors gave her medicine to diminish the hyperthyroidism (which is bad for the heart) and this affected her lymphatic system and aggravated her "thyroid storm" attacks, which extremely weakened her heart until she had a heart attack.
She passed away in the early morning of November 1. We buried her on the Day of the Dead, with her full name of a wife and mother: Lidia Sabasta Limachi de Garcia Merida, which is how she'll always be remembered.
"We're so blinded by racism that we don't see the rainbow in front of our eyes," said Eduardo Galeano, looking to Illimani, the eternal snow-cap, the day the Uruguayan writer was in La Paz to attend the inauguration of Evo Morales Aima, an act that appeared more like an enthronement, attended by hundreds of thousands of Indians dancing in the rain.
The rain. The water. The flood. The rainbow. The daybreak. The Pachacuti. The Jacha Uru.
The eyes of Evo Morales filled with emotion when he was bestowed the tricolor sash of the republic; and it was not least of all because utopia had finally been allowed to arrive. Now the sun will shine for all according to its plan. The rainbow of the new dawn (Jacha Uru) will inevitably come after the tempest (Pachacuti), fulfilling the prophesy.
In the Andean dialectic, which is holistic, natural phenomena exercise a determining social role and history tells of gods of the sun, rain, seeds, and rivers. Productivity and fertility are governed by the type of relationship human beings establish amongst themselves and with the others linked in the evolutionary cycle, including gods and goddesses. From there comes the definition of Pachacuti, as Sepulveda wrote, "A kind of rebirth of the people which occurs at the beginning of climatic phenomenon or a great social movement that causes a complete transformation of consciences."
The other history
Historically speaking, the first Pachacuti occurred in the early Tiwanaku period, approximately 1,500 years before Christ, when a great deluge raised the water levels of Lake Titicaca; and the god Tunupa, navigating in his blanket converted into a raft, opened the land to the south (passing through actual Bolivian Aymara territory), between hills and pampas, creating a winding path that resulted in the formation of the Desaguadero river, the result being a natural way for the waters of Titicaca to flow, forming the lakes Uru Uru and Poopo. This cataclysm of new waterways unified the ethnic groups that made Tiwanaku a splendid civilization. (In that respect, see our January 22 essay in Los Tiempos.)
The second recorded Pachacuti occurred in the second half of the 15th century. Quechuas and Aymaras, from the same Tiwanakan womb, came into conflict because the Quechuas began trying to impose a monotheistic cult of the Inca sun god; while the Aymaras, obstinately in favor of polytheistic communtarianism, tenaciously opposed the Inca expansion emanating from Cuzco. The Inca Pachacutec led the Quechua conquest of the Aymaras and failed militarily, leaving to his son Yupac Yupanqui the task of resolving the conflict on a religious level, through which the Quechua monarchy "negotiated" a pact of mutual respect with the Aymara gods and pledged to be the "huacsa" (devoted priest) of the community of deities, giving up their original monotheistic plan. The Aymara god Macahuisa accepted Tupac Yupanki's offer and "began, little by little, to fall in the form of rain. The men in the rebel communities started to gather, asking themselves what this phenomenon could mean. Attacking them with lightning, Macahuisa increased the rainfall and created streams all around, dragging away the members of the rebel communities with his torrential waters.
After these rains, peace arrived between the Quechua and Aymara peoples and it fell to the Inca Huayna Capac, son of Tupac Yupanki, to exercise this new hegemony of the emerging Communitarian State, expanding the empire to the edges of what are now Chile and Argentina in a process that was abruptly ended by the interruption of the Spanish conquistador.
Pachacuti in the 21st century
According to the Meteorological Report for January issued by the Integrated Watershed Management Program, in the first month of the year it registered a "55% surplus" in rains for the hydrological year, which means that the precipitation during that period was the most intense recorded in recent years.
The national press reported that the rains affected more the 21,000 families in the state, of which 7,800 were being attended to by the government.
This one rain cycle, which continues devastating communities not only Bolivia but in the entire world, has formed new waterways in areas previously occupied by villages and towns. In Asia, the December tsunami converted cities, now submerged and extinct, into navigable lakes.
This universal cataclysm has been the context in which Bolivia elected and anointed Evo Morales as the first indigenous president in our secular history of eternal apartheid. During his inauguration, the sun and the rain led a harmonious dance of near-magical displays that were captured by hundreds of television cameras. The meteorological forecast announced that on Saturday, January 21, the area of Tiwanaku would be deluged with intense rains, and that's what happened, except that when Evo Morales issued his message from Akapana pyramid, the rain moved to the background, a circle in the sky cleared amidst the black clouds, allowing a radiant sun to illuminate the words of the indigenous president. Upon finishing the inauguration, the rain again began to fall torrentially.
Tupac Evo Morales?
Sunday, January 22, the day he formally took the presidency, was also one of rain and sun, with the rainbow that inspired Galeano. Directing himself to the hundreds of thousands of Indians who gathered to salute their president in the Plaza of Heroes, Evo Morales shared that early this morning he had insomnia which revealed to him a Jacha Uru (daybreak after the cataclysm). "At four in the morning I was finally able to sleep and in this brief nap I dreamed that I was on the shore of Lake Poopo, and from the other shore the sun rose, radiant."
In the ancient Quechua-Aymara society, those born on a sunny day are called "Tupac," which in both Inca languages means "illuminated" or "radiant." One of the more lucid rulers of the Inca was called Tupac Yupanki, which translates into Spanish as "mutual illumination."
Tupac Amaru on the northern Quechua side of Titicaca and Tupac Katari on the southern Aymara side of the sacred lake, were chiefs who did not just meet the same tragic end fighting against the Spanish. Both of their names mean the same thing: "radiant snake." Amaru in Quechua and Katari in Aymara mean viper or snake, which in Andean cosmology symbolized wisdom and patience, under the always shining light of the first name "Tupac."
Ergo: it is not risky in some sense to suggest that the first indigenous president of Bolivia could officially be called Tupac Evo Morales, the Aymara.
Wilson Garcia Merida is an independent journalist in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Director of the Servicio Informativo Datos & Analisis. His email is [email protected].
Scott Campbell is the editor of the blog http://angrywhitekid.blogs.com and a member of Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, translator and reviser are cited.
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