my friends are pains in the ass [fregados].”6 He explained that if they found out about the baptism, they could reproach him with the question, ‘Why did you wait so long [to baptize her]?’ His long delay would be taken as evidence that he lacked proper fatherly concern for his children. But, he added, he also worried they might tease him by saying, ‘It turned out that his wife is a cholita!’ His wife’s status, when publicized among other professionals, could unmask him as other than the upwardly mobile persona that he hoped to convey.
And so, the Saturday afternoon of Edgar’s daughter’s baptism found only four of us winding up the highway between Choro and the Muyu church in Edgar’s purple Mitsubishi, a car he had bought used to try to enter Cochabamba’s auto resale market as a sideline to his law practice. Edgar sat up front with his best friend, a cousin who hadn’t completed high school. I brought up the rear with my teenaged goddaughter, whom I had roped in to keep me company. The churchyard was deserted when we arrived, apart from Doña Cinda and six-year-old Claudia sitting huddled together against the wind and harsh afternoon sunshine on the church’s yellowed front lawn. Claudia seemed shyly pleased at the pale green dress I had bought her and gamely tried to wear the black patent-leather shoes that were clearly too big (I had never met her).
Only one other child was being baptized that day; in the Sacaba church on Sundays, by contrast, hundreds of babies routinely were baptized together. Claudia, my new goddaughter, was so much older than most baptized children that the priest-in-training who officiated did not realize that she was to be baptized and excluded her from the beginning of the ceremony until we called out urgently to him from a rear pew.
After the baptism, we returned to Doña Cinda’s rented house in Choro. We sat at a battered Formica table and ate chicken she had baked that morning. The wind blew bits of trash across the grey dirt courtyard and rattled the window shutters and doors. It was a desolate scene. Edgar and his friend quickly escaped to a party down the road and my teenaged goddaughter to a youth group meeting, leaving Cinda, Claudia, and me. Cinda looked sober. Trying to cheer her up, I invited her to my going-away party, which would be held in a few days at Edgar’s parents’ house. Cinda burst out that she would never enter Doña Saturnina’s house and began to sob. “They are all students!” she cried vehemently in Quechua. “I am not a student.” She told me about a recent fight in which Amanda, Edgar’s sister, had insulted Doña Cinda. “Kiss my ass [sik’iyta muchaway],” Amanda had told her in Quechua while accusing her of being unworthy of Edgar.
Claudia’s baptism revealed that Doña Cinda’s and Edgar’s shared ambitions for middle-class status were, in fact, incompatible. Doña Cinda hoped that marrying Edgar, a lawyer, would raise her social and economic standing. Edgar, however, worried that acknowledging Doña Cinda, a cholita, as his wife—rather than his mistress—would lower his standing. He had not come so far up in the world that he could afford to have a cholita wife. But he also worried that his lack of commitment to her and to their children, when made public, would threaten his moral reputation as a responsible—and middle-class—father and husband.
The contrast between Edgar and David illustrated their intermediate class and racial identities and their classically middle-class anxieties and aspirations. David was acknowledged as the most ambitious and the most successful of the family. Widely regarded as handsome and an enthusiastic dancer at parties, he told me that he had decided to become a pediatrician after seeing seven of his siblings die as infants from easily treatable diseases. He had graduated with excellent grades from a well-regarded public medical school, amassing prestigious scholarships. After several years working as a pediatrician in a large hospital in Sacaba Province, in 2008 he was named hospital director in a Cochabamba clinic, a distinct honor. He also ran a thriving part-time private practice on the outskirts of Cochabamba City. I sat in on several of his medical consultations with Choro children, during which he treated them and their parents with more respect than did urban-based doctors who were often cavalier or downright disrespectful toward their Quechua-speaking patients.
When David talked to me about his own social and economic mobility, he expressed an excitement and confidence that contrasted sharply with Edgar’s ambivalence and puzzlement. David seemed to feel that his economic and social plans for upward mobility were coming to fruition. While Edgar characterized himself as feeling out of his element during his entire time as university student, David told me he had quickly outgrown such sentiments. David talked with obvious pride about his close friends who were prominent Cochabamba doctors, his decision to send his son and daughter to private schools in Cochabamba, and his plans to tour Mexico and the United States with his wife and children. Part of his confidence may have stemmed from his more secure job. He had obtained a tenured physicians’ post in the public health system, while Amanda and Edgar, as lawyers in private practice, were subject to the vagaries of supply and demand for their legal services. It seemed to me, however, that David’s confidence also emerged from his own temperament and from the ways in which in-between, middling status could lead people down different potential life paths.
The relationship between Doña Saturnina’s family and David’s wife, Eliana, a nurse, contrasts directly with their relationship with Doña Cinda and shows the ways in which the family members were equally anxious and torn between ethics of hierarchy and egalitarianism when they perceived themselves to be playing the lower-status role in a social relationship. As soon as David began dating Eliana, conflicts arose between Eliana and Amanda and Deysi. The sisters claimed that Eliana acted socially superior to them. This outrage contrasted with the sentiment of superiority they expressed in regard to Edgar’s wife, Doña Cinda. It seemed that while they saw Doña Cinda as a drag on the family’s prestige because she was socially inferior, their sister-in-law Eliana was a drag on the family’s standing because she belittled them, albeit subtly.
I had assumed at first that Eliana would be popular with David’s sisters because she seemed to share so many of their amusements and their family history. Like them, Eliana was gregarious, laughed easily, loved dancing to Cochabamba valley accordion music, and happily passed her weekend afternoons chatting with friends while they treated each other to round after round of chicha. Eliana’s parents shared Doña Saturnina’s and her husband’s background: they were from another Cochabamba valley provincial town, had weathered faces that attested to lifetimes of agricultural work out of doors, and her mother, like Doña Saturnina, wore a pollera. Both sets of parents appeared equally rigid and uncomfortable in their lace-up shoes and constricting finery in David and Eliana’s wedding photos. Where Doña Saturnina and her husband had sent their children to college with the proceeds of their coca plots, Eliana’s parents had sent Eliana to nursing school with the proceeds of their several dozen hectares of soy and cotton in the eastern tropics.
While Amanda and Deysi eventually warmed up to Eliana more than they did to Cinda, they often muttered exasperatedly at her snobbery. Eliana was altanera and creída (stuck-up), they complained. First of all, they explained, she refused to spend extended periods of time in their family home in Choro. Whereas David nearly always visited home on the weekends and continued to sleep over many Saturday nights in his old bedroom, Eliana almost always went back to her and David’s house in Sacaba to sleep. Eliana confessed to me that she felt stifled sleeping in David’s small room that stood next to the family latrine. The sisters mimicked Eliana almost as savagely as they did Doña Cinda, exclaiming in Spanish in falsetto voices while pointing to different places in their home, “This is dirty! That’s dirty!” With this parody of Eliana, they echoed the widespread concerns of rural residents, inherited from the structural subordination of rural indigenous communities under colonialism, that rural homes, and the countryside as a social and moral space, were irredeemably dirty (Gotkowitz 2003; de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001; Larson 2005). This concern, which they and many other Choreños voiced to me at other times, expressed the fear that the countryside (campo) was inherently uncivilized and unbefitting to their professional, middle-class aspirations.
The baptism of Eliana and David’s daughter Magaly contrasted cruelly with that of Doña Cinda and Edgar’s daughter and illustrated
