FIELD NOTES
We seek to integrate, creating an expandable network, based on a deep understanding of food, nature, cultures and environment.
Maras K´ampa’s Asociation is made up of 12 women from Maras town. They use the corn husk, in quechua called k’ampa, to create difrente handicrafts like baskets, rugs, vases, sugar bowls and other utilitarian and decorative objects.
The ancestral Andean plant, stigmatized for its uses in the narcotics industry, brings its nutritional and organoleptic properties to the world of food.Coca
We arrived at Kacllaraccay, a peasant community located in the district of Maras, province of Urubamba, in the Cusco region. As soon as we got out of the truck, I could feel that the party atmosphere had already taken over the space chosen to celebrate the 58th anniversary of the community.
Khipuy is a project under development in collaboration with Constanza Gainza, architect, through the alliance between Chazz and Mater Iniciativa, and carried out jointly with the community of Kackllaraccay in Moray. The community of Kackllaraccay has been working together with Mater Iniciativa for two years, developing different projects in agriculture and textiles.
Last December I met Justina Huamán. She and her family live in the Patacancha Peasant Community at 3810 meters above sea level. Justina and three of her neighbors go to the Urubamba farmers’ market every Wednesday to sell the medicinal herbs they collect, very close to their homes. They are joined by five other women from the Huilloc community, located about fifteen minutes before reaching Patacancha. Justina is a Quechua speaker, she understands very little Spanish, but it is not difficult to understand her as the language of the traditional medicinal plants is almost the same. Although there may be some variation in the common names from one community to another, their benefits are the same.
How can one talk about the MIL, our interpretive center in the Andes located at 3,670 m.a.s.l.,to an audience that has not had the opportunity to drive the bumpy, curvy road up to theMIL?A road where the rising altitude gives way to a constantly changing Andean landscape,allowing you to slowly immerse yourself in the environment.
In June 2022, I arrived at Mil Centro to carry out the pilot project entitled “Literary Peru: Promoting Critical Citizenship through Reading and Creative Writing” with the surrounding farming communities of Mullak’as-Misminay and Kacllaraccay. This is a project funded by the Humanities Council of Princeton University, the institution for which I work as a professor of Spanish. In the long term, my goal is to provide a tool to generate social development through access to literary materials through two strategies. The first is to implement a mobile community library and the second is to encourage the production of texts created by the community members themselves, so that reading practices go hand in hand with writing.
“It has a custom… of good breeding these gentlemen (the Inkas) and all the others of all the earth and it is that if a gentleman or lady goes to another’s house to visit him… he has to take… if it is a lady a canteen of chicha and in arriving… she makes two glasses of her chicha and the one she gives to drink to the gentleman who visits and the other one drinks to the gentleman or lady who gi ves the chicha and they both drink and so does the innkeeper who
takes out two more glasses of chicha and gives the one to the one who has come to visit and drinks the other…”.
Juan de Betanzos, 1551
The rainy season brings with it the growth of many wild plants, among them Brassica rapa L., locally known as Yuyo. It seems as if the first drops that moisten the thirsty soil after a long dry season implanted the seeds of this herb. Yuyo is a word of Quechua origin and is a generic name used to name wild plants and edible green shoots. It is also used for seaweed that arrives dehydrated, from the coast to the Andes.
And two years passed, in what felt like a pause for restaurants, businesses, for companies that were just starting operations, or ventures that were turning on their first lights, but not for Mater.
In Mater the work in the farm remained in force, and although the campaign had suffered the onslaught of neglect in quarantine …
I cannot find Ceferina in the crowd. I have written down her telephone number on a piece of paper but it is an automated voice that answers to inform me that this number does not exist. It is the first time I come to the Urubamba farmers’ market and I can’t find my way around. Ceferina is a member of the peasant community of Kacllaraccay with whom I had arranged to meet to observe her while she sells her products… I feel that the probability of not finding her is high. Where could she be? For an hour I scour the market in search of her, trying to understand how the space is organized to deduce her location.
One could drive along this road without noticing what the forests harbor behind their facade of banana, pacay and avocado trees. A sign on the side of the road just past Huyro announces: “HERE WE SELL TEA”. I did not know that the valley of La Convención in the Cusco region, besides producing coffee, is the first and most important tea-producing area in Peru. Daan recognizes the entrance to the road that leads to the house of a family of producers he had visited on a previous trip. He tells Wilfredo, our driver and fellow adventurer, to turn left.
“Yesterday we worked well, in my farm, with my mother’s machine. I wanted you to see what I worked on so that you could take my picture, that’s what I wanted (she laughs). While I was working I wanted you to take my picture yesterday.”
During my stay at Mil Centro many people asked me about Moray. ‘What is it exactly?’; ‘What is the most remarkable thing you have found?’. There were those who asked me about the possibility of it being an assembly center and even those who called it an amphitheater.
I think it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that “We are what we eat”, but I believe that we are rather everything with which we dress the act of eating. Every action, gesture, tableware, attire or way of sitting at the table has more to say about us than what we consume. Ingredients and techniques are exchanged, learned, but the way of eating them, of adorning the act itself, takes a subtle form in our cultural imaginary.
A woman carries her lliclla accompanied by her daughter, dressed in her traditional garments and the illusion of being able to dance for her lord. The image seems unchanged, a picture unchanged over time. It is not.
Frutillada is one of the most consumed drinks in the Valley. To the base of chicha de jora, a mixture of strawberries and sugar is added for a frothy pink color, sweet taste, with low alcoholic content (approximately 3%), which is offered in chicherías in typical wide-mouthed glass glasses.
Help is needed at the temple of Ollantaytambo. Mita means solidarity and collaboration, but above all, mita means work. A distant work to which one must depart.
A family prepares for the road, it is necessary to go as soon as possible and avoid pauses. They load up with toasted beans, mote and some chicha, the road will provide wild fruits and more food. They pack everything and start their journey.
Going out to dig potatoes in the Andes is hard work that one might not feel like doing. It hurts your back until you get used to the position, it’s windy and cold, which at times becomes less uncomfortable when the work helps you warm up, and, for much of the work, you feel very inefficient.
In my case, the instruction I received before starting sounded simple: ‘You have to pick the big ones first, just the big ones.’ Fine, but from what size are they considered ‘big’? Which would be the right size and which would not. Then, which potatoes come with worms and which are healthy. Learning to sort by these criteria takes a while.
Valeria Figueroa is a sculptor from PUCP, specializing in clay and metal. She currently lives in Lima, where she teaches ceramics. As part of Mater Iniciativa’s art and culture area, Valeria developed a two-week ceramics workshop with a group of women from Mullaka’s Misminay community, neighboring Mil.
I had many years without returning to my country. The years away made me unfamiliar with it, and for that very reason I had deep feelings about returning, returning to recognize it. I believe that your place of origin always stays with you, it is never completely forgotten.
If you aren’t looking for it, you may not see the structure that houses MIL Restaurant and its laboratory arm, Mater Iniciativa—this despite the fact that it overlooks the famous and heavily trafficked agricultural terraces at Moray, those concentric formations attributed to Inka cultivators from centuries ago. And yet the building grows out of the natural highland environment: its adobe clay bricks are taken from the surrounding earth and baked by the Andean sun; its carefully thatched roof points to the local pastures and fields that dress the hillsides.
It was the day of the Kacllaracay festival, when I met the people of the community for the first time. Among them Ceferina Atau, who would eventually become a very important part of my life, growth, knowledge and research process.
It was only a few minutes before dusk. The day had cooled down as the evening was falling. After a long day of work I walk to the little house we have 100 meters from MIL where we sleep. I take off my shoes, prepare a chamomile tea and open my computer to start typing, and suddenly I see a person waving at me through the window. I go out to look because I could not recognize him. It was Egidio Amau. “To eat!” he says, motioning for us to go together. And all the tiredness of the day disappeared. I nimbly entered the house and put on my shoes with all the enthusiasm in the world. I took a flashlight, put on my chullo to keep my head warm, and closed my jacket. “Hakuchis”- I said, as I hurried to follow him.
We visited the different areas of the International Potato Center in La Molina to learn how to create botanical samples. We were accompanied by Dr. Fanny Vargas, a specialist in the area and a great teacher in the area of mounting.
The path follows the hillside and bends around the gorge that stops me from walking straight in the direction where I need to go. This little detour is no hindrance at all, it is what guided me here to begin with. As I make my way around the gorge, it starts to reveal its depths, invisible at first by the steep edge where the green field in front of the restaurant suddenly descends into the depth below. A miraculous sight unfolds before my eyes. The deep gorge made ever deeper by the archaeological site that lies at its bottom: Moray.