Coming of Age in Times of Crisis: Youth, Schooling, and Patriarchy in a Venezuelan Town

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

This page intentionally left blank

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis Youth, Schooling, and Patriarchy in a Venezuelan Town

Janise Hurtig

coming of age in times of crisis Copyright © Janise Hurtig, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-312-29357-4 ISBN-10: 0-312-29357-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Westchester Book Group First edition: December 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my parents, Anita and Martin

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Illustrations

xi

Preface: The Meanings of Crisis

xiii

1

Coming of Age: Concepts and Contradictions

2

Santa Lucía: A Certain Place in Uncertain Times

31

3

Becoming Secondary School Students

65

4

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

89

5

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

115

6

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

133

7

Debating Women

151

8

Studying Adolescents in (Times of ) Crisis

169

9

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

189

1

Postscript: Years Later, Having Graduated: Reflections on Crisis and Coming of Age

209

Notes

217

Bibliography

225

Index

237

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

One of the themes of this book is the way individual life projects depend upon the affective and material support of the family in order to come to fruition. I certainly could not have begun, let alone completed, this book without the tremendous and constant support of my family: my parents, Anita and Martin; my brothers Tony and Elliott and their families; my son Jonah, whose youthful humor and wisdom have sustained me in the most intangible ways; and his father, Eduardo, whose artistic vision of his homeland has also made its way into this book in the form of illustrations. I am also indebted to my “extended” family in Venezuela: my son Jonah’s family in Mérida—Carmen, Ruth, Josué, Marcelo, Ismaila, and his grandparents Elvia and Mirueldo and their family—and those friends in Santa Lucía who have always received us as family—Señora Elvia Torres de Carizo and her family, Rosa Franco and her family, Reinaldo Gonzalez, Jesús María Espinoza and his family, and Lucy Quintero and her daughters. I would not have been able to do the research for this book without the warmth, generosity, and trust of so many Santa Lucians—far too many to name here—and the equally generous collaboration of the secondary school’s faculty and administration. Yet a third “family” to whom I owe intellectual and moral support are my colleagues at the Center for Research on Women and Gender and the PRAIRIE Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago where I have been a researcher for over eight years. The kind of support they offer as women and feminists has continually nourished my mind and spirit. This book benefited from readings and responses of many friends and colleagues, all of whom have helped me think carefully, critically, and caringly about this book. I owe particular gratitude to my dear friend Rosario (Charo) Montoya, who offered endless hours of insight and encouragement from the book’s start to its completion. Hal Adams and Lessie Jo Frazier have also read and talked through many parts of this manuscript with me, each time offering insights that helped me

x

●

Acknowledgments

push beyond my doubts. In Mérida, my friends and colleagues Carmen Teresa García and Carmen Rosillo have helped me think as a feminist about the strengths and struggles of Merideñan women. I also want to thank many friends who offered thoughtful and provocative comments and conversations about different sections of this manuscript: Amy Stambach, Bradley Levinson, Marcia Farr, Deborah Cohen, Lesley Bartlett, Lisa Rosen, Doug Foley, and Victor Ortiz. I also want to thank the participants in the 2001 Spencer Foundation Advanced Studies Seminar on Anthropology and Education for inspiring me to rethink education in all its dimensions. This book began as a doctoral dissertation in Ethnology that was the result of years of study at the University of Michigan and additional years of fieldwork funded by grants from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Latin America Program, the Organization of American States, and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan. I continue to be indebted and inspired intellectually by the two faculty members I consider to be my mentors, Sherry Ortner and Michael Taussig. I can only hope that their very different intellectual styles and forms of creativity— Sherry with her keen sense of pattern and insistence on analytic rigor, Mick with his keen sense of contradiction and his wryly redemptive critique of modern social theory—have in some way crept into my own work. I also owe considerable intellectual guidance and inspiration to the other members of my dissertation committee, June Howard, Fernando Coronil, and Roger Rouse. They and many other friends and teachers at the University of Michigan created an environment of theoretical rigor, interpretive imagination, and political commitment to which I will always aspire. Finally, I would like to thank the editorial staff at Palgrave for their editorial comments, assistance, and patience in seeing this book come to fruition.

List of Illustrations

Maps The Andes Mountains

2

Santa Lucía

3

Figures The Mucurujún Valley and Santa Lucía

39

Farmer Plowing with Oxen

46

A Small Family Farm

47

Liceo Parra

73

The Center of Town

121

This page intentionally left blank

Preface: The Meanings of Crisis

Crisis is a necessary condition for a questioning of doxa but is not itself a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse. Pierre Bourdieu (1984). What crisis? “Crisis” is just the propaganda the State uses in order to terrorize and control the people. The comment of a friend and street artist during a conversation in Mérida, September 2002.

In certain ways I knew, but in other ways I didn’t know, when I began my doctoral fieldwork in the fall of 1990, that Venezuela was in the throes of a crisis. Or rather, that it was in the throes of la crisis, as Venezuelans named it. The crisis: the article highlighting the apparent singularity and idiosyncrasy of the country’s rapid but general decline from the heights of populist democratic, petroleum-based prosperity, into the depths of political instability, state repression, rampant corruption, and debtridden economic decline. La crisis, the crisis: a singular and historic event. Of course I had read accounts of this notorious crisis, but they had left me skeptical. Whether commentaries traced the beginning of Venezuela’s swift transformation into a modern, oil-rich, industrializing, urban country to the 1970s, when the manifestations of that transformation were accelerated by social and civic projects that trickled the gushing oil revenues down to the masses, or to the 1940s when the political, economic, and even ideological foundations of that change began to be laid down in steel and stone (Coronil 1997; Hellinger 1991; Sonntag & de la Cruz 1985), the disruptions caused to families, communities, and entire regions as the country became increasingly urban and mobile, its economy and workforce decreasingly agricultural, its state apparatus increasingly centralized and technocratic, its population

xiv

●

Preface

more formally educated, these oil-fueled ruptures were never inscribed within the notion of crisis. For just as crisis defined the current economic decline and sociopolitical disarray as an aberrance, a kind of national illness or disease (Trigo 2000), it implicitly distinguished “modernization” or “development” as a national project that was stable, coherent, healthy (if uncertain), and somehow separable from the crisis that was its threat. It was only the decline from those heights of modern promise that constituted la crisis as a singular and aberrant historic event. With distant and doctoral skepticism, I read the crisis as rhetoric, discourse, ideology—as meaningful but not material. But then I wasn’t ready to face a “real” crisis. * * *

Like the image one creates of a person one has heard about only through rumor and hearsay, I had constructed an image of Venezuela based on books, articles, news clips, conversations, and vague memories from a visit four years earlier. And, like so many images of unknown and exotic places, mine was an incoherent collage of comparisons: Venezuela was richer, more modern, and more Americanized than other Andean countries; it was safer, more stable, and more secular than Colombia; it was more tolerant than the southern cone countries, less exotic than its Caribbean neighbors; and it was the most democratic of South American countries. It was of little interest to anthropologists (except for those studying the indigenous people contained within its frontiers), and this seemed related in some way to its being a comfortable place to live. Not that I hadn’t been clued in to the country’s increasingly precarious political and economic situation. There had been sporadic reportage in the United States about the country’s worsening economic situation, and some news of the 1989 reelection of former President Carlos Andrés Pérez, in great part because his association in the popular imagination with the boom years of the 1970s gave people hope that he would bring back the prosperity enjoyed during his first presidential term. But no. Shortly after taking office Pérez, a founding member of the country’s original social democratic party Acción Democrática, announced his neoliberal economic package. Even in the United States, there was considerable coverage of the bloody street riots that began on February 27, 1989, a massive, spontaneous civil response to the Pérez government’s implementation of IMF-styled austerity measures, and specifically to the rise in transportation costs stimulated by the government’s raising of federally regulated gasoline prices. The popular rebellion, which came to be known as the Caracazo, took the national security apparatus as well as antigovernment organizations by surprise

Preface

●

xv

and the capital city of Caracas by storm (Coronil & Skurski 1991, 295; Gott 2000, 44–58). The press rendered the event poetically as “when the hills came down” (“cuando bajaron los cerros”) or “when the river overflowed its bed,” naturalistic allusions to the storming, looting, and pillaging of the central city by barrio dwellers who poured down from the hills surrounding Caracas. If those precarious hillside settlements, their makeshift tin roofs glistening under the fierce tropical sun, looked from the distance of the modern, high-rise pocked city like a thin, slowly creeping crust, a kind of urban eczema that hinted at the diseased underbelly of modernization, the events following Pérez’s election had shown those hills to be alive, angry, and ready to burst at any moment. The military arm of the new president’s government responded swiftly and repressively. While official reports claimed a death toll of a few hundreds, unofficial counts were of thousands of civilians dead and injured, with accounts of police ransacking the streets of urban slums and massacring people at random. But even this news event, desperately violent as it was, was hard for me to make sense of from afar. For some reason I couldn’t place those vague signs of danger, instability, and crisis within the larger composite of the Venezuela I clung to. So I left them dangling. * * *

One doesn’t really see the image in one’s head until that image is brought face-to-face with the real thing, so to speak. I had only to walk out onto the streets of Caracas and try to order my first breakfast to learn that the image I brought with me had as little to do with the Venezuela I encountered as did my college Spanish have to do with the Castellano that Venezuelans speak. In order to learn the language and the country, I also had to unlearn almost everything I had brought with me. This kind of immediate culture shock was perhaps the most tangible, but not, I think, the most profound moment in the continual dialectic of ethnographic cultural lessons. In retrospect, I am surprised by how much time I spent in Venezuela without sensing, feeling, and cognizing the crisis. I would attribute this to place: the combination of my geographic and psycho-cultural location. I had decided to do my fieldwork in a small farming town in the Venezuelan Andes, outside the university city and state capital of Mérida. Geographically situated in the Andes, I was far from the eye of the crisis, which hovered around and periodically struck at the country’s political and economic centers—Caracas, Valencia, Maracay— occasionally drifting east to areas claiming a recent tradition of political militancy (Bolívar and Anzoátegui States), or to the petroleum center of

xvi

●

Preface

Zulia, a region claiming a deep history of labor struggle. Having had its moment of economic and political ascendancy during the late nineteenth century when the exportation of Andean coffee and the political ascendancy of Andean caudillos (strongmen) teamed up to run the country, the Andean region had long since been eclipsed as an economic or political force. Even picturesque Mérida, the region’s historical university city and contemporary tourist mecca, seemed out of sync temporally and out of place aesthetically with the turmoil and decay taking over the country’s urban centers. Once the locus of vital student activism, Mérida has seen the flames of its activism quelled over the years under the combined pressures of government repression and intellectual conservatism. In fact, over the three years I lived in and near Mérida, student demonstrations and police responses had become so ritualized that activism itself had become decontextualized and rendered typical, típico, much like the religious processions and dances traditionally practiced on saints’ days in villages across the region but now also performed as special events orchestrated by city or state cultural associations. Many of the qualities that distinguished the state of Mérida, and to some extent the Andean region more generally, were also the basis for its regional image. The region was religiously conservative, and the Church was a more important force than in other regions. It was not only a traditional stronghold of the country’s Christian Democratic party, COPEI (the Independent Electoral Political Organizing Committee) but it was also a region where the Left-leaning populist workers’ party Causa-R (R standing for Radical), which emerged in the 1980s and acquired national prominence by 1990, had made virtually no inroads. There was a reserve to the Andean people, a peacefulness that emanated from the picturesque hills, a sense of history and tradition etched into the colonial towns and villages where small plots of rugged land were still plowed by teams of oxen, that made it easy for me to immerse myself in its alpine bliss and lose a tangible, daily sense of the profound problems wracking the country. Santa Lucía,1 the town where I did most of my field research, was such a place. “Aquí no pasa nada,” Santa Lucians regularly reassured me, and themselves. “Here everything is always the same.” The other reason I was unable to perceive the crisis was because of my own coping with a kind of perpetual psycho-cultural crisis, otherwise known as “culture shock.” Culture shock, suggesting a sharp but momentary jog to the senses, is a misleading term for a process that, for this ethnographer at least, was rather enduring and chronic, involving the repeated but always-changing process of psychic disruption, loca-

Preface

●

xvii

tion, and re-disruption. This was the intense emotional basis for how I learned, unlearned, and relearned the local culture. The modern discipline of anthropology has tended to portray culture shock as a kind of rite of passage: a one-time, cathartic jolt to the system that has clarity and coherence on its other side. Conceptualized as a transitory individual experience, culture shock resembles the equally modern notion of adolescence as an inevitable if unpleasant stage in the developmental process. The idea that the ethnographer matures through her crisis of culture shock and comes of age intellectually as a result similarly resonates with modern concepts of adolescence as the precursor to adulthood. Thinking about that comparison now, more than 10 years after my first three-year stay in Venezuela and several subsequent shorter trips, having witnessed the national crisis take on a chronic quality that gives the whole notion of crisis an ironic twist (“crisis as usual,” as I discuss later in the book), it seems to me that the recurrent and unpredictable quality of culture shock—the way it assaults your system just when you think you’ve been finally cured—is more analogous to the recurring, persistent quality of national crisis than to the episodic quality of adolescent crisis. And just as the notion of crisis, by proposing itself to be a historical anomaly, disguises its modes of economic and aesthetic production, so does the notion of culture shock as a kind of crisis easily and dangerously disguise the uneasy mode of knowledge production constituted by ethnography. In the initial stages of culture shock, I was so intent on making sense of the totally unfamiliar, and thus unstable, world in which I was immersed that I had no basis for sorting out the locally normal from the locally aberrant. The ebb and flow of water was one example. In the city of Mérida, water was not only unavailable during the rationing periods of the dry season, it was also unavailable during periods of the heaviest rains, when the torrents would flow so fiercely they would carry more mud with them than the purifying systems could filter out, rendering the overabundant water undrinkable. But people assumed there would always be water; they would scramble to store up bottles of the precious stuff at the merest rumor; and no matter how frequently the water would go, as people put it, each time they were taken by surprise. Yet no one associated the unpredictability of running water with the crisis: For city dwellers, this was life as usual. But for me, the problems of running water—the illogic of its availability and rationing as well as people’s spontaneous ways of coping with its apparently regulated irregularity— were as disruptive and crisis-like as those aspects of daily life that for

xviii

●

Preface

Meridenians were emblematic of the crisis: increases in the cost of living, crime, violence, teen pregnancy, corruption. In Santa Lucía, just as in Mérida, there was much talk of crisis: Its causes, its symptoms, and its possible cures were described, discussed, and debated. But in Santa Lucía, it was hard for me to see, sense, or locate the crisis at all. Residents discussed changes and uncertainties that were palpable and troubling to them: the rising costs of seed and agricultural material for farmers; the high price of food, transport, housing, and school supplies for families and their children; the uncertainty of finding a job; the disintegration of families; the increasing number of teen mothers. But the critical quality of these problems was dulled to my senses, in part by a circumscribed temporal horizon that limited my perception of change, in part by an inclination to muffle my own crisis of culture shock in the tranquility and predictability of life in Santa Lucía. In Santa Lucía, where agricultural production was a priority, there was nothing critical or unpredictable about the flow of water—at least about its flow into homes. There were rationing schedules privileging the irrigation cycles of the growers, but residents knew the rationing schedules and saved water in enormous tubs for the long days without water. Only the great Motatán River that flowed alongside the town was unpredictable, uncontrollable. But its ever-widening fluctuations, between moments of near draught that extended the rationing periods, to moments of wild overflow that caused mudslides blocking the main road out of town, those changes were never considered a sign of crisis. Those were just the forces of nature at work. But crisis is both a description of a felt reality and a discourse producing an ideological effect, both an expression of lived contradictions and a denial of them as such, both a series of concrete disruptions and the creation of peoples’ descriptions of and responses to those disruptions. One of the hardest interpretive tasks I have faced in writing this book has been to try to represent the crisis as both reality and effect: to sustain its disruptive qualities without participating in the dehistoricizing impulse of crisis as a discourse of modernity. My efforts to represent the gendered social relations of inequality that predominated in Santa Lucía, social relations I refer to as “negligent patriarchy,” embody this tension. Santa Lucians associated many of the qualities of negligent patriarchal relations—familial instability, paternal negligence, teen pregnancy, and single motherhood—with the crisis. Most Santa Lucians explained these qualities in terms of a crisis of morality and the encroachment of material self-interest, implying that negligent patriarchy was a degeneration from a previously existing, and

Preface

●

xix

somehow more just, form of family relations feminist scholars often refer to as “classic patriarchy.” There are many troubling aspects to this perspective, beginning with the proposition that in the past things were really better; as Temma Kaplan points out, “patriarchy has always been nothing more than a system of male domination.” The other problem is the assumption that things were in fact different in the past. And yet regional historical accounts of family relations of (re)production in the highland Andean region of Venezuela suggest that serial monogamous relations were common, that women often raised their children alone or in mother-daughter run households, and that women often instigated the separations. But if negligent patriarchy was really nothing new, and if its attribution to the crisis rests on a denial of history and a romanticizing of the past, did its current manifestation in Santa Lucía make it any less a crisis for those graduating students trying to make life decisions about family, work, and intimacy, as they come of age? If young Santa Lucian women told me that they had to accommodate the likelihood of male infidelity and abandonment not only because “all men here are like that,” because “no hay más,” but also because there is always the possibility of finding “a traditional man,” doesn’t that perspective render negligent patriarchy as one more facet of the crisis as usual? * * *

Culture shock, like crisis, does not always hit when or where you are looking for it; and it is part of the lore of ethnographic fieldwork that the “real” culture shock occurs, not when you first leave home, but when you first return. Culture shock is an electric current that doubles back on the ethnographer and jolts her from behind, jolts her right out of the familiarity of home. In this passage from The Nervous System, Michael Taussig reminds us that it is not cultural difference per se (itself a kind of reification) that creates the shock, but the pressure to explain away the strangeness encountered elsewhere while denying the strangeness at home: I remember well the repeated shock of returning from the Putumayo to the university in the late 1970s, after the fragmented jock-riddled incompleteness of ways of talk, of active interpretation, so practical, so fabulous, in the all-night curing sessions there, coming back to face the demands for academic talk and writing—the demands for an explanation, the demands for coherence, the denial of rhetoric, the denial of performance, when what was crying out for a coherent explanation was the demand for such and the denial of such (1992, 7).

xx

●

Preface

The demand I felt to provide a coherent account of the crisis as people lived it in Santa Lucía depended not only on the assumption that I wrote and reasoned from a place of coherence, but also on the assumption that the place from which I wrote was somehow separable, historically, geographically, culturally, from that other place I sought to explain. I wrote the dissertation that became the initial draft of this book in a small apartment in Chicago, in a neighborhood on the geographic edge of the city, but right in the center of this country’s crisis. Unlike Venezuela’s explicit crisis, when I returned to the United States from Venezuela after nearly three years of absence I encountered an unspoken crisis. If Venezuela’s crisis was constructed in the interstices of rumor and repression, the crisis I encountered in Chicago was constructed in the silence of angry desperation. I shared the streets with gangbangers and café aficionados; I lived between abandoned buildings and overpriced condominiums. As the neighborhood’s real-estate stock improved, my neighborhood was “improved’ in the same way many Latin American countries have historically sought to improve their “stock”—through “whitening.” That was the place out of which I first reflected on and wrote about what daily became the increasingly faraway place of Venezuela. The ethnographic demand for coherence, as an aestheticizing and knowledge producing force, is also one moment in a massive cultural enterprise that partakes of modernity, of empire, that rationalizes and masks the crisis “here,” separating it from the crisis “there” as though it were beyond the ethnographic moment, beyond the pale as well. But the very denial of crisis here was as critical and as ideological as was the insistence of crisis there. I have often harbored the fear that the images of Venezuela, and especially of Santa Lucía, that I developed in writing the book, emerging out of a nostalgia I created in response to the vague but chronic sense of dislocation and despair I feel here, are as much about here as about there. As Chicago becomes increasingly harsh, rude, ugly, and violent, the small town of Santa Lucía becomes increasingly Edenic, the people increasingly friendly, and the landscape increasingly idyllic—despite, or perhaps because of, my brief but regular return visits. I long to retreat to that image, to make it my amparo, my shelter or refuge. Only my field notes and news from “there” have reminded me that this is shockinduced fantasy. Nearly 15 years have passed since I moved from Venezuela to that original apartment where I completed my dissertation and gave birth to my son, coming of age as a worker and a mother. Over that period of time, I have made six trips to Venezuela. Each visit has marked shifts in

Preface

●

xxi

the material conditions of social life here and there, in the discursive terrains that map out those conditions, and in my social and intellectual location relative to those terrains. The ideas that have made their way into this book have thus been formed through a process of repeated dislocations and relocations: repeated shifts in the lives and aspirations of Santa Lucians I first came to know as students and who are now young adults, some parents, some spouses, some workers, some university students; shifts in my position and relationship to those Santa Lucians; shifts in the places and meanings I assign to such concepts as crisis, gender, patriarchy, schooling; and shifts in my understanding of how youth come of age. As this shiftiness has heightened my sense of the evanescence of any particular interpretation, the contingency of understanding, and thus the unpredictability of life choices, I have come to believe that the best an ethnographer can do is to present her reader with a sense of the very slippery terrain that constitutes any ethnographic moment. I address the slippery signifying practices of crisis, meaning, and place at the outset in order to problematize the precarious interpretive position of the ethnographic writer and the difficulty in striking an optimum balance between physical proximity and perceptual distance in order to produce an image that contains some measure of reality. Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding” (1986). But in his poetic elaboration of the mutual enrichment that can emerge from the “dialogic encounter” of two cultures, Bakhtin left it for us to decide just how to constitute and sustain that outsideness; and the writing of this book has been punctuated by moments of ambivalence about the relative values of being geographically “inside” or “outside” the place I am seeking to understand. I think this loss of sensory memory was most acute and problematic for me as I wrote about the daily practices that constituted patriarchal social relations and the daily activities of the school and classroom. My recollection of the rhythms of the Santa Lucian classroom was blurred by vague but emotionally charged high school memories, which regularly intruded without being invited. Over time, as I went from being a student to a teacher and then also the mother of a student, the changes in my social position and thus my personal involvement and investment in schooling repeatedly blurred and refocused those images. Similarly, my attempts to not only remember but also re-feel how the persistently negligent qualities of patriarchy organized and signified daily life in a highland Venezuelan town competed with what I had to relearn in Chicago as I accommodated myself to the persistently neoliberal qualities of patriarchy that organized daily life here. The differences

xxii

●

Preface

between these two versions of patriarchy, one explicit, legitimate, discursively direct, the other implicit and denied in discourse, were much like the differences between the two versions of crisis in the two places. Where negligent patriarchy was naturalized by a machista sexual and familial double standard in Santa Lucía, neoliberal patriarchy was denied, silenced, by a masculine meritocracy here. Just as my relation and response to those patriarchal practices have changed as I have become a mother and a university worker, so my own repositioning continues to disrupt and challenge prior understandings, even certainties, I had about how patriarchy worked on Santa Lucian students as they came of age and how they worked on it. But this is only fitting. As I keep in touch with those individuals who, 15 years ago, were students at the local secondary school, I watch their lives take turns and twists as inconsistent as the meanings I have tried to assign to them. To the extent that I could remember, but not recall, the practices I studied in Santa Lucía, I could not write about them with something approximating the passion with which I believe they are lived by Santa Lucians—although I would have liked to. The distance that limits the ability to describe passionately also enhances the compulsion to explain analytically. Both have their merits, and balancing them is one of the tasks I have taken on in this ethnography. If social theory aims, in one way or another, to account for the apparent crisis in “Western” modernity and its cultural logic, it is through an eclectic, partial, and skeptical use of those theories that I aim to illuminate another modernity, another cultural logic, and to do so in a way that refuses to enter too fully into the aesthetics of crisis, but rather to sustain the power and creativity of contradiction, and thus the possibilities for change that lurk within that notion of crisis. In this book, I have tried to combine passion with persuasion, leading to what is perhaps an awkward blend of affect and analysis, a style that is my way of representing the awkwardness, the strangeness, and the discomfort of the continually shifting place I have occupied as an ethnographer coming of age through the exercise of doing ethnography work and writing about a small group of Venezuelan youth struggling in equally passionate but tremendously different ways to come of age.

CHAPTER 1

Coming of Age: Concepts and Contradictions . . . we would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should, anyway, be selfexplanatory. José Saramago, The Cave

A Career to Defend Yourself Late one November afternoon in 1991, I received a visit at my house from Andrea and Veronica, 13-year-old girls who were first-year students at Liceo Parra,1 the municipal secondary school.2 The two girls had come to ask if I could help them with their English homework. It was three months into the school year and nine months into my stay in the Venezuelan town of Santa Lucía,3 a prosperous agricultural town and municipal capital of over 12,000 inhabitants. Santa Lucía is situated at the northernmost end of the Venezuelan Andes, just before that expansive mountain range tapers down into the Caribbean Sea. See maps 1.1 and 1.2. Since the 1980s, the town’s “vertiginous growth” (Espinoza Marín 1992, 141) had pushed it beyond its original colonial center, so that it trickled up and down the narrow, fertile alpine valley of the Mototán River, whose fierce current fueled wheat flour mills in the late 1800s and whose waters now irrigated the surrounding fields. The town owed its prosperity to the voluminous horticultural and floricultural production of small family farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers who worked plots they either owned or rented and sold their produce, primarily for national consumption. They grew several varieties of flowers and almost every kind of tuber and vegetable—from the

2

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Map 1.1 The Andes Mountains

carrots, potatoes, and parsnips that were local staples to artichokes, zucchini, eggplant, and other exotic vegetables most Santa Lucians had never eaten. Andrea’s father farmed a parcel of his in-laws’ land; Andrea’s mother’s brothers farmed the rest. Her father supplemented the family income by renting out a team of oxen he had purchased from a relative who had moved to the city. Veronica’s father was a shopkeeper who ran the mercantile shop her paternal grandfather had opened in the 1960s to cater to the growing material desires of an increasingly affluent community. According to Andrea and Veronica, both their mothers were housewives “who didn’t work,” though Andrea said that sometimes her mother “helped out” in the fields at planting and harvest times, just as Veronica’s mother helped out in the store on weekdays when the children were in school. Neither of their mothers had ever prepared the exotic vegetables that were grown in the fields surrounding their town. Andrea said her father told her those vegetables were grown for rich people and tourists who lived in the big cities. Because family plots around Santa Lucía were small, the terrain uneven and rocky, and large capital investments impossible for most, the

Coming of Age

●

3

Map 1.2 Santa Lucía

farmers plowed with pairs of oxen rather than tractors. Every May 15, the town paid tribute to Saint Isidore the Farmer, the patron saint of agriculture, by parading dozens of the township’s pairs of oxen, amply adorned with the flowers and vegetables that were the fruits of their labor, through the streets of Santa Lucía. In recent years, it had become

4

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

custom to intersperse the procession of oxen with floats built upon the flatbed trucks that carried the town’s produce to market locations around the country. The farmers sold their produce to intermediaries—also known as dispatchers—except for those few farming families that had managed in one way or another to diversify their economic activities to include both growing and dispatching. The intermediaries dispatched the produce in Toyota and Ford flatbed trucks that guzzled gasoline processed from the oil that bubbled up from the country’s cortex as abundantly as water flowed down the Mototán River. Much as the ebbs and flows of oil prices set by global economic trends could alternately strengthen or wreak havoc on the economy of a country whose primary export “crop” is petroleum, the ebbs, flows, and torrential overflows of the Motatán River—mythically attributed to the fierce spirit of a precolonial water god, son to the Mother Mountain from which he springs eternal, or geologically attributed to regional deforestation, erosion of topsoil, and extensive irrigation resulting from agricultural mismanagement—could alternately swell or shrink the local economy. The flood of 1910 was remembered for destroying hills and homes and for driving the price of cane sugar up from a libra to a real (Rivas Mazzei 1991; Espinoza Marín 1992). While I lived in Santa Lucía, the river’s unruliness had a seasonal logic that the residents had learned to accommodate. When it flooded the main road during the rainy season, the dispatchers took a detour; when it dwindled down to a trickle during the dry season, the town rationed water, and each household ritually filled tanks and buckets with water each night. Rationing water; growing exotic vegetables for export to wealthy Venezuelans, foreign tourists, and occasionally foreign countries; distinguishing a housewife’s labors from “work” and reducing her work to “help”—these were among the daily material and discursive practices through which neocolonial, patriarchal relations were etched upon the social, cultural, and topographic landscape of Santa Lucía, creating contours of constraint and possibility that young students like Andrea and Veronica would have to navigate as they came of age, entering adulthood with the task of establishing a place for themselves in that landscape. I was not the first foreign researcher to come to Santa Lucía. A Canadian geographer and a small group of European ecologists had visited years earlier. But I was the town’s first U.S. anthropologist, or so I was told by people who claimed to keep track of such things. I was certainly the first foreigner to be interested in studying the town’s schools. Given my affiliation with the school and the fact that I was a white, for-

Coming of Age

●

5

eign woman, a gringa, most students and their parents came to refer to me as la profesora (the teacher) and considered my specialization to be English. And indeed, within four months of settling into my little house by the school, I was teaching English classes at the recently inaugurated Casa de la Cultura (the Cultural Center, literally “house of culture”): one class for adults, another for youth. I had come to Santa Lucía with two projects in mind, each of which located me somewhat differently within the local landscape I just described, and neither of which had anticipated a role as English teacher. The first project was ethnographic research for my doctoral dissertation. Back home, I had been persuaded by the coherence of certain academic literatures to frame my project as a study of the ways cultural continuities or discontinuities between home and school differently affected the school experiences of boys and girls. But the crises of understanding that the experience of fieldwork regularly provoked had unsettled my initial impulse to frame the research in the neat terms offered by cultural continuity or mismatch models of educational success and failure and challenged the educational constructs upon which those models were based,4 including the notion that social inequalities were directly related in some way to classroom performance.5 And so, by the time of Veronica’s and Andrea’s visit to my home, I had become reluctant to describe my project any more purposefully than as a study of the relationship between gender, schooling, and the life cycle. Ironically, when school staff and other residents of Santa Lucía presented me and my work to others, I often heard myself translated into “the profesora who is doing a study of the difference between the educational performance of male and female students” or “the profesora who is interested in how sexuality [the local gloss for gender] affects achievement.” The second project had emerged out of my affiliation with the Women’s Support and Outreach Center, a group of academic and professional women based in the nearby university town of Mérida who provided support services and workshops to women’s groups around the state. My colleagues at the center offered to support the effort of a few Santa Lucian women friends and myself to establish a women’s group in Santa Lucía. Over a period of months, our small planning committee met weekly at the Cultural Center, making an ill-fated attempt to form the Women’s Association of Santa Lucía. Without wanting to romanticize that failure, which was truly disheartening to all of us who wanted to form a group of women working for women, it was nonetheless profoundly instructive. Each misguided step we took, each overt or implicit threat we received, each challenge we faced in trying to form the Women’s

6

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Association was also a concrete lesson in how the cultural logic and material force of patriarchal social arrangements were played out daily, almost invisibly, in everyday practices organized around and signified by the spaces of the house and the street. Months after we abandoned our efforts to use the publicly accessible “house of culture” to convene the Women’s Association meetings and discuss women’s issues, I began attending meetings of the preexisting, thoroughly legitimate Damas Voluntarias. These “Volunteer Ladies,” a group of women spanning three generations, met weekly at each others’ homes to organize volunteer work for “the needy of the community”—but never for women per se. They also spent a lot of time, over coffee and cake, sharing stories about personal and family issues. Veronica’s mother was a member of that group. Since I lived right up the road from the school, I was regularly visited by students like Veronica and Andrea who came in search of help related to their English classes. Most visitors were female students who came in pairs or small groups, though some of the older and more confident students came in mixed-sex groups, especially when they were working on a project together. Rarely did male students come by themselves, and when they did, they came in twos or threes. Occasionally a student’s mother would stop by to solicit my assistance for her son or daughter, particularly as the end of the school year approached and parents became concerned that their children might not pass English and would have to “repair it” over the summer—that is, attend summer school and then retake the final English exam until they received a passing grade. As unpleasant as these “reparations” were for students who longed for a summer free from study, I found the system quite forgiving; it allowed— in fact, insisted—that students redeem themselves and remove the blemish of failure from their records. Reparations were among the school practices that relativized academic success and failure. Over time, such requests from students taught me several lessons. The first was a lesson in pedagogy and knowledge. To begin with, when students requested help with English homework, what they usually asked was whether I could “explain” English to them. Yet what many students were hoping or expecting was for me to do their homework for them. By the time they brought me their homework, it was usually due the next day, if not the next class period, and they had little time for explanation or guidance in completing the homework themselves. In an incisive treatise on education in Venezuela, the linguist and educator Angel Rosenblat noted that “[in] Venezuela . . . the student does the least possible, the minimum necessary to pass and graduate.

Coming of Age

●

7

Graduating is the supreme goal” (1981, 48). He also noted that graduating students was the teachers’ primary task (83). With no intention of laying blame but, rather, with the intention of characterizing public education in late twentieth-century Venezuela, Rosenblat identified an educational landscape or ethos and pedagogical logic that characterized schooling in Santa Lucía. Given that ethos and logic, I think it is fair to say that neither the students who came to me for assistance, nor their parents or teachers for that matter, considered such requests to be duplicitous or cheating or avoidance tactics. The students were simply complying with the requirement to get the homework done and get as good a grade as possible. By coming to me, they were being resourceful in completing the task at hand. Even those studious students who visited regularly because they contemplated teaching English one day, hoped that I would provide them with a few rules—which they referred to as “theory”—that would make English somehow knowable and their homework assignments solvable. Speaking English, what they referred to as pronunciación, was another matter. While learning to speak English was a purported goal of the textbooks, it was not a skill the teachers were prepared or expected to teach or that they expected their students to learn (see chapter 6). As the students frequently noted, most of the Liceo Parra English teachers did not know how to speak English. And when I asked the students on occasion why they didn’t take their problems to the teacher, they would respond that the teacher “doesn’t explain English well” or “doesn’t like to be bothered with questions.” This situation set up a conundrum for me. I obviously couldn’t teach English at the last minute; that is, I couldn’t teach my visitors what they needed to know in order to solve the problems their textbooks presented. In any case, I knew from my regular classroom observations that they were disposed to learn English in a rote fashion that emphasized memorization and discouraged problem-solving or analytic thinking. My concern was that I would be unable to teach them in a way that would help them with their exams because I was so baffled by the kind of knowledge they were supposed to demonstrate. It took a certain amount of time studying the textbooks with them and observing their teachers in action to realize that the goal was to learn English almost algorithmically, like mathematics: They needed to memorize a series of grammatical rules and minimal vocabulary so they could produce correct sentences in English and then translate them back into Spanish. The second lesson was a lesson in etiquette. I had learned that if I put my young visitors off in any way, suggesting we make an appointment for the next day or even later that afternoon, they most likely wouldn’t

8

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

come back. During the first months of my stay, I had unintentionally discouraged a few students by trying to formalize a meeting and suggesting they come at such-and-such a time later that afternoon or the next day—responding to the situation in accordance with my own cultural norms for appointments, as well as a personal sense of privacy that led me initially to resist the spontaneity of house visits. The students always agreed to come back later, but they never did. Eventually I understood why trying to set up an appointment of sorts did not work. To begin with, the students were usually asking for help on homework that had to be finished ya: already, now, immediately. Moreover, for a student to make a visit to my house in the first place involved mustering up enough courage to overcome their pena, a sentiment akin to but not quite the same as timidity, embarrassment, or shame. Since most Santa Lucians I knew went to great pains to avoid suffering pena, it was unlikely that my visitors, once put off, would approach me again in the near future, even if I had explicitly invited them to do so. This episode was also part of an ongoing lesson in the spontaneity of social interactions in Santa Lucía (and across the region), a spontaneity as characteristic of the institutional life of the school as the social life of its students and teenaged youth more generally. The norms of institutional life to which I was accustomed, in which one planned and organized, fitting meetings and other social events into rigidly delimited time slots established by institutional guidelines, were at odds with Santa Lucians’ extemporaneity about social planning and flexibility regarding time, and their ambivalent irreverence toward institutional structures if not authorities. It was as acceptable for a student in search of information to drop in on a teacher or even the school principal as it was to make an appointment, and more common. As my two visitors admitted while we chatted after the lesson, they had decided only moments before to stop by, having learned that their regularly scheduled class for that period was cancelled. This kind of spontaneity was not indicative of a lack of respect for school faculty or administrators; in fact, Santa Lucian students were generally quite deferential and responsive to adult authority. But authority was established and sustained in each moment of social interaction, rather than within the structures and norms of institutions. Given the norms of social spontaneity, any attempt on my part to set up an appointment would communicate not the desire to formalize a visit (though this is what it meant to me) but, rather, that I was not interested in meeting. It could even be interpreted as a polite way of indicating that I was bothered or annoyed by the request. This would only cause the students considerable pena and deter them from returning. So this

Coming of Age

●

9

time I invited my visitors in. They responded by meekly lowering their heads and mumbling an appreciative, nearly inaudible “thank you.” As they walked through the patio gate into the house, they had to walk past my partner, Eduardo, an artist from Mérida, who at that moment was painting out front on the patio. “Excuse me,” they said to him in unison, keeping their heads bowed to avoid eye contact. This gesture conveyed more than the appropriate modesty and pena that young girls might display to a male authority, el marido de la maestra (the teacher’s husband), as he was known.6 It also had a quality of the coquette; the repressed giggles on their 13-year-old faces belied their early mastery of the ability to combine flirtatiousness and pena, a manner by which a woman could simultaneously convey her shame, her righteous reserve, but also her timid willingness to be coaxed out of that reserve—an apparent ambivalence that drew upon, responded to, and reinforced the sexual double standard of patriarchal machismo. It was not unlike the glances I had seen on students’ faces in the classroom as they looked up to their teachers, readying themselves to respond to a question they had been called on to answer (see chapter 4): small but significant gestures, the kinds of gestures through which the vulnerable self proposes to define, sexualize, and objectify herself in relation to an Other assumed to be more powerful, to have already sized her up, assessed her, determined her value in relation to his. Eduardo greeted the girls broadly and teasingly urged them on: “Good afternoon, young ladies. Go on in, don’t be shy, the teacher is waiting,” he smiled as he motioned toward me and the front door. Writing in my field notes later that afternoon, I worried over the possible paternalism insinuated by Eduardo’s friendly teasing; regretted my limited ability to understand the significance of the interaction; and pondered whether my limited comprehension challenged the ethnographic proposition that I could act as my own research instrument. I also wondered whether the fleeting colonialist symbolism of that momentary triad—the foreign ethnographer as teacher presented to the student by her native boyfriend—might be more than just fleeting, more than “just symbolic.” The girls approached the doorway and paused again. The passage from the publicly accessible street, through the intermediate space provided by the patio, into the intimacy of my house was not to be rushed. The transition from street to house entailed more than a physical movement through space. As Roberto da Matta puts it in his discussion of street and house as two basic social domains, it also entails a shift from one “sphere of meaning” to another, each of which “constitutes a particular

10

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

reality and permits the normalizing and moralizing of behavior by way of particular perspectives” (1991a, 53). In other words, entry into the house required a change of perspective, propriety, and identity, and the patio served as an ambiguous space for that transition (cf. da Matta 1991b, 65). As da Matta emphasized in his work, the distinction between the symbolic spaces of house and street cannot be reduced to a sexual binary in which the house is women’s sphere, and the street is men’s sphere—although this is how those spheres are gendered discursively: “The man in the street, the woman in the house,” is how the saying goes. Rather, the distinction is at once binary and continuous, at once sexual, social, and cultural: the house a private, intimate, and familial space marked by cooperation and reciprocal exchanges, the street a public, impersonal, and individual space marked by competition and unequal exchanges. In other words, what distinguishes the spheres of house and street are the distinct ways in which patriarchal social relations are organized and signified in each.7 In this sense, da Matta’s framework is useful for understanding the social significance of those spaces in Santa Lucía. The limitation of da Matta’s framework is that he posits two spheres that are distinct but apparently complementary. This, I would argue, is an androcentric reading. As I discuss in chapter 3, Santa Lucian men could move comfortably within and between both spheres because the relations of power and production each sphere presumed was patriarchal, as da Matta himself implied: “Both domains should be governed by a hierarchy based on . . . respect and consideration . . . this basic concept is above all characteristic of the relationship between parents and children, and especially between father and son” (1991b, 64). The harmony and calm based in relations and norms of kinship that da Matta described as characterizing the house were organized around paternal authority and social control; and the movement, novelty, and action based in “relationships strongly marked by individualistic choice or at least the possibility of choice” (1991b, 64) that da Matta described as characterizing the street were organized around a machista sexual double standard that sanctioned men’s philandering and demanded women’s fidelity, using women’s bodies and reputations to establish male hierarchies. Where for Santa Lucian men the differences between the spaces of house and street were coherent and mutually reinforcing of their selves and their social status,8 Santa Lucian women experienced the spaces of house and street in terms of not simply different, but conflicting, constructions of their subordination. As a result, for women the daily movement between the two spheres was not coherent, as it was for men, but

Coming of Age

●

11

contradictory. More generally, house and street operated in terms of what Stephanie Coontz refers to as “sites of contradiction in the Marxist sense—places where inherent oppositions occur that are necessary to perpetuate a particular process or social system [in this case patriarchy] and yet also undermine that process or social system” (2002, 127). There are several critical conceptual points for feminist ethnographic praxis to be drawn from these propositions about house and street, each of which is central to how I understand the place of schooling for Santa Lucian youth coming of age. The first point is that the terms of local patriarchal social relations were produced as much through the division and signifying of social space—described, organized, and legitimized through the discursive operations of machismo—as through the division and signifying of productive labor (as some feminists define patriarchy in narrowly materialist terms). The second point is that the differences between house and street and the daily practices of Santa Lucians they sustained are not reducible to the passive expression of an already internalized “habitus”—a kind of cultural knowledge inculcated into the bodies and minds of youth through their unavoidable acquiescence to cultural norms, as Bourdieu (1977) might have it (Varenne & McDermott 1999, 174; see also de Certeau 1984, 56–58). Rather, the power of house and street to organize, signify, and symbolize the cultural, ethical, even aesthetic norms and sensibilities of daily life in patriarchal terms within and beyond the literal spaces of the house and the street resided not in the minds of habituated individuals, but rather in the ongoing, daily, constrained but creative practices in which Santa Lucian students, their families, and their teachers engaged (Varenne & McDermott 1999, 174). Because patriarchal rules of conduct were constantly being remade in their daily performance, because those rules of conduct were differently experienced by women and men, and because they were intrinsically contradictory, they were also always subject to contestation and change. And so, since the transition my visitors were about to make was not to be rushed, I had to repeat the invitation in order to coax the two girls through the patio and into the house. Once they had been persuaded to enter, they took a seat together on a small rattan couch, snuggling up to each other like a pair of nervous kittens. I suggested they take off their jackets and make themselves at home, and then offered them the obligatory cup of coffee. This confirmed that they were welcome in my home and that they could stay and relax. They accepted. To refuse the offer of coffee would have been as inappropriate for the guests as not offering would have been for the hostess. While I prepared the coffee, they sat

12

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

quietly, waiting, staring in front of themselves, their hands neatly folded together in their laps, uttering not a word. But I had already become accustomed to long lapses of silence. True to the Venezuelan refrain about Andean people, many native Santa Lucians were indeed “of few words.” I served the coffee in demitasses, as was customary. They sipped quickly but gingerly, silently, and then handed the cups back to me. “Thank you,” they whispered. Unlike the U.S. custom of nursing a large cup of coffee, sipping it intermittently during the course of conversation, in Santa Lucía the period during which people sipped their coffee was an extension of their entry into the house. The hostess—because coffee was usually served by a woman except on those rare occasions when there was no woman in the house—would often wait, eyeing her guests until they had finished, in order to remove the cups and carry on with the visit. “You’re welcome,” I replied, taking their cups from them. We were now ready to delve into the homework. They pulled out their notebooks and textbooks, secondhand English texts most likely passed on by a sibling or relative with the answers already penciled in, often incorrectly. I found these textbooks, all approved by the Ministry of Education, all written by the same two or three female educators, quite frustrating: The instructions were invariably in English, the English was often too sophisticated for the students, and the exercises required a logician’s mind to decipher—all qualities that would seem to discourage any student from wanting to learn English. The girls turned to the lesson at hand and we began. The lesson’s theme was “Existence.” The exercise asked the student to use the phrase “There is” in combination with various other phrases. I asked them how I could help. Andrea, the bolder of the two, explained that they didn’t know how to “solve the exercises.” I began by explaining that the phrase was comparable to the Spanish verb haber. This caused a certain degree of confusion since they were accustomed to translating English into Spanish word-for-word, and couldn’t quite understand how a single word in their language became two in English. I gleaned this, not from any questions they asked—they never asked any—but rather from the mistakes they made trying to complete the exercise. Over time, I had stopped urging students to ask me questions, as I learned that this practice was generally not encouraged by either teachers or parents, and the pressure to come up with questions only added to their discomfort. (Students told me they didn’t ask teachers questions about material they didn’t understand, either because the teacher did not like to be asked questions while teaching or because doing so caused the students too

Coming of Age

●

13

much pena.) So despite the girls’ timid affirmations that they understood my explanations, I was dubious. As soon as we had completed the assignment, the girls thanked me and began packing up their books. But I wasn’t going to let them off so easy. I wanted to learn something from them as well. “So tell me,” I solicited casually, without standing up or moving to the door myself, “How do you like English?” “I love it,” Veronica, the shyer of the two, exclaimed, her eyes sparkling so brightly it was clear she wasn’t saying it just for my benefit. “I love the pronunciation, like you hear in American songs.” Andrea wasn’t so enthusiastic. She declared her preference for science, especially Biology. “So you’re going to study Sciences?” I probed, referring to the election of the Sciences or Humanities “cycle” students made after their third year of secondary school. “Yes, of course,” she confirmed. “I want to study Forestry.” “Not me,” Veronica said with a sudden assertiveness that seemed out of character. “I’m going to study Humanities. I would like to be a journalist.” “So both of you are going to continue your studies after you graduate?” They nodded in unison but said nothing. “So you like school?” I pressed. They nodded again. “Yes, one has to study to improve oneself,” Andrea said, reciting the refrain I had heard from students and parents alike in discussions about the value of education. “Ahh,” I continued. “And what about getting married, having a family?” “Yes,” Andrea replied, “of course I want a family too. But only one or two children.” “Why is that?” “Well, because of the crisis. It’s just that the situation the country is living, well, things have gotten very difficult.” “Mmm,” I responded sympathetically. I turned to Veronica who sat, head down, eyes on her hands. “And how about you? Do you want to have a family?” “Yes, but like Andrea, after I finish my studies.” “And why is that?” I probed. Veronica replied softly and with unusual seriousness, “Well . . . because you need a career to defend yourself when your husband leaves you.”9 Because you need a career to defend yourself when your husband leaves you. Veronica’s declaration was disquieting, containing, and condensing as it did the complex artistry of her youthful effort to give form to an imagined adult life. More than that, it exposed that effort as involving the reconciliation of two very different interpretive inclinations: the inclination to imagine adulthood as the unfolding of an authentic, if uncertain, life project as an educated person, on the one hand; and the inclination to consider adult life as the inevitable repetition of a familiar, if vulnerable, family formation, on the other. Where the first inclination can be associated with the cultural logic of modern individualism (itself supported by the artifices of a patriarchal state), the

14

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

second responds to a local cultural logic I call negligent patriarchy. Unlike “classic” patriarchy, in which gendered hierarchies are disguised by norms of honor, responsibility, and reciprocal familial obligations (Kandiyoti 1991), or autocratic patriarchal relations based on an arbitrary authoritarianism combining “professed paternalism and calculated exploitation” (Stern 1995, 12), a distinct patriarchal logic pervaded daily life in Santa Lucía, one in which male authority and female submission were sustained through the tension between the moral expectation of patriarchal responsibility and the normative legitimacy of male neglect. Older Santa Lucians, both women and men, often described aspects of what I am calling “negligent patriarchy” as a loss of traditional ways, historicizing this tension as a relation between a proper past and a failed present, and ascribing its emergence to a “crisis in the family,” or a “crisis between generations.” Whether negligent patriarchal relations were a manifestation of the crisis, whether they were a response to neoliberal relations of global capital, as some materialist feminists have proposed (Mies 1986; Kaplan 2002), or whether they had even deeper historical roots that these explanations partially obscure are questions I consider in the next chapter. What I want to attend to here is that Veronica’s declaration referred to an effort at reconciliation riddled with contradictions. Patriarchal family relations presumed and promised a father’s or husband’s familial protection and his public authority in exchange for a daughter’s or wife’s faithfulness and cooperation—apparent terms of reciprocity that mystified unequal relations subordinating and exploiting women sexually and productively. But Veronica, already versed in the terms of negligent patriarchy, knew better than to believe this classic “patriarchal bargain” (Kandiyoti 1991; see also Mies 1986; Ortner 1978). Instead, she turned to the presumptions and promises of formal education to protect herself against the patriarchal negligence she had learned to expect. She would not need a man to represent her, as women of her mother’s generation proposed; she would represent herself. At the same time, the value Veronica ascribed to a career, a form of self-protection, dampened the modern patriarchal claims of the Venezuelan nation-state that the youth it educated into adulthood would be protected by the state in exchange for their service to it as workers and citizens; and it put an ironic twist on the notion that the reason for getting an education was, as Santa Lucian students told me, to “make something of yourself,” to “become someone in life.” This book is, in part, an ethnographic exploration of Veronica’s statement: the contradictory and uncertain social and material conditions of its production; its significance as the early effort of a young female stu-

Coming of Age

●

15

dent to imagine an adult life for herself as an educated person; and its relationship to the life decisions that she would eventually make. More generally, the book considers how Veronica, Andrea, and other Santa Lucian secondary school students learned about, made sense of, and worked with the conflicting dreams and disillusions, promises and expectations of formal education and negligent patriarchy to construct, abandon, and revise adult life projects and identities as they came of age in times of crisis. Meanwhile, if my young visitors’ departure left me with the lingering discomfort that they had unwittingly provided me with ethnographic lessons in exchange for an English lesson I offered knowingly, it also occurred to me that Veronica and Andrea may have sensed, or been quite aware, that their statements would be received sympathetically by the profesora, the gringa who had acquired the dubious reputation around town for being a feminist. Either way, it struck me that the congenial lesson and subsequent conversation were neither innocent nor transparent; instead, it seemed that through my asking, their telling, and my listening, the stories these girls recounted about how their imagined future would unfold had become artifacts of our respective, and now partially imbricated efforts to come of age as “educated persons.” Partially, if only temporarily imbricated, but not necessarily reciprocal. For if, as a dialogic theory of selfhood suggests, the subject can only recognize herself in relation to another (Bakhtin 1981; Morris 1994), that moment of alterity is as constitutive of power as it is of selfrecognition. Yet how can we measure the value of the ethnographer’s role as legitimizing Other to her subjects’ self-imagining, relative to their role as Others in that ethnographer’s quest to forge a career with which to defend and define herself? And so, while this book is primarily about the role of secondary schooling in youth’s coming of age in Santa Lucía, it is also, necessarily and uncomfortably, about, indeed a material instantiation of, the role of ethnographic fieldwork and ethnographic writing in the anthropologist’s coming of age. Becoming Someone in Life “Because you need a career to defend yourself when your husband leaves you.” Veronica’s declaration was so forceful and confident that, in the moment she uttered it, I too was convinced she would go on to the university, complete her degree, and begin a career before getting married and having children. Admittedly, I was also sympathetic to her levelheaded if cynical assessment of male fidelity, and I was impressed by her

16

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

application of that general assessment to her own adult life as she already imagined it unfolding. But Veronica’s statement struck me doubly: first as personal avowal, then as ethnographic instruction, a trenchant synthesis of the varied stories I had been told by secondary school students when I asked them similar questions about their school experiences or educational plans. Often as not, such discussions led them to tell me (and perhaps remind themselves) that it was important to study, to follow a career, if you wanted to make something of yourself, if you wanted to “become someone in life,” the implication being that they all did want to become someone in life. Over the months of my stay in Santa Lucía, as I got to know Veronica, Andrea, and their friends and families, my visitors’ declarations began to sound less like the certain articulation of future projects and more like fables: stories or tales about an imagined future that were fable-like in the sense that they contained lessons or morals (Benjamin 1969, 86) about the path to adulthood, but also fabulous in their improbability. For, as I would learn over time, few students who started secondary school passed their baccalaureate exam or graduated. And while far more young women completed secondary school than did young men, it was the rare female graduate who went on to pursue a higher educational degree. As these girls must have learned by watching their older female siblings and cousins come of age, it was much more likely that they would have children and perhaps a husband soon after, if not before, graduating from Liceo Parra. Nonetheless, a young woman’s fate was not sealed by motherhood, and the demands and constraints of family life did not always quell young women’s aspirations of becoming someone in life. I came to know several young, and some not so young, mothers who returned to school after having formed a family in order to pursue a vocational degree toward a secretarial, accounting, or computing career. Some of the women who made this decision risked their husbands’ ire or abandonment, while others found themselves returning to school after their husbands, or the fathers of their children, had left them. Or, in a few cases, it was the women who did the leaving in order to finally pursue the studies they had postponed so long. But even these protracted and circuitous paths toward educated adulthood did not resolve the conflicting life aspirations Santa Lucian women faced. For most young women I knew, the degrees and credentials they acquired or hoped to receive—whether as a secretary, a civil engineer, an English teacher, or a chemist—qualified them for jobs they could rarely find in Santa Lucía. And yet, while professional credentials

Coming of Age

●

17

promised personal fulfillment and a response to economic crisis, they could just as easily become a source of familial crisis. In order to pursue their careers, many women had to leave children, spouses, or dependent parents behind; and yet staying in Santa Lucía was difficult to justify, as the cost of living continued to increase but the expectation of prosperity persisted. And so, at every step along that path toward educated adulthood, Santa Lucian women were faced with conflicting choices and constraints that were not anticipated by the progressive promises of a modern meritocracy or the coherent certainties of classic patriarchy. All this is not meant to imply that the challenge of plotting a life trajectory was the exclusive struggle of Santa Lucian girls and women. Each male student who attended, left, or graduated from Liceo Parra had to do his own hard, cultural work of spinning life plans out of a patriarchal cloth worn ragged by modern disruptions to extended familial relations of production and power, and the gossamer threads of professional opportunity worn thin by the contingencies of crisis. However, it was not until they reached their third or fourth year of secondary school that male students began to elaborate life plans that responded to these uncertain terms for constituting a career or a household. Where Veronica was led early in her adolescent life to the decisive conclusion that she would need a career to defend herself when her husband left her, her classmate Alvaro proffered the unequivocal plan of completing a career in “computer engineering” and having a family, both as soon as he graduated from Liceo Parra. And where did he plan to live out this dream? “In Santa Lucía if possible. And if not, in Valera [the nearby city, economic and commercial center of the state of Trujillo] so that I will not be far from my mother.” While most boys in seventh and eighth grade declared similarly seamless intentions of making something of themselves and having a family—often but not always with a particular career in mind—Alvaro’s friend Raúl intended to get married, have a few children, and move to Maracaibo. Why Maracaibo? “Because there are lots of jobs and the salaries are better there. There is more money in Maracaibo,” Raúl explained. Unlike the young female students with whom I spoke, who tended to distance themselves from their own futures by representing themselves in the third person singular or the passive voice, Alvaro and his peers, already working with the patriarchal materials that legitimized their male subjectivity, narrated their futures in the first person—as protagonists of their own lives over which they had complete control: “I plan to complete an engineering degree and make something of myself ”; “My plan is to get work in agriculture that pays well, buy a house, and then

18

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

have a family”; “I’m going to travel first, while I have the chance. Then I plan to come back to Santa Lucía, work, and have a family.” Just as notable as these boys’ certainty about their future lives was their exclusion of women as identifiable actors in their life schemes. At 12, Veronica constructed her adult life in defensive response to the man with whom she would have to contend. But Alvaro and his peers incorporated women only indirectly and passively in their future life schemes, implicitly encompassed within their patriarchal desire for a family.10 However, these Santa Lucian boys’ simple and certain stories about an imagined adulthood were tempered soon enough by the approaching contingencies that began to gain material force as they came of age. Perhaps they began to learn life’s lessons by watching the lives of older brothers, relatives, and friends unfold. The poorer students whose families had no land of their own and farmed the land of others watched older brothers who had been able to continue their studies at the height of oil boom return to Santa Lucía to supplement a father’s day labor that could no longer provide for the entire family, or protect an aging mother from having to look for work cleaning homes or washing clothes. They may have noticed, as did I, the number of young, unmarried, or recently married men who had returned home after an initial attempt at a career in the city in order to compensate for the added household expense of younger siblings who were now studying for their higher educational degrees. But even students from economically comfortable families that were able to send more than one child to the university watched the frequent student demonstrations, teacher strikes, and budget cuts interrupt their older siblings’ university studies and attenuate the time it took to get a degree and make something of themselves. So it was not surprising that some older Liceo Parra students had begun to wonder about the value and practicality of a university degree. It seemed easier, more certain, and with the right connections more lucrative to stay and work in Santa Lucía. I knew several Santa Lucian men in their twenties and thirties who had spent a few years studying toward a degree and were waiting for “the situation” to improve in order to complete their studies and have a family. Some found themselves drifting along the current of negligent patriarchy, surprised to find themselves becoming fathers before they had a chance to become modern workers. Thus, for the relatively few young men who continued to study at Liceo Parra into their fourth and fifth years, the effort to create a life plan buffeted them between the challenges an educational meritocracy posed to classic patriarchy by proposing that all youth, regardless of sex or circumstance, might and should pursue schooling, careers, and a place

Coming of Age

●

19

in civic life, and the challenges the crisis posed to that proposal of universal opportunity and upward mobility. How did young Santa Lucian men respond to these contradictions? A few I got to know proffered an enlightened, Rousseauian version of the patriarchal bargain, imagining an adult life in which they would work and their wives would raise the kids with greater competence for being educated women. Fancying themselves more modern than their parents, whose family roles they described as traditional, these young men claimed they would help their wives with the chores at home—a proposal that implied a commitment not only to their wives as people but also to the house as a place, and thus the relinquishing of the kind of philandering their male adulthood entitled them to. Some older male students went even further in their modern aspirations. They described their life projects in the liberal terms of gender equity, expressing the desire to marry women who also wanted to become someone in life and claiming they would support their wives in their careers. Some young men justified a modern household arrangement in terms of the crisis: “Because of the crisis,” a fourth-year student explained to me, “it is important for both husband and wife to have a career. . . . You just can’t raise a family on one person’s wages anymore.” Others were more idealistic. In a discussion with one of the fifth-year classes, the three male students concurred that educated women were more interesting, more ambitious, more modern and thus better partners than women whose only aspiration was to be a housewife. It didn’t escape me that they said this in front of their female classmates: young educated women who outnumbered them four to one and who rolled their eyes and snickered at their male peers’ declarations. The girls’ skepticism was not surprising. Given how events unfolded in most Santa Lucian families, it was likely the same young men who as secondary students had averred their support for their wives-to-be would later renege on those modern, gender egalitarian family promises and try to prevent their wives from studying or working outside the house, much as their fathers had restricted their mothers. And so, for students like Andrea or Veronica as well as for their male counterparts, the work of creating, describing, and justifying a life course was never neatly inscribed within a landscape of continuity or of progress, although that was how coming of age was posited by the “dominant interpretive devices” of their culture (Steedman 1986). Rather, like all individuals and groups whose lives cannot be adequately accounted for by those dominant interpretive devices, who cannot easily plot their life plans according to a social landscape that purports to be for everyone,

20

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

the efforts of Santa Lucian school youth to plot out their adult life always entailed the hard work of compensation, improvisation, and compromise. But the daily work of coming of age that Santa Lucian students engaged in was also hard and oftentimes painful. And it would be an error of idealism to consider the creativity of Santa Lucian students coming of age without considering the personal and political effects of students weaving tales about their futures as educated adults that would not come true, of finding that schooling produced desires that would be left unfulfilled. Writing about how the experience of exclusion figures in the construction of a life story, Carolyn Steedman pointed out that the exclusions and losses suffered during childhood were more than moments in the development of the individual self, for exclusion is always historically located and socially interpreted. Thus the effects of exclusion are never just developmental, but also always political (1986, 110–111). Where Steedman was interested in how past losses and exclusions came to be figured in the stories her mother told to account for her life, I am interested in how Santa Lucian youth figured the experiences of educational exclusions into the work they did of fashioning an adult future. This is an issue I take up at various points in the book by looking at specific educational moments—the teaching of English, a student debate about Venezuelan women, an impromptu civics lesson, a group project on adolescence—in which modern desires were constructed and their fulfillment foreclosed. It is through these kinds of educational moments that I consider how the production of desires and the denial of their fulfillment—a dynamic central to the workings of negligent patriarchy, we should not forget—contributed to the youthful construction of social personhood and adult possibility. Concepts for a Feminist Ethnography Coming of Age questions of conceptualization are questions of power, that is, they are political questions. In this sense, the clarification of conceptual positions is part of the political struggle of feminism. Maria Mies (1986).

Way back in 1963, Jules Henry confronted the alienation of contemporary U.S. society and the hegemony of positivist science in his powerful and unabashedly critical ethnographic essays Culture against Man. Noting in his introduction that the book was based primarily on studies

Coming of Age

●

21

for which he was either the director or researcher or both, and that most of the research was by direct observation, he then asserted that “I do not use research as proof in any rigorous sense; rather I write about the research from an interpretive, value-laden point of view. Since I have an attitude toward culture, I discuss data as illustrative of a viewpoint and as a take-off for expressing a conviction” (1965, 4). I have written this book with the understanding that feminist ethnography is a similarly interpretive and critical endeavor. Feminism is, first and foremost, a political struggle to understand and end women’s oppression, and is thus premised on theories of the possibilities of societal change and not just its reproduction. Feminist ethnography is thus a value-laden, subjective, and necessarily interpretive exercise that should be full of “attitude.” Throughout the book, I try to bring an attitude of critical optimism to bear, an optimism that reflects my hopes for Santa Lucian youth and their families in their efforts to forge a better future for themselves and their families. Not unlike the research on which Jules Henry based his treatise, much of the research for this book was undertaken by direct observation and informal conversation, in the school and around the town. During my first three months, I spent most of my time sitting in classrooms, standing in hallways, and hanging out in the school yard observing and chatting with students, teachers, and other school staff. I supplemented this observational research with surveys, interviews, and formal group discussions with students and teachers and with secondary literature on the town, region, and the national educational system. Over time, however, I was invited to take on more participatory roles in the school and community, and many of the stories I tell in this book are based on my interactions with students, teachers, and parents in my role as tutor, teacher, or project advisor. I certainly share—and continue to be inspired by—Jules Henry’s trenchant and troubled critique of the cultural practices through which schooling manufactures the consent of youth to participate in the alienating practices of modern capitalist society by curbing creativity. However, I also believe that it is the job of any feminist interpretation to find the enduring seeds of creativity that are able to sprout inside the societal soil, no matter how dry that soil may appear to the ethnographic observer. This entails not only centering the social dimension of gender, but doing so in a way that destabilizes the coherence of eurocentric, androcentric theories and the social realities they seek to explain. Such destabilization exposes what Michael Taussig (1992) called the nervousness of the system, underscoring how unsystematic (and thus susceptible

22

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

to change) social systems really are. As the feminist philosopher Sandra Harding proposed, “feminist analytical categories should be unstable— consistent and coherent theories in an unstable and incoherent world are obstacles to both our understanding and our social practices” (1987, 649; emphasis in original). Questioning the effort of some scholars to engage in feminist critique by transcending the dichotomous concepts and categories that organize patriarchal thought and social life, Harding further argued that “until our dualistic practices are changed (division of social experience into mental vs. manual, into abstract vs. concrete, into emotional vs. emotion denying), we are forced to think and exist within the very dichotomizing we criticize” (1987, 662). This poses a particular kind of challenge for the feminist ethnographer, who must find a way to think and act through and between her own dichotomizing practices and those of her subjects, without reducing one to the other. In addressing the central themes of this book, I have used the concepts of negligent patriarchy, coming of age, and crisis because each concept describes and destabilizes the dualistic terms by which Santa Lucian students and I organized, explained, and assessed our respective social realities. By thinking through these concepts, my interpretive intention is to explore the instability of the social relations and cultural processes those dualisms or dichotomies propose to explain, and in the process problematize the relationship between the conditions of Santa Lucian students’ lives and the conditions of my research. Because of the ubiquity of crisis as a descriptive and explanatory discourse across the landscape of Santa Lucian life at the time of my stay, I examine specific instances of its uses and ideological effects throughout the book. In particular, I consider how crisis worked as a dehistoricizing discourse to mystify the uncertainties of local and national life by implying a condition of normalcy and stability that the country had either veered from or was meant to move toward. As a discourse of contrast and deviance, crisis at times implied the normalcy of traditional stability, at times the notion of modern progress or development as the ideal or norm. In the preface, I discussed the slipperiness of crisis as both a reality and an effect. In chapter 2, I explore the myriad ways Santa Lucian youth incorporated notions of crisis into their assessment of their town, schooling and adult possibilities. In other chapters, I consider how the discourse of crisis did the ideological work of naturalizing the contradictions between patriarchal bargains and realities, in the realm of the family as well as the school. For instance, where gendered and racialized discourses of temperament, apti-

Coming of Age

●

23

tude, and other dispositions naturalize the contradictions of the patriarchal meritocracy at the individual level (Bisseret 1979), the discourse of crisis does that mystifying work more systematically, more totally. As the Venezuelan media and my Santa Lucian neighbors regularly bemoaned, there was no more family unity because the family was in crisis; teen pregnancy was on the rise because youth were in crisis; students weren’t learning, teachers weren’t teaching, and school buildings were crumbling, all because the educational system was in crisis. In the rest of this section, I want to dwell primarily on the concepts of patriarchy and coming of age, as these function more as framing concepts than as subjects of interpretation. The concept of patriarchy is, in a sense, the key organizing principle of this book. Like Maria Mies (1986), I find patriarchy particularly conducive to feminist praxis, not as an explanatory device but as a “struggle concept” (Mies 1986). On the one hand, patriarchy is able to express “the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women . . . as well as their systemic character” (1986, 37). On the other hand, patriarchy “denotes the historical and societal dimension of women’s exploitation and oppression, and is thus less open to biologistic interpretations, in contrast, for example, to the concept of ‘male dominance’ ” (1986, 37). Where Teresa Ebert has proposed that “patriarchy is primarily a material practice of labor” and “only secondarily a regime of power of men over women” (1996, 91), I would argue that the conceptual value of patriarchy derives from its ability to account for both. It is precisely because of its systemic quality that patriarchy, more than gender, sustains a unity and tension between the cultural and material, the individual and collective, dimensions of social life while alluding to the inseparability of these dimensions that modern social theories have insisted on differentiating and prioritizing.11 At the same time, the concept of patriarchy addresses and destabilizes the dichotomies of the universal and the particular, the global and the local, the premodern and the modern. Because patriarchy describes the unequal and exploitative arrangements of the family as well as other realms of social life—the workplace, the church, the state, the schools— it has a quality of universality or totality that is in tension with its geographic specificity and historical particularity.12 Capitalist patriarchy implies both the historical specificity and global reach of a modern patriarchal social formation that has organized and legitimized the flows of production and consumption that Santa Lucian farmers and merchants live by, as well as the terms by which the discipline of anthropology has constructed its ethnographic practice. Meanwhile, the notion of negligent

24

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

patriarchy as a local formation disrupts the systematicity of capitalist patriarchy and exposes the exploitative underpinnings of the “patriarchal bargain,” whether it is the bargain a husband makes with his wife, a state makes with its young citizens and adult workers, or an ethnographer makes with her subjects. One of the contradictions I take up in this book is between the certainty, directionality, and uniformity of the life path that Venezuela’s modern, patriarchal “teacher state” proposed to its student-citizens-to-be through the formal structures and ideologies of its educational system, and the uncertain and unequal realities Santa Lucian students faced as they negotiated the conditions and expectations of negligent patriarchal familial arrangements. Through this contradiction, the instability of both patriarchy and coming of age are partially revealed, as are the dualisms they express. The negligence of patriarchy refers to the disruption of a presumably stable, accepted social order, and thus of coming of age as a predictable process of socialization—much like the socialization of young Samoan girls to womanhood that Margaret Mead described in her classic monograph Coming of Age in Samoa. Coming of age in this sense is the coherent work of and for the collectivity. The coercive work of negligent patriarchy derives in part from the sustained desire for that coherence. But the ideology of modern, state-legitimized capitalist patriarchy maps out different terms for the transition from childhood to adulthood. Coming of age in modernity comes to refer to an individual’s journey of personal development and self-realization that occurs in harmony or in tension with a person’s full entry into society as an authentic (and implicitly male) adult self. In this sense, the concept of coming of age indexes myriad modern dualisms: individual versus society, progress versus stagnation, primitive versus civilized. What is particularly compelling to me about this modern notion of coming of age is how uneasily it accommodates the equally modern notion of crisis. Coming of Age in Samoa was, after all, not just a descriptive account of the placid lives and predictable paths of Samoan youth; it was also a comparative study aimed at denaturalizing the crisis of adolescence that characterized youth’s coming of age in the United States. Thus its subtitle, “A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.” Many anthropologists have taken Mead to task for producing an ethnographic analysis and narrative that rested on the geopolitical and cultural dichotomization of primitive Samoa and the civilized West (Worsley 1992). As Eleanor Leacock pointed out, Mead’s “refusal to deal with the political economy of colonialism and its impact on the cultures

Coming of Age

●

25

she describe led to distortions that contradicted her own commitments” (1992, 19). For instance, when I reread Mead’s monograph to think about my own, I was struck by her almost explicit evasion of the significance of the mission schools that some Samoan youth attended. Perhaps, as Leacock generously proposed, Mead’s historical and analytic blind spots may have been intended to “mitigate the Western bias toward nonindustrial societies,” or may have “fed her own wish for a more cooperative and satisfying life” (23). Nonetheless, the result is a monograph that not only typifies and dehistoricizes Samoan society but also fails to offer a framework for considering the historical relation between the relatively unstressful adolescence of Samoan youth and the troubled adolescence of American youth. While this book is not a comparative ethnography of youth coming of age in Santa Lucía and the United States, I do consider how flows of products, ideas, and desires created by a neocolonial, patriarchal capitalist political economy contributed to terms by which Santa Lucian students came of age. This includes the infusion of Euro-U.S. concepts and commodities directed toward identifying, entertaining, and conceptualizing youth, or adolescents, as a population “in crisis,” a topic I take up in chapter 8. Coming of Age as Ethnographic Narrative As with any life project, in ethnographic fieldwork the most fateful decisions are haphazard, quite unscientific, really, occurring at the crossroads of material circumstances and individual relationships. Not unlike the improvised logic Santa Lucian students followed as they came of age, I found ethnographic fieldwork to be less a methodology based on verifiable rules, and more a practiced art that could only be learned through the crisis-riddled route of responding imaginatively to ever-changing conditions.13 The path that led me to Santa Lucía began with a suggestion from an anthropologist at the Universidad de los Andes (ULA) in Mérida that I contact a former student of hers, a history teacher at Liceo Parra and member of the Timotocuica Exploration Group, a local group dedicated to recovering the material culture of the region’s pre-Columbian inhabitants. I later learned that he was one of the founders of the town’s Casa de la Cultura, which became the site of a small archeological museum run under the auspices of the ULA’s archeology museum. When I met with the history teacher during my first visit to the town, he offered to introduce me to the school’s principal; encouraged me to think about

26

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

teaching about women, gender, and anthropology to his students; and invited me to join the archeology group. But it was really a chance encounter with a group of children on my first trip to Santa Lucía that endeared me to the town. After the bumpy, winding, but most of all breath-taking four-hour bus ride north from Mérida up over a 4,000-meter mountain pass, through the stark páramo (mountain heights), and down into the narrow, verdant, Motatán river valley, I was dropped off at the Plaza Bolívar. (The central plaza of nearly every city, town, and village in Venezuela is named for Simón Bolívar, the nation’s beloved “Liberator.”) As I made my way from the plaza to the nearby hotel, a group of young school children approached me on the street, catching me up in a conversation by playfully teasing me with their attempts to speak English, then asking in turn to pronounce their names in English, and eventually making me promise to teach them English when I came back. How that promise unfolded (and how it related to Santa Lucian students’ enthusiasm for English) is a story I tell in chapter 6, “English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing.” Over the next few days, I made arrangements to rent a small house fortuitously located right in front of the liceo on the outskirts of town. (The significance of the liceo’s location is a topic I take up in chapter 3, “Becoming Secondary School Students.”) I also managed to arrange an appropriately impromptu meeting with the principal of the secondary school, a broad-minded educator whose patience with my Spanish and interest in my project made me feel quite welcomed. It was through these mundane encounters that I was first introduced to the easy amiability of townsfolk that Santa Lucians like to boast about, contrasting themselves to the rude and raucous city dwellers or the aloof highland villagers who, it was often said, were chilled by their harder life and colder climate. I thus came to Santa Lucía delighted with the place but with much to learn about the town’s history and significance of its prosperity. It was the local agricultural economy’s paradoxical dependence on and autonomy from the national economic situation that permitted many Santa Lucian families to weather the sudden and drastic national economic downturn fairly well, at a time when many other agricultural towns and villages in the region were suffering tremendously. (Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s the rural sectors of the Andean region had among the lowest average per capita incomes in the country [OCEI 1981, 1992].) While it soon became apparent to me that this local affluence was significant both materially and symbolically, it would take longer for me to have the kinds of ethnographically motivated conversations that broached less

Coming of Age

●

27

congenial and more contentious aspects of the town’s political economic history or social life. Moreover, the more I talked to Santa Lucian adults with different relationships to the town’s agricultural economy and political economic history, the more explanations I heard for the town’s prosperity, and the harder it became to create a coherent account of that prosperity. This is not to say that it took a while for me to learn the “truth” about Santa Lucía or its residents, as though fieldwork were an archeological endeavor of digging down through accretions of self and social representation—a kind of inverse idealist exercise that seeks to find the real version lying beneath, rather than hovering above, material realities. Rather, it took a while for me to recognize the range of contradictory representations, values, material certainties, and social limitations that Santa Lucians associated with the town and that provided the material out of which Santa Lucian youth constructed possible life courses. Each of these future life stories were spun out in terms of the reconstitution of patriarchal social relations, family-based relations organizing the production of family members’ material and affective, educational and sexual needs and desires, and which for the past quarter century were being reconstituted and newly signified due to accelerated regional processes of urbanization and migration. In chapter 2, “Santa Lucía: A Particular Place in Times of Crisis,” I look at how Santa Lucian youth deliberated upon the value and meaning of their native town in relation to the promises and constraints of family life, schooling, and crisis as they plotted their educational journeys and adult lives. The rest of the book traces the paths of secondary school students becoming educated adults, beginning with the daily classroom experiences that constituted their first three years at the liceo, and then shifting to their final two years of Diversified Cycle when students began to anticipate graduation. By following youth along this trajectory, I offer a narrative of how the daily routines of schooling worked on students’ minds, bodies, and imaginations while they in turn worked on those routines, such that as they grew older they began to formulate their life plans in ways that more directly addressed the contradictions of opportunity as cast by formal education, and the contradictions of family life as cast by negligent patriarchy. Because the narration of that process is a product of my doctoral fieldwork, my interpretation of Santa Lucian youth’s self-construction as educated people is inseparable from my own self-construction as an educated person. One of the ways I explore this interrelation is by focusing on school-related activities in which I was centrally or marginally

28

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

involved, whether as an impromptu English tutor, a classroom teacher, or an advisor on a group research project. I use these moments in the field to exemplify and confront the inevitable politics of knowledge production and representation entailed in my efforts to plot the coming of age of Santa Lucian youth in order that I might come of age as an ethnographer and professional anthropologist. My encounter with Andrea and Veronica at the beginning of this chapter—a meeting between young students who were just beginning their secondary school studies and an ethnographer who was just beginning her first fieldwork—marks the first episode of that intertwined narrative. In chapter 3, “Becoming Secondary School Students,” I consider the experiences of first- and second-year students making the transition to secondary school. I open the chapter by exploring the ways young secondary students began to adjust to the liceo as a place that acquired significance through its locally enacted location between the spheres of house and street, and its nationally constructed location along the trajectory from childhood to adult citizenship. As I have suggested in this introduction, each of those locations insinuated distinct kinds of patriarchal relations and ideologies. Learning the place of the liceo was thus intimately related to the process of learning to become a secondary student across the contradictions of local and national patriarchal social arrangements, as I discuss in the second part of the chapter. There I consider the possibility that students engaged with the liceo in ways that depended as much on their “historical baggage” (Foley 1990, 11) and personal idiosyncrasies as on the explicit intentions of local educators or national agendas. In other words, becoming a secondary student was a process of negotiation, not inculcation. Chapter 4, “Pedagogy and Patriarchy,” serves as a transition from my discussion of students’ initial accommodation to the liceo as a place to a consideration of the daily classroom experiences of students through the middle grades of secondary school. In this chapter, I look at the unobvious ways in which the terms of negligent patriarchy were taught through teachers’ pedagogical practices and evaluation techniques and through students’ formal and informal learning practices. I draw particular attention to the ways pedagogical practices effected the shutting down of students’ impulses to contest conventional relations between gender and knowledge, at the same time that those practices produced contradictions that virtually required contestation. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on the middle years of secondary schooling, a time when students were beginning to contemplate whether they would pursue the Sciences track, the Humanities track, or leave school

Coming of Age

●

29

altogether. Each chapter revolves around educational activities through which students took up conflicting discursive messages about the possibilities of coming of age in times of crisis they encountered in textbook narratives, teachers’ classroom lectures, and out-of-school conversations and narratives framing larger social issues, including the crisis and the “Americanization” of Venezuelan cultural and social life. In each case, I consider how the practices students had acquired in order to engage in school activities constrained their use of implicit knowledge about the world. At the same time, I explore how conventional educational research frameworks can obscure our understanding of the ways students may use implicit knowledge to construct new knowledge about their worlds. Chapters 8 and 9 focus on students in their final two years—the Diversified Cycle—as they approached graduation and faced the possibilities of postsecondary education and all that entailed for them and their families. In chapter 8, “Adolescents in (Times of ) Crisis,” I draw upon my work as an asesora (advisor) to a group of fifth-year students preparing for a presentation on “Venezuelan adolescent women today.” I consider how Santa Lucian youth addressed the tensions between official constructions of youth as a reified sector of the population purported to be struggling through adolescent crises, and the students’ locally contextualized self-imaginings as parents, spouses, citizens, and workers. As with previous chapters, I am particularly interested in how the students engaged with academic discourses and practices that both spoke to and alienated them from their own experiences and identities. In chapter 9, “Myths of (Fe)male Achievement,” I take up the issue of student academic performance, in particular the significance of Liceo Parra girls performing better and staying longer in school than their male counterparts. As in chapter 8, I consider the contradictions between official ideologies about the relationship between schooling and gender and local realities, exploring how the negligent patriarchal arrangements of schooling and family life colluded to facilitate female educational achievement but also emptied it of any potential social power or material possibility. By tracing the unpredictable life trajectories of a few “successful” female students before and after they graduated, the chapter calls into question reproductionist models of schooling that tautologically predict dominant groups will succeed and subordinate groups will fail. At the same time, it challenges the culturalist arguments of much of the literature on gender and education in Latin America in which the aim of increasing young women’s participation and performance in formal schooling presumes a neat, causal relationship between

30

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

girls’ academic success, their expressed desires to become someone in life, and their actual life paths. When the story you want to tell is about processes that continue beyond the narrative’s frame, it makes it hard to know how and when to bring the story to a close. Much as the students I came to know during my initial stay in Santa Lucía continued along the path to adulthood after I had left, leaving the field did not mark the closure of my own coming of age. This book is informed by the lessons I learned through regular visits to Santa Lucía since my initial fieldwork in the early 1990s. During my first few returns, I learned about the twists and turns in the lives of individual Santa Lucian students and their families as they continued to cope with their country’s ever-deepening crisis. But the year 1998 marked a critical turning point in the nation’s trajectory, politically, economically, and ideologically. That year, Hugo Chávez Frias began his first term as president of Venezuela. In 1992, Chávez, then a young military commander, led a coup attempt against the Pérez government (see chapter 5), an event of historic proportions that landed the radical populist Movimiento Boliviariano 2000 right in the middle of Venezuela’s political landscape. Among many transformations initiated by the Chávez government, I have witnessed the increased politicization of the Venezuelan people, including Santa Lucians, and a shift in popular discourse from that of national crisis—in which the Venezuelan people were the victims of national policies or national character—to one of global conflict in which the nation as a whole has been constructed as the historical subject of anti-imperialism and regional leadership. I end the book with a brief postscript in which I consider how the political, economic, and ideological changes brought about by the Chávez government have affected the ways many of the Santa Lucian youth and families I know talk about their life possibilities. I focus my discussion around a comparison of shifts in political discourse with shifts in personal/familial discourse— the first a shift away from crisis and toward struggle, the second a shift away from opportunity and toward crisis via the presumed promiscuity of educated young women. I draw on this comparison to propose that the concepts of crisis and negligent patriarchy continue to have interpretive value in seeking to understand the role of secondary education in students’ work of coming of age in “neo-Socialist” Venezuela—or at least in post–neoliberal Santa Lucía.

CHAPTER 2

Santa Lucía: A Certain Place in Uncertain Times The Dialectics of Personhood and Place (Excerpt from a conversation with students from the fourth-year class, Sciences Cycle, Group B, Liceo Parra, October 1992)1 Janise: So have you thought about what you’ll do after you graduate? Marta: Continue studying. Janise: What do you plan to study? Marta: Forestry [Forestal]. If my grades are good enough. Janise: And where would you study that? Marta: At the ULA [the University of the Andes in the city of Mérida] if there is a space in that field. Miguel: I think you have to go to the ULA if you want to study Forestry. Ramón: The students I know, that is, the ones who plan to continue studying, are either going to study at the ULA or the LUZ [acronym for the University of Zulia, located in the coastal city of Maracaibo]. Janise: And you? Ramón: Well, I don’t see the necessity. It’s a lot of work, and for what? Here in Santa Lucía we don’t lack anything. There is plenty of work here, especially in agriculture. And there are diversions.

A few students nod in agreement; two others roll their eyes in apparent disagreement; one can be heard to whisper, “Depends on what you mean by diversions.” Ramon: Well, not like in the city, maybe. But there is always something to do, you know, besides work . . . . Raúl: I’d like to continue studying. That’s why I am getting my baccalaureate.2 But the way the situation is, well, everything is really costly. And then, well, there are a lot of expenses . . . .

32

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Janise: Expenses? Raúl: Expenses when you go to study at the university. You have to pay for a room, unless you have family. And food, books . . . . Susana: Yes, there are a lot of parents who say that. That’s why the muchachos [young people] want to study but their parents don’t let them. It’s too expensive. Janise: I thought the university was practically free. Susana: Well, maybe the tuition. But all the other expenses have gone up. Like everything. It’s because of the crisis the country is going through. Miguel: Some [parents] who have land don’t want their children to study; they want them to work the land. Some want them to study; if they don’t have land, they want them to get another kind of career. Because with the way things are right now, that is, the economic situation that we have in our country, you need to study to have other opportunities. Javier: Sometimes parents want their children to work the land, but the muchachos want to do something else, they want to make something of themselves. Ramón: Well, not me. When I graduate, I intend to work with my brother in the family store, save my money and then buy some land from my uncle, on the other side of the hill, build my house, then have a family . . . . Janise: And, Ramón, what do your parents think about this? I mean, about you becoming a farmer? Ramón: Well, it’s alright with them, I guess. Since my uncle has land . . . . My father, he didn’t want to work in agriculture, so he has the store. But it’s not like they think much of studies. At least not my dad. He says it’s a waste of time. Janise: And your mother? What does she say? Ramón: Well, she doesn’t talk about it much. But I know that she wants me to graduate. She talks a lot about how young people should be prepared to advance themselves in the future. Janise: And your father, he doesn’t want you to work in his store? Ramón: Well, that would be fine too. That’s what my older brother is doing. But he likes commerce. He’s always liked being in the store. I think my father, he recognizes that working the land, well, it’s secure. Especially here in Santa Lucía. Diana: That’s what my father says. He says that when you have land you have all you need. Janise: And what do you think? Diana: Me? Well, I don’t agree. I mean, I understand why they think that. My father is a farmer, and my grandfather was a farmer too. Santa Lucía is an agricultural town. It has always been this way. That’s all people think about here. Working the land. But, well, if you want to make something of yourself, that is, if you want to have a career, you have to leave Santa Lucía. You have to go to the city.

Santa Lucía

●

33

Javier: Yes it’s true. There are more work opportunities in the city. Janise: When you say that some parents want their children to work the land, do you mean muchachas and muchachos? I mean, do women work in agriculture too? Several female students: Nooo! [general laughter] Diana: No, they mean the males. The muchachas are supposed to stay at home and help their mothers. [Some giggling from the girls] Ramón: Or their husbands! [Lots of laughter] [Silence] Javier: Well, some muchachos, some that I know, well, they say when they graduate they’re going to go to the city, but, well, for the adventure. They say they want to leave behind village life. Sometimes I think about that, just going to the city to see what work opportunities there are. Ramón: Yes, I’ve heard that. But in my opinion it’s better to stay in Santa Lucía. Now, with the crisis, you never know if you’ll be able to study in the university, let alone complete your program. Alejandro: Yes, it’s true what he’s saying. My cousin, for example. He’s getting a degree in Engineering, or something. But he says there are always disturbances, strikes, they cancel classes. So he can’t finish. And he has to pay rent and he’s wasting a lot of money. Ramón: People say there aren’t job opportunities here in town. But, I don’t know, I think there’s always work in Santa Lucía. Susana: Well, I think one should go for a short-track [vocational] career. Because, as my parents tell me, with the crisis you can’t raise a family on one income. Gabriela: That’s what my mom says. But my dad won’t let me, that is, he doesn’t want me to study because I would have to go to Valera [the nearest large, industrial city] or maybe Trujillo [a nearby, mid-sized university city]. He says it’s too dangerous for a girl to leave home to study. Janise: What do you mean by dangerous? Gabriela: Well, what he says is that girls who go to the city to study acquire bad habits. Susana: That’s how Andean men are. Very machista. They always want to keep women locked up, keep them from improving themselves. Janise: And what do you think? Susana: Well, in my opinion, well, I guess I don’t understand why parents want us to go to school if afterwards we’re just supposed to dedicate ourselves to the home.

That this group of classmates, all students preparing to graduate at the same time from the same secondary school, had such disparate perspectives on Santa Lucía (which was not only their native town but also that of their parents and in some cases their grandparents as well) says as

34

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

much about Santa Lucía in 1992 as it says about these students and the place of secondary schooling in their visions of adulthood. That these students, different as their outlooks were, all assessed their hometown by thinking about what it might offer them as adults, and that in doing so they related Santa Lucía to a world beyond and, in particular, to an urban world, says as much about the horizons of these students’ lives and dreams as it does about Santa Lucía as a rural, agricultural town. That the crisis could delimit these horizons and temper their dreams in different ways says as much about the ambiguity of the crisis as it does about its ubiquity. And that these students differently negotiated the significance of schooling, work, and crisis in relation to the views, desires, and economic means of their parents as well as their own roles and responsibilities as sons and daughters attests to both the centrality and the uncertainty of patriarchal family relations in Santa Lucian youth’s formulation of their individual life trajectories. Six months into my research at Liceo Parra, at the beginning of the 1992 school year, I began audiotaping informal conversations with the third-, fourth-, and fifth-year classes, at the end of the school day or during one of their scheduled breaks. I asked each cohort of students about their family backgrounds, their school experiences and social life, plans to graduate (or not), and aspirations once they left Liceo Parra. They also talked about the situation the country was in, what they attributed it to, and how they thought it could be solved. I met with each class cohort two or three times over the course of the school year. The spirit of these conversations, which varied a lot, seemed to depend in part on students’ individual personalities, in part on the degree of familiarity and friendship among the students in the class. A few class cohorts appeared to enjoy these meetings and were eager to chat and share their views with me. These groups included students whom I came to know more intimately over the course of my stay in Santa Lucía. Other groups were less forthcoming, the young women in particular demonstrating an Andean reserve throughout, their heads tilted downward toward their desks for the entire period, glancing up hesitantly when a question or comment sparked their interest. I opened the chapter with an excerpt from the second of three conversations I had had with the fourth-year Sciences-B class—one of the two classes of students who had chosen the Sciences Cycle for their last two years of secondary schooling. The conversations I had with this group were particularly animated. All 18 students—12 young women and 6 young men—came from families of comparable means. Like most students who had continued to study into their fourth year and thus

Santa Lucía

●

35

were planning to get their baccalaureates, their parents were doing well enough economically to support at least one of their children’s formal schooling. However, none of the families was so comfortable economically that the rising cost of living they associated with the country’s economic crisis did not affect the daily decision-making of the household. Some students came from farming families with land of their own; others came from families that worked land they did not own. Others were from families whose commercial enterprises allowed them to make ends meet thanks to the fact that in Santa Lucía “the money always flowed, just like the Motatán River,” as one of their parents, a local merchant, had told me. While the liveliness of my conversations with this group of students was unusual, the range of possibilities they explored when they talked about their plans upon graduation and the issues they deliberated upon in considering their futures were comparable to the conversational content of each cohort group with whom I spoke. It was through these and other conversations with Liceo Parra students that I gained a sense of the range of meanings Santa Lucian youth attributed to their hometown in relation to their present lives and imagined futures. I opened this chapter with an extended excerpt from that conversation because it is through the students’ back-and-forth dialogue that we hear how these young women and men negotiated their different perspectives discursively. While the students considered similar issues in relating their lives and futures to their town—family, education, work, crisis—the range of identities and values they attributed to their town did not neatly correlate with gender or family background. Their dialogue thus makes evident the centrality of individual agency in the dialectic of personhood and place. Finally, my conversation with these Liceo Parra students makes it clear that it would be ethnographically impossible and analytically irrelevant to write about Santa Lucía in any kind of homogenous fashion. Rather, what is important in thinking about Santa Lucía as these students’ town of origin is how and why they constructed Santa Lucía in such variable terms, and how the particular identities each student attributed to Santa Lucía as a place mattered to the ways they saw themselves as youth, and imagined themselves coming of age. As the varied comments and concerns of these fourth-year students suggest, for Santa Lucian youth the cultural work of coming of age entailed an assessment of their native town, the value of which they deliberated in relation to the promises and constraints of family life, schooling, and crisis. In different ways, it mattered to each of these youth that Santa Lucía was an Andean, rural, agricultural yet prospering

36

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

town. These differences were gendered by the patriarchal expectations of the family and the state—expectations that were not always consistent with each other. The patriarchal farming family called on its sons and daughters to reproduce its social organization and local relations of production; while the patriarchal state called on its citizens to educate and improve themselves to accommodate the country’s “development.” And so we can see that, for all the certainty that Santa Lucians tended to ascribe to their town—a place where nothing ever happened, where things and people always stayed the same, where the land always gave— the significance of these conditions was not certain but was always subject to interpretation. The point, however, isn’t simply to recognize that Santa Lucía had a range of meanings for its youthful residents, but that the life decisions they made in response to those meanings were among the processes that made Santa Lucía the kind of place it was. I would thus be remiss in representing Santa Lucía as a kind of preexisting “context” that conditioned or constrained its youthful residents as they came of age. After all, the cohort of liceo students I got to know were on the threshold of becoming Santa Lucía’s next adult generation. The decisions they would make—to leave Santa Lucía to become another urban denizen, to stay and become a single mother living with one’s parents, to leave to study and return as a professional, or to keep or sell the family’s land—each of these decisions would contribute to making Santa Lucía what it would become as a place for their children. Thus, these students’ discursive deliberations were laden with concrete, material implications—not only for themselves and their families but also for the town of Santa Lucía as a certain kind of always-changing place. Arguing for an antiessentialist approach to the relationship between place and gender, Doreen Massey (1994) proposed that the identities of a place, like personal and group identities, are constituted through shifting constellations of social relations. Moreover, “the social relations of space are experienced differently, and variously interpreted, by those holding different positions as part of it” (1994, 3). These propositions have several implications. First, it means that “the identities of a place are always unfixed, contested and multiple” (5). The fourth-year students I spoke with on that October day certainly conveyed the instability of Santa Lucía’s place identity. Although each of those students was located within similar and overlapping networks of social relations, they attributed distinct, even contradictory identities to their native town. A second implication is that the specific identities attributed to a particular place are consequential to how people from that place frame their

Santa Lucía

●

37

lives and thereby plot out their futures. This is so because place identities are constituted by relations that are at once geographic and symbolic, material and political. As Carolyn Steedman put it, “the specificity of place and politics has to be reckoned with in making an account of anybody’s life, and their use of their own past” (1986, 6). For Santa Lucian students working their way through Liceo Parra, this reckoning entailed making an account of their family’s past and present socioeconomic conditions in relation to both the personal politics of a patriarchal family configuration and a national political economy perceived as “in crisis.” In other words, for these students the specificity of place and politics (and the economics of each, we might add) had to be regularly reckoned with in order to plot a future life within a social and cultural landscape whose horizons were shifting and uncertain. Both Massey’s and Steedman’s propositions imply that place identities—and the use of those identities to make sense of one’s life— are created through, reproduce, and potentially challenge culturally and historically particular social relations of inequality. This is apparent in the distinctly gendered ways these fourth-year classmates positioned themselves in relation to their reading of the material and symbolic landscape of Santa Lucía, and the ways that positioning mattered to their plans for an adult life. Ramón saw Santa Lucía as a place that had become just modern (it offered plenty of diversion) and prosperous enough (there were plenty of job opportunities) that he could eventually follow in his uncle’s footsteps, become a family farmer, and, apparently, the patriarch of his own family. For Gabriela and Susana, that same patriarchal family structure (which they associated with the Andes, or with andinos [Andeans]) implied constraints on their futures, not possibilities. And for Diana, it was precisely the tendency of family farming relations to stay the same in Santa Lucía (at least from her vantage point as a young woman) that defined her town’s limitations. Diana’s comments are particularly striking. In pushing the horizons of her adult life beyond the local in order to inscribe herself into a modern urban landscape, in rejecting not only farming as a livelihood but also the patriarchal division of labor and gender ideologies it implied, Diana identified herself not in relation to her mother or grandmother but over and against the male patriarchal subjects who were her forebears. Although the official educational discourse of the contemporary Venezuelan State made no social distinctions in proposing that opportunity and advancement were available to all citizens via public education, for Diana the goal of making something of herself was an implicitly masculine enterprise.

38

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

As these students’ explicit and implicit comparisons of Santa Lucía to the city indicate, places and their identities are constructed both positively through particular networks of relations, and negatively through their distinction from other places and peoples. Moreover, one person’s relation of distinction can be another person’s relation of affiliation. Diana and Ramón distinguished Santa Lucía as an emblematic farming town from the city as an abstraction in creating particular identities for Santa Lucía. But Diego, a graduating (fifth year) student whose aunt taught at Liceo Parra and who was hoping to study engineering at the ULA, linked Santa Lucía to the city of Mérida in delineating a regional nexus he was loathe to travel beyond. He told me that he was willing to study and settle in Mérida or Trujillo, not so much because he had family in those cities (although this was also the case), but because he preferred to marry an Andean woman. “Some people find fault with the Andean woman for being to submissive, too quiet,” he said, referring to “her” in generic terms. “But,” he added, “They are also hard working, and very faithful.” Thus, woman as a regional type could mediate country and city. In the rest of this chapter, I consider what it meant for Liceo Parra students to grow up in Santa Lucía by examining the relation between the conditions of life in Santa Lucía and the wider world of apparent possibilities that led students to contemplate staying in or leaving their native town, as they came of age in times of crisis. Santa Lucía, Paradise of the Andes3 The Venezuelan Andes—magically majestic as one approaches them from the plains to the east or from the coast to the north—are in fact the final, modest trickle of the immense Andean mountain range: a series of chains with modest origins in southern Argentina that winds its way northward through Chile into Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador where the range reaches its greatest expanse and heights, tapering as it makes its way through Colombia and Venezuela, downward into the Caribbean Sea. Lying along the northwestern edge of the country with the VenezuelanColombian border drawn right up its middle, the Venezuelan Andes “consists of two large chains, between which run long valleys cut transversally by deep valleys that permit its waters to drain out to the plains . . . .Most of the Andean inhabitants sit in the bosom of this enormous scar that divides the two mountain chains” (Delfina Trinca 1981, 36). Centrally located along that scar, the Mucurujún Valley, carved out by the abundant and fast-flowing Motatán River, cradles the town of Santa Lucía. (figure 2.1)

Santa Lucía

●

39

Figure 2.1 The Mucurujún Valley and Santa Lucía

For most readers, the Andes will no doubt conjure up one of two images: either that of the vast pre–Columbian Incan Empire, its temples and cities situated at breathtaking heights amidst broad, snow-capped mountains of what is now Peru; or that of rural indigenous communities, descendents of pre–Columbian Andean societies now surviving in harsh upper montane regions, maintaining aspects of their native lifestyles in the face of cultural, social, linguistic, and economic isolation. However, as William Roseberry pointed out in the opening to his study of a coffeeproducing town in the Venezuelan Andes, neither image has much, if anything, to do with the history, colonial legacy, or present-day reality of communities in the Venezuelan Andes (1983, 13). Prior to the Spanish Conquest, the Mucurujún Valley was inhabited by native peoples of the Timoto-Cuicas cultural complex, “whose economic base of horticulture and animal husbandry sustained small sedentary communities that traded amongst each other, but whose population, economic, political and social organization were much smaller in scale than those of the tribal states or empires to the south” (14–15). The region that now comprises the Venezuelan Andes was initially of little interest to Spanish explorer-conquerors who were focused on the vast Inca Empire to the south and the coastal ports to the northeast. It was eventually invaded and settled in the mid-sixteenth century by

40

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Captain Juan Rodríguez Suárez and his army who had abandoned their desperate search for the precious ores promised by the myth of El Dorado, once thought to be located deep in the continent’s interior, and had begun to recognize the economic potential of the region’s agricultural and livestock resources. The Andean region’s sedentary agricultural people were compelling to the Spaniards, both as forced laborers who could provide sustenance to the colonists, and as savage souls who could be saved by Franciscan missionaries. In 1619, over 500 native peoples claiming six distinct aboriginal affiliations were rounded up from the surrounding hills and forcibly consolidated to form an indigenous resettlement (reducción) known as the “Pueblo de Indios de Santa Lucía de Mucurujún.” Thus consolidated, the native residents’ labor and the land they occupied were allotted to the Spanish settlers by the Crown as encomienda—a patriarchal colonial system according to which the native population was required to provide three months of free labor to their masters in return for their basic clothing and medical needs, as well as their indoctrination into the teachings of the Catholic Church and Spanish custom. By the early 1700s, massacres, epidemics, and miscegenation had all taken their toll on the small native population, which had dwindled to less than 150 people living under a tribute system that had replaced the encomienda as communal lands were parceled out to individual families (Arcila Farías 1966). During that time, most of the land was acquired by Spanish settlers and representatives of the Catholic Church. In his Historia Mínima (Minimal History) of Santa Lucía (1992), local historian and school teacher Jesús María Espinoza Marín traced the slow decline and eventual disappearance of native peoples from the region— through the combined effects of death and miscegenation—by the late 1800s. “Nonetheless,” he noted, “many Andeans maintain the physical features which proudly reveal their aboriginal descent” (15). As proudly as those features may have revealed themselves to an outside observer, few Santa Lucians I knew were inclined to reconstruct their familial ancestry or construct an individual identity through reference to Indian blood or an indigenous heritage. Most Santa Lucians were, or claimed to be, of either mixed (mestizo) background or European descent, though the town’s population also included recent or second generation immigrants from South American countries, European countries (particularly Spain, Portugal, and Italy), and the Middle East (particularly Syria), as well as immigrants from other parts of Venezuela. 4 The contested identity Santa Lucians constructed for their town around ethnicity and nationality resembled the ethnically mixed communities of

Santa Lucía

●

41

the southern Andean zone, who Venezuelan anthropologist Clarac de Briceño described as being ambivalent about their racial heritage (1981). Clarac de Briceño contrasted these communities to certain villages in the southern part of the state of Mérida where the residents distinguished themselves as Indians, “an ethnic identity they consciously related to the indigenous past of the zone” and deliberately contrasted to ethnically mixed communities (Clarac de Briceño 1981, 23). The significance of the town’s diversity was a point of contention among Santa Lucians. While some Santa Lucians proudly asserted that “here in Santa Lucía we have some of everything,” others, in particular those members of the town’s intellectual and political elite whose families had lived in Santa Lucía for several generations, read the town’s heterogeneity, along with the growth and mobility of its population, as lamentable causes or symptoms of a loss of town unity. Unity, in the discourse of the town’s elite, was a euphemism for class and ethnic homogeneity. Doña María del Carmen, the widowed daughter of a former municipal council member and landowner of a sizeable family plot, described the changing nature of the town as new homes and modern businesses crowded into the center of the town and the outskirts sprawled onto the hillside: In the old days, the center of town was made up of lovely homes, nicely maintained cobblestone streets, plenty of culture and commerce. The farmers came into town on the weekends to sell in the market. Now the farmers are living in town and cultivating parcels every which way. There is no market anymore, just fruit and vegetable stands run by Arabs. Even the tourists from the Coast are buying homes in the center of town. Now everything is all mixed together. It’s a shame.

If most Santa Lucian youth and their families minimized or denied an Indian heritage in constructing their personal identities and family histories, they readily embraced cultural traits commonly attributed to the region’s pre-Columbian inhabitants, which corresponded to qualities they positively associated with present-day Santa Lucía. For instance, many people boasted of the precolonial indigenous inhabitants’ sophisticated farming technology and extensive trade routes, their social egalitarianism, and their temperamental passivity, associating these qualities with their image of present-day Santa Lucía as a relatively unstratified community of mild-mannered, well-bred, respectful people who were also adept and successful farmers and merchants. These traits echoed official representations of the region’s native peoples that appeared in the secondary school history texts Liceo Parra students used in their first

42

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

year of secondary school (Arías Amaro 1976, 15–18). The texts, which referred to precolonial peoples as “our aborigines,” depicted their social organization as collectivist, their economic structure as based on communal property, and their political and social structure as tribal, with a tribal elder appointed chief (cacique). None of the Santa Lucian students I came to know considered themselves to be direct descendants of the pre-Columbian peoples of the region. However, the appearance of native people in school history texts and the references to their town in history lectures as a place traversed by Simón Bolívar in the course of his military campaigns to liberate the region from the Spanish Empire were more than a source of pride: They were historical details that gave Santa Lucians a legitimate place in their nation’s history. The inscription of Santa Lucía into the official history of school texts contributed to Liceo Parra students’ sense of their relevance to the nation’s future as well, and thus a broadened horizon of possibility as they plotted their adult lives (Bisseret 1979, 39–41). For some students, the institutional legitimacy of their town’s rural agricultural identity bolstered their plans for the future. One fifth-year Sciences student justified his plans to study Agronomy, in part, on “the importance of maintaining the indigenous customs of our region,” which has always “fed the country”; while a fourth-year Humanities student explained that she was planning to study Tourism in order to teach other Venezuelans about the important history of her town and municipality, especially “our peaceful native people who knew how to live in harmony with the land.” But Santa Lucians were just as likely to draw on the town’s indigenous heritage as a way to distinguish themselves critically from the rapidly modernizing and industrializing nation of which they were a part. Two town organizations in particular fostered a relationship of critical and conservative distinction from the city as a modern urban place. The town’s archeological museum, which had been established under the auspices of the ULA’s Archeological Museum and located in the Cultural Center, sought not only to document the town’s precolonial past but also to deepen its residents’ awareness of historical, indigenous roots of Santa Lucía’s present-day cultural and agricultural production. The practice of retrieving indigenous artifacts was linked discursively to the notion that modernity was destroying local knowledge and folkways. The local amateur archeological group that worked in tandem with ULA archeologists was committed to “retrieving” and “conserving” aspects of native culture, not merely as an academic exercise but because they believed native knowledge would help the nation return to a lifestyle that was more har-

Santa Lucía

●

43

monious ecologically, socially, and spiritually than the culture of urbanizing, agro-industrial development that was being fomented by the “uncontrollable explosion of the petroleum economy,” as one of the group’s members explained to me. A similar position was taken by several of the town’s cultural revival groups, informal organizations committed to “rescuing” the rituals, folklore, and agrarian practices of past generations. These groups were not interested in simply sustaining a nostalgic memory of past traditions but rather in resuscitating the explicitly antimodern values and practices they associated with those traditions, ranging from a respect for nature and the revival of organic farming practices to greater devotion to familial and spiritual life. Prosperity in Times of Crisis: Santa Lucía between Country and City When Santa Lucians grounded their town’s identity in its rural, alpine setting, its agricultural economic base, the industriousness, reserve, and moral conservatism of its people, they were drawing an implicit contrast to the demeanor associated with people from the large cities of the coast and interior. According to many Santa Lucians, the qualities that distinguished them as a community also accounted for the town’s prosperity and its resistance to the harsh vicissitudes of national crisis. For many Santa Lucians, the crisis was associated with, and primarily located within, the country’s urban centers. Thus, they believed, their town’s resilience depended, in part, on its marginality to a modern, urban national landscape with rough and uncertain contours that were shaped by the magical but unbridled wealth generated through the extraction and processing of petroleum for a global export market. Where the nation’s political and economic leaders aimed to ascribe value to the petroleum economy by linking it to the nation’s agrarian past through metaphors that invoked the “sowing” of petrodollars (Coronil 1997), for many Santa Lucians the difference between agricultural wealth and petroleum wealth was both clear and ambivalent. As one older farmer put it, “The crops we grow here in Santa Lucía provide what is necessary for the country—food. But petroleum, what is that? It is not a crop. You can’t plant or sow petroleum, let alone eat it. It makes people crazy the same way gold made the conquistadores crazy. They can’t get enough of it.” “But,” he added, unable to deny the importance of that noncultivatable commodity, “It has brought a lot of money to Santa Lucía.” The various accounts of the town’s emerging economic prosperity contributed to a strong local pride in the town’s autonomy, an ambivalent

44

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

pride because residents saw the town as both benefiting from national economic trends and as surviving and prospering independently of them. At the time of my stay, the town was riding the crest of a recent wave of economic and urban growth that had begun in the 1970s. In the municipal “Plan de Desarrollo Urbano Local de Timotes, Estado Mérida” (“Plan of Local Urban Development”), this growth was described as “a direct response to the agricultural development programs implemented years earlier in the Andean region” (PROCARI 1994, 16). The Plan’s authors were referring to nationally funded programs such as the “Conservation Subsidy” and the “Irrigation Systems of the High Valleys,” funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock and by the regional agency CORPOANDES. These programs were made possible, the authors noted, “thanks to the Venezeulan State’s petroleum revenues” (COPRI 1994, 23). Santa Lucía’s ability to sustain a thriving local economy in the face of national crisis was another source of local pride and distinction, and was often rendered discursively in the same modern terms that rendered the crisis as the result of national illness or evolutionary failing. The use of the modern imagery of well-being and adaptability in the ongoing construction of a town identity is conveyed in the commentary of the aforementioned Plan of Local Urban Development: The strengthening of the system of horticultural production and its resistance to the blows of the current economic crisis through which the country is passing, is conclusive evidence of the productive capacity of the system and its adaptation to the conditions of the zone, which guarantees its permanence through time. (1994, 16) * * *

“The particularity of any place,” suggests Doreen Massey, is “constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond.’ ” (1994, 5; italics original). For most Santa Lucians, the “beyond” with particular significance was the city.5 In one sense, the city was a specific place with real or imagined material significance: the place where a family farmer sold his produce, or where a grocer bought dry goods to stock the family store; the place where a secondary school student contemplated continuing her education, or where an adventurous farm boy contemplated moving in search of a wage job and perhaps the means to buy a house and start a family. But the city also existed as a

Santa Lucía

●

45

beyond more abstractly: as a referent Santa Lucians used discursively to stand for the locus of progress, education, wealth, and adventure, but also of crisis, danger, physical decay, and moral decadence. It was thus in relation to one’s conception of life in the city that being from and living in Santa Lucía might be thought of as an advantage, a limitation, or both—as we read in the fourth-year students’ distinct comments that opened this chapter. While the alterity of the city in the lives and minds of Santa Lucians conjured up an image of their town as a relatively remote setting insulated from the city and all things urban, Santa Lucía had a historically deep and intimate relationship to the city. The historical connection between Santa Lucía and urban centers was based on several factors: the town’s economic role, first as a producer and processor of wheat for regional consumption beginning in the late seventeenth century, and more recently as a principal producer of horticultural produce for internal markets; its commercial role as a strategic location at the intersection of numerous internal trade routes; its political role as district capitol; and its religious role as a “renowned spiritual center” (Espinoza Marín 1992, 95). Santa Lucía had thus participated for centuries in regional and national flows of people, goods, and culture between the country and the city. However, Santa Lucía’s socioeconomic ties to the city were distinct from other rural regions of the country. Unlike the class-bifurcated plantation and ranching economies that had supported Venezuela’s agrarian society for centuries until the advent of the petroleum economy (Arellano Moreno 1974), Santa Lucía’s agricultural economy conformed to that of the Andean highland area more generally, which has distinguished itself from the rest of the country historically as a region dominated by smallscale family farming (Margolies 1979, 63–64). The rugged topography and high altitudes of the Andean region were neither propitious to the development of plantations, such as those spanning the northern coastal region where sugar and cocoa were produced for export from the early colonial period into the early nineteenth century, nor to the expansive cattle ranches or tobacco farms that have dominated the central Plains for centuries (Roseberry 1983, 50). The highland regions in particular were resistant to conversion into large landholding systems. (figure 2.2) In addition to these geographic factors, a long process of land distribution that began in the late 1600s when the demise of the encomienda system afforded lower-class Spaniards and mestizos the opportunity to buy small parcels from native peoples led to the regional development of a modest agrarian economy based on small-scale family farming, with production directed primarily toward an internal market (Margolies 1979,

46

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Figure 2.2 Farmer Plowing with Oxen

63–64; Rangel 1968, 54; cf. Moreno Perez 1986). This pattern of land tenure continued to characterize Santa Lucía at the time of my visit. In 1991, when I moved to Santa Lucía, over 70 percent of the parcels were one hectare (2.5 acres) or smaller, and less than 10 percent were larger than two hectares. (figure 2.3) But Santa Lucía was also regionally anomalous because of its history of prosperity—the Andean highlands being one of the most impoverished regions of the country for centuries. Many Santa Lucians considered their town’s affluence to be a fairly recent phenomenon. Some traced it to federal and regional subsidizing of horticultural and floricultural production of the last few decades, implicitly linking their local wealth to the petroleum boom. But most began their story about contemporary Santa Lucía with the arrival of “Mister Herman.” According to local history and legend, Santa Lucía owes its fortune as a center of horticultural production to a German settler who introduced horticultural and floricultural production into the valley in the 1920s. In a conjunctural moment embodied in a single individual, Mister Herman arrived from a Europe devastated by the war, ploughing the earth, opening the petals of life to Mérida’s horticulture and floriculture. Arriving at [Santa Lucía], he taught through his own knowledge the planting, irrigation, fertilizing, and other techniques unknown at that time . . . .Bit by

Santa Lucía

●

47

Figure 2.3 A Small Family Farm

bit there emerged a quite varied horticultural production. (Espinoza Marín 1992, 42)

Regional historians have offered a different history of the town’s prosperity (Jauregui Moreno 1948; Febres Cordero 1960; Burguera 1982; Cunnill Grau 1987). Descriptions of Santa Lucía from the early colony to the early years of the republic frequently refer to the town’s economic good fortune, which is attributed to the valley’s fertile soils and advantageous trade location—a patriarchal geographic history based on the harmonious blend of feminine and masculine elements of fecundity and mobility. According to these histories, Santa Lucía’s economic development and demographic growth were remarkably progressive and relatively impervious to the vicissitudes of national economic life. The one exceptional period was the second half of the nineteenth century. During that brief period, Santa Lucía suffered a fate similar to other non-coffee producing regions of the Andes as its labor supply was pulled to the prosperous coffee-growing regions and its fields abandoned (Cunnill Grau 1987, 10). Apparently, Santa Lucía soon recovered its vitality, and accounts of the town’s development during the twentieth century describe continual

48

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

growth, spurred on by periodic construction of new and more extensive road systems that served to stimulate Santa Lucía’s ever-expanding horticultural economy. In the early 1900s, regional prosperity waned, initiated by the international decline of coffee prices and further eroded by the replacement of coffee by oil as the nation’s principal resource for export. But Santa Lucía found its productive and commercial activity booming and the export of wheat, potatoes, and cold climate vegetables rising steadily. This period of prosperity reached its apogee in the 1920s with the construction of the Transandean highway, placing Santa Lucía on a direct route to Caracas, the nation’s capital. During the second half of the twentieth century, Venezuela’s ruralurban constellation was dramatically reconfigured, stimulated initially by the transformations associated with the petroleum “bonanza” from the 1940s to 1970s. The swift and near-total conversion of Venezuela into a wealthy oil-exporting country in less than two generations stimulated a process of urbanization with a speed and scale that was not only unique to contemporary Venezuelan history, it was “the fastest urbanization process on the continent” (Naím 1993b, 40; see also Suárez 1979, 41). In the Andean region, the vast and rapid pace of urbanization stimulated a massive migration of rural inhabitants (of all socioeconomic backgrounds) to the cities. Between 1961 and 1971, an average of 52 people left the region daily, and 205,377 left over that 10-year period (Suárez 1982). But these national transformations also contributed to the “urbanization of the countryside”: a process in which family farming was commodified, the farming household becoming a unit not only of production but also of consumption, and farming families diversified their economic and migratory strategies to eke out a living (Margolies 1979, 70–81; Rhoads 1992). The drama of numbers can perhaps represent sweeping, regional migratory trends, but not the distinct impact urbanization had on particular villages and towns in the region. Remote villages located high up along the Andean mountain chain were virtually abandoned during the 1970s and 1980s as migrating farmers left their lands barren while looking for wage work in the city (Suárez 1982). Villages located near the major urban center of Mérida often suffered a different fate, as the development of the regional transportation system and the burgeoning urban population led to their eventual incorporation into the metropolitan area (Clarac de Briceño 1981, 35–39). Many farmers from those villages abandoned agricultural production, built residences on their land, and rented to university professors and other public employees, such that the “small landowner and producer of a subsistence economy [was] converted into land investor” (Clarac de Briceño 1981, 39).

Santa Lucía

●

49

Meanwhile, with the inception of the petroleum era and national urbanization, Santa Lucía suffered neither depopulation nor economic decline. While the town was affected by regional shifts in patterns of migration, settlement, and employment, these changes were not precipitated by rural impoverishment. Rather, as petroleum wealth trickled into Santa Lucía, it fueled the town’s productive and commercial activity, drawing as many individuals and families from surrounding hamlets and villages into its orb as were lost to the lures of city life. Santa Lucía further urbanized both culturally and materially, through the increased availability of modern products, technologies, and sources of entertainment. But each new product or technology subtly transformed the dynamics of family life. For instance, while indoor plumbing, home washing machines, stoves with ovens, and refrigerators made women’s household labors easier, they also located more of their labor within the house, reducing women’s contact with and dependence on each other and increasing their isolation. It was with ambivalent nostalgia that Santa Lucian women recalled accompanying their mothers or grandmothers to the river to wash; they were relieved of making the laborious trip but saddened by the loss of the sociability, fresh air, and fresh gossip. Similarly, where an entire row of houses once shared a single refrigerator or phone, justifying frequent neighborly visits, the recent appearance of a refrigerator and a phone in every household further isolated women, who had less cause to venture out to their neighbor’s home or into town to buy groceries on a regular basis. Eventually, the urbanization of the countryside also brought postsecondary educational opportunities within greater proximity to rural areas, particularly through the expansion of the Universidad Nacional Abierta (National Open University) or UNA, which operated similarly to extension programs at U.S. institutions. Students took classes that were equivalent to courses offered at one of the nearby universities. The only requirement was that the students meet periodically with the supervising professor and take a final exam with the rest of the class. Several Liceo Parra teachers I knew—all but one of whom were women—had gradually received teaching degrees in this manner. The local UNA office was a small space located on the second floor of Liceo Parra around the corner from the sparsely supported school library. The office provided the administrative service of registering students for classes and exams. When the office opened, the local town newspaper El Campesino celebrated its inauguration as something that would “help innumerable [Santa Lucians] to complete their distance studies in a more practical manner” (September 1992). Indeed, the UNA, and the increased accessibility of postsecondary

50

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

programs of study to rural residents more generally, offered women the possibility of acquiring credentials for “dignified” work while remaining within the bounds of their restricted mobility. Indeed, while I was living in Santa Lucía, a branch of the UNA opened in Santa Lucía and located its offices in Liceo Parra. Most of its students were women in their late twenties to late thirties. The urbanization of Santa Lucía was thus hardly a progressive process, but rather one that heightened the contradictions of capitalist patriarchy as they were manifest locally. On the one hand, urbanization introduced technologies that further justified women’s consignment to the house in their roles as housewives and mothers. On the other hand, the same urbanizing processes, including transmigration to and from nearby cities, created greater access to and diversification of paid labor for women and men, allowing individual families to vary their strategies for making ends meet. At the same time, urbanization opened up the possibility for the diversification of familial roles and responsibilities, and a reconfiguration of the relations of power, authority, production, and mobility as a result. The expansion of local public education beyond secondary school offered easy access to professional and vocational degrees through the UNA, bolstering the legitimacy of the modern patriarchal state’s bargain by proposing a locus of reciprocal obligations between the state and its citizens. While not intending to operate in tension with the social relations of the patriarchal farming family, local higher educational opportunities often had that effect, in the context of the precarious prosperity that characterized Santa Lucía at the time. The Typical Andean Family As I noted early on in this chapter, the taped conversations I had with older student cohorts varied considerably by classroom. I had two conversations with the one fifth-year Humanities section. The twelve students in class, nine young women and three young men, were particularly taciturn, even by Andean standards. Unlike the other sections, they had little to say about their school experiences, their work or study plans after graduation, or their social life. But they became animated when the conversation turned to family: Janise: So you’re a year away from graduating from the liceo. Do you have plans after that? Silence. Janise: Will you look for work?

Santa Lucía

●

51

Silence. Janise: Will you continue your studies? The students in unison: “Sí!” Janise: Really? All of you plan to go on to study at the university after graduating from the liceo? They all nod. There is another long pause. Janise: What about having a family? Rosalba: Of course, I want to have a family. But later. I don’t want to get married until after I finish my studies. Janise: Why is that? Rosalba: Well, you know how Andean men are. Very machista. They never want their wives to leave the house, to make something of themselves. Diego: No, that’s how it used to be, you know, in the typical Andean family. Like our grandparents. But, for myself, well, I don’t believe in those things. Janise: What do you believe? Diego: Well, I think there should be equality between the husband and the wife. The girls snicker. There is a long pause. Janise: Well, Diego’s proposal sounds good. But what I want to know is who raises the children? Alirio: The idea is to not have too many children. Once they are grown then the woman can get a job or study for a career. Rosalba [directing herself to Alirio]: You say that now, but let’s see what you say when your wife announces she’s ready to go back to school, to get her degree. That’s what my sister did, and her husband wouldn’t let her. After he’d promised. Marielena: I agree with the part about not having so many children. Like in my family, for example, there are six of us. And in my mother’s family there were eight. But you know, they were farmers. They worked the land . . . . Inés: People who live in the country always have big families. Well, they did. But I think that is changing. Rosalba: I agree with Marielena. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a lot of children, because of the situation the country is in. It’s not like it used to be. Now the money we earn isn’t enough. Manuel: Not me. I plan to make a lot of money in dispatching, like my father, have a big house in the hills and a lot of children. That’s one of the advantages of working in agriculture. It’s profitable. That way even with the crisis the woman doesn’t need to work.

This conversation was emblematic of the centrality of family formation in the minds of Santa Lucian secondary school students, male and female alike, as they came of age. But not family formation in the

52

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

abstract. As this group of older students—youth between the ages of 16 and 20 in their final year of secondary school—engaged in the modern exercise of imagining their adult lives as a project based in the presumption of choices, opportunities, and progress, they drew upon a model of the family that was strikingly nonmodern: the patriarchal farming family, or the Andean family, as they often referred to it. Whether they embraced or rejected the Andean family, or sought to recast aspects of it in more modern terms, it was for them a viable and meaningful social framework that mediated not only the way they envisioned their own lives but also the ways they related to Santa Lucía as a specifically rural, Andean place. Santa Lucian youth grew up in a town where for generations the normative spatial and symbolic horizons of women’s lives had been delimited by the confines of the house (or the farm), extending out in a restricted manner through a network of connected houses of family members and, to a lesser extent, other women friends. Men, by contrast, were expected to extend and expand their vistas out and away from their paternal house into the fields or town to labor, the street to recreate, and out beyond the confines of the town to work, study, travel, serve in the military, or otherwise engage in those networks of familial and extrafamilial relations that constituted national life. This patriarchal social geography had prevailed as the norm during Liceo Parra students’ grandparents’ generation. Women’s mobility was dictated and delimited by familial bonds and obligations that operated like a centripetal force pulling women into the house. Many older women with whom I spoke described these arrangements as a force that reined a woman in and split her apart: One part pulled toward the house of her husband and his family, another part toward her natal house and family, with whom she had enduring relations and mutual responsibilities. Given the backgrounds of the women with whom I often talked about these matters, these arrangements were supposed to hold true for poor farming women who worked with their husbands in the fields as well as for middle-class women who were supposed to receive an education but not work. Indeed, this is the portrait of the “typical Andean family” represented in much of the social science literature (Suárez & Dipolo 1979; Suárez 1980). However, a 1950s interdisciplinary study of farming families in the Andean region complicates the picture (Consejo de Bienestar Rural 1954). While the study’s findings concurred with the normative expectations of the patriarchal farming family, it portrayed the actual lives of poor rural Andean women rather differently. According to that study, rural farming women exercised greater personal freedom and

Santa Lucía

●

53

mobility than their middle-class counterparts. Among the households surveyed, serial monogamous relationships based on consensual union were the norm, with women being the primary instigators of separation, abandoning their partners when the husbands became negligent or abusive—often as a result of drink, the women reported. Much like the familial scenarios in other small farming regions of Latin America, it seems that the inability of poor rural men to hold up their end of the patriarchal bargain had the ironic effect of partially freeing poor women from the strict patriarchal norms imposed on their bourgeois counterparts (Socolow 2000; see also Montoya 2002; Mies 1985). However, for middle-class women to transgress the normative boundaries delimiting and dividing their social lives was risky business. Such was the case for Miss Alicia, an elderly unmarried Santa Lucian woman who was in her seventies when she told me the story of her life. The second daughter in a family of modestly middle-class means, she had begged her father to send her to a sewing school in the nearby industrial city of Valera after the sixth grade. “I was enchanted with sewing from the time I was a child,” she commented. She studied there for six years, and then she moved back to Santa Lucía. Alicia became a seamstress but never married. In our conversation, Alicia related spinsterhood to her decision to follow a vocation: “In those days, the women who wanted to work didn’t marry,” she explained. Later in our conversation, she alluded to the social inappropriateness of a youthful adventure that had taken her away from home and led her to study. Not that her siblings had stayed in Santa Lucía: Both her brothers had gone to study at one or another university and then established their families elsewhere, and one of her sisters had married and moved to Caracas with her Santa Lucian husband, joining an uncle who had set up a butcher shop there. But if middle-class status afforded mobility, for women that mobility was only legitimate if it was controlled by a man of the family. As Mrs. Ramirez, Alicia’s second cousin, explained to me over coffee one afternoon, in her youth a woman of “good family” was supposed to have received schooling but was not meant to study for a career. That would imply that her husband wasn’t adequately supporting her. She could only enrich her mind if it was for the purposes of domestic arts and activities. Of course the question Alicia’s story leaves us with is why her father allowed her to study to become a seamstress in the first place. It is one of those gaps in the logic of patriarchal social control that reminds us of the discrepancy between models and realities. The women of Diana’s and Ramón’s mothers’ generation were born into a town made up of families and households dramatically transformed

54

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

by the urbanizing processes and possibilities of the 1960s and 1970s. And yet, despite the modern landscape of social and geographic fluidity and its promise of economic and educational opportunity across class and racial distinctions, a woman’s mobility could still have personal and familial consequences. Or so it seemed to one of my neighbors, Mrs. Lidia. A mother of three, Lidia told me her story as we rode together on the bus back from Mérida, where she had gone to take her final exams. (She was studying accounting at the University extension campus in Trujillo, but had to travel to Mérida for final exams at the end of each term.) The second of six children and the oldest daughter, Lidia left secondary school to get married when she was 16, before receiving her baccalaureate. Lidia’s father was a sharecropper and part-time bricklayer, her mother a housewife, and so her parents were happy she’d married a man who could support her and whose family had some land. At that time, there were few jobs for women in Santa Lucía, and there were fewer men who would allow their wives to seek work, as she put it. But she had always been restless, Lidia said almost apologetically, as though her nature had been her own worst enemy. After having three sons, she decided to go to night school and get her baccalaureate. Eventually, she decided to continue studying and have a career, knowing full well that the choice would jeopardize her marriage. As we chatted, Lidia mentioned that when she decided to get a university degree, there was no way for her to study in Santa Lucía. The UNA did not exist at that time (or at least had no nearby branches), so aspirations of higher education necessarily entailed a temporary move or regular trips to the city. Though Lidia’s father was reluctant, her mother supported her, agreeing to look after her younger children while she was away. All this was taking place just as the first signs of national economic downturn were beginning to appear on the horizon. But Lidia’s husband Miguel was not convinced that hardship was heading their way, and he insisted that they did not need a second income. He worked as a carpenter and was sure that the lull in construction work brought on by the crisis would soon subside. Besides, he would say, they had the family land to fall back on. Although Miguel had argued against Lidia’s aspirations on economic grounds, Lidia felt that it was her mobility, more than the decision to study or work per se, that had pulled her and her husband apart. She speculated that had she been able to attend school in Santa Lucía her husband might not have resisted, and they might have stayed together. “Not that my husband would have liked me to work,” she explained. “It’s just that, well, you know how the situation is. Most men are just having to accept the necessity that their wives work too.”

Santa Lucía

●

55

For Santa Lucian men, by contrast, mobility had always been sanctioned, albeit within the limits implied by the expectation of patriarchal authority over and surveillance of the home. The trajectories of Miss Alicia’s two brothers were not uncommon among middle-class men of their generation: Both had moved to Caracas where they entered the university, received professional degrees, settled in the city, and formed their families there. It is interesting to compare their trajectories to that of another Santa Lucian of comparable age but from a poor farming family, Mr. Pedro, the owner of a Santa Lucía hotel and restaurant where I roomed when I first arrived in Santa Lucía. On one occasion, we got to talking about the early days of the petroleum boom, and that sparked Mr. Pedro’s reflections on his own life story. The son of landless sharecroppers (“we were always poor but never hungry,” he said), Mr. Pedro had gone, upon his graduation from primary school (which is to say after sixth grade), to work in the oil fields near the coastal city of Maracaibo. He spent 15 years there and did quite well for himself. But unlike Alicia’s brothers, Pedro returned to Santa Lucía where he set up a small inn that eventually grew into a large hotel-restaurant. Most of his customers were affluent tourists from the northern coastal region who came to Santa Lucía during the holiday seasons to seek relief from the oppressive heat of the Maracaibo basin, and dispatchers based in other parts of the country with no family ties to Santa Lucía. For younger men, youthful wanderings were fine as long as masculine wanderlust did not prevent them from eventually settling down and “forming a home.” The peripatetic tendencies of two Santa Lucian men I knew—one in his late twenties, the other in his mid-thirties—were openly frowned upon by family members and indirectly challenged by some of their more settled male friends. Nonetheless, while people expressed concern as to whether these two men would ever settle down, no one ever suggested that their extended wanderings would imperil the eventuality of their forming a home . . . once they had made the decision to do so. But the life decisions women made, or had thrust upon them, during their early adulthood were often fateful. It was one of the contradictions of modern patriarchy to forgive male wanderlust but not female ambition—a contradiction that could not easily absorb male negligence or the changing conditions brought on by the crisis.6 A man who had already formed his home was expected to wander enough to demonstrate his independence and autonomy, but not so much as to leave his wife “unprotected.” This set up a dilemma for men. According to the dominant cultural schema of negligent patriarchy as it operated at the time I lived in Santa Lucía, women’s vulnerability was

56

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

not a matter of her dependence on men for material needs, but rather her susceptibility to the temptations of the street. The implicit weakness of social sanctions to control women thus demanded the direct supervision and scrutiny of women by male authorities. At the same time, younger men were invested in avoiding the reputation of being a casero, or homebody. This was a once-valued quality older people said was associated with that of “the good husband,” but which had increasingly come to symbolize a weak man, submissive to his wife’s domestic demands or his insecurities regarding his wife’s fidelity—a change suggestive of the disruptions to the classic patriarchal order (see chapter 1). Meanwhile, the comments of women—wives and mothers— regarding the wanderings and commensurate absences of the men of their households implied an ambivalence toward or skepticism about patriarchal male authority. “As long as he’s out making money I don’t mind if he’s away now and then,” commented my neighbor Carmen, a middle-aged woman with four children and two grandchildren still living at home. She added that “it’s easier to run the household when there aren’t too many men about.” When I asked Carmen why women bothered to put up with men if they caused so much trouble, she commented that “a woman always needs a man to represent her”—a common refrain among women of Carmen’s generation that echoed like a last whisper of earlier patriarchal values. The Place of Possibility in Patriarchy Given the normative social geographies Santa Lucian students were learning to navigate, what was striking about the different ways they represented their future desires in relation to the place which was their home was not the differences per se, but the gender of the differences: namely, that the young women hoped to leave home, while the young men hoped to stay; or that the young men located opportunity in Santa Lucía, while the young women located it beyond. That none of these youth was particularly unusual among their peers in having those plans points to the rapidity with which the gendered norms delimiting the legitimate possibilities for mapping one’s life project had not so much changed as diversified over the past few generations. Or had they? Diana, the feisty graduating student determined to study at an urban university, didn’t leave Santa Lucía after all. Or at least she hadn’t done so three years after her graduation from secondary school when, on a return visit to Santa Lucía, I ran into her on the street watching the procession for the Festival of San Benito. The last time I’d

Santa Lucía

●

57

seen the procession three years earlier Diana had been among the participants, donning the white clothes and colored ribbons of those who had made devotional promises to the saint. This year, not she but her twoyear-old son was dressed in the ritual white with colored ribbons. I might have walked right past her if she hadn’t waved to me. Even so, I hardly recognized her. In her frilly white dress, a bit plumper, with her son by her side and her two-month-old daughter in her arms, she was transformed from schoolgirl to mother. But then there I was, a bit plumper myself, with my two-year-old, half Venezuelan son by my side, transformed from graduate student to mother. We talked briefly, and she invited me with blushing pride to visit her for coffee. So we met the next day in her modest home—a charming reversal of past meetings in my former home. In her living room I sat on her rattan couch while she served me coffee, and timidly but eagerly told me the story of how she had gotten married right out of secondary school. Her husband, José, was a Santa Lucian a couple of years older than Diana. In none of our after-school conversations three years earlier had she let on that she had a boyfriend, and it occurred to me that she may have been secretive about their relationship because he was neither a student nor from a family with land. Like many of his peers, José had left school after ninth grade on his father’s prompting. Diana described her husband’s father as a man who saw no particular value in formal schooling. “Only work can turn a boy into a man,” she said, imitating her father-in-law’s gruffness. So José had gone to work with his father as a bricklayer. But, she was quick to add, he had aspirations of becoming a construction worker. After they got married, the couple lived in his parents’ house for a year until he had saved enough to buy their own house, from a relative, down the street. (This was a lucky break since houses were rarely sold in town and Santa Lucía property was extremely expensive.) “We moved just in time, just before the first child was born,” she commented in a near whisper. Diana had, in effect, followed the same road her mother had taken a generation earlier. Well, not quite: Her mother had only received a sixth-grade education and had not married until she was 25. In a conversation three years earlier, Diana had told me that her mother—who also married a man with less formal education than herself 7—had watched family life replace her dreams of becoming a school teacher. At that time, Diana was set against family life interfering with her career plans. When we talked three years later at her house, Diana was thoroughly enchanted with motherhood, and thoughts of a career had not so much vanished as become abstract. “I always maintain the hope of

58

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

continuing to study in some future,” Diana told me. But I too was enchanted with motherhood, and I confessed to her that it had been life in Santa Lucía that had convinced me of its value. Neither of us, we concluded, had come of age in the way we had proposed at an earlier time, and neither of us particularly regretted the deviation from our projected trajectories. As it turned out, Diana’s classmate Ramón hadn’t left Santa Lucía either. He was working in town as he had planned, and sure enough I ran into him the day after the festival, behind the counter of his brother’s general store. As we caught up on the past three years, I congratulated him on having procured the position he’d wanted and asked whether he still had his sights set on a piece of land. “Well, maybe in the future,” he smiled, with an air of recently acquired maturity. Ramón explained philosophically that in the years since he’d graduated he’d developed new goals—“a broader vision of life”—and was no longer in such a rush to build a house and start a family. Ramón then embarked, with unusual equanimity, on a comparison between himself and other young men his age who had been reckless, gotten their girlfriends pregnant, and either found themselves forced into marriage by the girl’s family or their own, or forced to leave town to avoid marriage. “There’s no sense in doing things before their proper time,” he explained. Instead, he had taken to studying in the evenings, working toward a degree in Business Administration through the local branch of the UNA. But Ramón was clear in letting me know that he had no intentions of leaving Santa Lucía, although he couched his attachment to the place in terms of its benefits. “Despite the crisis, Santa Lucía continues to be a rich town, with many opportunities,” he explained, adding after a pause that “one doesn’t have to work the land to take advantage of the money that comes into the town because of all the agricultural production.” In peeking beyond the temporal frame of my ethnographic narrative, my intention is not so much to offer a reminder of the unpredictable particularity of individual life courses, or of the limits of the ethnographer’s own horizons—although both points always bear mentioning. Rather, my intention is to point to an important distinction between these two young people’s life stories. For what is striking is not so much the disparities between their earlier aspirations and their later life courses, but the differences between the disparities: between a young woman’s abandonment of educational and professional ambition, and a young man’s assuming that ambition; between the young woman’s relinquishing of the symbolic road to advancement that higher education represented, and the young man’s sudden recognition of that road and

Santa Lucía

●

59

confident selection of it; between Diana’s apparently voluntary entry into motherhood, and Ramón’s apparently comfortable postponement of fatherhood. In pointing to the transformed trajectories of these two young adults, my intention is not to suggest that Diana’s life took a turn toward “tradition,” while Ramón’s took a turn toward “change.” It would not be particularly productive to assess the unfolding of their life paths according to the same key signifiers of modernity, the same culturally constructed landmarks they navigated in making their way into adulthood. Moreover, neither Ramón’s nor Diana’s lives had finished unfolding at the time of my visit. It was still possible that Diana would take up her studies again, just as it was possible that Ramón might abandon his. And it would be dangerously counterproductive to consider Diana or Ramón in any way typical of their generation of young adults. As is attested to by the life stories of other young Santa Lucian adults who populate this book, some young women did postpone family life in order to continue their studies, while some young men did not. (It would certainly be remiss to assume that Santa Lucian women were inclined toward tradition while men were disposed to the modern, despite this common gendering of modernity.) Rather, the point of the comparison is to serve as a reminder that, no matter how fervently and certainly Santa Lucian students expressed and defended their life plans and aspirations as they completed their secondary school educations, those expressions represented only one moment in a process of coming of age. The apparently unanticipated turns of events in the lives of young adults like Diana and Ramón remind us that coming of age for youth of their generation involved a regular repositioning and reconsideration of their adult selves in relation to the changing realities of work, family, crisis, and nation. Paradoxes of Crisis and Prosperity She lived during a period when economic circumstances disrupted collective ideas about what an individual’s life might, or ought, to be like. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman. It’s not that I wanted to leave Santa Lucía, but that, at that time, that is, when I graduated from secondary school, I looked at my father, who had always been a sharecropper, and he worked so hard and had so little, and I didn’t want to end up like him, and he didn’t either, he wanted me to make something of myself. So, I enrolled in a program in Geology at the ULA . . . .At that time, it was affordable to live in Mérida, but of course I had to work at night too. But I got through . . . .My dream was to return to Santa Lucía

60

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

and form my own home here, but there were so few job opportunities in my field here . . . all of which is to say that I found it necessary to take a position in Caracas . . . .Of course, I always hope that in the future I will have the opportunity to return to Santa Lucía and work here, and raise my family here, and help my parents just as they always helped me. From an interview with Roberto, graduated from Liceo Parra in 1983. I always hoped to study, to be someone in life. I would like to study nursing. I would like to have a good position, maybe work for a clinic8 in the city, and be able to help my mother, who has always given me everything. But these days the situation has become very difficult, and it seems that my parents can not afford to send me to the university . . . My father works in agriculture, but he doesn’t have his own land. Before, my mother didn’t work, she stayed home and took care of the house. But now money doesn’t go far enough, and she has to work. She helps cook meals at the community kitchen. So right now I feel I have to stay here and find a job, so that my mother can stop working. From an interview with Ramona, preparing to graduate from Liceo Parra in 1993.

Both Roberto and Ramona were native Santa Lucians whom I came to know well while I lived in Santa Lucía. I met Roberto through my work at the Cultural Center where I taught English classes in the evenings—one for adults, one for youth. Roberto was a one of a small group of Santa Lucian men and women, all graduates of the Liceo Parra in the early 1980s, who founded the Center, which was only just opening when I arrived in 1991. While I was living in Santa Lucía, Roberto was offered a position working for a scientific research foundation in Caracas. Though we didn’t talk often, from our first conversations Roberto had been unusually open, candid, and direct: unusual for a Santa Lucian, and particularly unusual for a man. In conversations leading up to and culminating in his decision to take the job, he talked about his decision with a great deal of ambivalence that conveyed both his misgivings about big city living and his sadness about leaving Santa Lucía. He framed his longing to stay in terms of his commitment to family and to the town. He had a strong sense of obligation to his parents and commitment to his younger siblings’ well-being and education, and an equally strong desire to form his own family in Santa Lucía. At the same time, he wanted to use his professional degree to help his town. “I want to contribute something to this town, to its farmers. I want to support this community,” he told me in a voice filled with passion. “But so many things have happened, the economic situation, you know, at the national

Santa Lucía

●

61

level. But also politics here locally . . . .” His voice trailed off sadly as he stumbled over his words trying to explain all the factors that had impeded him from attaining his dreams. Ramona was a 17-year-old graduating Liceo Parra student who I first met at one of my school visits. She was one of a few students who sought me out, approaching me after class on the first day I visited her fifth-year Sciences section. She was always eager to talk with me after class, and within a month became a frequent visitor to my house. Ramona exuded a curiosity that expressed itself through her innumerable questions about life in the United States. In both her unabashed curiosity and her uninhibited frankness about her own life, Ramona was exceptional among the female students I came to know. Ramona’s family lived at the edge of town, in a modest but wellfurnished house, which her mother managed to keep impeccably clean. Ramona had an older sister who was studying accounting at a technical school in Valera, and a younger brother and sister who were in primary school. Her father worked as a day laborer. For a while, he had supplemented his earnings from agricultural production by helping his cousin in the dry goods store on weekends. But Ramona said that he began to complain about being overworked and about no longer having enough time “even for a game of dominos.” When he gave up the extra job, her mother went to work. Ramona was studious and diligent. She also kept herself aloof from the school’s social scene. In this sense, she resembled several other female students I got to know who were serious about their studies and insistent on the “fundamental importance,” as one young woman put it, of their studies (as opposed to their personal lives) in framing their futures. Those young women expressed indifference to or disdain for their peers’ cliques, tiring of what they perceived to be childish and petty rivalries among supposed friends. In my discussions with Ramona during the months leading up to her graduation, I listened to her deliberate on and finally abandon, or at least put on hold, her earlier plans of applying to nursing programs at some of the regional universities. As with Roberto, both ambivalence and sadness emerged as she talked about her future. But in Ramona’s case, the ambivalence came from the difficulty of deciding whether to plan her future around her family’s (and in particular her mother’s) needs or her own dreams—dreams the crisis had transformed from expectations into ideals. And her sadness came from the impending abandonment of her dreams of moving to the city to study and work, as familial obligations increasingly overshadowed individual opportunities.

62

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Balancing family obligations with individual desires, Roberto and Ramona framed their future plans in similar ways, perhaps because they both came from landless agricultural families and thus occupied socioeconomic positions of considerable vulnerability for a town like Santa Lucía. But their trajectories were differently affected by two factors that gave that socioeconomic position distinct meanings: the differences in their sexes, and the different points in time at which they were coming of age. As their comments suggest, Roberto and Ramona had different expectations and ways of thinking about themselves as educated and working male and female adults. Roberto was driven to seek a compromise between his sense of obligation to repay his parents for their support and his desire to establish the basis for forming his own household. This latter impulse was a normative expectation for men, entailing two commitments: finding a steady job and, most importantly, acquiring his own house. Whether the house was to be built, bought, or inherited, acquiring one’s own house was a goal central to young Santa Lucian men’s formation of an adult identity, inasmuch as it demonstrated and stood for their autonomy from their parents and their ability to form a family of their own. In other terms, it represented their marriageability. “El hombre que se casa, busca una casa” (“the man who gets married, looks for a house”). So went the oft-quoted saying. Roberto’s dreams were in this sense continuous with those of older men. What had changed were the means by which to realize them. Women’s expectations, by comparison, were much more ambiguous at the time Ramona was getting ready to think about leaving her parents’ house. What Ramona faced was not so much a discontinuity as a divergence or proliferation of options for women, from her mother’s to her own generation. Where Roberto had integrated education into a conventional male trajectory that took him out of his paternal home toward a career and to his own front door, Ramona had imagined her education as the basis for a nontraditional, modern life in which her career would come before and be the basis upon which to build her family life. These different circumstances also affected the impact and relevance of the crisis to their lives: Where Roberto, in abandoning his ideals, found himself obligated to leave Santa Lucía and give up a conventional male trajectory, Ramona, in abandoning her ideals, found herself obligated to stay in Santa Lucía and accept a more conventional female trajectory. The extent to which the impact of the crisis was mediated by a student’s family’s socioeconomic situation is evident in the comparison of Ramona’s trajectory to that of my neighbor Celia. Celia was a serious

Santa Lucía

●

63

student who had graduated two years before Ramona but, unlike Ramona, went to the university to study. Celia’s father was not only a landowner, he also ran a small butcher shop in town. This had significant implications for Celia and her siblings. On the one hand, the economic standing of Celia’s family allowed her to attend the university without having to worry about finding a job in the near future. On the other hand, the availability of lucrative agricultural work allowed one older brother to stay in Santa Lucía and work for their father, while the other took over the butcher shop. According to Celia, her parents—and her mother in particular—had been supportive of the girls going on to the university; but her father had never been enthusiastic about her brothers’ studies, even when they were in secondary school. However, over the course of my year’s relationship with Celia, she too came to bring the crisis to bear on her personal trajectory. Over time I learned of her original desire to study Nursing. When she was not accepted into that program, she decided to apply to the English Languages program because her grades had been better in the Humanities than the Sciences. Celia’s initial strategy had been to study English a few years, get good grades, and then attempt to transfer into the Nursing program. But the combined effects of the crisis on university education—rising costs, not so much of schooling per se but of city living, and the extended period of time it was taking to finish a degree program because of perennial school closings—led Celia to abandon her dream of getting a Nursing degree. Instead, she settled with a shift in studies from English Language to (Spanish) Literature, and a shift from dreams of being a nurse to the diminished expectation of being an editor or perhaps a teacher. When I returned to Santa Lucía three years after my initial fieldwork, Celia was still studying Literature, making progress “poco a poco” as the sharpening crisis led to more frequent and extended school closings. In the rushed conversation we had during my short visit, Celia reflected with the utmost pragmatism upon her lost dreams, engendering the impact of the crisis on her schooling and future as well as on that of a close friend: I suppose I will never be a nurse. But at least I will have a career. Because Father has always taken care of the home. I feel sorry for my friend Cristina. She was studying Literature with me, and then shifted to Geography. She really likes it. And she is a good student. But she had to leave her studies and go back to Santa Lucía to help her mother at home. Cristina says it’s because of the crisis. But I think it’s because of her father: he’s one of those men who likes to give orders but doesn’t like to work.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 3

Becoming Secondary School Students Starting Secondary School (Conversation with a group of students from the seventh grade—first year of secondary school—following World History class.) Janise: So how do you like secondary school? Judith: [timidly] I like it. Janise: And you? [directing myself to Judith’s friend] Libia: Well, at first I didn’t like it. Sometimes I’d get confused, or I’d get lost. The school seems so big. There are so many classrooms. There are so many rules to remember. But now that I’m getting used it, I like it too. Xavier: For me the problem is that we always have a lot of homework. The teachers are very demanding. Janise: The primary school teachers aren’t demanding? Libia: [smiling] Nooo!!! Xavier: Well, maybe a little, but not like in secondary school. The Grupo1 [primary school] was more fun. There wasn’t so much studying. There was more time to play. José Luis: And the teachers weren’t as strict. Silvia: The Grupo is like, it’s like being at home. Well, it’s not the same, but, how can I put it, here it’s, more, it’s more different. José Luis: Here there are a lot of rules, a lot of tests. It’s hard. Lucía: Yes. It’s more serious. It’s more like work. It’s hard.

(Conversation with a group of students in their fifth and last year of secondary school [second year of the “diversified cycle” specializing in Sciences], Liceo Parra.) Eleana: In my opinion, one’s studies are very important if you want to get ahead.

66

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Laura: It’s true. If you want to get a good job, you have to go to the university . . . Luis: Or a technical school. Andrés: In my opinion secondary school doesn’t have much purpose. Janise: What do you mean? Andrés: After five years you go out with your degree but without any preparation for life. Janise: So why go to secondary school? Andrés: Well, my mother thinks it will give me more opportunities in life. But my father thinks it’s a waste of time. Janise: And what do you think? Andrés: I’ll wait and see what it brings me.

Day after day, Monday through Friday, eight months out of the year, these and some 600 more youth between the ages of 11 and 21 left their houses in the morning to attend classes at Santa Lucía’s secondary school, the Liceo Parra. Descending from the town of Santa Lucía and its surrounding hills, or climbing up from the lower valley, the students converged upon and entered a space the state called Unidad Educativa (“Educational Unit”) but the students, their parents, and teachers called el liceo (“the secondary school”). Most of the first- and second-year students arrived by 7:30 a.m. for the first-period class; some of the older students managed to have a free period in the morning and had to make it to school by 8:30. Similarly, most of the school’s 34 teachers, the director, and subdirector arrived at or before the first bell rang at 7:30 a.m. But several teachers arrived later in the day, and some left early. The art, environmental science, and psychology teachers, for instance, had full-time positions elsewhere in town or in a nearby city, working at an hourly rate for the school, which provided a supplemental wage for them. From early morning until lunch at noon and again from 1:00 p.m. until 4:45 p.m., teachers and students engaged in practices the state referred to as aprendizaje (“learning”) but the students referred to as los estudios (“studies”). The state called their teachers docentes, but the students, their parents, and everyone else in town called them profesores(as), in distinction from the primary school teachers they referred to as maestros(as). And where the state called the classroom el aula, the students and their teachers called it el salón. Somehow, the local community had been selective about the official educational terms with which they were or were not comfortable. Now some readers may think I am making much of these lexical distinctions. But I would argue, following de Certeau and Bakhtin— theorists of everyday responses and resistances to institutionalized

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

67

languages and practices—that it is precisely through the adaptation and repeated use of alternative languages and practices that ordinary people appropriate, transgress, and transform the forms and meanings of institutional life. The educational vocabulary of Santa Lucians suggests that, no matter how centralized and homogeneous the formal structures and dictates of Venezuela’s national educational system, secondary schooling as a complex of situated practices was rendered local by the everyday practices of Santa Lucian students, parents teachers, and administrators. One of the conceptual themes that runs through this book is the notion that the meanings of everyday practices are produced in dialectical interaction with the contexts in which those practices occur. Places and practices are mutually signifying, mutually transforming realms of social life, one might say. Moreover, as I discussed in chapter 1, as people move into, out of, and across the different places that organize social life—such as the house and the street—they shift their sense of purpose, perspective, propriety, and identity. Social theorists of modern state institutional settings have explored how these processes of social realignment and individual reidentification are particularly apparent within institutional spaces, in great part because they are externally delimited and internally prescriptive, regulating and regulated, scrutinizing and scrutinized spaces (see, for instance, Goffman 1961; Foucault 1980). However, the institutional space of Liceo Parra hardly resembled the kind of “total institution” Erving Goffman described in his sociological writing (1961), spaces like asylums and prisons in which social interchanges are highly regulated and restricted. In these settings, Goffman observed, the scripted, enforced performance of social roles often provoked subtle resistances on the part of individuals held captive to institutional requirements, as they engaged in communicative work of self-identification over and against the imposition of social roles. By contrast, Liceo Parra could be more aptly characterized as a “partial institution”: a place that was as susceptible to informal disruptions of noninstitutional life as the formal requirements of state education. Almost every facet of the formal school routine at Liceo Parra—from classroom lessons to the daily schedule—was permeable to the informal practices of house and street life. The open classroom windows allowed for students on the outside of the building to peak through the grillwork into the classroom and converse with students on the sly. The multiple roles and demands many teachers confronted—particularly part-time teachers on an hourly wage—encouraged them to enter and leave the building during the course of the day, on rare but significant occasions bringing their preschool aged children with them to class. During the course of the day,

68

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

students often used their unscheduled time to wander in and out of the school building, walk to the corner store for a snack, or buy a homemade ice from one of the nearby homes. At midday, the school closed for lunch for an hour, at which time students either returned home for lunch or, if they lived too far away, ate in the town’s community kitchen. Once their classes were over for the day, students might head into town for a coffee or soft drink with their friends, hang out and chat in the Plaza Bolívar, stop into the field house to watch a match of indoor soccer, or spend some time in the public library to prepare their research assignments. Or they would head back home where they might do homework, often as not while watching an afternoon soap opera (all Latin American) or sitcom (mostly from the United States, dubbed over in Spanish). For secondary school students, then, the various practices that comprised their school day were thoroughly integrated (spatially and temporally) into the routines and practices of noninstitutional daily life. These daily routines, and the gendered division of house and street that organized them, contributed to the ways students made sense of, or gave meaning to, schooling. For Silvia, one of the seventh-grade students I spoke with after her history class, primary school was similar to being at home; but secondary school was, in a way she could not (yet) articulate, different. At the same time, that inchoate difference was perhaps the very experience that allowed her to perceive her primary school years as “like home.” And when these young students described secondary school as “hard,” perhaps the difficulty they referred to was caused in part by the school’s ambiguous symbolic location: It was no longer like the house nor was it like the street. In other words, secondary schooling was not only a nationally constituted institution inflected with local meaning. It was also a place and constellation of experiences unique unto itself, irreducible to other institutional spaces with which first-year students were already familiar. In the comments I opened with, the students alluded at different points to the social meanings of the school (as a place), of schooling (as a complex of social practices), and of being a student (whether as a social role or as an identity2). In this chapter, I look at these three dimensions of the social significance of schooling. When Santa Lucian students went to school, they unselfconsciously negotiated two very distinct gendered terrains that mapped out their social worlds: a local terrain based on the dichotomy of street and house, and an official terrain based on the domestic/public distinction that established both a geographic opposition and an individual progression or life course. In terms of the first opposition, while the school was located geographically between house

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

69

and street, the school as a place and the social practices that constituted schooling took on attributes of both house and street. In terms of the second opposition, the secondary school was formally located along an educational trajectory from the primary school to the university. As part of this extended educational experience, secondary schooling was located along the life course of the idealized citizen—from the domestic sphere characterized by the family to the public sphere characterized by work. This was the life course that children supposedly passed along as they were transformed into adult citizens of la patria—the fatherland, their abstract, civic home, perhaps. By juxtaposing the comments of first-year secondary school students against those of fifth-year students preparing to graduate, my aim is to provide the reader with a sense of how the social significance of secondary education changed over time for Liceo Parra students, in relation to their past experiences and future expectations. In articulating the social meaning of schooling and being a student, the older students drew upon the distinction of street and house that they knew through their life experience, and upon the state’s distinction between domestic and public spheres. To the extent that Santa Lucian students themselves formed a social group or subculture,3 the social meanings they gave to secondary schooling were indebted to, but distinct from, those meanings circulating among family and friends. But they were also distinct from, though influenced by, official representations of secondary schooling located in and expressed through formal educational structures, such as the curriculum and evaluation system, as well as discourses of the state and the mass media, in particular television and newspapers. Constructed in relation to the spatial and symbolic schemes of both street/house and domestic/public, the social meanings of schooling and of being a student were thus imbued with multiple and conflicting gendered meanings. But what were these meanings, and how were they gendered by local and national patriarchal ideologies and arrangements? These are the two questions I address in this chapter. In so doing, I am particularly mindful to avoid a reductive structural determinism that views the symbolic force of institutions as a mold pressing out cultural forms without the creative mediation of, say, students. As Paul Willis insisted in his study of working-class British students’ cultural production, “[We] need to understand how structures become sources of meaning and determinants of behavior in the cultural milieu at its own level” (1977, 171). In an effort to contribute to such understanding, I examine the ways Liceo Parra students drew upon the two distinct oppositional schemes of street/house and public/domestic—schemes at once structural

70

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

and symbolic—to create their own meanings and thus experiences of schooling, as well as their own identities as students. Before continuing, however, I want to make explicit something I have implied in my initial comments: Namely, Santa Lucian students constituted a social group that shared certain meanings and practices relating to schools and schooling. In their study of education and class reproduction in Venezuela, Bronfenmajer and Casanova (1986) proposed that the homogenizing effects of a national-popular culture and the expanding communication industries have tended to strengthen a shared national ethos, which transcends class differences (81). The authors argued that “in Venezuela class subcultures share socializing environments relatively [equivalent], in that the uses of cultural goods do not differ significantly [by class] . . . the assimilation of school culture will depend more on pedagogical practices and the socializing power these generate, than on the cultural capital that the students possess when they enter” (83). While I cannot speak to the accuracy of Bronfenmajer’s and Casanova’s claims with regard to the country as a whole, in the case of Santa Lucía the scenario they describe was reinforced by factors that homogenized the student population’s socioeconomic backgrounds. For where the children of the wealthiest Santa Lucians were generally sent away to private schools, the children of the poorest Santa Lucians were obligated by their parents to work at a very early age and thus either never attended school at all or were removed by their parents before they reached secondary school. As a result, the majority of youth who attended Liceo Parra came from families located in the middle ranges of Santa Lucía’s socioeconomic spectrum. However, regardless of whether Santa Lucian youth came to school with different “amounts” or kinds of “cultural capital,” they all had personalized to some extent the contemporary Venezuelan dream of national progress and personal upward mobility. As the Venezuelan critical educator Xavier Duplá put it, In the 30 long years of Venezuela’s democratic system, formal education has raised the general expectations of the population as an almost unfailing vehicle of social ascent. In a primarily peasant society, with expectations of progress practically nonexistent, education has served to generate hope of abandoning hard manual work . . . .From a one generation to the next there is often a move from illiteracy to professionalization. (1991, 7)

Indeed, such had been the life histories of many Santa Lucian adults I knew—some of whose stories I recounted in the previous chapter.

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

71

These were women and men with professional degrees as lawyers, teachers, architects, agronomists, or civil servants whose parents had been family farmers with a small plot they worked or parceled out, or perhaps the sharecroppers who worked those parcels, all of them peasants with little or no formal education, eking out a living. These older adults— individuals in their forties and fifties at the time of my stay—had benefited in the 1970s from the combined expansion of formal education and its monetary support through the trickling down of vast oil wealth. By contrast, adults in their twenties and thirties who had just completed, or were in the throes of completing, university degrees were already experiencing the reneging of this national modern promise of universal progress regardless of class background. Such was the case of Roberto, whose story I recounted at the end of the previous chapter, a young man whose professional aspirations had been dampened by the realities of national economic downturn—the crisis, as it were. That poorer Santa Lucian students’ class location might serve materially to limit the realization of their aspirations was something older students I talked to pointed out frequently. The issue came up in a discussion I had with a group of fifth-year students on the relationship between a student’s family background and their educational futures. One of the students, a young man whose father did not own land but worked as a day laborer while his mother provided laundry services for other families, gave the concrete example of how he wanted to study architecture. However, even though the cost of attending the university was low, the materials were quite expensive, putting that career out of the poor student’s grasp.4 Nonetheless, as Duplá’s comments suggest, the reality of rapid upward mobility through the ranks of professionalization that oil wealth had afforded vast sectors of the country in the 1970s and early 1980s encouraged all students, including those from poorer families, to participate in this contemporary national dream. It was, in other words, a dream through which schooling contributed to “the organization of the self in relation to the future” (Willis 1977, 172). The Venezuelan State’s egalitarian educational ideals posited a genderless as well as a classless student who entered a meritocratic system offering the same achievement opportunities to all students. To a certain extent, Santa Lucian students themselves accepted and reproduced this ideology through the homogenizing discourse they used to talk about themselves as students, adopting the populist language of the state, which tended to render secondary students as genderless citizens, or workers, in formation. (By comparison, the state’s discourse regarding primary school, with its emphasis on childhood socialization, in both

72

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

the curriculum content and textbook language and imagery, was laden with domestic images and domesticating intentions of primary school.) But there were also ways in which Liceo Parra students’ conversations about their educational and adult life plans expressed a resistance to the centripetal pull of official educational discourse around the genderless (but read male) educated subject. For instance, the discourse of self and future that pervaded the educational system separated educational and occupational trajectories from domestic life. Liceo Parra students, by comparison, rarely talked about those two parts of their lives separately. As the reader will encounter in the many excerpted conversations throughout this book, the topic of educational experiences and goals almost invariably went hand in hand with discussions of plans about marriage and family. There were other reasons to wonder whether the equality of educational experience and opportunity posited by the neoliberal capitalist state bore out in reality. For instance, something has to account for the fact that, while an equal number of girls and boys enrolled in the first year of secondary school, by the last year of secondary school the ratio of boys to girls was an astonishing one to eight. Why were young men leaving school at such a disproportional rate? If the social significance of secondary schooling was similarly experienced by students regardless of their class background, was it similarly experienced by students regardless of their sex? And if the practice of becoming an educated adult meant the same thing for male and female students, if all students believed that schooling was supposed to empower youth, expand their opportunities, and promise them a better livelihood as proto-citizens regardless of class or gender, why in Santa Lucía did so many more girls stay in school and graduate, while so many more boys dropped out and went to work? And why, then, did so few of the girls who graduated go on to study at the university, while most of their male counterparts who graduated did? These paradoxical challenges to the modern mythology of school achievement, which I take up at length in chapters 4 and 9, have to be understood in terms of the ways the practices of schooling, as both a state apparatus and local institution, attempted to “de-gender” students as a class while simultaneously teaching negligent patriarchal social arrangements. The Secondary School as a Place There was something both intimidating and welcoming about the Liceo Parra. It was a modern building, inaugurated in 1978 during the pros-

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

73

perous years of President Carlos Andrés Pérez’s first regime. An austere concrete structure, devoid of any exterior adornment, it was perched prominently atop a bluff that overlooked the highway at the north end of town. (figure 3.1) Santa Lucians were very proud of their secondary school. Compared to most other secondary schools I visited in the state of Mérida (and, as teachers would tell me, compared to other schools in which they had taught), it was in very good condition: fairly clean inside and outside, with functioning bathrooms and enough desks to go around. The walls had very little graffiti, only occasional scribbles announcing that Juana loved Marcos, or that “Jhonny” had been there in 1985. Its walls boasted none of the vilifications of “CAP,” (as then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez was referred to) or glorifications of Chávez (the military commander who was one of the leaders of a failed coup on February 4, 1992, and who is now president of Venezuela) that adorned the walls of Mérida’s secondary schools. At the time of my stay, Santa Lucian students seemed to be more inspired by love and romance than by politics. As I discuss later in this chapter, the apolitical quality of Santa Lucian student life in the 1990s distinguished it from the more politically engaged student culture that characterized prior generations of Liceo Parra students. It also distinguished the focus of student life at Liceo Parra from the highly politicized student culture of urban secondary schools in the region at that time.

Figure 3.1 Liceo Parra

74

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Liceo Parra was the only public secondary school in the municipality and the students who attended came from the town of Santa Lucía as well as outlying villages and hamlets. Some students walked in from town, like Lorena, the oldest daughter of the owner of a small arepera in the center of town. She had to get up by 6:00 a.m. to prepare fruit juices while her mother made arepas and empanadas for the morning customers. Then Lorena made breakfast for her three younger siblings, whom she roused and helped get ready for primary school. She often went to bed late because she was charged with helping her younger sister and brother with their homework before completing her own. Several dozen students rode in on the school bus. Others arrived by family car or on the back of a pickup truck, like Manuel and José, the two youngest sons of a family farmer who farmed a modest-sized plot of land on the hillside across the ravine from the school. Their oldest brother, a 20-year-old young man who had attended Liceo Parra for three years, supervised the farm’s two day laborers. Their older sister had graduated from Liceo Parra two years ago, gotten married six months later, and was living with her husband, also a farmer, in the nearby town with his family. Their next oldest brother worked for a produce dispatcher in town and brought the boys in to school. By the time they got up to go to school, their mother had prepared the morning coffee and arepas and was fixing the midday meal for the workers. There were several ways to approach the school entrance. Arriving by foot, one could walk along the highway—down from the town or up from the outlying zones—and then make the arduous climb up a challenging flight of stairs that took you up from the road to the ridge along which the school was perched. These stairs were a favorite spot for students to linger and chat during their breaks, on their way home for lunch or at the end of the day. Others opted for the back route, passing by the public primary school (also built in the late 1970s) on one side and the cultivated fields and grazing areas of family farms on the other side. This was the route Lorena took with her younger siblings, whom she left at the primary school. She then continued around the road as it curved toward the school’s back entrance. If you went straight, you arrived at the municipal cemetery, a convenient location for amorous students’ trysts. Another spur headed up into residential areas, relatively new housing developments situated beyond the school, which were northern extensions of Santa Lucía. Like the secondary school, these developments were of recent construction, having been built during the national housing boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Historically, Santa Lucía’s schools had always been located in town, never far from the central

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

75

plaza. But both the modern secondary school and primary school were placed outside of town, away from the town’s traditional political, commercial, and religious center, on the outskirts close to a modern residential area. This relocation of the public schools correlated with the modern function of schooling, in particular with the orientation of secondary schooling toward the preparation of technical workers for a modernizing society, and less toward the socialization of a cultured, local elite who would expect to take on leadership roles in their own town, as had been the case in years past.5 By 7:30 a.m., students began trickling in to school, some rushing to the first-period class, others lingering in the schoolyard to chat with their friends or to prepare their homework for the day’s classes. This habitual process of entering the school constituted a series of spatial transitions that symbolically marked the students’ passage from the informality of the street into the formality of the institution. The transition occurred as students passed through one after the other in a series of concentric rings, each ring having a different significance. Encircling and demarcating the entire institutional space was an impressive metal fence, within which there was an outdoor area (including the building, the school yard with volleyball and basketball courts, and a garden area for teaching horticulture), within which there was the school building, and within which there was a circle of rooms. The rooms on the first floor wrapped around a patio or courtyard space, while on the second floor the classrooms wrapped around a balcony that looked down upon the courtyard. From the outside, Liceo Parra bore a resemblance to other state institutions, including government buildings, prisons, military barracks, and hospitals, which often displayed the same institutional colors—white with blue trim at the base. Like most other secondary schools I visited around the state of Mérida, Liceo Parra was built on the model of the colonial urban house, the principal characteristic of which is the centrality of the inner patio.6 The comments of the art teacher, Mr. Pulido, with whom I discussed this issue during the early months of my fieldwork are apropos. We were talking after his art history class about the school’s architectural plan, looking down from the second-floor balcony into the patio below. I had gotten to know Mr. Pulido outside of school through his work on the committee to create the Community Center, and because he tended to be outspoken in his views, I in turn felt comfortable pressing him on issues of cultural significance. I proposed provocatively that the school’s architectural plan was similar not only to a colonial house but also to the local army barracks. “Well, yes, on the

76

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

surface these buildings might seem the same,” the teacher agreed. “But,” he added, “the army barracks is built that way so that the soldiers can be easily trained and supervised. The school is different. Think of it. Here we are, looking down upon the students, but it is not with the intention of surveying them. I prefer to think of the school as a place where students are protected and educated. If you think of it a bit, the school is more like the home (‘el hogar’) of the Nation.” This notion of the school as a house or home was very much a part of official discourse as well, as illustrated in the ministry’s educational publications, which exclaim to its citizens: “Children, parents, teachers: the school is your home! Take care of it!” Thus the state, while attempting to inculcate modern notions of individual development and progress, also had recourse to familiar, familial social forms and meanings in its efforts to incorporate schooling within the daily lives of the masses. Through these familial images, the identity of citizen-worker-to-be was imbued with a domestic ethos of loyalty and belonging. Several additional meanings can be read off the physical structure of the school building. First, it both mirrored and mapped out the homogenizing impulse of secondary schooling, which, like all public education in Venezuela, was established by the Ministry of Education and was formally consistent across the country.7 Second, its affinities with other state institutions effectively reiterated the role of the school as a locus of state discipline and authority. At the same time, the state school, constructed as a modern institution, presented a striking contrast architecturally to that institution which from colonial times had been the historical site of formal education in Venezuela, namely the Catholic Church. Through the integration of a modern, state-institutional exterior, devoid of the typical features of Spanish colonial domestic or religious architecture, with a colonial, domestic interior, the school embodied and expressed the modern Venezuelan State’s structural and ideological continuity with and severance from its colonial heritage. It also substantiated, so to speak, the state’s conceptual placement of the school between the domestic and public realms. Let us look at the school from the perspective of a student as she arrived and began to penetrate its successive rings. The space of the school, as I mentioned above, was delimited by an intimidating fence with a large sliding gate casually monitored by a security guard. The gate was intended to both protect and discipline: protecting students during class time and the building after hours from the dangers of the outside world, and controlling the flow of students into and out of the schoolyard through the course of the day. (The allusions to patriarchal control

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

77

of female family members are not incidental.) But liceo students, already well attuned to the limits of institutional discipline and the limited reach of dominant authorities as they worked to define and delimit public spaces, had over the years poked, prodded, and pried open the fence at several other points, effecting a deCerteauian “tactic of the weak,” “an appropriation of the topographical system” (De Certeau 1984, 36–38; 97–98; italics in original) through which students etched their presence upon the dominant landscape, disrupting existing structures and strategies of social control and effectively making their coming and going impervious to the monitoring efforts of the school’s security guard. The state may not have liked this, but the local school authorities seemed indifferent. However, school officials would periodically decide to control students as they entered and exited the actual building, which they did by passing through a second gate that served as the building door. During these times, the custodial staff were charged with keeping the gate locked during class periods. The practice lasted for a few days, and then there was a gradual return to the old habit of leaving the gate open all day. This disciplinary process included discursive commentary, a kind of “gate gossip,” which amounted to the devolution of blame from top to bottom: Parents blamed the administration for being lax; they, in turn, blamed the teachers for letting students out before class was over; teachers blamed the custodial staff for forgetting to lock the gates; and the custodians blamed the students for unruly conduct that made their jobs impossible. Both the unruly nature of discipline and the hierarchy of blame occurring at the school’s entrance were reminiscent of the social practices of discipline, authority, and responsibility I witnessed in many Santa Lucian households as parents and children negotiated the terms of negligent patriarchy. Between the main entrance and the school building was a cement schoolyard consisting of the basketball and volleyball courts surrounded by a concrete walkway that had stoops and benches on one side. The students used this space in ways that both integrated and distinguished the informal recreational practices of the street with and from the formal recreational practices of the school. For instance, physical education was the only class for which girls and boys were separated, and when they used the outdoor space for gym class their activities were segregated by sex. The relationship of gender to sports projected by the state had little to do with either local traditional notions (according to which girls and women weren’t meant to practice sports at all) or more contemporary trends (in which girls and boys had begun to practice some sports or recreational activities together, especially volleyball and aerobics).

78

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Indeed, students commonly used the space to play volleyball together informally in mixed-sex groupings. However, youth had their own norms for establishing which extracurricular activities were coed and which were not. Along the walkway separating the ball courts from the school building, groups of boys could always be found playing handball— a game I never saw girls participate in. And when students used this space to sit and chat, they almost always formed single-sex groups. Groups that combined female and male students had one of two purposes: Either they were involved in a class project together or they were (groups of ) girlfriends and boyfriends. On the other side of the school, the space between building and fence was taken up by plant beds that were used by the horticulture classes, a part of the school curriculum in rural (agricultural) zones.8 These activities were the “laboratory” component of Agriculture courses, in which girls and boys learned agricultural tasks that traditionally were rigidly separated according to sex: how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, and reap crops. Here again, the state’s organization of outdoor educational activities according to sex was based upon a gendered model of the citizen completely removed from local models and practices. This is not meant as a pedagogical assessment or judgment. Rather, my point is that at Liceo Parra secondary school students were learning to relate to each other and to certain practices of daily life in ways that were contrary to the gendered organization of those practices in other places—notably the house and the street—at the same time they were surrounded by signs and symbols of local gender arrangements. Let us continue shadowing our hypothetical student through the gate, across the schoolyard, through the inner gate, and into the school itself. As she walked in, she entered a patio, interrupted by a stairway wall adorned with a mural—painted by students—depicting Simón Bolívar’s historic march over the Andean pass on his way to Trujillo to declare his momentous “War to the Death.” Across the bottom of the mural, one could barely make out the fading caption: “The Liberator Simón Bolívar, painted by the class of 9th Grade, Section B, 1988, in commemoration of our beloved school.” In front of this wall was a raised platform used constantly by students and teachers as a place to sit and chat between classes. In its use, it resembled the house patio—a piece of the street inside the house, as Roberto da Matta (1991a) pointed out in his ethnographic essay on the street and house in Brazil (see chapter 1). Where it differed from the house patio—a space organized in terms of the hierarchical authority relations of the house—was in the ambiguity of the gendered practices

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

79

that occurred there, particularly between teachers and students. In contrast to the practices of the classroom that seemed to neutralize gender (and class) differences among students (see chapter 4; see also Levinson 2001), the informal interactions between teachers and students who met in the patio—before or after class, on the way to class, or during a coffee break—drew upon normative gender practices of both the house and the street. Male teachers talking to female students tended to use paternalistic language in conversation, but they also resorted to street habits, examining the teenage girls’ physique. I frequently heard comments, perhaps meant to neutralize the tension of the male teacher’s ambiguous position at that moment, in which the male teacher gently complimented the female student on her appearance but then neutralized the sexual connotation. Sometimes this was effected paternalistically—“So, Mireilla, you decided to put on a skirt for a change. You look very nice.” Other times, the sexual innuendo was neutralized through sarcasm: “What happened, Judith? You fixed your hair this morning! Very pretty! Very pretty!” These same male teachers adopted a very different stance in their informal patio chat with male students, often patting them on the shoulder, teasing them, or challenging them in a manner consistent with men’s street practices. Female teachers tended to adopt one of two postures during patio interactions with students: either a stern, distant stance of masculine authority, or a softer, more maternal demeanor. The female teachers were, in general, quite serious with the students. This was the case even for those women who were otherwise casual, informal, at times even giggly in their demeanors, both amongst themselves and with their male colleagues. One teacher I came to know quite well explained that she would never be so informal with the students or she would lose their respect. Where the male teachers assumed they would be respected, or at least obeyed, by the students, the female teachers sensed that they had to work at gaining and maintaining that respect, and that the authority their position as teacher commanded only went so far. Wrapped around the patio were a series of rooms. Where in most family dwellings there was a gradation from street to house as one moved back from the front door, in the school the gradation marked a transition from the official public realm to the domestic realm. Off the main entryway, one found the director’s offices and sectional administrative offices on each side, followed by classrooms, the cantina (snack bar), and kitchen tucked away behind the stairwell. The remaining rooms on the ground floor were classrooms. There were more classrooms on the second and third floors (the third floor was a half-floor consisting of three

80

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

classrooms and a gym). The assignment of these classrooms at Liceo Parra was significant. Rather than each teacher being assigned a room (as was the case in the primary school), each class section was assigned a room. The five first-year and four second-year sections were located on the ground floor; the three third-year and three fourth-year sections were located on the second floor; and the three fifth-year sections were located on the third floor. As a result, over the years a student literally moved up and out of the liceo. Liceo Parra classrooms were thus formally student centered and not teacher centered. (However, we should not confuse this formal gesture toward a student-centered approach to education that Venezuelan educators and educational planners have insisted on for years with any kind of pedagogical implementation. Pedagogy, as I discuss in the next chapter, was unequivocally hierarchical, with the teacher always and necessarily situated on top.) Indeed, it was striking how marginalized teachers were by the spatial arrangement of the classrooms. At Liceo Parra, there was no real space designated for teachers: no offices, no lounge. By contrast, the director and subdirector each had their own office space and an administrative assistant’s support. And the section offices could only accommodate the section leader and their secretary. In contrast to the total authority that teachers had in the classroom, once outside the classroom they and the students were compelled to improvise their use of space. They did so in ways reminiscent of how people tended to congregate on the street, which was one of the factors encouraging the kind of ambiguous “corridor” interactions between teachers and students that I described above. Another implication of the absence of a teachers’ space is that it made it difficult for teachers to be “at home” in the school, as it were. Several teachers I interviewed commented about the inconvenience of this arrangement, noting how they had to carry their textbooks and folders with them from class to class, how they had to leave the school to prepare assignments or grade exams. One female teacher noted tellingly, “at Liceo Parra I can never really make myself at home.” The differential status of administrative staff and teachers represented through the parting out of space was not lost on teachers, and it had an impact on their disposition toward their profession. As one teacher put it, in terms that were shared by her less explicit colleagues, “It’s hard to feel committed to a school building when you are not invited in and offered a space in which to do your work.” It occurred to me as I listened to her explain her lack of investment in terms of institutional commitment that the strategic allotment of space within the secondary school

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

81

by school officials might have had the contradictory effect of relegating teachers to the status of the neglected rather than the negligent, patriarch. This sense of neglect, it bears noting, was bolstered by the low wages teachers received, particularly those with hourly contracts rather than salaried positions—a situation that one teacher compared to that of a day laborer on someone else’s family farm. In this section, I have explored some of the ways in which the school as an institutional space represented both state and local notions of patriarchal social relations, and how students and teachers in turn occupied the school according to the spatialized gender arrangements that organized much of their daily life. In the next section, I consider the ways in which students took up local (particularly familial) as well as official discourses about schooling and being a student in creating their own gendered notions of what it meant to be a student and attend secondary school. The Social Identities of Secondary School Students In Santa Lucía, the two primary sources contributing directly and explicitly to the formation of students’ disposition toward schooling and their identities as students were their families and the media (television, radio, and print, particularly newspapers), which I will refer to as local and official9 discourses, respectively. Here I am interested in comparing the ways in which these discourses, and the conflicting models of educated adulthood they implied, contributed to students’ ideas about and orientation toward schooling. Official discourses about the social value of education, to the extent that they borrowed from Euro-American educational ideologies grounded in the opposition of public and domestic spheres, cut across popular gender and place distinctions. To begin with, these discourses presented schooling as a personal and collective trajectory from childhood to adulthood that was gendered, suggesting a transition from femininity to masculinity as part of individual development (and national history), in which the secondary school was an intermediary, transitional stage from the domestic life of the child to the public life of the (implicitly male) adult. Moving along this progression, an important shift occurred in the transition from primary to secondary schooling. Where much of the discourse about primary education was continuous with local gender ideologies that dichotomized male and female social roles, the discourse on secondary school education, directed as it was toward the preparation of students for higher education, converted gender oppositions that were

82

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

thought of as absolute and coextensive with the individual into life stages. While this ideology permeated official documents about the philosophy and objectives of the formal educational system (Ministerio de Educación 1984, 1985, 1990; Rodríguez 1989), it made its way into the space of Liceo Parra in a very indirect fashion, primarily through the curriculum and infrequently through individual teachers or administrators. This was in part because one of the central mechanisms for directly inculcating this ideology into students, the role of the student advisor (orientador), was totally lacking at Liceo Parra. It was also because many teachers themselves expressed, and often through their own career trajectories embodied the local, instrumental valuing of schooling, 10 which I turn to next. This official framework was different from the discourse about education emanating from the familial realm. There secondary education was signified in primarily instrumental terms. Moreover, its social value was rigidly distinguished from that of primary schooling. Parents I spoke with about their children’s formal schooling emphasized two principal functions of primary education: to socialize and discipline their children, and to impart rudimentary educational skills (basic reading, writing, and math). But secondary education was evaluated exclusively in terms of its qualifying function: that is, to confer the necessary degree or enrollment in certain higher educational programs, and thus, indirectly, to qualify for certain jobs. Indeed, “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” was an irrelevant or absurd concept to most Santa Lucians. Moreover, as many parents made clear in conversations with me, they were hardpressed to tolerate the amount of time their children spent in school when they could have been working. Those who did tolerate this institutional indulgence did so with the skeptical hope that it would pay off in the long run. Despite the prevalence of an official discourse on formal education emphasizing the developmental role of secondary schooling in the formation of “productive citizens,” this state-sanctioned rationale did not seem to be a basis for parents’ evaluation of schooling. More often, it was students, and not their parents, who integrated education and civics, linking their goals to “become someone” or to “make something of themselves” with the primary intentions of helping their families, establishing families of their own, and serving their nation. In formal and informal conversations about the purpose and value of secondary education, and on the survey I conducted, students consistently emphasized career and family goals. Much less often did they associate the role of secondary schooling with a sense of civic duty. Moreover, the latter sen-

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

83

timent was expressed primarily by older students, suggesting that schooling itself contributed to students’ assimilation of this role as part of their imagined adult selves. There were rare instances of students linking all three aspirations, as in the comment of one older female student about to graduate in Humanities: “My aspiration is to advance myself, become someone in life in order to help my family, and also in order to help others.” A young man graduating from Sciences responded more elaborately to a question about his future expectations and aspirations: I want to continue my studies in the university, study music, put all my effort into my studies before I form a home, and work hard at everything since the country needs hardworking people and not corrupt people as they are now.

One fourth-year female student wrote the following comment in her survey, extending the civic role of schooling into the next generation: I want to continue studying, my goal is to be a professional, and when I am, to have my own home. Have no more than two children, and educate them as well as possible so they can be useful to the Nation.

These kinds of comments were perhaps the clearest expression of the ways youth integrated official and local ideologies about the significance of schooling and its place in their emerging life stories. What is also significant about students’ personal reflections on the role and significance of education are the ways in which they effectively positioned themselves, as educated workers vis-à-vis the state, in the traditional female role of servitude or caretaking. In this sense, the patriarchal frameworks of the family and state seemed to have overlapped in the roles they assigned to the educated adult. The topic of education and schooling came up frequently during household conversation, at least in homes where one or more children attended school. During my months in Santa Lucía, I had the occasion to visit a few households on a regular enough basis to become privy to casual conversations among family members. Thus, my comments here are based on an admittedly limited exposure to students’ home life, although that exposure included visits to the homes of students whose families represented the range of socioeconomic backgrounds in Santa Lucía. The one consistency across those households (with the exception of a schoolteacher’s home) was the absence of any discussion of the content of students’ classes in talk about school. Parents and children discussed

84

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

pragmatic issues, such as the students’ needs for school supplies, the closing of schools, or the scheduling of a special event. Most common between parents and children was disciplinary discourse around the subject of homework; while parents talked frequently among themselves, or with me, about practical matters such as the high price of textbooks, the absenteeism of teachers, and the always-impending possibility of school closures. While fathers and mothers made frequent quips about the value of education, students I talked to said that it was their mothers’ positions more than their fathers’ positions that contributed to or even determined their own educational views and decisions. This was true of youth who were beginning and finishing secondary school as well as of youth who had dropped out. There were also those students who claimed that their fathers had no opinion on the matter, and yet others who suggested, directly or indirectly, that their mothers’ opinions mattered more to them than their fathers’ in making educational and life choices. The influence of mothers in this sphere is related to the more general local perception of a parental division of labor in which mothers were seen as offering guidance, while fathers were meant to lay down the law. Indeed, in the few instances where youth referred to their fathers as having a determinative role in their educational and career directions, it was because the father had either insisted that the youth study or had prohibited him or her from doing so. Here it is important to note that when fathers specifically prohibited their sons from studying, it was usually because schooling was considered a waste of time, when they could be working and earning money; while fathers who prohibited their daughters from studying generally did so to protect them, usually in those cases where continued study would entail traveling long distances or moving away from home, this being thought of as “dangerous” for girls— a local concept I explore at greater length in chapters 8 and 9. However, we should distinguish this patriarchal concern on the part of fathers to protect their daughters from the temptations of the street, from a gendered educational ideology that presented formal education as somehow un-feminine. The traditional notion that a woman would be undesirable as a spouse if she had too much formal education did not seem to have much social currency among Santa Lucians. (In fact, as I discuss in this chapter and the next, the social meaning and classroom practices of students were in certain ways feminized.) Rather, Santa Lucian parents seemed to participate in the general sense that the rising lifestyle expectations afforded through formal education were equally accessible and legitimate for women as for men. In the abstract, parents

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

85

did not seem to think that education was more important for boys than for girls, and they assumed that girls were as likely as boys to use their educations to improve themselves. In personalizing their judgments, parents evaluated formal education as a worthwhile investment or a waste of time in terms of the employment possibilities that were available for their children, with or without the credentials conferred. In Santa Lucía, there were plenty of employment opportunities for young men in agriculture or business, some quite lucrative, that required little or no formal educational background or credentials. For young women, however, formal schooling seemed to greatly expand their employment horizons, particularly if they took postsecondary courses at a technical school to learn secretarial or computing skills. I take up the relationship between schooling and jobs in chapter 9. What I want to emphasize here is that while youth certainly learned a great deal about the dimorphic qualities of femininity and masculinity through family life, schooling itself, or being an educated person in the abstract, was not evaluated in gendered terms. For Santa Lucian youth, their identities as students seemed to be constituted less by who they were and what they did as students, than by what they were going to be by virtue of their educations and the credentials it conferred. Being a student meant, above all, “becoming someone.” However, being a student meant something different for male and female students, because “becoming” that “someone” posited by a secondary education had profoundly different implications and repercussions for men and women. Before examining that difference, however, I want to digress briefly to consider the significance of the strikingly apolitical nature of the Liceo Parra students I worked with, a quality that I associate with the strong emphasis among Santa Lucians on the narrow, economically instrumental role of secondary schooling and the future orientation that implied. While I was in Venezuela, media presentation of school-related issues were primarily of two kinds. The first were social scientific discussions of the national educational crisis, appearing regularly as op-ed columns in the Education sections of newspapers or as special issues on television magazine shows. In the process of offering expert explanations for current educational trends, students were reduced to performance statistics: numbers of graduates or deserters, levels of literacy or scientific competence, and the like. In contrast to these arid discussions that were often as not vehicles for the evaluation of the country’s “educational crisis,” secondary students were also depicted in the media as the protagonists of student demonstrations (alternately called “manifestaciones” or “disturbios”),

86

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

occurrences that, during my stay in Venezuela, were often quotidian events in the country’s principal cities, including the university city of Mérida, which has a historical reputation for student activism. These were vividly dramatic descriptions of student protests and violent and often fatal confrontations with the police or national guard. In portraying students as political actors, the media (including the commentaries of educational critics) drew upon several different scenarios. Most notable among these were the student as heroic protagonist in the history of Venezuela, the student as a dangerous subversive, and the student as adolescent rebel. Where the media recapitulated the central role of students in contemporary Venezuelan political history (Silvert & Reissman 1976, 153), depicting students as political actors in their own right, Santa Lucian students associated student activism with city life. While Santa Lucian students I talked to were generally more sympathetic to student protesters than were their parents, they consistently positioned themselves as distant from “those events” and distinct from “those students,” through the ruralurban opposition I discussed in chapter 2. Below is a conversation I had with a group of students in the schoolyard after a recent visit to Mérida: Janise: So what do you think of all these student demonstrations in Mérida? Male student: Well, in the city there are always lots of demonstrations. Janise: Not here? Female student: Nooo! Female student: No, that’s what happens in the city. Here everything is always tranquil. Male student: Anyways, what are we going to protest about here? Male student: What I hear is that students in the city are very involved in politics. Janise: And here? Several students: Here no!!! Janise: But you have a student association, no? Female student: Of course. Right now we are organizing a clean-up of Eagle Peak (el Pico Aguila). Also we are starting to save money to buy new desks and chalkboard erasers. Janise: And what else? Female student: Well, that’s all, for now. We are just getting started.

In contrast, not only to their urban counterparts, but even to a previous generation of Liceo Parra students who counted local activists among their graduates,11 Santa Lucian students at the time I was there were

Becoming Secondary School Students

●

87

explicitly apolitical as students. Rather, they thought of their civic roles as emerging through the assumption of the adult role of worker and, to a lesser extent, parent—as the comments I cited above suggest. I want to conclude this chapter by reconsidering the topic I began with, namely the significance that “becoming someone” through schooling had for young Santa Lucian women and men. What I want to suggest is that the “someone” it posited instigated contradictions with the gendered roles and identities posited by negligent patriarchy. The contradiction it posed for young women was implied in the remark made by the young student I quoted in the introduction, who came to my house for help with her English homework. Here I am referring to her comment that she wanted to “be someone in life” so that she could “defend” herself when her husband left her. In giving meaning to her role as a student, this young woman appeared to be arming herself in preparation to do battle with negligent patriarchy head-on. However, while the rewards of schooling promised to protect her from negligence, it did not offer an alternative basis for constructing her femininity outside of patriarchy, so that she still felt compelled to marry a man she anticipated would abandon her. As we will see in chapter 4, the practices that being a student entailed were continuous with the demands of proper femininity as a local construction and set of expectations. It was the “someone” that young female students were meant to “become”—and which they claimed to desire to become— that proved very difficult for most young Santa Lucian students to “be.” For young Santa Lucian men, the “someone” that secondary schooling was supposed to help them become was generally consistent with the masculine roles and expectations they were assuming. As an individual with a “career,” that someone was supposed to earn a living that would provide him the means to buy or build a house, to form a family, and to provide him the leisure time to spend “in the street.” The wealth, comfort, and status that higher education and professionalism promised were all consistent with the expectations and values of negligent patriarchal arrangements. Why, then, did so many young Santa Lucian men opt out of that future? My suggestion, which I explore in chapter 4, is that the contradiction for male students lay not in what a student would “become” but in what a student had to “be.” The lengthy suspension of their assumption of an adult masculine status that secondary schooling demanded, and the absence of a means of practicing patriarchal authority within the school context, encouraged so many young men to choose not to be students, even though they may have desired to become that “someone in life” that secondary schooling was promising to make them into.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 4

Pedagogy and Patriarchy One Thursday evening in November after the weekly English class I taught to youth at the Cultural Center, I got into a conversation about teaching styles with Marta, one of my five students, while we waited for her mother to pick her up. Marta was one of the schoolchildren who had greeted me when I got off the bus upon my initial arrival to Santa Lucía (see chapters 1 and 6). In that group, and in my English class, Marta was the most gregarious and the most openly curious. Marta was 11 years old when I met her—“11 going on 50,” her mother said to me once, with what seemed to be a mixture of pride and concern. It was true; Marta often seemed mature far beyond her years. Marta was the oldest of five children and her mother was raising the children on her own. I didn’t know the details behind that situation, but I knew that Marta’s mother cooked for the primary school in the nearby village, washed and ironed clothes for neighbors on her days off, struggled to make ends meet, and had a warm and cheery disposition whenever I saw her. Marta initiated the conversation that Thursday with an observation about how much English we spoke in my English class. Marta had started attending my English class while in sixth grade, before entering secondary school and thus before studying English in school. Now that Marta was in seventh grade at Liceo Parra and studying English at school as well, she had a point of comparison. She told me that her English teacher almost never spoke English to them or had them speak English, the way we did in my English class. “It’s just as well,” Marta smiled. “She has terrible pronunciation.” I asked Marta how her teacher taught English, and she said the same way she taught Spanish and Literature class: “First dictation, then explication. Then she writes problems on the board, and then calls on the students to come to the board and solve the problems. “This is what you do every day?” I asked. “Every day, pretty much. Oh, except when we have a quiz or exam.” I asked Marta what she

90

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

meant by solving problems. “Sometimes we have to translate Spanish into English, or English into Spanish. Sometimes we have to fill in blanks. You know, like in the workbook I showed you. Each day it’s the same routine: dictation, explication, problems on the board, solving problems.” I asked Marta what she thought of the routine. She said she didn’t know if she was learning very much English, but she liked it. Surprised by her answer, I asked why. Marta paused a moment, then said that it was easy. “So you’re not bored by the routine?” I asked, at the risk of putting words in Marta’s mouth. “No,” she replied. “Not really. It’s not boring. It’s more” . . . she struggled for the right word . . . “relaxing.” Again, Marta’s response surprised me, and I pressed her to explain what she meant. “Well, compared to all the work I have to do in the house, helping my mom with the cooking and cleaning, and helping my brothers and sisters with their homework, well, it’s relaxing to go to school and just sit there and write down what the teacher says. It’s easy. If I do what the teacher tells me to do, and if I pay attention and copy correctly, I get a good grade.” I told Marta that she was the first seventh-grade student I had talked to who said they liked dictation or explication—or the tests for that matter. Most students told me they didn’t like dictation; what they liked the most was working in groups (the rare occasions when the teacher assigned a research project to students and asked them to work on it in small groups in class). Marta said she hadn’t worked in small groups very much, and never in her English class. But the times that she had, she felt it was very burdensome. “Since the boys know the girls will do good work, they just leave it all to the girls. At least when we do dictation I don’t have to do anyone else’s work for them. I just do what is needed to get a good grade.” “It’s easy,” she smiled. In chapters 2 and 3, I considered what it meant for Santa Lucian youth to become secondary students, by locating their experiences of attending Liceo Parra within the broader panorama of their daily lives at home, in the street and, for some, at work. I looked at the school as a place framed by locally and nationally constituted, often contradictory, educational meanings and identities that both produced and were informed by negligent patriarchal social arrangements, and tried to give a sense of how students negotiated those contradictory meanings and identities in the process of coming of age. From their first week at school through their third year, Liceo Parra students spent on average five of their seven daily school hours in the

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

91

classroom, primarily receiving direct instruction from their teachers (unless they were skipping class). Thus, much of that negotiation—the cultural work students did to make sense of and give meaning to their school experiences in relation to their emerging identities as young educated adults—occurred during, through, and in response to the daily instructional activities of the classroom. In this chapter, I focus on the classroom and, more specifically, on pedagogy. Borrowing from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) work on the operations of daily life, I consider pedagogy, the instructional practice of Liceo Parra teachers, as “strategic” activities (36) through which teachers controlled the terms by which certain kinds of knowledge were deemed legitimate or proper, and determined the nature of the spatial relations in which that transfer of knowledge took place. I look at students’ classroom practices—their engagement in, obedience to, and deviations from the dictates of teachers—as “tactical” activities, artful responses to and appropriations of the teacher’s pedagogic practices—a kind of consumption or use of the teacher’s instructional production through which their agency is enacted (36–39). But it is not quite that simple, because Liceo Parra teachers were both strategists and tacticians, producers and consumers. Much as the contradictory hierarchies of negligent patriarchy encouraged Santa Lucian men to engage in activities that reinforced strategies of dominance while resisting those strategies through other kinds of activities, Liceo Parra teachers’ pedagogical practices were shaped as much by dominant structures of educational practice as by their resistance to and tactical appropriation of those structures. Students’ engagement with teachers’ instructional practices was framed in part by this contradiction. Moreover, as Marta’s comments suggest, students’ responses to those pedagogical activities, while apparently rote, repetitive, and conformist acts of obedient imitation, were in fact tactical acts laden with agency, creativity, and individuality. The ethnographic study of schooling is predicated on the assumption that the classroom is a site of cultural production—a place where social relations and individual identities are constituted and contested (Levinson & Holland 1996). The sheer number of hours students sit in classrooms, combined with the ideological impress of the school as an institutional place laden with rituals and routines, has a significant influence on the social and psychic formation of youth (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Reichel-Dolmatoff 1961, 115; Henry 1965; see also Spindler 1997). However, as Marta’s reflections on her experience in English class at Liceo Parra remind us, we should never presume to know a priori the nature and meaning of that influence. Pedagogical practices are enacted,

92

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

experienced, and made sense of by individual teachers and students in relation to other past and present experiences. Like any communicative process, the form and meaning of classroom activities—of teachers’ instruction and students’ response—depend in part on the social relations that create the conditions for those activities (Volosinov 1973, 20–21). Thus, we might expect that Santa Lucian teachers’ production and students’ use of classroom pedagogy would draw upon, reproduce, and at times transgress the negligent patriarchal social arrangements and ideologies that structured their daily lives. But the nature of that use, because of its intrinsically creative quality, cannot be predicted ahead of time. Marta’s reflections on the secondary school English classroom were informed by her familiar, daily routines at home as well as her relatively new experience in my English class. While she, like other students, drew upon the negligent patriarchal social relations that constituted home and school life to make sense of classroom routines, she responded to and used those routines in ways that were based on her particular situation and that suited her particular needs as a youth coming of age. Who would have thought that of all the students at Liceo Parra, an alert and enterprising seventh grader such as Marta would find dictation so agreeable? As Marta’s description of the daily routines of her English class convey, most of classroom time at Liceo Parra was taken up by the teacher’s dictation, explication, and administering of small tests and major exams. This was generally true of all teachers across all grades, subject matter, and the educational philosophy of the teacher. In other words, the predominant pedagogical mode at Liceo Parra was discursively monologic (the teacher’s voice was primary, often unitary), instructionally and epistemologically authoritarian (the knowledge the teacher imparted was absolute), and cognitively mimetic (the principal modality by which students were expected to learn was by copying). The practice of calling on students individually to do board work was also common and represents a pedagogical mode in which the locus of knowledge was temporarily transferred to the individual student, albeit in a form orchestrated by the teacher. In comparison to the time during which the classroom was organized around monologic and authoritarian pedagogy, students spent very little time engaged in practices that were discursively dialogic and instructionally cooperative. The time spent doing research in groups that Marta mentioned, the work in science labs (which only occurred in the last three years of secondary school), or the presentation of debates or group projects to the class were exceptional—consuming less than 5 percent of

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

93

total class time on average, if I were to extrapolate from my observations. These monologic, mimetic activities not only consumed the preponderance of students’ classroom time, but they were also central to teachers’ assessment of students’ schoolwork, and thus the valorization of students. As a result, these predominant pedagogical practices also established a context of habits—a set of tacit guidelines or rules—that guided the ways students engaged in more dialogic instructional activities, such as board work in class, debates, and research in groups (learning activities I take up in greater detail in later chapters). In this chapter, I consider how these prevalent pedagogical practices of dictation, explication, and administering exams, despite their apparent gender neutrality, in fact were legitimated by and in turn naturalized the relations of knowledge-power that organized negligent patriarchal social arrangements. Monologic Pedagogy: The Hidden Practices of Negligent Patriarchy I was introduced to the monologic qualities of secondary school instruction with the first class I observed at Liceo Parra: Castellano y Literatura (“Spanish Language and Literature”), Seventh Grade, Section B, taught by Mr. Camacho. The classroom was on the first floor, the second room in from the corner, next to the Section A classroom. (Since students moved up the building as they moved through the grades, all the seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms were on the first floor.) When I arrived, the teacher and most of the students were already in the classroom. I looked around to see a familiar scene. The desks engraved with youthful graffiti; the blackboard on the wall; the dusty smell of erased chalk; and the students with their textbooks, notebooks, mechanical pencils, and backpacks triggered memories of high school. I wasn’t consciously aware at that point of the extent to which my initial observations were based on constant comparison to a familiar experience and set of relations, and the unintended expectation of finding that experience and those relations repeated before me. At the same time that I worked to observe exactly what I saw, part of me was forever waiting for the content to become as familiar as the form. I had made prior arrangements with Mr. Camacho to observe his class. He was one of the teachers the school principal had suggested would be disposed toward working with me and had introduced us the previous week. Indeed, Mr. Camacho was quite amenable to my observing his classes, and suggested that I come on this particular day because

94

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

they would be covering “interesting material.” When I walked in, he kept me at the front of the room and motioned to the students to rise. “This is Señora” (he looked down at his papers) “Hurtig. She has come to Santa Lucía from the United States to do research in” (he glanced again at his papers) “anthropology. She is going to visit our class, so be on your best behavior.” So much for noninvasive research methods, I thought. “Buenos días,” the 32 students said in unison. “Buenos días,” I responded. The students remained standing. I remained standing. There was a moment of tension. I had no idea what to do next. Trying to mimic the teacher’s authoritative tone, I finally said, “Thank you. You may sit down now.” The class sat down in one swift, unitary wave. I then explained who I was, reiterating the teacher’s comments with a bit more accuracy and describing what I would be doing in their classroom: “I’m going to sit in back and listen to the class, and take notes on what the students and the teacher say and do. But it’s not an evaluation or a test. I’m just trying to understand what school is like for you. So don’t feel nervous.” Then I asked them if they had any questions. No questions. I scanned the faces. They looked young and timid. I wondered if there weren’t a more effective way to elicit questions. I wondered what my presence meant to them. I moved to the back of the room to the one empty desk, tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, and readied myself to write. I noticed that the class was neatly divided by sex: All the girls sat on the right by the windows (this facilitated occasional dialogues with friends who passed by and beckoned to one of the girls through the always-open windows); all the boys sat on the left near the door. Aha, I thought: the gendered organization of space in the classroom. I jotted it down and wondered in the margins of my notebook whether this arrangement was imposed by the teacher or instigated by the students. As I took notes, I became conscious of myself waiting for the next indication of the reproduction of gender inequalities in the classroom. Given the extent to which Santa Lucian adults, youth, and children organized their daily activities in sex-segregated groups, and given the machismo that permeated the house and the street and rendered gender differences as hierarchies, I expected that manifestations of those gender hierarchies would similarly pervade the class session. I expected the boys’ hands to shoot up at every question the teacher asked, and the girls to sit quietly in meek and intimidated admiration. I expected the teacher to discourage those girls who were assertive, and to call on boys more often; I expected the boys to use more authoritative language, and the girls to express more self-doubt in their answers to questions. These were the

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

95

kinds of classroom practices that myriad feminist studies—ethnographic, sociological, sociolinguistic—had identified as evidence of how pedagogy produced or instantiated the gendered hierarchies of knowledge, power, and authority organizing the wider society. So I observed, and I took my notes. I wrote and wrote, but to my surprise and chagrin, nothing gendered, or gendering, seemed to be happening. At least nothing obvious to me. Here is what I observed: Mr. Camacho initiated class by taking attendance. He called the students, not by name, not with the use of a gender-identifying title such as Señorita or Señor, but by the number assigned to them in the class list. Numbers, I wrote in the margins of my field notes, are gender indifferent. The teacher listened for each student’s response—“presente”—and repeated the number again if there was no answer. He never glanced up, never made eye contact with the students in front of him. Attendance took four minutes. During that time, the students sat fairly quietly. A few sharpened their pencils. Mostly they waited. It was early on in the school year, it was their first year as secondary school students, and they seemed somewhat intimidated by their deep-voiced, matter-of-fact teacher. Once attendance was taken, Mr. Camacho stood up and moved to the front of the class, where he began to dictate material to the students from a textbook: Castellano y Literatura, Primer Año, Ciclo Básico (“Spanish and Literature, First Year, Basic Cycle”). As he searched for the page, some of the students reached into their desks or their backpacks for their notebooks. The teacher did not announce a page number or ask students to pull out their textbooks. He simply began, proffering a brief introduction to the day’s topic: “Today we will finish the objectives from the last class on punctuation: uses of the period, the comma, the semi-colon, the colon.” He scribbled the list on the board. Punctuation: period, comma, semicolon, colon. As he wrote, the students began to scribble the same list into their notebooks. Mr. Camacho read in a slow, monotonous drone without intonation—an incantation strikingly distinct from his forceful and dogmatic conversational voice. He paused occasionally to insert his own commentary: the definition of a term, the summary of a passage. He looked up from the text ten times: four times to glance at the students and six times to glance out the window to his right. As Mr. Camacho dictated, the students wrote, or “copied,” as they called it. They adopted similar postures, hunched over their notebooks, their pencils cramped tightly in their hands, their gaze alternating from the blackboard to their notebooks. They erased regularly, apparently intent on keeping their notebooks neat. Occasionally a student interrupted the dictation to confirm a particular word or ask for its spelling.

96

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Male and female students interrupted with comparable frequency. Indeed, their behavior throughout this class—and the next and the next—was strikingly similar. Or so it seemed to me. Most of the students, male and female, wrote down most of the words; most of the students, male and female, were quiet when the teacher dictated. A comparable number of girls as boys blurted out questions over a word of passage; a comparable number of boys as girls raised their hands first before asking their questions. How “micro,” I wondered, could the “micro” practices of schooling that reproduced gender inequalities, possibly be? Periodically Mr. Camacho inserted his own commentary into the dictation. Whenever he did so, the students stopped their copying, immediately recognizing from the tone of his voice or his glance up from the book that this was a digression from the dictation. Apparently their years in primary school classrooms—where dictation was also common, and over the primary years an increasingly predominant pedagogical practice—had already taught these first-year secondary school students to distinguish between “dictated information that belongs in notebooks” and the teacher’s “explications” or informal commentary. In my conversations with students, they explained that teachers often reviewed students’ notebooks at the end of each academic period, looking to make sure they contained all the dictated material that would be the basis for tests . . . and nothing more. The students’ notebooks were meant to be a record of the dictated material. But teachers did not only scrutinize the notebook’s content; presentation was of utmost importance. Teachers wanted to see neat, uncluttered notebooks, complete sentences, no gaps, but nothing superfluous either. In subsequent discussions I had with teachers, they uniformly confirmed that they had no expectation that the students note down anything that was not dictated. Not that they considered their commentaries unimportant, but rather that they deliberately dictated the material they wanted the students to later study or memorize for the tests. As one teacher explained to me tersely, “my explanations are for the students’ edification; they are not part of their evaluation.” Even the few teachers who identified themselves as practitioners of the “new pedagogy” did not expect the students to use their classroom notebooks as a way to take their own notes on a topic. That could be done separately when they worked on their individual or group projects. While these few teachers were notable for encouraging students to ask questions and at times proffer opinions about a particular topic, classroom notebooks were meant for dictation or for solving problems presented by the teacher.

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

97

In The Politics of Education, Paulo Freire describes the educator who aims to “deposit” words into the passive learner as engaged in pedagogical acts that are at once mechanical, magical, and messianic (1985, 7–8). And so it was in Mr. Camacho’s classroom. The rote, mechanical instructional activity of dictating sequences of words the significance of which was not immediately apparent, could only be considered a practice of imparting knowledge if somehow the words the students wrote down magically transmitted understanding (Freire & Macedo 1987, 34). And the teacher’s dictation could only prompt the dutiful copying by students if they somehow had faith that the messianic teacher was imparting valuable knowledge to them. Or perhaps the teacher’s authority derived as much from his ability to discipline and punish—through the power of assessment—as his ability to save. And so we have our first clues into the hidden practices of patriarchy. Mr. Camacho dictated intermittently for nearly 10 minutes. He then spent another 10 minutes illustrating the points of punctuation he was teaching by writing passages on the board and asking students whether each punctuation mark was correct or not. Turning to an example on the board, he asked the class, “Is this first period used correctly?” After the briefest of pauses, he answered his own question: “Of course it is. It comes after the end of the sentence, true?” “Yes,” the students murmured softly in unison. And on he went through the examples, always asking, but never really giving the students a chance to answer. Having worked through the examples on the blackboard, Mr. Camacho turned to the class and asked whether there were any questions. With a pause that would hardly have allowed a student to formulate a question let alone intone it, he glanced quickly across the room and snapped, “Good. Let’s move on.” Were his questions rhetorical, I jotted in the margins of my notebook, or had he learned over his years of teaching that these timid young Santa Lucian students wouldn’t answer his questions even if he gave them more time to do so? Or had the students learned during their years of primary schooling that there was no sense in offering an answer since the questions were rhetorical? Whatever the source of this practice, it bore little apparent resemblance to the middle-class suburban U.S. classroom I was accustomed to, in which the teacher’s questions prompted some students who thought they knew the answer to battle with their waving arms for recognition, while causing other students who thought they didn’t know the answer to pray fearfully not to be called on. Nonetheless, in both kinds of classrooms knowledge and authority were fully located in the teacher: In the U.S. classroom, the teacher used her authority as an interrogator to engage students in meritocratic, individualist competition; Mr. Camacho used his authority as a

98

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

pseudo-interrogator to suppress individual responses and reassert the unity of the classroom and the totality of his knowledge-authority. This reduction of class participation to a silencing formality, I would come to learn after months of sitting in on classes at Liceo Parra, was common practice among most teachers of seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The dynamic began to change in the diversified cycle classrooms—the last two years of secondary school. But that is the subject of later chapters. At this point, Mr. Camacho set the text down on his little desk in the corner, walked to the center of the room, and began to talk extemporaneously. “It is very important that you learn the rules of punctuation. The Venezuelan people are a very illiterate people. We are a shame to our forefathers. How can a country so rich in resources, with so much human potential, have so little culture? If you are to make something of yourselves, you have to learn to write properly.” He paused, glanced briefly in my direction, and continued. “Look at what has happened to the United States. Yesterday I heard a news program on the television about the decline in the educational levels of United States students. This is why such a great power like the United States faces such grave problems these days. If we Venezuelans don’t educate ourselves, we will never be able to overcome the crisis we face today.” As I listened to Mr. Camacho and watched the students listen, never taking notes but never glancing away either, it occurred to me that this might be the “important material” he had mentioned would interest me. In the moment I wondered whether his sermon was for my benefit; but in the weeks to come I witnessed similar civic digressions in many of his classes. (Mr. Camacho was certainly not the only teacher to proffer periodic civic education lectures in the middle of their classes. Most teachers did this on occasion; but he and a few other teachers, all but one of them men, were particularly notorious for their didactic digressions—a practice I consider at length in chapter 5.) Mr. Camacho continued to talk about the moral import of punctuation and being literate until the class bell sounded, at which point he hastily informed the students that they would have a quiz on punctuation in the next class. And with that the class was over. Some of the students began to put away their notebooks, others moved toward the open windows to chat with friends passing by, and a few others left the classroom to use the bathroom or get a snack from the cantina. They had five minutes until their next class, Venezuelan History, taught by Ms. Salinas, would begin. After class, I lingered in the classroom to chat with the students about what had transpired. I learned several things from these young secondary school students. They told me that the class I had observed was a lot like

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

99

any other class time with Mr. Camacho. Neither the amount of time he spent dictating nor his apparently extemporaneous sermonizing about the civic and moral import of punctuation was uncharacteristic. The students also told me that they did not enjoy dictation in particular. Unlike my English student Marta, the five or six male and female students I chatted with after class that day described dictation as tedious. The only thing they disliked more, they declared, was taking tests. When I asked the students if Mr. Camacho was like other teachers, there were differences of opinion. One of the boys said he was the strictest of all the teachers who taught seventh grade. The other boy said he wasn’t strict, he was just serious. He thought Mr. Camacho was a good teacher. Two of the girls agreed that he was strict and serious. But one of the girls made a comment I found especially interesting. She proposed that Mr. Camacho just seemed strict compared to the teachers they had in primary school. The teachers there were nicer and didn’t mind if you weren’t always sitting still or if you didn’t always know how to spell some of the words in the dictation. “True,” one of the boys rejoined, “That’s because we’re not children anymore. Now that we’re in seventh grade we have to carry ourselves like adults.” Given the ambiguous status of the secondary school in relation to the everyday spaces of house and street that I described in the previous chapter, this young student’s comment is notable. It suggests that one of the effects of classroom pedagogy at Liceo Parra was not so much to support a transition from house to street (after all, both were sites of childhood and adulthood), but rather a transition from compliance with the nurturing authority of the maternal role to the more demanding and dogmatic authority of the paternal role. As the students I talked to indicated, Mr. Camacho’s class proved fairly representative of what I observed in class after class, regardless of subject matter taught, the students’ grade level, the teacher’s sex, their social class background, or their educational training. Over the course of 18 months during which time I observed dozens of classes taught by most of Liceo Parra’s 30-some teachers, the organization of the class period and the pedagogical orientation were impressively similar.1 Moreover, the apparent gender neutrality of the entire set of practices was striking: Teachers consistently dictated in monotone voices to the entire class, rarely called on male students with greater frequency than female students or praised the work of male students more than female students—or vice versa. While a few teachers had the reputation (sometimes among students, sometimes among colleagues) of favoring the boys or the girls, the purported favoritism seemed to cut either way:

100

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Some female teachers were said to like the girls better, others to like the boys better; while some male teachers were said to prefer boys to girls, or girls to boys. Because this favoritism was so elusive to me, I asked students and teachers how it was manifest. They located it primarily in the nonverbal communicative practices that on rare occasions accompanied instruction, such as smiles or nods a teacher might confer on a student as she answered a question or solved a problem on the blackboard. Some claimed the bias was manifest in teachers’ assessment of student work and exams. If so, there was no systematic evidence that any of the Liceo Parra teachers gave consistently higher grades to students of one sex over another. The gossip around favoritism reinforced the notion that professorial power was conferred in gendered terms, but how that distinction was converted into the systematic reproduction of a gender hierarchy was by no means clear. Nor did students bring into the classroom the dramatic genderdimorphic dispositions of posture, dress, and speech they engaged in with great vigilance in the school patio, in the house, and on the street. In the schoolyard and patio, interactions among students, among teachers, and between teachers and students were not only blatantly gendered but also often quite sexualized. By contrast, there were only two visibly gendered practices I witnessed within the classroom, both initiated by students: students’ voluntary segregation in their seating arrangements by sex, and students’ voluntary divisions into same-sex study groups on those occasions when the class was preparing group presentations or studying for an exam. While the gendered segregation of seating was a practice engaged in by boys and girls, the gendered segregation of small work groups was invariably initiated by the girls who, like Marta, claimed they didn’t like to work with the boys because boys were too lazy and made the girls do all the work. However, although girls and boys avoided sitting together and the girls did not want to do research projects or work in groups with the boys, the classroom discourses and demeanors of male and female students—particularly in their first three years—were remarkably similar. Official accounts of Venezuelan education I had read, produced by the Venezuelan Ministry of Education as well as by historians of Venezuelan education in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasized the contemporary refashioning of the Venezuelan educational system, inspired by Deweyan social and educational principles that tied public education to the democratization of society.2 Over the past half-century, a new pedagogical and evaluative system christened La Escuela Nueva (“The New School”) had been adopted, aimed at forming the self-conscious and

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

101

critical, “integrated” person who would have the practical knowledge needed to participate in the material development of an increasingly industrial and technological country. The primary aims were to move away from an overly “theoretical” education based on a predominantly didactic and authoritarian pedagogical and evaluative system toward a pedagogy based in child-centered, “active” learning—a vision explicitly influenced by the progressive pedagogy of John Dewey.3 In short, official Venezuelan educational ideologies sounded very similar to those that had circulated in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. However, as Venezuelan educational researchers have long pointed out, the discrepancies between the theory and practice of education were enormous (Marrero Pérez 1987; Rodríguez T. 1989). This was true, not just in remote rural regions like Santa Lucía, but across the country. Neither the pedagogical practices advocated by the Ministry of Education nor the social and civic ideals they were meant to produce were actualized in Liceo Parra classrooms. The didactic techniques that prevailed in the Santa Lucian classroom emphasized conformity and obedience, and a focus on knowledge as a product based on the reification of the teaching and learning process rather than the teacher-student relationship as a creative process encouraging discovery and producing knowledge (Lizarraga B. & Colli M. 1992, 96). Indeed, I observed little in the classroom practices at Liceo Parra that was self-consciously student centered, in the Deweyan sense of that concept, except for the rare reorganization of the classroom into student work groups. If the kinds of communicative practices normally identified by educational researchers as reproducing gendered hierarchies were not occurring in the ways teachers responded to individual students or the ways students interacted with each other, could this mean that the classroom was actually a rarified space in which negligent patriarchal social relations were suspended? Or was I just not looking in the right place? Perhaps. Or perhaps the narrow horizon was not just that of my ethnographic lens, but of the feminist social science frameworks that assume the production of binary hierarchies such as “male dominance” occur in similarly binary, bifurcating terms. But the unequal social arrangements of negligent patriarchy, as I proposed in the book’s first chapter, are not reducible to the domination of men over women, but are constituted through a complex constellation of familial relations of domination based on the failed compliance of the patriarch with the classic patriarchal bargain, and the enduring longing by the mother and children for the bargain’s fulfillment. Which would lead one to wonder whether there weren’t other, less obvious ways in which the sensibilities, symbolism,

102

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

and social arrangements of negligent patriarchy—were produced through classroom pedagogy. Dictation Dictation as practiced in Liceo Parra classrooms was based on a pedagogy of absolutes: the absolute authority of the teacher as the dictating person and the absolute truth of the dictated word. However, this authority was mediated by the book, since the process of dictation was one of transferring the written word from the book to the student, via the teacher. Indeed, the very act of reading from the text enhanced the teacher’s authority, just as the authority of the teacher’s position imbued the text she or he read with veracity. This resembled the authority of the priest as he gave Mass. The book’s truth became his truth, the book’s knowledge his knowledge. As he read the Bible passage, the word of God became his words; and God’s authority became his. But it was also his sacred authority as a priest that connected the words on a page with the word of God. There was also a similarity between the rhythm of a classroom when the teacher was performing dictation and the rhythm at a church service when the parish priest was performing a mass. The teacher led, the students followed. Certain key phrases cued their writing performance: punto y aparte (“period and new paragraph”); punto y seguido (“period and continue”). Much like the congregation, cued when to rise, cued when to sit down, cued when to pronounce an “amen.” The pious individual had attended mass so often that she could pick up the slightest significant motion of the priest, gesturing for the congregation to rise, to sit, to sing, to pray, like the woman dancing with her male partner in the discotheque, her body and mind attuned to the clues of her guide as he directed her across the dance floor according to his terms. So it was with the teacher dictating in front of the class. Some teachers were inclined to pace back and forth at the front of the room, marking the rhythm of their voice with their step; others would stand beside their desk and read in a monotone as though wearied by the tedium of their own voice, glancing, distracted, out the window during pauses, commanding authority by expressing indifference. I was entranced by the uncanny way in which even the seventh- and eighth-grade students knew when the teacher’s extemporaneous explication ended and the formal dictation began. A slight change in the teacher’s tone, as he stepped out of his own authoritative role and adopted the anonymous voice of bookish authority. At that moment, the

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

103

students shook themselves from the distracted lethargy they assumed during the explication, opened their notebooks, picked up their pens, all in unison like a choir preparing to sing, and then . . . began to write. They scribbled silently, huddled over their notebooks as though the closer they were to the page the more accurate or beautiful their writing would be, the only utterances an occasional, punctuated comment to the teacher, perhaps verifying the accuracy of a word, perhaps inquiring about a missed word. At times, it occurred to me that the single word that escaped the inquiring student could have been deduced from the context of the passage. But the students focus seemed to be, not on the passage or its meaning, but on each individual word. The exercise was purely and fully mimetic; the goal was to copy each word precisely, exactly as dictated. This was confirmed through conversations I had with students after class in which any question I might ask regarding the content of the lecture would immediately prompt them to open their notebooks and recite from the copied text. In U.S. classrooms I had been part of or had read about, studentcentered, competitive pedagogic techniques encouraged students to be the first to speak, to know the answer to the teacher’s question and gain her attention by fiercely waving one’s hand in the air. The sound of one’s own voice, singled out and commanding the class’ attention, was the sound of success. In the Santa Lucian classroom, teachers and students colluded to make choral responses the norm; teachers limited the opportunity for students to speak out, appeared indifferent to students’ constant comparing of notes and collaborative efforts to resolve problems (as long as it was not an exam). For students, raised as most were in households demanding that respect be demonstrated through silent obedience, drawing attention to oneself was anathema: “it embarrasses you,” students would say. A student’s question or comment during dictation was intoned quickly, just above a whisper, as inconspicuously as possible. No raising of hands, no attention drawn to oneself. The student’s goal was to procure the information needed to produce a perfect copy, while remaining anonymous and invisible. Every attempt was made not to interrupt the even flow of the teacher’s recitation. If it appeared easier to lean over and peak at another student’s copy than to open one’s mouth, speak, and break into the wall of discursive authority that the teacher commanded—all the better. That way one also avoided the pena of drawing attention to oneself. But unlike the “silent Indian” of U.S. educational research lore, whose silence has been read by teachers and educational researchers alike as an indicator of ignorance, laziness, or resistance (Foley 1996), at Liceo Parra silence was an appropriate classroom

104

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

behavior associated with attentiveness and a greater likelihood of academic success, according to several teachers with whom I spoke. I have tried to stress the uniformity in teachers’ dispositions toward and classroom interactions with male and female students, as well as in students’ postures when taking dictation. However, there was one distinction I observed regularly between girls’ and boys’ practices during dictation: a slight difference in how they interrogated the teacher. Male students tended to assert their questions, attempting, it seemed, to establish their own authority even as they validated the authority of the teacher. After all, the challenge for the son of the patriarch was how to model themselves after their father while maintaining their subservient position to him. The female students, however, were more timid. They asked questions in a clearly interrogatory tone, with no attempt to mask their uncertainty. Girls asked questions in a deferential way that made the teacher’s authoritative response sound like both an answer and an assurance, a means of protection, reiterating the ideological basis for the traditional patriarchal hierarchy. The goal of copying was to mimic: to create an exact replica in writing of the teacher’s verbal pronouncements. In this sense, copying was and was not an individual activity. Granted, students wrote in separate notebooks, and their work was graded separately. But as they took down dictation they consulted and conferred with each other openly. The teacher did not seem to mind. Nor was there any sense of competition between students, of privacy of effort or guardedness of intelligence. I never saw a student hide her notebook from another student peering over to find the word she missed. Students made learning cooperative, even when teachers didn’t. And so it seemed that in response to the potentially homogenizing objectification of the student listener that was effected by the teacher’s monologic discourse (Bakhtin 1981), the students managed to momentarily disrupt the authoritative position of the teacher through their inquisitive engagement with each other as they searched, collectively, for the correct, unitary voice. And so these tolerated disruptions can be seen as both complicit and in tension with the patriarchal impulse of classroom dictation. Given the students’ inclination toward cooperative learning, it is not surprising that most students of all ages listed “working in teams” as their preferred class activity on the school-wide survey I conducted. I was continually impressed by how systematically and thoroughly the same students whose individual study habits at home were haphazard and unsystematic, would divide and organize a research team’s tasks. They were also attentive to making sure all members of the group did

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

105

their share. Indeed, in a given class section students evaluated each other, not in terms of intellect or grades, but based on a reputation for cooperation or exploitation. In general the girls thought the boys were lazy and would try to take advantage of them, making the girls do all the work and then reaping the benefits. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the institutional removal of schooling from everyday life somehow allowed the female students to perceive, criticize, and resist the kind of exploitative relations between father and family, brothers and sisters that were naturalized and tolerated in the house. Explication Interspersed throughout the teacher-centered act of dictation was explication. This is the term students and teachers used to refer to the explanatory comments that teachers offered about the material they were dictating. In some instances the explication was a dissection of the material dictated, in other cases an illustration of a point contained in the text. Some teachers tried to use examples from the students’ environment or experience to illustrate more general points. For instance, in a general discussion in Earth Sciences class of the erosive actions of rivers and streams, the teacher (whose training was in Environmental Studies more than in Education) focused his explanation on the formation of the local valleys around Santa Lucía. Other times explications provided a clarification of terms or, most rarely, of concepts, such as one lengthy digression from dictation that the Art History teacher got himself caught up in as he attempted to convey the concept of aesthetics to his bemused students. The moment the teacher began to explicate—marked by a change in the cadence of her speech, the closing of a book from which she was dictating, or perhaps a question directed to the class (questions were almost never asked in the course of dictation)—the students automatically stopped writing. I never saw a student write down anything the teacher said while explicating. In casual conversation, I asked many students why they did not write down the teachers’ explications. I received several different answers. Some students told me there was no need to; the information stayed in one’s head. “One retains everything one hears,” one fourth-year student pronounced, applying a principle he claimed to have learned in his Psychology class. Other students told me that certain teachers didn’t like students to take notes when they were explicating, because they wanted them to pay attention. (Some teachers described their approaches in this way, although others claimed that they wished

106

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

students would ask more questions, expressing frustration at the students’ restraint and passivity.) Several students said that they didn’t take notes because they couldn’t concentrate when they were writing, a selfreflection about their learning practices that supported my perception of the students’ engagement with the dictated material as being directed toward a series of words rather than the content of a passage. Given that the entire instructional process was geared toward passing exams, I occasionally asked students if they were tested on what the teacher explained. The unanimous answer was no, with some students qualifying that response by explaining that the teacher gave the explicación to help them better understand the dictation. But it was the dictated material that their notebooks were graded on, and that the tests were based on. While teachers verbally reinforced this perception on the part of students, many teachers were notorious for asking questions on exams that were based on the content of their explications, or that addressed material never covered in class, rather than on the dictated material. This evaluative practice on the part of teachers, of establishing and then breaking the norms regarding the content of exams, can be interpreted as a mechanism through which teacher asserted the arbitrariness of their authority, and their authoritative indifference to the terms of instructional reciprocity in which the students were supposed to diligently copy and memorize the dictated material, and the teachers were supposed to test and evaluate them on that material. There were two ways in which teachers opened a space for students to participate in the course of their explications. One was a kind of “fill in the blanks” interrogation. This technique was not used to encourage competition, because students were addressed and responded as a group. Whether one student or ten or none responded, the teacher’s reaction was the same. He would acknowledge the correct answer by repeating it, and continue along with his explanation: Teacher: “The company that had a monopoly over trade between Spain and Venezuela during the Colony was called the” Students: “Guipuzcoana.” Teacher: “The Royal Guipuzcoana Company. As we know, this company was named after” Students: [Silence] Teacher: “The Guipuzcoana Company was named for the region of Northern Spain ‘Guipuzcoa.’ That is an important fact that is not in the history texts. Good. Continuing” [Students pick up pens and prepare to copy.]

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

107

The other method was a review of the dictated material using a question-answer format, as when the Chemistry teacher interrupted her dictation on the composition of certain molecules: “Okay. What are the two elements that make up a water molecule?” There was a simultaneous pause in her speaking and her pacing. “Hydrogen,” called out a few tentative voices. “Hydrogen is one,” she affirmed. “Good. And what is the other?” “Carbon,” shouted out a lone voice. “Carbon, no. Think, students, think.” There was a brief pause, while the teacher paced back and forth waiting for a reply. Finally someone murmured, “Oxygen.” “Oxygen, oxygen,” other voices, recognizing the word, repeated. “Exactly. Water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.” And she continued her explication. The technique was not intended to motivate students competitively, because the teacher almost never called on an individual student (in the way she might if she were resolving math problems or completing English sentences on the blackboard). Whatever the conscious purpose of this technique, one of its effects was to keep the students attentive. By the time students reached secondary school, they were used to this method of prompting: It was used by primary school teachers and it was also used by catechism teachers. There was a rhythm and cadence I heard in various settings, including the storytelling that went on in the street, in which listeners often provided the storyteller with ends to sentences as though they had assumed the role of the student listening to a teacher’s explanation. And although students often responded as a chorus, the interaction resembled the dyadic relations of the street more than the relations based on commandments and obedience in the house. Like a dance, the teacher led and the students followed. As in dance, the aim of the male figure—in this case the teacher—was to be artful and subtle in his maneuvering, making it appear as though he was not leading at all, while also making sure to communicate his complete mastery of the situation and control over his (female) partner. Meanwhile, the goal for the female figure, in this case the students, was to cooperate: to use all their concentration in order to appear as though they weren’t concentrating at all. In other words, the measure of the student’s mastery of the subordinate female figure, was their effectiveness in demonstrating and acquiescing to the teacher’s mastery as a leader. It was an unequal social arrangement—much like the patriarchal bargain—in which a hierarchical relationship of knowledge and power was masked by the artifice of reciprocity. Over the course of a class period, the movement back and forth between dictation and explication was reminiscent of the daily move-

108

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

ment between house and street. In their resemblance to the gendered relations of the street, the periods of explanation relaxed the deliberate relations of power, knowledge, and discipline created during the period of dictation, and gave the students the momentary sense that they had a certain mastery over the material the teachers expected them to learn. Although dictation was central to the evaluative process that drove schooling, the teacher’s explanatory techniques provoked the most student commentary. In fact, the extent to which teachers explained dictated material, along with their willingness to respond to students’ questions, were among the most important qualities in students’ assessments of teachers—and not, as I would have expected in an exam-driven system, whether they gave easy, hard, fair, or predictable exams. In distinguishing good and bad teachers, students most often referred to qualities such as whether she explained well or at all, or whether he solicited students’ questions in the course of explaining. Despite the prevalence of monologic, didactic instruction, Liceo Parra students had the desire for teachers to be engaging and dialogic. It was a desire they expressed, but did not expect to be fulfilled—not unlike Veronica’s desire for a faithful husband in the face of the expectation of abandonment. As one secondyear student said to me as we walked to the cantina after her Spanish and Literature class, reflecting on that particular teacher’s commitment to her students, “Ms. Ramirez is not like most teachers at this school. She really wants her students to do well. And you can tell she is committed. Most teachers just want the students to be obedient and work hard, even though they don’t want to work hard. If the students are working hard, they look good. But then we do all that work and they don’t do their part. It’s just not fair.” Exams At Liceo Parra, the evaluation system was based almost entirely on exams. This was a general feature of the Venezuelan educational system, much decried by critical educators within Venezuela (Rosenblat 1981; Cuadernos 1981; Rodríguez T. 1989; Duplá 1991), and not at all peculiar to Liceo Parra. The structure and content of exams paralleled and reinforced a didactic approach that enacted, literally, an epistemological system based on the reduction of knowledge to the division, simplification, and schematization of information. The material students transcribed into their notebooks was presented to them in outline form, and the outline generally followed the points enumerated in the textbooks. This approach was used consistently at Liceo Parra for all subjects, from

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

109

History to Biology, from Philosophy to Physics, by all teachers, at all levels. It was as though the state’s impulse to systematize colluded with the teachers’ impulse to simplify and minimize their labor, such that they tended to organize their entire courses as narrowly as possible around the dictates of the standardized curriculum—all of which, by the way, they were obligated to cover. In fact, most of the informal conversations I had with teachers revolved around the sharing of strategies for fitting all the units for a given marking period into the narrow time frame they had. This kind of schematic thinking was reinforced in the exams, which usually demanded that students retain lists of information, detached from any meaningful context. “What are the three defining qualities of the indigenist novel?” “What were the eight taxes that the Spanish government imposed in the colonies?” “What are the stages of mitosis?” “What are the distinguishing traits of Romanesque architecture?” Evaluations drove an educational system geared toward the mastery of a fixed quantity of goals or objectives in each subject, each term, and in which educational reform was often reduced to the modification, addition, or reorganization of objectives constituting the formal curriculum. There has been an abundance of criticism among Venezuelan educators concerned with the anti-intellectual emphasis on evaluations and exams. What interests me, however, is not a critique of the educational system in terms of its role in imparting academic knowledge, but rather a consideration of how Liceo Parra teachers’ practices of assessment and evaluation contributed to the enactment and legitimation of negligent patriarchal relations of knowledge and power. I’ll begin by setting out the agreed upon terms according to which evaluative procedures took place. The students’ primary goal was to pass—to pass tests, to pass from one year to the next, to pass out of secondary school. Given that that teachers’ assessment of their students rested almost entirely on exams, one can imagine the symbolic and material weight exams had for students, and the power teachers enacted every time they administered and graded an exam. Consistent with the general tension between discipline and casualness which characterized other pedagogical practices—and which imbued the classroom with an ethos more reminiscent of the house than the street— exam-taking was at once a rigid and informal event. Teachers considered exam-taking an uninteresting activity for me to observe, discouraging me from attending classes when exams were being conducted. One teacher pointed out that “there’s nothing to observe”; another suggested that “nothing really happens,” a dehistoricizing comment that reminded me

110

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

of Santa Lucians’ casual refrain about their town as a place where nothing ever happens. But from the point of view of students, exam-taking was crucial. It was the instructional event for which all other classroom activities were mere preparation. It was the only reason for their reluctant participation in hour after hour of dutiful dictation, of tedious memorization. And so I sat in on exam sessions as regularly as possible. If students took exams more seriously than any other aspect of their schoolwork (even though it was the aspect they claimed to enjoy the least), teachers were notably casual about them. (Or at least they were casual about preparing their exams. They were hardly casual about the student outcomes, for which they articulated high expectations and occasionally threats.) While some teachers prepared exam questions ahead of time, which they dictated in class or wrote on the blackboard, few teachers prepared written exams in order to avoid the expense of making copies. But at more than half the exam sessions I attended, the teacher invented the exam questions on the spot, in an impromptu fashion. And in the enactment of these different dispositions we can point to the workings of negligent patriarchy. Exams were a source of tremendous anxiety and expectation for students: Talk about what was going to be on an exam, how one answered questions on an exam that had just been taken, whether the questions on the exam covered material that had been dictated, or whether one’s answers on an exam were correct constituted nearly all of students’ school-related discourse outside the classroom—at least the discourse that focused on academic content. But while teachers demanded their students’ absolute obedience to the terms of performance and parameters of mastery they set down for exams, many teachers, particularly the “veterans” (as others called the older teachers with years of service), treated the preparation of exams, and even their administration, with the utmost flippancy. The first time I witnessed the informality with which teachers gave exams was when I observed Mr. Gomez’s Environmental Sciences class. Mr. Gomez was a teacher who identified himself as a “modern” teacher, in that he liked to give the students a chance to participate in decisions about what they would learn. (It was an instructional identity that I came to learn opened up a space for negligence, as the teacher regularly left homework tasks up to the students.) The teacher had told the students the day before that all latecomers would be excluded from participating and would effectively fail the exam. Students were still entering as I arrived: The boys were dashing in, sweaty from their recent game of handball; the girls were prancing in, adjusting their hair clips and

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

111

putting away their lipstick cases. As the bell that signaled the beginning of the fourth period rang, the teacher asked one of the (male) students to close the door—implicating him as an agent of discipline. Moments later, there was a knock at the door. The students looked at the teacher, waiting in suspense. The teacher did nothing. Silence. Finally one student suggested that it might be Manuel and that perhaps he hadn’t been in class the day the teacher told them about the exam. Students had learned that it often paid to challenge authority, because the rules were so inconsistently enforced. They learned how to tactically negotiate the arbitrariness of authority in the home, and these lessons served them well in their encounters with teaching and administrative staff. I suspect that, as with the tactics de Certeau (1984) explores, there was a logic to both the arbitrariness of authority and the students’ contestations, and that youth learned when it was more or less feasible to challenge authority. However, this seemed to be intuited rather than rationalized. When I asked students about particular teachers’ alternate strictness and leniency, they attributed it to personal vicissitudes: how a teacher felt on a given day, or what tended to trigger their compassion, for instance (such as one female teacher who had a reputation for favoring the boys). All of which reinforced the image of the school as an “unruly” institution, in which there were not even rules about how to break the rules. So the student was locked out and the teacher (re)asserted his power and authority at a crucial moment—just prior to administering an exam. And then, just as I expected him to pass out an exam sheet, he asked the class, in a thoroughly nonchalant and unabashed way, “Now, which were the chapters you’re supposed to be tested on?” I glanced around the room, searching for the slightest expression of disappointment, of betrayal. Didn’t the students feel irritated, offended, disappointed, neglected? I saw no sign of it. Instead, they remained primed for the exam: stiff in their seats, pencils in hand, ready to do battle. In a rare display of assertiveness, three hands shot up. Two male voices shouted out: “Chapters 3 through 7.” Another male voice contested: “No. Just three through six.” (Sounded suspicious, I thought; an instance of resistance a male student was more likely to pull off than a girl.) A softer but confident female voice said, “Three through seven.” “Three through seven,” the teacher affirmed, as though he’d made the decision himself. I was not surprised that the girl’s suggestion carried greater authority. The teacher opened his book to chapter 3, perused it, and then asked the first question, writing it down on a scrap of paper as he dictated. He dictated five improvised questions in this manner, and then told the students they had 40 minutes left in which to respond.

112

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

I watched the students write, struck by how excruciatingly intent they were as they took an exam. Their intensity made the teacher’s casualness that much more impressive. But where the students’ concentration and intensity was out of character for them, the teacher’s nonchalance was consistent with the generally disinterested disposition most all teachers displayed in their daily teaching practices, a posture that expressed their status and reproduced their power. On a given day, a teacher might arrive late or not show up; give an unscheduled test or forget to give a scheduled test; reschedule class presentations or forget the topic they had required the students to study for that day. This kind of negligence was the norm. But because it was unpredictable, and because it occurred within a context that was nonetheless driven by standardized evaluations and that required students to achieve certain grades in order to pass through the system—in other words, because teachers controlled the means to assess and neglect—teachers’ negligence never undermined but only augmented both their power and authority. Patriarchal Pedagogy and the Erasure of Meritocracy Instead of encountering in the school classroom a rarified space in which the ideologies and practices of gender inequalities were rendered down and reinforced ritually, I found instead a space in which genderdimorphic social norms were suspended, neutralized, or ignored. However, it would be shortsighted to presume that the absence of obvious sex-stereotypic pedagogical practices was indicative of pervasive gender egalitarianism in the Santa Lucian classroom. Rather, as I have suggested, patriarchal arrangements were enacted and legitimized not in explicit ways that might be transparent to the foreign ethnographer, not through advantages conferred upon male over female students, and not through male students’ greater predisposition toward pedagogical and evaluative practices (as correspondence theories of educational reproduction would have it), but between the teacher as the male, patriarchal figure, and the students as the subservient female counterpart. In this sense, the qualities of classroom instruction, modeled principally after the rules of discipline, authority, and knowledge in the patriarchal family, gave little expression to the modern meritocratic rules of liberal education that emphasized competition among students and the construction of hierarchies based on aptitudes (Bisseret 1979) rather than social positionality. However, as I have suggested, the apparent indifference to pedagogical ideologies of modern individualist progress

Pedagogy and Patriarchy

●

113

on the part of teachers and students in the Santa Lucian classroom, while perhaps minimizing the enactment of explicit gender differentiation in the classroom, did not create a space for the practice of egalitarian pedagogy, but rather of negligent patriarchal pedagogy.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 5

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis Crisis and Corruption It was about 7:30 a.m., November 27, 1992, and there was a slight chill to the dry morning air as I strolled onto the patio with my morning coffee. Across the ravine, I watched as a group of farmers harvested cabbages, packing them in neat tight rows into wooden crates and piling them onto the back of a flatbed truck parked at the edge of the field. The slow, steady repetition of their motions, the tight orderliness of cabbage heads squeezed into the packing crates that were then tightly stacked up on the truck, was relieving in its predictability. The broad, repetitious rhythm of the field workers, their entire bodies—back, legs, arms, and hands—working in smooth unison to pull out, clean off and pack up the cabbage head, bore a strange resemblance and dissimilarity to the tight, circumscribed repetitive motions of students in the classroom as they took dictation—hunched over their notebooks, pushing the pencil onto the paper. I recalled the last class I had observed the week before: Ms. Gómez’s Universal History class. In it, the teacher had listed on the board the five periods of human history, noted that we were now in the “contemporary” period (which came after the “modern period”) and that this period was marked by the political development of democratic states around the world, and the economic development of technologically based production. “This is the historical period in which Venezuela finds itself today,” Ms. Gómez told her students. I had just returned to Santa Lucía from a weekend in Mérida, where the sensory signs of social unrest were gradually penetrating and transforming the routines of daily life. There were increasingly frequent student demonstrations—against hikes in meal prices or bus fare—which usually ended in police throwing tear gas bombs (the death of a student a few years earlier from bullet wounds had led to a city ordinance

116

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

prohibiting police use of firearms for demonstrations). People carried handkerchiefs and vinegar with them in preparation for the toxic tear gas fumes that could accost your lungs at any turn of the corner as you strolled innocently through town. And then there were the more dramatic but less explicitly politicized lootings by “encapuchados,” young masked men (in Mérida I never saw a female encapuchada) whose protest often took the form of sacking, raiding, and then burning delivery trucks, buses, or other vehicles, sending the noxious fumes of burning rubber into the air. It was particularly arid for the dry season, and the hot urban air hung heavy and gray with the fumes and gases of crisis. Meanwhile, newspaper headlines and street corner talk exploded over and over with rumors of coups—rebel coups, military coups, state “auto-coups.” Dodging the rumors of government insurrection were other conversations about rising prices, failing services, school closings, teacher strikes. The popular mood was as gray as the smoke-filled air. On one occasion as I walked back to my Mérida apartment, I joined the crowd that had gathered to watch the looting of a truck carrying crates of canned tuna that a group of encapuchados had seized and overturned. The windshield was decimated by large rocks, but the driver had managed to flee, apparently unscathed. Now and then, an onlooker joined in the looting, rushing agitatedly onto the crippled truck, grabbing an armful of tuna cans and dashing off. One of my neighbors scurried by, tuna crate in his hand, urging me to partake in the pillage: “If the government doesn’t want the people to earn what we need to buy our food, we’ll just have to take it,” he grinned. An elderly man standing beside me was less sanguine. “Venezuelans,” he sighed, shaking his head, “we are a lazy, advantage-taking (aprovechosos) people. I once saw a chicken peddler fall from his cart, and the people passing by simply grabbed the chickens as they escaped from the cages. No one bothered to see if the old man was all right. There is no decency anymore.” And he walked away, empty-handed. Meanwhile, only a few valleys away from Mérida in Santa Lucía it was easy to forget about the crisis amidst the rituals and routines of daily life that reverberated through the valley and muffled the distant murmur of unrest. In Santa Lucía, the morning of November 27 was like any other morning: quiet and calm. My companion, Eduardo, and I were walking out the door to go for an early morning jog, as was our custom, when our neighbor Leticia called out to us from her patio: “They overthrew Carlos Andrés [the president]! Chávez [the most visible and popular of the coup leaders] is on TV,” she yelled, beckoning us in to watch.

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

117

There on the television screen was a blurred, faint and coarse image of Comandante Hugo Chávez Frías, the charismatic leader of a failed military coup attempt staged eight months earlier who had been captured and imprisoned along with four of his comrades.1 (Readers now know Hugo Chávez as the populist socialist president of Venezuela, elected in 1998 and popularized, or demonized, in the mainstream media as a friend of Fidel Castro and vituperatively outspoken enemy of the United States, which he dared to call a neoliberal empire to its face. But in 1992 he was the jailed leader of a coup attempt and rebel hero of Venezuela’s poor and progressive sectors.) Somehow, magically, heroically, there he was, not in prison, but on television, appearing intimately near yet far away, in his familiar khakis and his red beret, symbol of the Movimiento Bolivariano 2000 (Bolivarian Movement 2000, named after the nation’s historical and mythic Liberator, Simón Bolívar) calling for the people of Venezuela to take to the streets and rise up against the corrupt government of Carlos Andrés Pérez—a government that was, Chávez and the Bolivarian Movement claimed, “the real threat to democracy in Venezuela.”2 We watched, each of us shocked—but not surprised. During these times of crisis, rumor and instability made everything imaginable, and so there were no surprises. Indeed, ever since the first coup attempt on February 4 of that year, escalating rumors of another coup had brought the country to such a point of tense anticipation that folks were saying they almost wished the thing would happen already. Just to get the suspense over with. Just to be able to get on with their lives. It was frightening the way rumors, like gossip, could terrorize you into desiring the undesirable; like the way you found yourself just wanting to find out that your husband’s been cheating on you, just to end the gnawing suspicion. It was the uncertainty that was so painful, so paralyzing, keeping you from getting on with your life, a Santa Lucian friend and long-time divorcée explained to me in a discussion about rumors and gossip, about the differences in their production and uses, but the similarity of their effects.3 So people would ironically declare their desire for a coup, for someone to “take charge,” if only to resolve the uncertainty, to get on with things. Such were the daily workings of negligent patriarchy, in which rumors and gossip sustained a reign of terror, maintaining obedience and the desire for authority and control through uncertainty and suspense, from the family up to the state and back down again.4 Not that most women really wanted to discover that their men were cheating on them, let alone face the consequences or the compulsion to (re)act, any more than most people really wanted a coup, or thought it

118

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

would resolve the crisis. But nor were most people above wondering whether a swift blow to the country’s belly wouldn’t set it back on the modernizing track from which it had apparently been temporarily derailed (though there was no doubt the derailment was temporary). Not that most folks I spoke with thought dictatorship was a good idea. Dictatorship brought to mind the barbaric, premodern evils of the Gómez regime under which Venezuela had entered the twentieth century; dictatorship was too primitive for the modern nation that Venezuela had since become.5 But people trusted the Bolivarianos’ claims that they had no intentions of installing a military dictatorship or of restricting constitutional rights, as was the habit of the current administration when it was threatened by public uprisings or rumors of insurrection. In leaflets that circulated in the streets of Mérida soon after the first coup attempt, the Bolivarianos addressed the Venezuelan people, declaring that their plan was to establish an emergency government made up of “the most honorable people of our country, to recover the values of the Venezuelan people and to eliminate the rampant corruption of the past 34 years.” And so, despite the country’s—indeed the continent’s—past history of recurring military rule, the people trusted that these military rebels would be different, better; not unlike my neighbor’s teenaged daughter who trusted that her boyfriend would be better, more faithful, and would not abandon her when she became pregnant with his child—even though her sister and her girlfriends had been abandoned by their boyfriends and spouses. And maybe the Bolivarianos were sincere—in the same ways, Rosita’s former husband had been sincere. Rosita was a Santa Lucian mother I knew, a forgiving woman who described her husband as a “modern young man” who had been sincere when he told his fiancée that of course she should study for a degree at the university if that was her dream in life, and who promised to support her in her efforts to become a nurse . . . until the moment she walked out the door of their house, into the street, on her way to enroll in her first class at the Open University. That was when their problems began, she explained, as we conversed during a rickety bus ride back to Santa Lucía from Mérida, where she had gone to take an exam for one of the courses she had just completed at the Open University, and where I had gone to meet with colleagues at the ULA. Rosita recounted the saga of her marriage turned sour, the bitter feuds preceding their divorce, her slow recuperation, pulling herself together until she was eventually able to follow her dream and begin taking courses toward her nursing degree. In reflecting on how poorly both she and her husband had predicted each other’s actions,

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

119

Rosita commented, “It wasn’t me that was deceived by him; it was he that was deceived by his own modern ideas.” But there were also those Santa Lucians—most of them older men but some women as well—who thought that what Venezuela needed was a firm hand to whip this uppity little country back into shape. They didn’t think a dictatorship was such a bad idea, and some of them fondly recalled the country’s most recent dictatorial regime, that of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (who some people referred to as “the other Pérez”) as a “modern dictatorship.” It was he, they claimed, who built the country’s roads, gave it electricity, gave it modern buildings and public works. For these folks, the state of crisis into which the country had fallen was a clear indication that Venezuela was still too underdeveloped, economically and culturally, for democracy. According to their logic, Venezuela, still a child to modernity, needed a good dose of dictatorial discipline. Not unlike adolescent girls these days who thought they could wander the streets and go with any boy who looked their way, who had no shame anymore, because their parents didn’t discipline them enough. Not that Santa Lucians I talked to drew these comparisons between national and familial or personal life directly; but the tropes they used to discuss, argue about, and resolve the problems of the coup and of the crisis drew upon social and sexualized norms, images, and practices of the patriarchal family. This should not surprise us. As Joan Scott reminds us, gender is simultaneously “a constitutive element of social relationships” and “a primary way of signifying relations of power” (1986, 1061); and what better way to talk about and make sense of the strange and unruly goings-on of the state and its nation than through the comprehensible, familiar, and naturalized terms of patriarchal family relations. Moreover, the gendering of crisis has a deep history in Latin American cultural production. Since the nineteenth century, the discourse of Latin America’s cultural and intellectual elite has rendered its racialized representations of national crisis—whether as economic underdevelopment, cultural backwardness, or political instability—in terms that meld images of disease, decay, and disorderliness with those of female sexual impropriety, “cantankerousness,” or betrayal (Rodríguez 1994; Trigo 2000). One implication of the bodily inscription of national crisis upon “natives” and women was the notion that the protection of national well-being could only occur through the erection of boundaries (walls and fences) against the house that was the sacrosanct nation, to be defended and protected by its patriarch (Rodríguez 1994). The gendering of national crisis in the media on the heels of the coup attempts, extended the metaphoric use of the house that had to be put back in order by responsible patriarchs as

120

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

the solution to the crisis—whether these were figured as the existing or an alternative political leadership charged with tending to the hacienda (El Nuevo País, January 3, 1993) or the entrepreneurial class taken to task for abandoning the condominium (El Nacional, December 18, 1992). That these two discourses, the first referring to a premodern oligarchic, landed class, the second to an ultramodern entrepreneurial class, figured the crisis and its solution in terms that adopted similar metaphors of gender and place, attests to continuities in Venezuelan patriarchal social relations—and its cultural force—across transformations in the political economy of crisis. By the time Eduardo and I had walked from Leticia’s house to Alirio’s coffee shop in the center of town (figure 5.1), the certainty of coup had been dispelled, replaced by news of its failure and a swirl of rumors as to its perpetrators and their intentions. The image now framed by the television screen was that of President Carlos Andrés Pérez. We listened as he announced that everything was “under control,” that the country had returned to a state of “complete normalcy,” that the people and the military had demonstrated their unfailing support of democracy, and that he deemed it necessary to suspend all constitutional guarantees—for the good of the Venezuelan people. His pale, haggard, aging face, civilian garb, and paternalistic rhetoric offered a study in contrast to the dashing, virile rebel whose image he supplanted. As people in the coffee shop listened to the pronouncements, they began to murmur comments of relief and dismay. They certainly didn’t trust the intentions of their president, the now-fallen hero who had risen to stardom during a previous era of national prosperity, was reelected by a populace yearning for a return to those years of oil boom, but whose notorious neoliberal economic austerity measures had only seemed to exacerbate, not heal, the deepening crisis, and who at that moment faced charges of embezzlement and potential impeachment. But they also wondered whether they could trust Chávez and his rebel forces. “A moment ago they were heroes, but now they look ridiculous,” commented one woman between sips of coffee. By the next day, the routines of agricultural and commercial life had returned Santa Lucía to the kind of surreal normalcy that characterized the provinces “during times of crisis.” This phrase had been popularized by genre-defying telenovela (soap opera) “Por Estas Calles” (“In These Streets”), a serial drama that deliberately broke with the elitism of the classic telenovelas by focusing its plots around the “realities” of contemporary Venezuelan urban life across social classes. “During times of crisis.” Perhaps what captured the imagination was the temporal contradiction

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

121

Figure 5.1 The Center of Town

contained in that slogan, implying crisis as disruption and as epoch and thereby capturing the strange simultaneity of disorder and routine that characterized everyday life in 1990s Venezuela. Certainly in Santa Lucía the melodrama of rumors about impending coup attempts or government crackdowns circulated over people’s heads like a rain cloud, dampening the town’s mood but not its daily routines; just as the continually rising prices of food, clothing, and other necessities that were among the primary symbols of crisis became the topic of regular, routine banter. Meanwhile, the general curfew and closing of government facilities, including the public schools, were among the few tangible ways in which the coup attempt and official response continued to impress themselves upon everyday life in town. For most Liceo Parra students with whom I spoke, the school closings had concrete and abstract implications that were not always consistent with each other. In terms of their daily lives as students, the closing of the school in late November was a welcomed relief, especially as it came toward the end of the grading period when they had a lot of studying to do for their final exams. But students also interpreted the closing according to a range of political positions that

122

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

circulated in the town and no doubt were discussed amply in many homes. Some students considered the school closings as one more indication of how the leaders of the coup attempts were aggravating the crisis, while others blamed the government for using any excuse to close schools. For some, the regularity of school closings—of which this was just one of many over the course of the year—was a manifestation of the “crisis in the educational system in our country.” Others speculated that teachers would not get paid for the days they didn’t teach, and so this would save the corrupt politicians money, which they would no doubt pocket for themselves. José Luis, a graduating student from a middleclass family of educators, one of the few Liceo Parra students I knew who was always eager to proffer a political analysis, suggested that the government was always closing the schools because they didn’t want to educate the country’s youth. “If they keep us from learning,” he proposed as I chatted with him and a few friends in the plaza two days after the coup attempt, “then we will accept anything they do.” “So,” I reasoned back to him, “your secondary school education is helping you make sense of what is going on in the country?” José Luis paused and considered my comment, the thinly veiled irony resonating with past conversations we had had about the general irrelevance of the content of his classes. “Well, maybe not what I’m learning in my classes,” he replied. “But there is something about being educated that makes you feel as though you have a right to expect things of your government.” “We Are All Corrupt” Nine days later, as town life returned to its usual state of uncertainty repressed by predictability, as rumors switched from coup attempts to presidential impeachment to the cancellation of imminent presidential elections, the schools finally reopened and I returned to my equally spontaneous and unstable research routine. I had decided to ask Mr. Rodríguez for permission to sit in on his eighth-grade (second year) Universal History class, to which he agreed enthusiastically. I was curious to hear what he would talk about, since he was one of a handful of Liceo Parra teachers known for using their desks as a pulpit (see chapter 4). Most teachers at Liceo Parra restricted the content of their classes to fulfilling the rigid requirements of the formal curriculum—developing the prescribed objectives for that day, they explained in the language of educational jargon (Rodríguez T. 1989, 105). But Mr. Rodríguez considered it entirely appropriate, in fact a teacher’s moral imperative as a role model for potentially wayward youth, to sermonize. He peppered

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

123

his lectures with impromptu digressions on topics ranging from etiquette to ethics, from politics to popular culture. That Mr. Rodríguez had a reputation among students for moralizing neither raised nor lowered his status as a teacher in the eyes of the students. Most students evaluated their teachers positively if they were serious, which Mr. Rodríguez was, willing to explain the material they dictated, which he was, and fair in their grading, which he was as well. The only personal quality that tainted Mr. Rodríguez’s reputation was the peculiar fact that he was over 40 years old and still single. This was especially peculiar since he was not known to be a womanizer and thus had no apparent reason for wanting to remain single, so that some of his colleagues would gently teased him on occasion, suggesting he was afraid of women. I was nonetheless surprised to learn that none of Mr. Rodríguez’s students criticized him for digressing or for inserting his opinions rather than sticking to the facts—especially since most every aspect of instruction, from pedagogy to assessment, to the reductive format of the textbooks, seemed to contribute to the fetishization of facts as the embodiment of knowledge. But when I spoke with students about Mr. Rodríguez’s classroom lessons, they considered his lectures, despite their moral overtones, to be legitimate extensions of the day’s lessons. Some students I spoke with said they found what he said interesting or important, while others thought it rather tedious; but none of Mr. Rodríguez’s students suggested he was being inappropriate or irrelevant. And it occurred to me that, if none of the students criticized their teacher for spouting “mere opinion,” it might be because students were never encouraged to make the modern distinction between “facts” and “opinion.” To the extent that this was a modern distinction legitimizing the authority of “experts” over and above the experience of ordinary people, an authority produced in particular through the communicative genres of the news media (Benjamin 1969, 88–89), in the Venezuela news media “facts,” “opinions,” and “speculation” were freely mixed, much as they were in informal conversation. Indeed, the effectiveness of rumors and gossip I alluded to earlier required this blurring of genres—and the accuracy of a statement did not seem to be as important a basis for making authoritative claims as did one’s reputation or social status. When I arrived for Mr. Rodríguez’s class that December day, nine days after the second coup attempt, the students were waiting in front of the door in two lines: one for boys, one for girls. (At the secondary school level, this protocol was no longer required, but rather up to each teacher’s discretion. Most teachers maintained the ritual for the firstand second-year students, but rarely did teachers require their students

124

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

to line up beyond their second year, or eighth grade.) Mr. Rodríguez stood stiffly in front of them, eyeing his watch in anticipation of the bell signaling the next period. It rang. He opened the door and gestured to the students to enter. “Girls first. Okay, now the boys. Slowly, please. Thank you.” All the students were there because they knew Mr. Rodríguez was a stickler for punctuality and wouldn’t let late students enter once the doors were closed. While requesting punctuality of students was common among Liceo Parra teachers, enforcing it was unusual. But then, punctuality was an ambivalent virtue among the school faculty and staff, desired but not expected. And since it was not the norm within or outside the school, it was difficult to legitimately hold anyone to standards of timeliness. Mr. Rodríguez was exceptional in this regard, as he had a reputation for being consistently punctual. Some of his colleagues said jokingly that he aspired to be a gringo. But I saw him as a devout nationalist, working assiduously to be a model of exemplary Venezuelan citizenship for his students. The students chose their seats—girls clustering themselves on one side and boys on the other. The teacher took attendance and then began class. The topic was how to prepare for class presentations. Mr. Rodríguez dedicated the first 10 minutes of class to dictating the features of a well-organized presentation. The students dutifully copied his words, verbatim, into their notebooks. The teacher asked no questions. Except for the occasional confirmation of an obscure word, the students asked no questions. The teacher then put down the text he was reading from and embarked on an extemporaneous lecture about self-presentation when giving a class presentation. The theme seemed to have great import for Mr. Rodríguez, his body becoming increasingly animated and his voice increasingly insistent as he described the proper stance: stand straight, keep your hands to your sides, no distracting gestures, look directly at the audience. Speak slowly and clearly. (As I listened, his description conjured up the indelible image of Comandante Chávez I had seen only days before on the television screen.) And memorize your lines. This, he emphasized, requires self-discipline. “But, lamentably,” he noted, “in this country we aren’t disciplined. We do not have the strength or determination to work. We are not hard-working, like the Americans.” “I heard on the news,” the teacher continued, “that many Americans work as many as three jobs. Why? Because they like to work. They have the strength and conviction to improve themselves.” Inspired by his own oratory, Mr. Rodríguez began pacing as he talked, defying the norms of self-presentation he had only moments ago dictated to his pupils. He lamented Venezuelans’ lack of punctuality, com-

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

125

paring them unfavorably to the North Americans, English, and Germans. He bemoaned Venezuelans’ lack of seriousness toward their work, their preference for parties and relaxation. He decried their lack of honesty and the rampant corruption that one encounters everywhere. He paused to catch his breath. “Why are we Venezuelans like this?” He paused again, as though his question was not purely rhetorical. “Because we are products of the Spanish Conquest. The United States was fortunate enough to have been colonized by the English. And we all know that the Spanish are a lazy people with tendencies toward corruption, while the English are a hard-working, serious, honest people.” He continued his comparisons, ending with the definitive comment that, “It was simply our destiny to become an underdeveloped country.” He paused yet again, his expression becoming pensive. “Venezuela is a beautiful country,” he began in a measured voice. “We have many natural and human resources. Lamentably, among the people there is a lot of laziness, a great lack of seriousness.” He paused and then added as though an afterthought, “Corruption is not about the government. In the end, we are all corrupt.” Some Are Lazy, Some Are Corrupt, All Are Citizens The notion that corruption did not just infect the upper levels of government and business, but was rather a societal disease, a facet of the Venezuelan makeup, was not a new concept. One of the political debates I frequently heard disputed in Santa Lucian coffee shops was whether or not Venezuelan corruption rose from the bottom or trickled down from the top. A third position distinguished between corruption and laziness. The owner of one of the town’s arepa shops, a second-generation Santa Lucian of Italian background, proposed that the politicians were corrupt but the people were simply lazy. This comment led a Santa Lucian farmer sipping his morning coffee at the counter to propose that not all Venezuelans were lazy, but that urban life and easy access to money had made them that way. These were among the many representations of the national “situation” that competed for legitimacy within official discourse, popular culture, and informal conversation, each of them drawing on different interpretive frameworks to explain and clarify the ambiguities of crisis (see Mehan 1993, 241). So for every newspaper headline or television commentary that decried the coup attempts as threats to Venezuelan democracy and extolled the president for restoring democracy to the country, there were others who took the opposite position, considering

126

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

the coup attempts as heroic, legitimate efforts to restore democracy to a country suffering through a crisis brought about by a failing, corrupt, illegitimate, and undemocratic regime. For some commentators, the coup attempts were symptoms of the national political crisis, in which the electoral system no longer represented the masses (El Nuevo País, December 21, 1992). Yet other commentators portrayed the coup attempts as signaling a deepening of the crisis by blurring the lines between civil society, the “proper site of political struggle,” and the military, “which should never get mixed up in the electoral affairs of a proper democracy” (El Diario de Caracas, December 4, 1992). Along with the chronic commentary and speculation about the source of the recent coup attempt and competing calls for President Pérez to crack down or step down, they heard daily discussions in their homes— on television and radio if not among family members—and on the street, about the unbridled rise in food prices, the commensurate decline in the value of their currency (the Bolivar). And they were privy to regular television specials that focused on some aspect of the nation’s formal and informal institutions “in crisis”: Education in Crisis, The Family in Crisis, The Prison System in Crisis. Occasionally their teachers would assign the viewing and written review of these programs as a supplement to their regular homework regimen. Nor was Mr. Rodríguez the only Liceo Parra teacher to avail himself of the classroom “pulpit” to impress his representation of the national crisis upon his students. In the weeks following the attempted coup, I heard two other teachers sermonize on the state of affairs of the nation, and there may have been more. Mr. Mendez, a forestry engineer who taught the fourth-year Environmental Sciences course, implicated his students in the crisis in a much more optimistic way than his colleague. Drawing on a representational mode similar to the farmer in the coffee shop (one based on the rural/urban distinction through which Santa Lucians located themselves within the nation, as I discussed in chapter 2), he began by offering a class distinction between those in leadership positions who are corrupt and other potential leaders of the nation. “This terrible situation our country is going through can be traced to the growing corruption at all levels of government. But corruption is a tendency of the elite who have not had to work to get where they are. They are corrupt because they do not appreciate the value of hard work. Unlike those of us from humble backgrounds, those of us whose parents were farmers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. We have been able to take advantage of this country’s oil wealth to make something of ourselves in honest ways. You too have that opportunity. You can take advantage of

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

127

the great natural resources of this country and give something back to your country. That is the only way we can continue to become a modern, civilized nation.” The seventh-grade History teacher, Mr. Paredes, who was also codirector of the Cultural Center and a local historian, presented the situation still differently to his young 12- and 13-year-old students. In his class on December 9, a few days after Mr. Rodríguez’s lecture, Mr. Paredes prefaced a timely lesson on “The Declaration of Independence,” by reviewing the events of the past two weeks. He said that he wasn’t going to tell the students whether he thought the Bolivarianos were right to stage a military coup, or what he thought of the rumors that the government was going to postpone the upcoming elections, and the more general problem of election fraud. “But,” he said, “I don’t think that anyone can argue with the fact that our politicians have led this country into a terrible crisis. It is the responsibility of the Venezuelan people to take matters into our own hands and restore democracy to our country. As students you have studied the political vision of our great liberator, Simón Bolívar. It was he who incited the people to rise up against the Spanish Crown, and to form a government for the people, not for the elite. This is what it means to be a ‘Bolivariano’—to always fight for democracy, for the good of the people.” Mr. Paredes paced a bit as though not completely satisfied with the message he had just delivered. “Perhaps you remember what we studied in the first marking period? Ileana, do you remember?” “Prehistory?” The girl replied cautiously. “Yes, but whose prehistory?” “Venezuelan prehistory?” “Yes, including the Timoto-Cuica. The native people of this valley. They were a peaceful, farming people, who lived together in harmony with a collectivist government. We as Santa Lucians have to maintain that heritage. It is part of our duty as Venezuelan citizens. It is up to each one of us to do this.” At that point, Mr. Paredes returned to that day’s lesson. As the bell rang for the next period, he instructed his students to write a piece on the November 27 coup attempt. He directed them not only to recount the events but also to take a position and defend it. “I want to know what your opinions are, and I want you to support your opinions,” he insisted, and then dismissed the class. As the students filtered out for the break, Mr. Paredes approached me. “It is so rare that these young people form an opinion about what is going on in their country,” he said, “That is why I gave them that assignment.” After this class, I was able to speak briefly with some of Mr. Paredes’s students, most of whom were very shy and not as forthcoming as older students would be about their teacher’s extemporaneous commentaries.

128

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

While none of the students took offense at Mr. Paredes’s representation of the national reality—and most concurred that, yes, “that is how things are right now,” that “the country is living through a very acute situation”—two of the students did take issue with his insistence that the students get involved in the political life of the country. “Mr. Paredes is very involved in politics. But that is not part of his job as a teacher,” one student commented. “No,” another student concurred. “His job is to teach us history.” Many Venezuelan educational scholars have criticized the overly theoretical, irrelevant content, and didactic pedagogy of classroom instruction (Rosenblat 1981; Bigott 1978), insisting on a more engaged and relevant approach to teaching in order to foment the kind of critical engagement among the populace considered key to the formation of citizens in a democracy (Lizarraga Bernal and Colli Misset 1992). But by the time Santa Lucian students were in seventh grade, they had come to expect didactic instructional practices and found the teacher’s use of the classroom to engage them actively in political discourse to be inappropriate. He could pontificate about the state of the nation, he could moralize about the state of the nation’s youth, but he shouldn’t demand that the students apply the content of the subject matter to their daily lives. As for the assignment Mr. Paredes had doled out to his students, it received no criticism. “That’s different,” one boy explained to me. “That’s like a research project. He wants us to research the topic and give a report.” “It will be hard to find information on the topic,” one girl grumbled, “because it is not in the textbooks.” I suggested that they might have to review the newspapers and they concurred, with discouraged looks on their faces. Yes, that was what they would have to do. They didn’t like the prospects of the assignment, but they didn’t consider it an inappropriate task. “We Are the Future of Our Country” That students had assimilated this range of representations into their own process of making sense of the national situation and its implications was evident in the written responses they provided on a schoolwide survey I administered in the months before the coup attempt. The last two questions asked the students to write about their adult aspirations and then to give their opinion about the “situation the country was passing through”—a familiar, generic expression that stood for the general sense of sociopolitical crisis and economic downturn . . . plus anything of other significance a person wished to attribute to that phrase. The

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

129

written comments of the eighth-grade students, many of whom who would be hearing Mr. Rodríguez’s lecture months later, were striking. Over half of the students mentioned the “crisis” along with “corruption” in their brief commentaries of anywhere from one to five sentences. Most students associated the corruption with the government or “our deputies” or “our elected officials,” and attributed the growing poverty, or delinquency, or threat to democracy, to these corrupt individuals. However, a few students generalized corruption to the country as a whole: “The crisis in this country is getting worse all the time. It is affecting students and children. I think that we need to start working hard and stop being corrupt. That way Venezuela can resolve this difficult situation it is in.” About a third of the eighth-grade students’ commentaries simply described the crisis and offered a reason for its existence: the president, the government, or “los corruptos.” However, several students prescribed an exit to the crisis. Of the proposed solutions, about half involved a change in the rulers of the country; the other half involved the people, the country as a whole or themselves specifically as students. “In my opinion Venezuela is going through a difficult situation, and all of us Venezuelans have to work hard and study hard to be able to help our country,” wrote one female student. Another personalized this plea: “In my opinion we as students have to apply ourselves to studying to help our country get out of this situation, because we are the future of our country.” To the extent, then, that these 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old students’ written inscription of their views of the state of their nation on a survey that a North American professor asked them to fill out in their school can offer some indication of the ways in which they were making their own sense of the landscape of their country in crisis, and locating themselves within that landscape, it appears that they perceived themselves as not just victims of the abuses of the powerful, but as protocitizens with a role to play as workers and educated adults in remedying that situation. Much like José Luis, the older student I had spoken to about the school closings after the coup attempt, many of these eighthgrade students were developing a sense of their historical agency as adults in direct relation to their identities as educated individuals. The Neocolonized Classroom In a lengthy essay titled El educador neocolonizado (“The Neocolonized Educator”), Luis Antonio Bigott claimed that Venezuelan teachers— through their discourse, pedagogical practices, and teaching materials—

130

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

collude with other ideological agents of neocolonialism (in particular the Church and the mass media) to configure “the new ‘zombi’ of neocolonial structures: the neocolonized national” (1978, 12). Bigott proposed that the idyllic, ahistorical, and essentially false images of Venezuela and its people promulgated by teachers and textbooks mesmerize students into complacency. By projecting a superficial, insubstantial, and mythical national image—of a country with “great resources,” formed by “great heroes,” and populated by “great people”—teachers and texts discouraged students from adopting a critical posture or global perspective for understanding Venezuelan history. Inspired by Fanon’s propositions about the function of colonized “nationals” who perpetuate colonial relations at home, Bigott proposed that this educational process of “obscuring and distorting of our past, preventing us from finding our own historical origins, is a fundamental ingredient of neocolonization” (Bigott 1978, 21; cf. Fanon 1963). The portrait of the Venezuelan nation and its people that Mr. Rodríguez offered his students, though no less reductive and ahistorical than the romantic and blindly positive portrait of the Venezuelan nation Bigott attributes to Venezuelan school teachers and the textbooks they use, was more complex and contradictory. Idealizing the country’s natural capacities on the one hand, while disparaging its people for their cultural deficiencies, on the other, in the end Mr. Rodríguez presented his students with a pessimistic view of their country and a fatalistic vision for its future. Nonetheless, Mr. Rodríguez’s rationale for the nation’s present state and future trajectory was similar to the version of history Bigott criticized in his essay. It too replaced a history of colonial and neocolonial domination with the fated and fatal effects of national character: dissociating the complex connections of the histories of center and periphery, reducing them to a race toward development in which Venezuela (and by extension all of formerly Spanish America) was doomed to lose. But Mr. Rodríguez’s view was not unusual; indeed it was archetypal. “Nothing could better justify the colonizer’s privileged position than his industry,” wrote Albert Memmi in his treatise on the ideology of colonial domination, The Colonizer and the Colonized, “and nothing could better justify the colonized’s destitution than his indolence” (1965, 79). In portraying schoolteachers as unwitting agents, and thus also victims, of neocolonialism—as “neocolonized educators”—Bigott was concerned that they were inculcating similar attitudes in their students, forming yet another generation of “neocolonized nationals.” Bigott’s concerns rested on his argument that the transmission of this ideology

Teaching History, Teaching Crisis

●

131

from teachers to students was direct (unmediated) because the didactic teaching methods to which students have been subjected for years have predisposed them to accept everything at face value (1978, 44). Certainly, Bigott was critical of the didactic pedagogy that he claimed was the instructional process by which the pacified disposition and objectifying information forming the neocolonized subject is transferred from the teacher to her students. However, his critique rested on an acceptance of the notion that the teacher acts as the possessor of a unitary knowledge that she transmits to the passive and susceptible learner (see Lave 1993, 12–13). That notion, itself embedded within neocolonialist representations of subject peoples (Memmi 1965; Freire 1985) as well as neocolonialist representations of patriarchal family relations (Rodríguez 1994, 67) has been challenged by critical educational theories that reframe teaching and learning as contentious communicative activities in which teachers may simultaneously capitulate to and resist their neocolonized practices (Luna 1992) and students are necessarily engaged, creative participants in their own learning (Freire 1985; Eckert 1989; Foley 1990; Lave 1993). By recognizing the agentive dimension of learning as an everyday practice, the implications of Mr. Rodríguez’s and the other teachers’ discourse on the events of November 27 shift. What becomes interesting is not simply the range of representations about the national crisis and its implications for the country, for the town, or for its youth that were presented to the students by their teachers or in their history textbooks but, more particularly, how students took up the lessons they were being taught in the classroom and made sense of them—both as lessons in contemporary Venezuelan history, and as representations they might take up as they developed concepts about themselves as educated adults with a role to play within the nation. One of the propositions of this book is that the uses Liceo Parra students made of their school experiences were evident in the ways they drew on those experiences to imagine and develop life plans. In the preceding discussion, I have juxtaposed the comments of students on the state of their nation and their own potential roles as adult citizens in relation to the national crisis with the representations they were exposed to in the classroom and in the rest of their daily lives, to shed some light on the distinct sense students were making of the national situation and its relation to them as students coming of age, at the very time when their teachers were hoping to influence or guide their students’ sense of the relationship between the trajectory of their nation and their own trajectory as educated citizens.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 6

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing They were stories designed to show me the terrible unfairness of things, the subterranean culture of longing for that which one can never have. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman

I began learning about the enchantments of English—its ability to conjure up longings for things, places, and positions in life, its taunting promise to fulfill the very desires it conjured—during my first conversation in Santa Lucía. As the reader may recall from the book’s first chapter, that conversation was initiated by a group of elementary school-aged children who approached me as I made my way from the bus stop down a winding back street to the Plaza Bolívar in search of the secondary school. Their gregariousness, so different from the timid reserve of children I had met in other Andean villages, initiated my enchantment with the vibrant and picturesque town. “Where did you come from?” asked one of the older girls whose boldness was unusual among girls her age. “From Mérida,” I replied, knowing this wasn’t exactly what they were asking. “No, where are you from? What place?” insisted another. “Ah. From the United States.” “You spick Ingliss?” another jumped in. “Yes I do. Do you?” I offered, playfully. “Sí, sí. Wha’ is you’ nem?” several children replied in unison, eager to show off the one phrase they knew in English and hear me pronounce first my name and then each of theirs. One after another, each child offered me his or her name, listened to me utter its English version, and then repeated it back to me slowly, delighting in its strange sound. Then one of the girls asked, her timid voice almost inaudible but her eyes aglow, whether I knew the words that Michael Jackson sings in his songs. “Yes. Why? Do you like Michael Jackson’s songs?” “Oh, yes! I

134

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

want to learn English so I can pronounce1 the words to his songs.” “As long as you don’t sing along!” one of the boys teased her. “Do you like Michael Jackson too?” I asked, teasing him back. “No, not much. I like Michael Jordan.” “Yes, yes,” came the chorus of boys. “The Cheecago Boos.” “Ah, you like the Chicago Bulls? Well, I’m from Chicago,” I smiled with feigned casualness. The boys looked at me, awestruck. I felt that I carried Michael Jordan’s magic in me by sheer virtue of geographic association. “Really?!” “Where is Chicago? Is it in New York?” “No, stupid,” one of the older girls chided. “New York is a city, and Chicago is a city. How can Chicago be in New York?” “Chicago,” I replied, “is in the middle of the United States. It’s a big city, with lots of very tall buildings, kind of like Caracas.” Ah,” exclaimed the tallest of the boys. “I really want to travel to the United States. But first I have to learn English. That’s what my parents tell me.” “Yes, but you need lots of money too. My cousin is saving his money to go to the United States.” “How is he going to go to the United States,” one of the girls asked incredulously. “He has a cousin in Texas who works in oil.” “But what does your cousin know about oil? He’s a farmer!” “It doesn’t matter. They say as long as you know English you can get some kind of a job there. They say there’s a lot of work there, in Texas.” And so we bantered on, the battery of questions, answers, sighs, and declarations alternating between English and the United States, magically melding together language, culture, place, and power. When at last I mentioned that I should be heading on to visit the secondary school director, one of the boys asked if I had come to Santa Lucía to teach English. I explained that I had come to study what went on at the liceo. “That’s too bad,” said one of the older girls. “My sister is in ninth grade at Liceo Parra. She wants to be an English teacher. But she says none of the teachers can speak English.” “Yes, it’s true,” another girl responded, more to her friend than to me. “That’s why my mother says the only way to learn English in this town is to pay a teacher to teach you.” “Ms. Lidia gives English lessons. They say she speaks English very well.” “Yes, of course, because she lived in the United States.” “No,” one of the boys argued, “Because her father is a gringo.” “No he’s not; he’s just rich,” the other boy retorted. As I listened to the group dispute the status of Ms. Lidia, her family, and their relationship to the United States, the girl who had first approached me on the street turned to me. “Look, maybe you can give English lessons.” “Yes!” another girl exclaimed. “Maybe you could teach us English.” These school-aged youth were only the first of many Santa Lucians to plant that idea. Often as not, my early conversations with townspeople

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

135

began with their asking whether I had come to teach English and ended with their suggestion that I do so. Either they were interested in learning English, or they knew many people who were, or they wanted their school-aged children to study English from a native because they weren’t learning it in school. They guaranteed a large class and an income, assuring me I could charge a lot for English lessons because in Santa Lucía hay billete (there’s money) and people would be willing to pay a lot of money to learn English from a native. And so, three months into my stay, I started teaching English at the Cultural Center. I began by offering an evening class, twice a week, to adults. Eventually, pressured by parents and some schoolteachers, I started another class for youth. I charged a small fee to the adults, enough to pay for class supplies and, as one of my students suggested, to motivate them to attend class. And so, early on in my stay, I was incorporated as a teacher of English into the local economy of neocolonial longing. In this chapter, I use the terminology of neocoloniality to signal a political, economic, cultural, and psychic continuity between past processes of colonial domination that occurred in the context of direct colonial rule of Euro-U.S. industrial capitalist governments over southern colonies and proto-nation-states (Fanon 1963; Memmi 1965), and those processes occurring in the present context of exploitation and manipulation of the economies of “under-developed” nation-states of the South by global, neoliberal corporate capitalist, “over-developed” states of the North (Mies 1986, 39; Chomsky 1999), particularly the United States. It should not be forgotten that the workings of the United States as a neocolonial power depend in part on exploiting the extractive economies of southern nation-states such as Venezuela—if not on the specific commodities produced in Santa Lucía—nation-states that are actively constructed as a neocolonized Other to the United States (Bigott 1978), as I discussed in chapter 5. Both Memmi and Fanon explored the role that the imposition of the language of the colonizer played in creating a “cultural catastrophe” (Memmi 1965, 107) for the colonized, and the psychic trauma and sense of cultural loss caused by the imposed bilingualism of colonialism that the colonized subject comes to need to survive. In the context of neocoloniality the language of the neocolonial power—no longer an imposed necessity but still a symbol of power, affluence, mobility, and purported progress—is commoditized and fetishized, as I explore in this chapter. As my first encounter with that group of Santa Lucian youth taught me, the seeds of students’ desire to learn to speak, or as they put it, to pronounce English—to have access to its magic through its use, its mimicry

136

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

(Taussig 1993)—were planted long before they began to study English in their first year of secondary school. Long before they set foot in their first English class, they had heard stories at home, at school, in the news media, and on the street about the utility of English for work or travel, its value for the acquisition of local fame or modest fortunes. So, for instance, went the story of one ninth-grade student’s cousin, who had learned enough English to become a crewman on a cruise ship, had met a North American girl on one of their trips (though some say she was Canadian), and was now married and living happily up North somewhere, apparently in a large house with a two-car garage. The enchantment that English held was magnified and darkened by other stories about the failed dreams of friends and relatives who had set their sights on a glorious future that depended on the mastery of English, only to find it impossible to learn the language, either in school or under the tutelage of a private teacher. Such had been the case of one my adult student’s uncles, a bricklayer from a village near Santa Lucía who had joined up with a family member who worked in construction in Texas, with the promise of getting him hired onto his construction crew. Instead, the man spent six months bussing tables at a diner while trying to learn enough English to join the crew, but eventually returned home with a few English words in his vocabulary and considerable humiliation. At least as early as the 1970s, the national curriculum (determined by the Venezuelan Ministry of Education) communicated the state’s unequivocal commitment to English language studies by requiring five years of English study. Beginning in 1980, with the reorganization of the educational structure, this meant that students studied English for the last three years of the Basic Cycle (seventh through ninth grades) and the two years of the Middle Diversified Cycle, regardless of the educational track they chose (Sciences, Humanities, or Vocational). The primary purpose of English studies, as stated in English language textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education, was “to acquire the four fundamental skills of oral and written comprehension, and oral and written expression, for the broader purpose of communication.” The specific ways in which the state considered the knowledge of English to be a valuable dimension in the formation of educated citizen workers are apparent in the concrete objectives laid out for English programs at both the Basic and Diversified levels. According to these objectives, English was meant to provide, first “the knowledge of other cultures and appreciation, by contrast, of one’s own”; second, “the acquisition of a technical vocabulary that will be useful for students in their professional studies; and, third, a professional resource” (Duplá et al. 1976, 6–7).

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

137

The value that the state gave to English by attributing it with utility puts an ironic twist on Marx’s statement in his elaboration on the concept of commodity fetishism, that “to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language” (1977, 436). At the time I lived in Santa Lucía, Liceo Parra students studied English every year for five years, three or four hours each week. English as a subject matter was allotted as much time in the national curriculum as the study of Spanish and Literature (Castellano y Literatura), World History and Venezuelan History combined, and Mathematics. It was taught more than any one Science subject, more than Geography, more than Art. And while students choosing the Humanities Cycle for their last two years of secondary schooling studied English and another foreign language during those two years, students choosing the Sciences Cycle continued to study English, and only English. Because over threefourths of Liceo Parra students entering their fourth year chose the Sciences track, for most Santa Lucian youth English was the only foreign language they studied in school. The value the state attributed to English through the institution of schooling was no doubt magnified by the ubiquity of English in the house and street through the news media and popular culture. English appeared on television, on the radio, on commercial and leisure products that circulated around the town, and it did so principally through the popular and professional media and material products of the United States. In grocery stores bags of Venezuelan corn flour sat across the aisle from boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The blue jeans students wore to school bore the name brands of Levis, Lees, or Gap. And at the school cantina, a student could buy locally prepared empanadas and fruit drinks or packets of Oreo cookies and a bottle of Pepsi Cola. Indeed, except for a miniscule percentage of youth from immigrant families whose parents spoke another language in the home (such as Italian, Portuguese, or Arabic), English was the only foreign language Santa Lucian youth heard or saw written in the course of their daily lives outside of school. It is thus not surprising that nearly every Liceo Parra student I got to know wanted to learn English in one form or another.2 Over the course of secondary schooling, which involved the integration of the value of English into students’ work of imagining their adult futures, Liceo Parra students’ desires for English became increasingly focused and concrete. When I talked with the younger students—the 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds in the seventh and eighth grades—they told dreamy stories about how English would undoubtedly help them make something of their lives. They became passionate as they contemplated

138

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

the magic doors they hoped the knowledge of English would open up onto the artifacts of youth culture. They wanted to understand enough English to make sense of popular music lyrics, video game instructions, or U.S. television programs broadcast by cable networks in English (those on national television were dubbed over in Spanish). For most of these youth I spoke with, their longing referred to a present-oriented, locally contained enchantment with the English of imported youth culture and entertainment than to an imagined adult life. The older students shared a yearning for English, but it was based on a sense of the value of English for their adult life plans. By the time they had entered their last two years of secondary school, this sense of value had become tied to concrete goals they were developing for themselves as adults. For some, this goal meant having a particular kind of job or profession, for which the knowledge of English was key. Other youth wanted to speak English in order to travel to a foreign country—the United States or Canada, in particular—where they hoped to find wellpaying work, or an American spouse, or simply a final youthful adventure. “I have always planned to settle down in Santa Lucía,” Juan Carlos, a fifth-year student, told me when I struck up a conversation with him and his buddies as we all waited for the morning bus into the nearby city of Valera one weekend morning. “But I would like to first have a grand adventure, traveling to the United States: to New York and San Francisco. That is why I need to learn to speak English.” I asked Juan Carlos whether he had thought about going to Europe for his adventure—to Spain, for instance, where he already spoke the language. Juan Carlos explained to me that this would be like staying home. “We Venezuelans are descendents of the Spanish,” he explained to me as though I didn’t know. “We have the same culture, the same habits. We don’t have a modern way of thinking. I want to get to know the American way of life.” Many older students were also clear in identifying the kind of English language knowledge they wished to acquire. Some students longed to speak English or, as they often put it, to “pronounce it well.” A few female students associated this form of linguistic knowledge with their expressed desire to study English at the university and become English teachers. One fifth-year student I came to know well was specifically interested in becoming an English teacher at Liceo Parra. She was a young woman with whom I had many conversations about careers. She seemed determined to construct and sustain an identity for herself as a professional woman despite the lack of support for that possibility from her parents, whom she described as being traditional. At times she

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

139

expressed her interest in teaching at Liceo Parra as though rehearsing a professional disposition—“It has a good reputation in the region.” Other times she explained her goal as a personal compromise: “that way I can have a career but stay and look after my mother.” A few students, most of them in their fourth and fifth years of the Sciences cycle, expressed a specific interest in learning to read or write English. These students were planning to pursue a course of vocational or professional studies, which they had heard required knowledge of “technical” English: careers associated with the mysteries of science and technology that students understood to be penetrable through the English language. The notion that knowing English was important in relation to national crisis also permeated students’ discussions about English and life goals. The attribution of English with the power to help them avoid or weather the vicissitudes of crisis was based in a neocolonial cultural logic that linked English to international opportunity (affording the possibility of escaping the crisis), technological advancement (affording the knowledge to surmount the crisis by contributing to national development through a career requiring English), or progress more abstractly (English as a “modern,” “civilized” language). Meanwhile, the expressed intentions of older Santa Lucian students when it came to applying English to their adult life plans attested to the unpredictable ways in which the negligence of local and state patriarchal promises conjoined with the anticipated economic unpredictability of crisis to both reinforce and disrupt conventionally gendered patterns of career path (see chapters 2 and 9). So that for every young man planning a conventionally male technical or science career requiring English, there were at least as many young women imagining themselves as English-adept accountants or architects. This disruption was evident in the association of English with the career track of tourism. For several young men, English converted their masculine wanderlust into the desire to have a career in tourism—a service profession generally associated with women—because, as one young man put it, “it is never too early to start saving dollars.” Many young Santa Lucian women expressed a similar intention of applying a mastery of English toward the career of tourism. For some, who recognized Santa Lucía’s location along Andean tourist routes, tourism had the potential of allowing them to have a career in their hometown. But other young women believed a career in tourism would allow them to travel not only beyond Santa Lucía, but beyond Venezuela—as was expressed through the dream of one student who longed to be a flight attendant. In this sense, for female students fashioning adult plans, English represented a way of complying with or contesting the geographically inscribed

140

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

proscriptions of local patriarchal control. It was as though the same vast power inhering in English that belittled the value of local language and culture also challenged the prescriptions and proscriptions of that culture. So Santa Lucian students were intent on learning English, and the state was apparently intent on teaching it to them. And yet, despite the amount of time Liceo Parra students spent studying English, despite how important it was to the neoliberal Venezuelan State that its youthful citizens-to-be become speakers of English, despite how motivated Santa Lucian youth were to acquire some modicum of familiarity with the language, and despite the fact that the vast majority of students passed their English classes year after year (a few with consistently high marks, many after summer “reparations”), Liceo Parra students weren’t learning English. None of the students from the 1992 or 1993 graduating class had acquired the ability to form a coherent utterance, read a simple passage, or compose a complete sentence in English. Lest one think these two years were an aberration, or that they represented a decline in the quality of English teaching, I hasten to add that adults I knew who had studied at Liceo Parra (many of whom felt the general quality of education at the school was better when they were students) recounted similar stories of studying English each year but graduating or leaving school with no practical ability to use the English language— even those adults who went on to study English at the university. This state of affairs might prompt the reader to wonder why Liceo Parra students weren’t learning English. The issue I am concerned with, however, is not the narrowly pedagogical problem of why Liceo Parra students were not learning English during their English classes. To focus my inquiry on the nonlearning of English would restrict the exploration of the effects English instruction to the academic goals and epistemological terms of the educational system itself. Much like the focus of educational research on why most minority students fail (or even on why some minority students manage to succeed), this kind of analytic emphasis evades the more critical exploration of school success and failure as a kind of cultural production, or a consideration of how the cultural production of success and failure, of learning or nonlearning, perpetuate social inequalities through the educational system, while contributing to the legitimacy of the system’s terms (see McDermott 1997; Varenne and McDermott 1999). Instead, the question I find compelling in terms of the cultural critique of formal schooling, is just what were Santa Lucian students learning when, while, and perhaps because, they were not learning English?

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

141

Given the central role that the knowledge of English was purported to play in the professional trajectories and economic well-being of educated Venezuelan citizens, and given the pervasive desire of Santa Lucian youth to learn English, what did it mean for Liceo Parra students to enter their English classrooms each day hoping to learn English, knowing that they would be presented with formal instruction in that foreign language, but also knowing not to expect that they would eventually acquire the knowledge they desired? In posing this question, I am led to consider the ways in which the institutionally situated (if not orchestrated) nonlearning of English might be comparable to the denial of desire central to the workings of negligent patriarchy. Recall my conversation with two Santa Lucian seventh-grade girls that I described in the first chapter of this book. Those young students had come at a young age to ascribe particular value to their educations, and incorporate education in their adult plans, in response to the anticipation of the inevitable abandonment of the spouses they nonetheless desired to have. Such were the locally sanctioned terms of negligent patriarchy. Perhaps the teaching of English and the broader messages about the power of English promulgated by teachers and texts, contributed to a similar dynamic—simultaneously feeding Santa Lucian students’ desire to acquire English in the abstract, while denying students that acquisition in the classroom. Nonlearning English and Neocolonial Schooling In trying to make critical sense of the systematic nonlearning of English by a cohort of Santa Lucian secondary school students, it is important to put this local pattern of instructional failure into a larger national context, because the nonlearning of English was not peculiar to students at Liceo Parra. The students at other public schools I visited in the region were not learning English either. Nor were most students at the three secondary schools I visited in the university city of Mérida learning English: neither the students from the upper-middle-class neighborhood whose parents were primarily professionals, nor the students who attended a “pedagogical” school where the faculty all had advanced degrees in Education and their subject matter; nor the students at the school located in the city’s center, whose population represented a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Nor was this situation particular to the times. In a 1976 essay entitled “Los textos de inglés, vehículo de colonización” (“English texts, vehicle of colonization”), “Javier Duplá and his co-authors examined the content

142

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

and use of English textbooks as vehicles of colonization.” Based on a content analysis of English textbooks used in both Basic and Diversified Cycles, the authors argued that the teaching of English reinforced students’ admiration for North American society and created the illusion that learning English would give them easy access to “a whole world hidden behind an American style—unsuspected pleasures, incredible voyages, comfort without risk, complete triumph in life” (16–17). The authors proposed that, as a result of this constant failure to learn English, students became frustrated and then began to feel guilty and inadequate, blaming themselves for their failure rather than the particular form of instruction or the inequities of the educational system. Given the particular value and power textbooks ascribe to the learning of English, the authors conclude that “the teaching of English contributes, like few other subject matters, to the internalization in the colonizeddominated student, of a situation of inferiority” (17). Throughout the study, Duplá et al. present English textbooks as cultural or ideological artifacts containing particular neocolonial messages that are transparently transmitted to students through their use. In an essay titled El Educador Neocolonizado (“The Neocolonized Educator”), the Venezuelan educator Luis Antonio Bigott similarly portrayed a direct and unmediated transference of neocolonial ideology from teachers, textbooks, and mass media to students. While both essays are forceful and important critiques of the educational system’s unwitting contribution to neocolonial relations and ideologies, their arguments rest on a reproductionist epistemology that renders students as passive, uncritical victims of an educational system complicit with global forces of neocolonialism that has effectively recruited unwitting—and thus similarly unselfconscious or critical—teachers. Ironically, in explaining the role of education in processes of neocolonization, the authors adopted a theoretical framework that, much like the ideology of neocolonialism, portrayed the subordinated Other as passive victim. What is missing from these essays is a consideration of how students might take up these images, narratives, and artifacts of neocolonial ideology—an exploration of the creativity and thus historical agency of their youthful subjects. In the rest of the chapter, I explore how the teaching and nonlearning of English produced a particular, neocolonial longing by discussing one emblematic class lesson in which I participated. I then recount some of the ways students appropriated the content and value of the lesson in relation to their youthful work of coming of age.

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

143

Juan Rodríguez Goes to London: Neocolonialism in the Classroom The first English teacher to invite me into her classroom was Ms. Sanchez. She taught English for the third, fourth, and fifth-year students, and was recognized among faculty and students as one of two English teachers who really knew the subject matter. Where faculty identified expertise in terms of credentials and tenure, students expressed their appreciation for these two teachers by noting that they really knew how to “explain” the material. This meant, in the first place, that students were able to do their homework for each lesson and, in the second place, that they were able to pass their English classes. Being able to explain English, in other words, had nothing to do with being able to teach students to speak or write in that language. Ms. Sanchez was quite clear about the area in which she thought I might be of assistance, namely pronunciation, or speaking. She admitted to me that she had “lost” her pronunciation since she began teaching in Santa Lucía seven years earlier. “When I graduated from the university I could speak very well—if I do say so myself. But here in the village I have no one to practice with, and so I have forgotten a lot.” The teacher’s dismissive tone as she referred to Santa Lucía as a “pueblo” (which can mean town or village) suggested an association in her mind between Santa Lucía’s status as a small, rural place and her inability to sustain her English language proficiency. The first of Ms. Sanchez’s English classes I attended was a ninth-grade class of 24 students, 15 young women and 9 young men. Ms. Sanchez and I met prior to class to review the day’s lesson. The teacher warned me that it might be hard to get the students to participate. “I ask them questions in English but they never respond. They never try to speak,” she told me. She ascribed the students’ limitations to a combination of inadequate teaching resources—no language lab or audiotapes—and the inherent timidity of Andinos. “Andinos are very taciturn, so they never try to speak in class.” My task was to assist the teacher by pronouncing new vocabulary words and phrases, and then ask the students to repeat the word in unison. Ms. Sanchez began with attendance, calling on the students using anglicized names, which invariably made a few of the students giggle. Following attendance, Ms. Sanchez instructed the students to turn to lesson 3, page 23, of their text. The title of the lesson was “My friends and I.” About two-thirds of the students had copies of the textbook, and they shared with those who didn’t. I leaned over a student’s shoulder to look at

144

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

what they were reading. On the page was an illustration of five youth, each from a different Latin American country. Below each face was a short biography in the first person. The first biography, which was of the book’s protagonist Juan Rodríguez, read as follows: “My name is Juan Rodríguez. I’m eighteen years old and I want to study a technical career: Tourism. I came to London six months ago.” In the previous lesson, Juan told the students about himself and how he had made his way to London: “I am Juan Rodríguez from Venezuela. I have always been a good student and because of my high marks in English, I got a scholarship to study a technical career in England. I came to London three months ago. I am really interested in learning English. I think everybody must try to learn it.” Ms. Sanchez then turned to me and asked whether I would read the biographies, “So the students can hear how English is really pronounced.” I obliged. She then pointed to four students successively, asking each one to copy a biography onto the blackboard. Once they had completed the exercise, Ms. Sanchez proceeded to read each sentence aloud, asking the students to repeat in unison. Ms. Sanchez then pointed to the words that were highlighted with boldface in the text, and asked students to translate them. Each question was followed by a silence, followed by the teacher calling on a student who softly mumbled an answer. Ms. Sanchez then told the students to translate the passages for the next class, and for the first time the students opened their notebooks in order to record the homework assignment. From there she went on to review the content of the grammar lesson associated with the biographical sketches, a process which led her to write, over and over again on the board, various permutations of the following phrases: “Juan went to England to study a technical career.” “Why did Juan go to England?” “He went to England to study a technical career.” “What are you going to do in England, Carmen?” “I am going to study English.” “What are you going to study in England, José?” “I am going to study Computer Science.” This instructional technique of teaching the near future tense (not the conditional tense, mind you, for Juan was certain about realizing his aims) through the rhythmic reiteration of sentences establishing an association between going to England, studying English, and studying a technical career, had the mesmerizing effect of conveying a cultural as well as a linguistic message about the centrality of English language learning to a bourgeois life trajectory—a trajectory that necessarily included leaving one’s native land to pursue the career path of one’s desire. After the lesson was over, I had an extended conversation with a group of seven students from the class. I asked them what they thought about the

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

145

lesson. The questions prompted them to comment initially on the textbook content. Most found it quite comical. “Who is this Juan Rodríguez?” they joked. “Where did he get the big bucks?” “He must be from Caracas.” “Or Maracaibo.” It was clear to these students that the subject of their textbooks was not them. Their comments also made it clear how the overt content of the English textbooks, along with the less direct messages contained within the school’s curriculum, contributed to the pain of neocoloniality. On the one hand, these students were encouraged to construct identities as citizens of a modern developing nation, identities that implied the possibility of travel abroad just as their identities as secondary students with higher educational aspirations reinforced the possibility of that dream. To the extent that they were also learning that such aspirations hinged upon their ability to know English, their institutionalized experience of nonlearning English seemed to deny them the very dreams and identities the textbooks were cultivating. On the other hand, the content of textbook English lessons reinforced Santa Lucian students’ identities as poor, rural youth whose life trajectories lay outside the transnational circuit presented in their textbooks. Through the depictions of Juan Rodríguez and his family, the way they dressed, the ability to get scholarships, and the upper class commodities that seemed to be a natural part of their lives, the textbook stories clearly associated everything from the mastery of English to the ability to travel abroad with well-to-do urban youth. But soon enough, the students from Ms. Sanchez’s class shifted to a discussion about how bad the book was at teaching them English. This in turn led to a debate as to whether it was the quality of the textbooks, or the instruction, or both, that seemed to make it so hard for them to actually learn to understand, let alone speak, English. The consensus was that the fault lay more with the teachers than the text—although one student proposed that it was neither; it was because the school didn’t have the technology—the audiotapes, tape recorders, or computers for them to study English in a lab that the “city schools always have.”3 But most students felt the teachers simply weren’t prepared to teach the material. As they well knew, only two of the four English teachers at Liceo Parra could speak English, and only one of these spoke it with some fluency. The other two, to their openly expressed chagrin, had been assigned to teach English even though they had no formal preparation as English teachers, or even as foreign language teachers. For the students in Ms. Sanchez’s class, as with most older students, the lack of preparation of their English teachers contributed to a more general concern they had about their teachers’ lack of training in the areas they taught. Some claimed that it was due to the school’s location in the countryside. It was

146

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

a commonly held impression among Liceo Parra students that the good teachers, the teachers who were “prepared,” didn’t want to teach in a “little village school” like Liceo Parra. Other students said that the city schools had all the good teachers, or simply had more teachers, so that the Literature or Crafts teachers would not have to teach English if they were not prepared to do so—as was the case at their school. That neither of these assumptions was necessarily true (in the first place, many teachers told me they preferred jobs in village schools because students were better behaved; in the second place, teachers in many public city schools were also often put in the position of teaching subjects outside their areas of expertise) is less important here than what the assumptions suggest about students’ perceptions of their own status as rural students in an urban nation. The significance of English being taught at Liceo Parra by teachers “without preparation,” was related to students’ collective sense of themselves and their school as marginal to the educational project of their nation. That students explained their inability to learn English, not as a personal failure, but rather as a failure of one or more aspects of the educational system, played a paradoxical role in the cultural production of neocolonial longing. While it provided students with the critical, depersonalized distance from which to justify their academic experience of not learning English, it also encouraged them to both defer their abstract desire to know English and to magnify the value of English. If English was not available through the quotidian and populist practices of public education, it was available to those who could pay a private tutor for classes, or those who could travel abroad to learn it “in context.” A Letter to a Pen Pal: English between House, Street, and School One of the reasons the experience of nonlearning English in school contributed to the production of neocolonial longing was because Santa Lucian youth sustained the belief that the United States as a place was indeed accessible, a belief which in turn fed their desire to know English. None of the Santa Lucian students I knew or knew of had ever traveled to the United States (many had never traveled outside of the region, and the only youth I knew of who had visited a foreign country were the children of immigrants from other South American countries). Nonetheless, the presumed possibility of travel to the United States was reinforced informally through stories about other Santa Lucians, perhaps a friend or relative, who had traveled to the United States.

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

147

Several times during my stay in Santa Lucía, I was drawn right into the middle of the plot of such stories, particularly when they were played out through exchanges of English-language artifacts. There was a letter of invitation from the boss of a distant family member, offering the person a job on a construction crew that I was asked to translate. And there was the sweepstakes form offering the winner two free tickets to Disneyland, which had been sent to a neighbor by a relative in Caracas who in turn had a relative living in Florida, that I was asked to help them fill out. In most cases, the protagonists of these stories were adult men; it would not have been seemly for a woman to approach me for assistance in developing connections—with possible travel implications—to the United States. As these stories circulated out from people’s houses into the streets, they linked the value of English as a symbol of neocolonial longing to the negligent patriarchal geography that encouraged male freedom and adventure over and against female containment and restraint. On a few occasions, the person with connections to the United States was a Liceo Parra student. Two months after attending this class, I was on my way home after a long afternoon of observing classes at Liceo Parra, cutting across the vacant basketball court toward the gate, when two female students approached me. I thought I recognized them from Ms. Sanchez’s third-year English class. “Excuse me, Profesora,” one of them asked me. “I was wondering if you could help me with something.” She giggled after proffering her request, as though trying to retract her boldness. She glanced at her friend and they giggled together. Deferring my answer, I asked what their names were and whether they were in fact in Ms. Sanchez’s English class. The student asking the favor glanced down, smiled, and nodded. She presented herself as Luz, and, when her friend remained silent, presented her friend as Carmen. Her shy friend lowered her head, smiled, but said nothing. There was a pause. I knew Luz would be too embarrassed to repeat her request, so I asked what it was she needed help with. Luz dug deep down into the front pocket of her skintight blue jeans (the older girls had a way of making themselves look sexy even in the drab school uniform of blue jeans and beige tee-shirt) and pulled out an envelope. She unfolded it delicately as though it were a talisman, and then presented it to me. As I began to read it, Luz told me the story of the letter. It was a letter from her new “pen pal” (she used the English term), a high school student named Jenny from Colorado. Jenny had been given Luz’s address by a distant uncle of Luz, an engineer from Maracaibo who was in Denver on business. Luz’s uncle had been invited to dinner by Jenny’s father, also an engineer. So that, when Jenny commented that she

148

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

was studying Spanish and would like to be able to correspond with someone her age in Venezuela, the uncle gave her Luz’s address. This, Luz explained, was all recounted to her by another uncle who lived in Santa Lucía, and was a cousin of the engineer. I looked over the letter, which was typewritten in Spanish, the accents added in black pen. The Spanish was quite good, and as I read the note, Luz commented to that effect. “Maybe since Spanish is a simpler language,” she speculated aloud, “it’s easier for American students to learn Spanish than it is for us to learn English, which is a very difficult language.” I suggested to Luz that perhaps Jenny had received help composing her letter, but I wondered about the neocolonialist message contained in her assumption about relative difficulty of Spanish and English as languages. Many students I had worked with on English related their difficulties learning English to the notion that it was a particularly difficult language to learn and to speak. Santa Lucian youth had many theories about why English was so difficult, ranging from the nonequivalence between the orthography and the pronunciation to the supposed complexity of the grammar. The naturalization of English as a “difficult language” was part of the ideological process through which English nonlearning contributed to students’ sense of the inaccessibility or unattainability, not just of English, but also of things American. Because of the presumed link between complexity and superiority, it also reinforced the neocolonial notion that English-speaking societies were superior to Spanish-speaking societies. Luz allowed me to copy the content of the letter into my notebook, which I have translated, verbatim, below: Dear Luz, My name is Jenny. I study Spanish in my high school for three years. I like Spanish a lot. I want to be your pen pal, because I want to learn about your country, Venezuela, and because I want to more practice Spanish and I can writing [sic] letters for you in Spanish and you can writing [sic] letters for me in English. I saw your uncle at my house for dinner. He says that you live in the mountains like me. He says that your village is very pretty. My city where I live is called Denver. It is very big. The mountains here are also very beautiful. I hope we can be pen pals, and know about you and I with letters. Maybe one day I can visit you in your village, and you can visit me in my city. Sincerely, Jenny

English Lessons and Neocolonial Longing

●

149

As I reviewed the letter, Luz explained that she was wondering whether I might be able to help her write back to her pen pal in English. I told her I would be glad to, and asked whether she preferred to write a letter in English, which I would then correct, or compose the letter in Spanish so that we could translate it together. Luz looked a bit crestfallen; I suspect she hadn’t anticipated that the favor might turn into an English lesson. She paused a moment to weigh her options, and then mumbled timidly that she would prefer to compose the letter in Spanish and then work on the translation together. We agreed that she would stop by my house in the next few days with a draft that we would then translate together. Below is the translation of the letter she brought to me in Spanish, as she sent it back to Jenny: Dear Jenny, I would like very much to be your pen pal. This would be a great honor for me. My greatest dream is to learn to speak English so that I can visit the United States, like my uncle. I think the United States is a great and beautiful country. I would like to get to know it. My favorite subject is English, and I hope that I can study English in the university. My dream is to one day have the opportunity to study English in the United States. I think that you would enjoy visiting my little village of Santa Lucía. It is a picturesque village in the Andes. Many tourists come here. They especially like to see the Festival of San Benito, which is very typical and famous across Venezuela, with a lot of dancing in the street with ribbons and a very lovely procession. If you come to Santa Lucía, you can stay with my family in our home. We are always at your disposal. Sincerely, Luz Ramírez At the time Luz came to me with her pen pal letter, she had followed Juan Rodríguez in English class on his various adventures in London, the arrival of his sister who won a scholarship too, and his travels around Europe. It doesn’t matter much that Juan went to London and not, say, to Denver, Colorado. (None of the Santa Lucian students I knew expressed a desire to travel to London, or Europe for that matter, and British culture had no role in the material or ideological world of Santa Lucian youth.) The neocolonial import of the lesson was contained in the association between English language learning, travel, and upward mobility. Given the myriad sources of stories to which Luz was exposed, which

150

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

intertwined English with travel abroad and with the self-fashioning of a bourgeois adult life, it is perhaps not surprising that Luz expressed her desire to visit Denver in terms of the construction of a career path, whereas Jenny expressed an interest in nothing more than visiting Luz’s village. And while I didn’t ask Luz at the time, I wondered whether this distinction, coupled with the superlatives Jenny used in describing her place of origin, in contrast to the diminuitives Luz used in describing her own, further reinforced and personalized the neocoloniality of the relationship of Santa Lucía to the United States. Neocolonial Longing and the Cultural Scheme of Negligent Patriarchy I have argued that English classes located students within a neocolonial discursive terrain as proto-citizens of a Venezuelan nation, and as such in a subordinate position of material and cultural longing in relation to the United States. In this process, I propose, Santa Lucian students integrated the learned relationship between language, national identity, and power into their own identity formation as they constructed their imagined futures in terms of the gendered dynamics of negligent patriarchal relations of power that I have presented in earlier chapters. After all, English lessons located students as neocolonized subjects within a context of global inequalities through an ideological process that was analogous to the location of Santa Lucian women in a system of negligent patriarchal gender arrangements. The former operated through the simultaneous perpetuation and frustration of students’ desires to know English; while the latter perpetuated both a woman’s desire for a faithful and good husband and her expectation of abandonment. Through this analogy, we can think of the nonlearning of English as the constant establishment of an expectation and the deferral of its fulfillment, which put students in a feminized position relative to English as a symbol of power that was comparable to the position of women with a system of negligent patriarchy (Mies 1986). To the extent that negligent patriarchy operated as an “encompassing” (Ortner & Whitehead 1981; Ortner 1996) cultural and social formation, it provided a logic and a sensibility through which students came to engender and integrate English, and the neocolonial relations it represented, into their present lives and their adult imaginings.

CHAPTER 7

Debating Women* Spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)

“Venezuelan Women in Society” My field notes remind me that it was a Wednesday morning in March of 1992, six months into the school year and a year into my stay in Santa Lucía. I left the house early and joined the flow of students as they headed to the first-period class at Liceo Parra. Each student sporting the requisite national uniform—blue jeans and beige or white shirts depending on their grade, blue sweaters on chilly Andean days—they created a nearly monochrome stream of disciplined informality that briefly transformed the otherwise motley, sparsely inhabited, and principally adult space of the street. I was looking forward to attending the first class that day. Ms. Martínez, the serious, soft-spoken young ninth-grade Language and Literature teacher, was holding a debate (“debate” in Spanish) on “the role of Venezuelan women in society,” and she was expecting me to attend. Two weeks prior to the debate, Ms. Martínez had invited me to attend the event and help her evaluate the two debating groups’ performance. When eight students from one of the groups appeared at my doorstep the following week and asked if I would serve as their asesora (“advisor”) in preparing for the debate, I went back to Ms. Martínez, got her permission to do so, and then agreed with her that it would be inappropriate for me to also serve as an evaluator. Instead, I would simply observe. But, she added as though searching for a way to include me more actively in the event, I was welcome to contribute to the discussion, ask questions, or correct any incorrect information that the students provided. * An earlier version of this chapter appears in Montoya, Frazier & Hurtig, 2002.

152

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

I had visited Ms. Martínez’s classes previously and had found her to be a pleasant and thoughtful, if rather conventional, teacher. We had also struck up conversations in town on several occasions, and each time she seemed to lead the conversation toward the topic of women. I soon got the sense that she saw me (the anthropologist who was known around the school as studying women or sexual relations) as a kindred spirit. In our discussions about higher education and her own training to become a teacher, she generalized from her personal experiences to the systematic discrimination of women students by the university. On these matters, she was always thoughtful and circumspect. Thus, although she never told me so directly, it was my sense that when Ms. Martínez organized the debate she fully intended to counter the conspicuous absence of “women” in the secondary school curriculum. That she chose to use the potentially critical, pedagogical form of a debate to expose the students to a topic that, in and of itself, implied a critique of the conventional curriculum was, I suspect, no coincidence. Ms. Martínez, in her quiet and unobtrusive way, was something of a rebel. This chapter, however, is not an exploration of Ms. Martínez’s political motives or educational intentions. Rather, it is an inquiry into the social conditions that her students responded to, and the educational habits they drew upon, as they prepared for and engaged in the debate. Following de Certeau’s proposition that everyday spatial practices in fact structure those conditions and habits, this chapter is also a consideration of how those students worked on, structured, and signified those very conditions and habits. In the chapter, I consider this singular event of a ninth-grade classroom debate as a series of gendered spatial practices that called upon the participating students to enter, navigate, rearrange, or resignify familiar places. In so doing, I look at how the students in Ms. Martínez’s classroom implicitly deliberated over the possibilities of their lives as adult women and men as they explicitly debated “the role of Venezuelan women.” Before I return to the scene of the debate, I want to remind the reader of two propositions that guide my inquiry into the relation between educational practices such as the debate and the cultural production of social selves and social inequalities. The first proposition is that the everyday practices of schooling that occur in and beyond the classroom, are “spatial practices” (de Certeau 1984), activities whose significance and materiality are constructed in relation to the spaces—the geographically delimited and socially signified contexts—in which they occur and which they affect (see also Lave 1993; Mehan 1993). The second proposition, which can be phrased in more narrowly ethnographic terms, is

Debating Women

●

153

that the everyday practices of schooling in Santa Lucía did more than structure the conditions and habits of Santa Lucian students’ educational experiences. They were also among the spatial practices that “secretly structured” the determining conditions of gendered social inequalities, and in particular of negligent patriarchal social arrangements and ideologies, in Santa Lucía. These two propositions are significant not only in what they claim about the relation between educational practices and their putative contexts, but also in what they implicitly contest. By approaching the educational activities of the debate as gendered spatial practices that are both conditioned by and create the contexts in which they occur, I hope to pull apart and expose for critique a series of tightly linked dualisms that have framed and essentialized concepts of learning for centuries. Here I am referring to that familiar Cartesian scaffolding that separates individual from society, mind from body, thought from action, and actors from their putative contexts. Each of these distinctions is supported by Enlightenment social theories that begin and end with the authentic individual as the unit of social analysis who is positioned within, but somehow separable from, an unproblematically observable context (cf. Taussig 1992, 45). By taking learning to be an individual achievement and the horizons of that achievement to be determined by the student’s constitution and/or individual behavior (aptitudes, habitus, sex, ethnicity, and class background, for instance), any exploration of learning as collective and contested gendered cultural activity is precluded. And by taking the learning “context” to be a static set of spatially, temporally, and socially delimited conditions separable from but determinative of the individual learner’s constitution and/or behavior, any inquiry into the relation between individual learning and historical processes is foreclosed. As the educational anthropologist Ray McDermott puts it, “a static sense of context delivers a stable world” (1993, 282). These conceptual mystifications, I fear, have guided much of the research on women/gender and education in Latin America, in which there continues to be a tendency to invoke causal relationships between female students’ school performance and their eventual location in the work force as explanations for the reproduction or transformation of gender inequalities; or to analyze educational texts and discourses for their gender “content,” as though gender ideologies are poured directly into the half-empty heads of students who then act accordingly or bristle and resist. To the extent that this research treats schooling as a process of mechanical reproduction and students as its passive objects, it is

154

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

limited in the social processes it can account for, and thus the paths toward change it can propose. By approaching the debate as constituted by spatial practices that are located within and act upon the gendered, historical conditions of its very production, I hope to contribute to the small but growing body of anthropological studies of schooling in Latin America that focuses on the cultural production of gendered personhood through educational practices.1 Such studies counter the determinist tendencies of positivist research, providing instead “generative accounts of subjectification and agency” (McNay 2000, 16). In offering a generative account of the debate as an instance of the dialectic of material conditions or contexts and spatial practices such as learning, I hope to accomplish two things: to apply an “active concept of agency” (16) to the spatial practices of schooling, while also exploring those spatial practices in a theoretically oblique way that reveals them as doing “critical ideological work” (Poovey 1988, 2–3) in the reproduction of negligent patriarchy. However, contesting the enduring positivist hegemony in learning theory requires more than the conceptual move of relocating learning within the field of ethnographic examination; it is equally important that we situate ourselves as researchers within that field. To the extent that the researcher is always necessarily implicated in the ethnographic moment we study, attention to place, context, and the practices of “contextualization,” “should be one that very consciously admits of our presence, our scrutinizing gaze, our social relationships,” as Michael Taussig insists in his critique of colonialist social theory. Such an admission, Taussig proposes, “opens up to a science of mediations—neither Self nor Other but their mutual co-implicatedness” (Taussig 1992, 45–48). But as I attempt in this chapter to open the debate up to such a science I am brought to tears and laughter, recalling that the debate’s essentializing topic—“the role of Venezuelan women in society”—was also, initially, at the very heart of my ethnographic inquiry. So my thoroughly compromised participation in the debate as expert/teacher/observer (a product of which is this chapter) must be included in the expanding and ever-messier terrain of gendered ideological work that I am here calling “learning.” If the reader finds in the pages of this chapter little resolution of that mess, it is with the intention of encouraging you to subject the debate, as well as my interpretation of it, to your own mediations.

Debating Women

●

155

Debating Women? As I walked to the school that morning, I met up with several of my young neighbors who were heading to school for their first classes. One of them, Maribel, had also been among the group of students who had come to me for assistance in preparing for the debate. As we walked toward the school yard I asked if she was ready for her class. “I think so,” she answered hesitantly, “although I’ve never participated in a debate before, and I don’t have any idea about what’s going to happen.” She paused, and then added that neither did any of her friends. I tried to comfort her by pointing out that at least that meant they would all be facing the same situation. She smiled, but my comment did not seem to assuage her fears. While I was sympathetic to Maribel’s uneasiness about the debate, it added to my own curiosity. This would be the first time in my eight months visiting classes at Liceo Parra that I would attend a debate. Indeed, it was the first time I had heard the term used as a specific classroom activity or pedagogic practice. As I have described in previous chapters, most of Liceo Parra’s social science and humanities teachers employed three teaching techniques: dictation, investigation in groups, and individual research with class presentations. Of these three activities dictation, the most didactic, took up by far the most classroom time. The other classroom activity that occupied considerable class time was evaluation: exams and their review, pop quizzes, individual reports, and group presentations. There was thus something about the contestability of truth implicit in the term “debate” that made it sound quite distinct from the prescriptive orientation of most teaching I had observed thus far, and rather at odds with the implicit epistemological absolutism of most pedagogy. No less significant than the novelty of the debate’s apparent pedagogic form was the novelty of its content. For this was also the first time I would attend a class in which “woman” (la mujer) was the explicit topic of study. Aside from a lesson in the fourth-year literature curriculum devoted to the Venezuelan novelist Teresa de la Parra, and a brief reference to Frida Kahlo by the art history teacher during a unit on Latin American art, individual women were invisible to literature, history, the arts, and sciences. Moreover, women as a group or class of people never constituted an object of study. The family was studied in Family Education and Citizenship class; youth and adolescents were studied in Psychology class. But there was no place for women, or Woman, in the standardized, nationally certified curriculum.

156

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

And so I expected the debate would be no conventional classroom lesson, but rather a unique pedagogical moment whose content disrupted curricular conventions and whose method disrupted pedagogical conventions. However, it was not the debate’s two-fold novelty per se that makes it compelling. After all, there is only so much we can learn about “learning” as a cultural constitutive social practice by focusing on the spatial arrangements and tangible materials that were offered to or imposed on the students by their teachers or ritualized by the school. Whatever we make of the explicit discourses and even hidden curricula of the school, and whatever the articulated or unconscious aims of the teachers, once the texts, discourses, rules, and other cultural material of the classroom are released to the students, that “production” faces the “ruses” and “fragmentation” of a different, quiet, almost invisible kind of production called “consumption” which is manifest, not in its own products, but “in an art of using those [products] imposed on it” (de Certeau 1984, 31). Learning, I would argue, is exactly this kind of productive activity— a kind of consumption or use. In the spirit of de Certeau’s investigation into “the ways in which users—commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules—operate” (1984, xi), I am interested in how the students responded to and reconstituted the debate. Like de Certeau, my focus is on “modes of operation” as collective activity rather than “the subjects (or persons) who are their authors or vehicles” (1984, 33). For it is there, outside individual minds or bodies and through the social relations among persons making use of the ideas, images, and materials made available to them, that patriarchy as an ongoing historical project producing social inequalities and individual subjectivities is not only substantiated and confirmed but also debated and transformed. However, the production of new meanings by users may just as likely resort to the proprieties of a particular place and reassert dominant ideologies as it may subvert those proprieties and ideologies (de Certeau 1984, 118–124; see also MacDonald 1981). While Ms. Martínez may have intended the debate to liberate the students from the confines of conventional pedagogy and curriculum (and the lessons of male dominance that material represented), as the students prepared for and engaged in the debate, they collaborated to create an event that was pedagogically familiar and spatially comfortable, and to make the topic substantively legitimate. I do not think they did this on purpose. I think they did this because the places in which they engaged in these activities insinuated certain “modes of use” and “ways of operating” (de Certeau 1984) that delineated what kind of learning was possible and what kinds of thoughts about Venezuelan women were thinkable.

Debating Women

●

157

Nonetheless, eschewing the romance of resistance does not mean succumbing to the fatalism of social reproduction; and it is certainly not my intention to reduce learning to one or the other pole in a conceptual binarism. Rather, my account of the debate is an attempt to sustain the complexity and creativity of learning as a historical, situated, and social activity that is thoroughly uneven, if not altogether unpredictable, in its meanings and effects. Looking for Women Liceo Parra had a small, dark, virtually unused school library with a collection of about 100 textbooks that had remained from previous years. When students had to do research for class presentations they ventured through the street to the town library. Unlike other public places such as the Culture Center—a refurbished colonial building located off the central plaza with programs and classes frequented by women, men, youth, and children alike—the library was not integrated into the town as a communal space. Hidden down a cobblestone side street, the library was a peculiar spatial extension of schooling into the town itself. Its primary patrons were students and the bulk of its books, many of them textbooks, related to the secondary school curriculum: world history, Venezuelan history, literature, sciences, social sciences, psychology. The main room also boasted an extensive reference collection, including a general encyclopedia and encyclopedias on specialized subjects such as medicine and agriculture. The small side room, dedicated to children’s books, resembled a day care, a reminder of the ideological link between primary education and child socialization. Students went to the library in small groups after school and occasionally on Saturdays. They planned these outings carefully, packing extra pens and paper in anticipation of the meticulous copying of lengthy texts that comprised their research activities. More than once students described their forays to the library as preparation for university life. Some youth said their library trips made them feel like they were really students, like they were really studying. Distinct from all other activities that took liceo youth into town—to the parish for Sunday mass, to the grocery store on errands, to the stadium for a soccer game, to a crafts class at the community center, to a relative’s house, or to the post office to call an out-of-town or overseas friend or relation—visits to the library projected students beyond the familial and productive nexus of street/house and into “society” in the abstract as educated persons, extending their imagined adult selves beyond local life.

158

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

The library’s collection ranged from the mundane to the arcane. Its literature section included Latin American classics and translations of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Its social sciences section included books on the history of Western philosophy, a subject never studied by secondary students. According to the librarian, most of the books they received were donated by the public library in Mérida, the state capital. The Mérida librarians had no idea how decisions about which books to donate were made; but the presence of such books as En Defensa del Aborto en Venezuela (“In Defense of Abortion in Venezuela”), written by Venezuelan feminist scholar Giovanna Machado (1979), and a Spanish translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex on the shelves of the Santa Lucía library and not the Mérida library made me wonder. Those books and a few others addressing women’s issues were clustered together in the Social Sciences section of the library shelves. Yet somehow, they were invisible to Liceo Parra students. Indeed, what prompted the students to come to me in the first place was their frustration over not being able to find any information in the library on Venezuelan women. (One female student from the other team told me after the debate was over, that “the hardest thing about the debate was the preparation. I didn’t know where to find information about Venezuelan women.”) In their initial perusal of textbooks and the Encyclopedia—the sources they were accustomed to using—they had found one reference to Manuela Saenz, a revolutionary woman of the nineteenth century most famous as Simón Bolivar’s intrepid lover (but not, strictly speaking, a Venezuelan woman); one reference to the author Teresa de la Parra; and one reference to the contemporary poet Gloria Stolk. And they had done their homework well. Reviewing a study guide on contemporary Venezuelan history prepared for students in the first year of the Diversified Cycle (the fourth and penultimate year of secondary school), the students scrutinized a 26-page listing of “outstanding personalities of national life” titled “Who has made history?” and found references to five women (Domínguez and Franceschi 1988). Not only were the students unable to locate “important” Venezuelan women to determine their “role in society,” but they also were unable to find information on Venezuelan women more generally, let alone on women’s collective social action. For instance, in a textbook on contemporary Venezuelan history, the acquisition of the vote by women was not presented as the successful outcome of a feminist movement to gain suffrage. Instead, it was obscured within a generic description of the 1947 Constitution, which “established the vote as universal, direct and secret

Debating Women

●

159

for Venezuelans over 18 years of age, men or women, literate or not” (Franceschi and Domínguez 1988, 128; emphasis in original). In another textbook, “women” were not even included in the list of new recipients of this civic privilege. And so women were doubly invisible: invisible as historical actors (whether as celebrated individuals or as a social class) and even invisible as the passive beneficiaries of the historic deeds of famous men. A state of affairs that prompts yet another displacement and reconfiguration of the study of learning practices—from their location within a sociology of knowledge into a “sociology of lack of knowledge . . . which studies how and why knowledge is not produced, is obliterated, or is not incorporated into a canon” (Reinharz 1992, 248; see Reinharz and Stone 1992). It was a state of affairs that prompted me to do two things with the students I was assisting. First, I arranged to meet them at the library in order to point them to the section on women and sexuality. Several of the students confessed they hadn’t known they could use books other than texts and references for their schoolwork. Putting aside the books on women, sexuality, or feminism in general, they selected from the shelf a book that was specifically about Venezuelan women: Una Vida Una Lucha, Eumelia Hernández’s “summary of events in which the Venezuelan woman has played an important role from her position as citizen, worker and mother” (Hernández 1985, 12). When I asked why they were not checking out the book on abortion, the boys pretended not to hear, while the girls looked down to the floor in that shy and embarrassed way that young Santa Lucian women could so easily adopt, until one of the girls reminded me matter-of-factly that “abortion is a sin.” The second thing I did was provide the students with some of my own materials on Venezuelan women: articles and newspaper clippings on women and education, work, health, and politics, on women’s centers around the country, and on International Women’s Day celebrations; chapters from Venezuela: Una Bibliografía Inacabada, a compilation addressing “women’s participation in national development, 1936–1983” (Ministerio de Estado 1983); and material from the 1989 Venezuelan National Conference on Women. I watched them peruse the material, hoping this fount of information on Venezuelan women’s roles in society would somehow impress them, perhaps lead them to contemplate why they hadn’t found comparable information in any of their textbooks. Whatever impression it made, they didn’t let on. But then Santa Lucian youth weren’t generally inclined to proffer their opinions to adults, let alone teachers. (But then they weren’t often encouraged to do

160

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

so, either in the classroom or at home.) The only reaction they shared with me was that it was an “awful lot” of material. For some this meant it would help them do well in the debate; for others it meant a lot of work. After some negotiation in which the boys tried to foist the work onto the girls while the girls quietly but steadfastly refused, it was decided that they would share the materials with other students on their team so that everyone could “copy the important points” from the readings. Drawing on what they remembered from Ms. Martínez’s instructions, they then appointed Alvaro, the most charismatic of the group, to be their director. When Maribel suggested he take the work they’d done and draw up a list of questions to pose to the other team, he quickly refused, claiming it was too much work for one person to do and suggesting instead that each of them draw up questions from their notes and give them to him. With that decided I left them to their copying. The following Monday, the group of eight dragged a few more of their teammates to my house for our final meeting. Once again, they were well prepared. Each student had diligently copied what she or he believed were the important points from the material they had reviewed. Their selections were striking. From a newspaper article on Venezuelan single mothers, the students copied down percentages of those working, studying, or staying at home and numbers of children born to young mothers. But they passed over the comment that, “after confronting her abandonment by her companion, the Venezuelan mother has to fight against discrimination that she continues to face in the labor market” (El Nacional 1991, C8). From a journal article describing contemporary Venezuelan women’s political participation, Alvaro copied down percentages of judges and magistrates who were women and percentages of women elected to legislative positions in 1989. But he ignored the commentary noting that women still do not have a significant presence at the level of “top leadership positions in which fundamental political decisions are made, leaving them primarily in intermediate or technical positions” (Rosillo 1992, 42–43). If we take learning to be “the construction of present versions of past experience for several persons acting together” (Lave 1993, 8), we can think of the students as drawing on their past experience—of what constituted legitimate information for the classroom, of what kinds of information could be performed back to the teacher for a good evaluation, of how women count and are accounted for in school and in society—to select material they considered appropriate for the debate. This

Debating Women

●

161

information—numbers, dates, laws, or summary declarations—turned out to be the least debatable. The passages they excerpted reduced women’s individual and collective struggles and accomplishments to dates and numbers, and rendered their societal roles as possibilities opened to them by men’s accomplishments or as assigned statuses. Women had roles in society, changing roles no less; but the conditions of those roles were never of their own making. Debating Women On the Wednesday of the debate, as on most days, I walked through the main gate, casually supervised as usual by a security guard, and into the school yard. During school hours, the concrete yard was used for Physical Education classes. Before and after school, the students used this space in ways that both integrated and distinguished the informal recreational practices of the street with the formal recreational practices of the school, applying their own norms to establish which extracurricular activities were coed and which were not. Along the walkway separating the ball courts from the school building, groups of boys could always be found playing handball—a game I never saw girls play. And while male and female students would play volleyball or shoot baskets together, when students used the space to sit and chat they almost always formed single-sex groups. Groups that combined female and male students had one of two purposes: Either they were involved in a class project together or they were chatting in clustered pairs of novios (girlfriends and boyfriends). As with the seating arrangements of the classroom, the students created learning spaces by arranging themselves rather ritually according to their own gendered terms. I walked through the next gate, across the patio, and up to the second floor in search of Ms. Martínez. When I entered the classroom I was disoriented at first by the strange configuration of the desks, and it took me a moment to locate Ms. Martínez in the classroom. She was sitting, not in her usual place at the front of the room, but on the side against the wall. She signaled for me to take the chair beside her. Except for a nervous shifting of feet, the classroom was silent. The teacher then called on Alvaro to begin the debate. All eyes—those of the 23 students as well as the teacher and myself—fixed themselves on Alvaro. Meanwhile, Alvaro was looking down at a piece of paper clenched tightly in his hands. The trembling paper belied the nervousness behind his staid demeanor. He glanced up at the students across the room then back down at his paper, pondering it with distracted concentration.

162

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Was it the silent attention he commanded that made it difficult for Alvaro to concentrate? Or was it the discomfort he felt sitting in a classroom that had been completely rearranged for this specific event, the desks configured in an unfamiliar way, creating a spatial relationship among the students and the teacher that was new and strange? After all, day after day for the past nine years, Alvaro had entered the classroom and taken his seat with the other students at desks lined up in fairly neat rows all facing the teacher and the blackboard at the front of the room. And for the past six months, Alvaro had entered this particular classroom, headed straight to the right side of the room toward the back, and set himself down amongst the other nine male students who inevitably clustered themselves apart from the 14 female students. This habitual seating arrangement was only disrupted when a teacher assigned a research project and divided the students into study groups. On those days the students would arrange their desks in groups of four or five in order to work together. Since the girls preferred not to study with the boys—“they are lazy and leave us to do all the work,” commented the female students—Alvaro rarely found himself sitting in a group with girls during class time. But now, as Alvaro pondered that vital piece of paper, he found himself sitting on one side of the room with half the class, in the first of four rows of desks that were lined up facing the other half of the class, which was similarly arranged. Moreover, there were girls sitting on either side of and behind him, while his three male teammates were sitting together off to one side. And if the novelty of all this weren’t enough to make him fidgety and uncomfortable, he had just been called upon to initiate an educational activity that neither he nor any of his classmates had ever participated in before nor seen enacted in other classrooms. In staging the debate, not only were the students divided into teams and pitched against each other in a sequence of inquisitional turn-taking that was entirely novel, but also the traditional locus of knowledge and authority— the teacher—remained on the spatial and performative margins of the event. The debate thus had an unfamiliar pedagogic form and uncertain evaluative standards that resisted easy assimilation to other more familiar practices. No wonder Alvaro was nervous! The near-silent seconds passed. Then Alvaro, lifting his head slowly and deliberately, fixing his gaze on the students in front of him and artfully imitating the gestures of a teacher about to interrogate the class, finally spoke: “Name two laws that benefit the Venezuelan woman of today, and the dates of their enactment.” In his enunciation, his entire self seemed to embody pedagogic authority. But it was only practice.

Debating Women

●

163

Without turning his head, Alvaro’s eyes darted toward the teacher, searching for a nod, a raised eyebrow, any gesture of approval. But the teacher, her arms folded, remained impassive. She turned her head to the opposing team and awaited their response. With his boldly enunciated and succinctly stated question, Alvaro had simultaneously initiated his first debate and constituted “Venezuelan women” as a legitimate topic of study through which his performance as a student could be evaluated. Alvaro’s question was followed by silence. The members of the opposing team looked at each other, then at the teacher, then to their director. Timid hands went up then back down; the students kept glancing over to the teacher with looks of mild distress. Apparently the students had no idea who was meant to respond, and the certainty of the answer’s content was quickly overwhelmed by the ambiguity of the activity’s form. Determining Venezuelan women’s role in society was creating a panic! Ms. Martínez, impassive as ever, identified the problem and clarified the uncertainty: The person asking the question could request the answer from one person or open it up to the entire team. All eyes darted back to Alvaro who, taken aback by his additional power, fumbled a bit and then called on one of the female students across the room. “The reform of the 1982 Civil Code,” she promptly responded. He glanced down at his papers and then back up to the group. “That is correct. And the second?” he added more confidently, apparently beginning to enjoy his place at center stage. The young woman looked down at her paper, glanced around to her teammates to see whether one of them had raised their hand, to her friend beside her who was motioning to her paper, and then to Ms. Martínez to see whether she could confer with her classmate. Since the teacher said nothing, and since students were in the habit of conferring with each other and comparing notes on most class work except exams, the student bent over and read from her friend’s paper. “Two: the 1982 law against all forms of discrimination against women.” Alvaro glanced at his paper, which apparently did not include that datum. He was about to rule the answer incorrect when Maribel tapped him from behind. “Yes, it is correct,” she whispered, showing him her paper. “You have correctly answered the question,” he declared. I turned to Ms. Martínez, commenting that the student hadn’t indicated what the reformed civil code had done for women. (It eliminated all legal impediments for married women to acquire property in urban areas.) She responded that this was Alvaro’s fault, since he hadn’t asked. After all, the student did answer the question as it was posed. I asked her whether the students were aware

164

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

of that. She was sure they were, since those were the terms by which their responses to exam questions were evaluated. The opposing team then reviewed their list of questions together and their director, also a male student, responded with a “date” question: “In what year did Venezuelan women first exercise their right to vote?” he asked, invoking the vocabulary and syntax of the same textbooks that had omitted this very information. Alvaro’s team spontaneously conferred among each other, affirming cooperation as a legitimate debate practice. One of the girls raised her hand just as Alvaro replied: “Venezuelan women first exercised their right to vote in 1946.” “Yes, it is correct,” replied the interrogator. And so it went. The questions posed were of three general kinds. There were empirical questions about dates marking changes in women’s juridical status or political events, for instance. Then there were descriptive questions posed in such a way as to require short answers, as though the list of possibilities were finite, and as though there were no margins for debate: “In what three ways is women’s condition better today than it was in the past?” “What are the most common health problems for modern women?” And there were more expansive questions, similarly presented in such a way as to imply that there was only one correct answer, and that it could apply to all Venezuelan women, as a unitary category: “Is there discrimination against women today, or not?” As the students carried on the debate, I began to notice that neither team posed questions about the lives or acts of individual Venezuelan women, whether in political or cultural life. Nor did either team ask about women’s collective struggles or accomplishments. Because I had given Alvaro’s team plenty of material on both subjects, it is possible that this selective omission reflected a collective interpretation of the subject at hand: that debating the “role of Venezuelan women in society” meant considering how women’s roles were determined by society, and not vice versa. But we should also wonder whether the near exclusive celebration of famous men in textbooks, and the severe repression of women’s collective activity outside the house, made learning about Venezuelan women as historical actors an inconceivable spatial practice for that group of Santa Lucian students. While the students delineated the parameters of the debate’s content in terms that were substantively familiar or comfortable, they also modified the initial procedures for turn-taking that ran counter to the standard classroom hierarchy. About midway through the debate Elisa, one of the female students who was not on Alvaro’s team, raised her hand and asked the teacher whether she could pose a question. Ms.

Debating Women

●

165

Martinez responded that of course she could, since it was never stated that only the directors could ask the questions. (Was I imagining a glimmer of delight in her eyes in response to this young woman’s assertiveness?) Elisa promptly asked, “How was a woman looked upon in the Gomez days, 2 if she abandoned her home to work?” Several hands went up, and the Elisa called on Carmen to answer. Without looking at the papers on her desk Carmen intoned her reply as though in catechism class: “During the dictatorship, a woman who left the home to work was abandoned by her family and had to defend herself alone.” At that point Elisa, appearing rather flustered by her opponent’s confident response to her question, looked down and mumbled softly, “Yes, that is correct.” Elisa’s break with the presumed rules of interrogation and response led quickly to a more democratic debating practice, as teammates began to confer with each other in search of the most challenging questions. But this democratization of the debating process also engendered a division of intellectual labor by sex, in which the male students asked and responded exclusively to quantitative questions or questions regarding dates of events, leaving it to the female students to pose more descriptive questions and offer more narrative forms of response. Girls from each team asked questions about women’s status in the past or asked for comparisons between women’s role or situation in the past and today. (Curiously, the terms role and situation came to be used interchangeably as the debate went on, an interesting conflation of identity and context that could be interpreted as yet another sign of the students’ resistance to the construction of Venezuelan women as historical subjects.) Through their deliberations on Venezuelan women in the past and present, the female students colluded in the construction of an insistently positive account of the changes in Venezuelan women’s role in society. In every aspect of social life that was considered, Venezuelan women’s situation today was portrayed as better than in the past: In the past, women were kept in the home, but now they can work in many fields; in the past men were allowed to beat their wives, but now they are not; in the past there was discrimination against women, but now there is not. This comparative account of Venezuelan women’s role in society was based on a construction of women’s present situation, not as a progression out of the past but rather through a morally inflected, binary opposition to the past. In this sense, the students’ apparently historical account of Venezuelan women’s role or situation was notably different from the progressive, evolutionary framework they tended to use in narrating their individual life courses, a framework that was more likely

166

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

than a deterministic binarism to open a space for individual or social agency in the course of life events. The fact that male students quantified the role of Venezuelan women in society while the female students narrated and historized that role was not the only difference in the practices through which they constructed and construed their subject matter. Through their referencing of the subject of their debate, the male and female students positioned themselves differently in relation to that subject and each other. The male students used only the third person, “she” or “they” but never “you”—not daring, or perhaps refusing, to include their female companions within the objectified category of “Venezuelan women.” If generic women could be the subject of debate, of formal education, and thus of history, the women they knew could not. Where the male students were uniform in their referencing of “Venezuelan women in society,” the female students were not. Their subject pronouns included “they,” “she,” or “we.” But the young women’s referencing had its own consistency, a pattern of usage through which the girls implicated themselves in their binary historical account of Venezuelan women’s role in society in a particular way. When they discussed the role of Venezuelan women in the past, the female students had recourse to the third person singular—“she.” In this way, Venezuelan women became a unitary Other when presented as the victim of a past machista barbarism—a past from which female students wished to distinguish their own situations and possibilities, as well as the state of their nation. And yet, although the female students were consistent in distinguishing themselves from Venezuelan women of the past, they were less consistent in their referencing of contemporary women, alternating ambivalently between “they” and “we” as if to index their uncertain efforts to construct themselves as modern women in-themaking. Whether they felt too young or too modest to think of themselves as Venezuelan women, or whether they were uncertain whether the optimistic portrait they had created pertained to them, I can’t say. But the uses of pronouns would seem to suggest whose role in society, for the students, was and wasn’t subject to debate. Resolving Women If the young women in Ms. Martínez’s class were reluctant to identify themselves with Venezuelan women in the past, they nonetheless rendered the history of Venezuelan women’s role in society in celebratory terms that acknowledged women’s past sufferings, and perhaps implicitly

Debating Women

●

167

validated women’s struggles. At the same time, the modern-day scenario these young women colluded in creating was at odds with the everyday realities they regularly discussed amongst themselves and even with me in our discussions: realities faced by their mothers, aunts, sisters, and themselves. What happened to their personal, historical understanding of the value of a career as a tool “to defend oneself when your husband leaves you”? What happened to their ongoing identification of the repressive practices and beliefs of their fathers, brothers, and boyfriends? Subtly, stupendously, the female students had gradually occupied the performative center of the debate, appropriating the process of constructing Venezuelan women as their own. And yet, through the spatial practices of the debate these young women seemed to have created yet one more dream of hopeful unreality. Ten minutes before class was to end, Ms. Martínez’s mild voice cut gently and abruptly through the bustle of the debate in full gear. “Team One, prepare your last question.” As the students huddled together to decide on a question, Ms. Martínez explained to me how she was going to determine the outcome of the debate: “I will give each team points for the quality of each question and the accuracy of each answer.” As the students waited with anticipation, their gazes and bodies shifted toward Ms. Martínez and the familiar configuration of knowledge and authority was quickly reestablished through the practice of evaluation. “Well,” announced Ms. Martínez, almost cracking a smile. “I have to congratulate both teams: Team One got the most points for questions, but Team Two got more points for answers.” “You mean there is no winner, Profesora?” blurted out one of the male students, appearing rather crestfallen. “No, I mean you have carried out a very good debate.” Ms. Martínez smiled. “Class is dismissed.”

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 8

Studying Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis For me, personally, being an adolescent is, as they say, very difficult. They say it is because of all the changes, you know, that are going on inside of you. It is like, in a way you are an adult, you know, ready to take the next step in life, but in a way you still feel like a youth. Reflections of Magda, a fourth-year Liceo Parra student during our first group project meeting on the topic of “adolescent pregnancy.” I don’t feel that these problems adolescents face, you know, like teen motherhood, have much to do with our age, that is, how old we are. In my opinion, it has more to do with the situation, you know, the crisis the country is going through. That’s why it’s so hard to be a young person today. Comments of Rosy, a fourth-year Liceo Parra student during our second group project meeting on the topic of “adolescent pregnancy.” Adolescence is made in and through the passage of time. Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence.

Adolescence and the Crisis of Fieldwork It was the end of May and the year was 1992. Santa Lucian families were adjusting their daily routines to accommodate the beginning of the rainy season, Liceo Parra students were entering the last of four terms (lapsos) of the school year, and I was entering my fourteenth month of fieldwork. The repetitive cycle of the region’s two seasons, the progressive spiraling

170

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

of the school year (with one year supposedly preparing students for the next), and generational cycle of family life, were three distinct—at times compatible, at times clashing—temporal modalities that Liceo Parra students engaged with, accommodated, and resisted in the course of their daily lives coming of age.1 Meanwhile, my efforts as a novice fieldworker to engage with those local modalities, always in relation to another, exogenous, modality of fieldwork (situated within a linear, directional time line of graduate study toward the anticipated but uncertain finality of a degree), was a key facet of my work of ethnographic understanding. That process, which I characterized in the book’s preface as entailing repeated, if unpredictable, moments of cultural confusion and clarity—the episodic crisis anthropologists refer to as culture shock—was inevitably also the process of self-definition. Crisis, Benigno Trigo proposed in his extended essay on the nationalist discourses of nineteenth-century Latin American literati, “is the result of a series of parallel, intersecting, and sometimes repeating timelines” (2000, 11). If we replace the linear concept of a time line with the more encompassing notion of temporal modality, then Trigo’s proposition suggests one possible basis for drawing a comparison, metaphoric if not material, between the quotidian experiences of Liceo Parra students and those of the foreign ethnographer who was trying to understand their experiences. Ill-defined yet overdetermined and chronically unsettling, perhaps the perpetually transitional experience of fieldwork was not unlike the experience of adolescence that Magda and Rosy, the two students whose comments open this chapter, worked to comprehend. Or is my suggestion of a similarity between the temporal disjunctures and cognitive confusions of that very modern Euro-U.S. practice of fieldwork, and the uncertainties and upheavals associated with that equally modern concept of adolescence, one more essentialization that the concept of crisis provokes? Can we use the same discursive practices that reify and legitimize adolescence or fieldwork in order to denaturalize them, to explore them as cultural constructions? In Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, Nancy Lesko (2001) does exactly that, beginning with what she refers to as “confident characterizations,” or “grounding assumptions” about teenaged youth (2001, 2) as the basis for engaging in a critical historical investigation of the development of modern concepts of adolescence. Through her “history of the present” (2), Lesko challenges and pushes beyond sociohistorical critiques that may relativize the concept of adolescence historically and sociologically, but do so without challenging the dominant ideas that underlie, and are reproduced through, contemporary

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

171

explanations of the adolescent experience (7). By exposing the concept of adolescence to critical scrutiny, Lesko provides insights into the relation between modern adolescence and “broad cultural transformations of time, race, gender and citizenship” (8). In this chapter, I draw on my experience of doing ethnographic work among “adolescent youth” in order to contribute to the de-essentialization of the two quintessentially modern developmental concepts of adolescence and fieldwork. I begin by exploring some of the local conditions and concepts, temporal modalities and material changes, that informed the ways Santa Lucian students and adults participated discursively in what Lesko (2001) refers to as the “cultural construction of adolescence.” Consistent with the themes of this book, I pay particular attention to the interplay of schooling, crisis, and negligent patriarchy in local constructions of adolescence. Although Lesko’s Foucauldian archeology of adolescence is focused on the twentieth-century United States, her attention to the ways a modern temporal sensibility based in social evolutionary notions of development and progress inform and find expression in the concept of adolescence, is particularly germane to my exploration of the construction of adolescence in Santa Lucía. In Santa Lucía, this progressive, developmentalist modality was locally substantiated in the educational institutions of primary and in particular secondary education, more than any other state apparatus. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, in Venezuela secondary education in particular was officially rationalized through its patriarchally rendered, dual purposes of supporting students’ psychic and civic evolution—from children supported by their families to worker citizens who supported the nation as it provided for them. At the same time, these modern notions linking the development of the person with the progress of the nation, existed in tension with other ways of experiencing and rendering the passage of time—in particular cyclical patterns of the seasons, agricultural production, and the family life cycle. In the next part of this chapter, I consider how Santa Lucians drew upon those various modalities in the production and circulation of local discourses that appeared to interconnect adolescence, local changes, and national upheavals—often articulated through the concept of crisis. In Act Your Age, Lesko deploys her cultural construction of adolescence toward the end of encouraging new concepts and practices through which adults can engage with and advocate for youth via nonhierarchical relations, acknowledging that she does not deal directly with the subjective experiences of specific youth (2001, 9–10, 13, 190–194). My interest in the practice of cultural construction is somewhat different. Picking up my thematic thread of examining Liceo Parra students’

172

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

agentive engagement in their own coming of age, I use the denaturalization of adolescence not only to historicize the concept but also to shift the locus of its construction from the inevitable reproduction of a dominant framework, to a decentered, Gramscian process in which youth, and in particular secondary school students, engage with, struggle against, and intervene in the informal and institutional production of their identities as adolescents.2 In the last part of this chapter, I address this issue through a consideration of the ethnographic and educational work I did with a small group of fourth-year students as they prepared a project on “adolescent mothers.” By focusing on a series of meetings in which these students and I examined, questioned, and reconsidered their own notions of teen motherhood as a manifestation of the “crisis of adolescence in Venezuela today,” I call into question modernist notions about adolescence as a universal stage of individual developmental characterized by hormonally driven, psychic crisis. I approach those meetings—a conjuncture of the students’ schoolwork and my ethnographic work—as a moment of mutual selffashioning, the girls as adolescent students and me as an adult ethnographer. In a sense, this discussion of my collaboration with those four students brings me full circle to the point of shared self-definition that occurred with my young visitors Veronica and Andrea who had come to me eight months earlier for help with their English homework—a meeting I considered at length in the introduction. By presenting a moment toward the end of my fieldwork in which I broke with the conventions of ethnographic participant-observation, engaging with the students in a critical, field-based inquiry into the topic of teen motherhood, my aim is to contribute to critiques of fieldwork as an essentialist and essentializing enterprise. Through a reflection on my work as an advisorethnographer, I consider how practices of dialogue and co-construction can also lead to cultural understanding. Signs of Sameness, Times of Change In high mountain areas like Santa Lucía, the rainy season was marked by periods of ebb and flow: strong rains or light drizzles, dense fogs or misty clouds, the sun peaking out most every day for a just a spell—nothing like the hot, torrential rains of the tropical rainforests. The advent of the rains meant that students often walked to school in a cool drizzle that abated by midday and returned by late afternoon. It also meant that the local rationing of water for residential and agricultural uses (with the municipal council favoring the producers’ irrigation needs over house-

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

173

holds’ domestic needs, some of my neighbors complained) would taper off. Many families had already stopped storing water in big buckets to make it through the daily shut-off times that occurred at the height of the dry season. Only at the peak of the season were the rains heavy and steady enough to produce water damage in homes, flooding of streets or stream banks, and periodic rockslides onto the roads. Santa Lucians anticipated these inconveniences by tapping their leaky roofs, placing bowls and buckets under the low points of their roofs where rainwater tended to enter, relocating their clotheslines under roof overhangs, and altering their road travel to avoid blocked or dangerous passages. Local conversation about the regularity of the seasonal cycle and the quotidian activities that were responses to that cycle, was one facet of the discourse of predictability through which Santa Lucians represented their town in ahistorical terms—as a place where nothing ever happened, where things were always the same (see chapters 1 and 2). As I have suggested in earlier chapters, Santa Lucians further naturalized local stability by contrasting it to national instability. The construction of national instability itself rested on ambiguous conceptual ground, historicized as it was through a discourse of crisis that assumed an idealized national trajectory based on stable, progressive change—much as the representation of adolescence as crisis depended on its location along an otherwise predictable and progressive developmental trajectory. However, the certainty of local stability was itself up for debate. For every avowal I heard from a Santa Lucian proclaiming the invariability of the seasonal cycle and the exceptionality of natural disasters, there was a comment to be made by her neighbor or relative about the increasing unpredictability of the weather and changes in the seasons. Most Santa Lucian adults I spoke with reckoned that the dry season was hotter and lasted longer than in the past and that the rains were fiercer and mudslides more frequent and severe. Most also thought that teenaged youth were becoming increasingly defiant, unruly, and unpredictable. At the same time, there was considerable debate as to what was causing the changes in the seasons—just as there was considerable debate, among youth and their parents, as to what was causing teenaged youth to be increasingly confused and lost (as youth characterized their affective state), or disrespectful and difficult (as parents characterized their teenage children). Some Santa Lucians feared that the climatic changes were caused by the growth in local agricultural activity: “all those trucks racing up and down the roads, spewing out exhaust, are heating things up,” a local day worker suggested to me as we waited, sweating under the midday sun, for a bus to the nearby town. But his traveling companion disagreed,

174

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

considering the erratic weather to be part of the inevitable but unpredictable cycle of nature that farmers have had to endure “since the Indians first cultivated in the mountains.” Mr. Castillo, a smallholding farmer in his early 40s whose family had been farming in the region for several generations—and the father of Alisa, one of the fourth-year students doing the Psychology project on adolescent mothers—was someone I had occasion to chat with periodically, as he and I frequented the same coffee shop in the early mornings. In one of several conversations about local trends in farming, Mr. Castillo recounted how his father had switched from the cultivation of potatoes and carrots to cabbage, lettuce, and other greens with the advent of what he described as modern technologies and government subsidies in the early 1970s. The expansion of the family’s farm production had coaxed Mr. Castillo away from his secondary school studies—his dream had been to eventually get a degree in agronomy—and back onto the farm with his father. Thanks to those modern technological advancements, Mr. Castillo said with what sounded like a twinge of irony in his voice, his labor was no longer needed in the fields. Instead, he and his father invested the family profits into a dispatching enterprise with two of his older brothers. Despite the prosperity that the local agricultural boom has brought to his family, Mr. Castillo said he worried that the cyclical, predictable quality of Santa Lucian life was increasingly disrupted by extremes of rains or droughts. Like many agronomists at the university he never attended, Mr. Castillo attributed the changes to the overexploitation of the valley’s fertile lands, in particular the frequent crop rotations that the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers permitted (Drost et al. 1999; Velázquez 2003). “The soil is becoming thin and tired, just like me,” he commented through a wry smile. In certain ways, discussions among Santa Lucian adults about changes in the cycle of seasons were similar to discussions about the impact of socalled modern life on local youth. Both were characterized by a tension between the attribution of changes to natural causes or to the advent of modern life. A conversation among eight members of the Volunteer Ladies Club of Santa Lucía during a meeting I attended, exemplifies the discourse about youth that circulated among Santa Lucian adults. Reflecting over coffee about what they described as the lack of respect and proper upbringing (“educación”) among young people today, some of the women proposed that it was inevitable. Mrs. Calderón summed up that position with the commonly heard refrain that adolescence was “an always difficult stage” (see Levinson 2000, 14). An older member of the group, Mrs. Lázarro, questioned the refrain. She argued that in her

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

175

day, young people were respectful of their elders, young men were hardworking, and young women took care of themselves (a euphemistic way of saying that they didn’t get pregnant, at least not out of wedlock). Mrs. Rodríguez concurred with this assessment, associating youth behavior with the wantonness (libertinaje) of modern times and urban influences. But much as Mr. Castillo recognized good and bad in modern agricultural developments, Mrs. Salinas complicated the implications of modernity for youth, quoting her husband who wondered whether all the educational opportunities that had come to young people in Santa Lucía weren’t also responsible for some of their defiant thinking and wayward behavior. All of which is to suggest that the debates Santa Lucians engaged in around the nature, causes, and relative value of climatic stability and change, were discursively and morally similar to—at times intertwined with—discussions and debates about local and national productive, political, and social changes, including purported changes in the behaviors and demeanors of adolescent youth. Given the prevalence of these kinds of discussions in Santa Lucian homes, streets, coffee shops, newspaper stands, and secondary school classrooms (see, for instance, chapter 5), it bears considering whether local discourses of cyclicality and stability, progress and its disruption, crisis and change, contributed to the ways Liceo Parra students experienced and made sense of adolescence—that stage of life they were purportedly in and passing through. Stages of Life and Learning As I proposed in opening this chapter, the temporal modality through which Liceo Parra students engaged with the routines of school life was that of the four terms. It was common for students I chatted with informally about how school was going, to frame their answers in relation to the particular school term. “Well, it’s still hard to say, since we’ve only just started the first term”; or “It’s going alright, but I’ll be glad when the second term is over”; or “So-so. We just started third term and already we have a bunch of tests coming up.” Toward the end of May, the temporal point of reference for this chapter, the topic of the final term of the school year came up in several of my conversations with students. Nelia, a first year (seventh grade) student in my Cultural Center English class, was looking forward to her final term. “I am beginning to feel comfortable at the school,” she told me after class. “I am getting used to the teachers and the older students, and the homework. Now that I know what to expect, it’s not so scary anymore, being a

176

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

liceo student.” Like other seventh-grade students I knew, by the fourth term Nelia had become comfortable not only with the educational routines and demands of secondary schooling, but with her new identity as a liceo student—an identity closely tied to that of adolescence. But for fifth-year students who were getting ready to graduate, the fourth term of the last year was a stressful and uncertain time. Such was the situation Rosita faced. She was studying for her final exams as well as for the placement tests in Biological Sciences. However, she and other students in her cohort knew that, even with good grades and high test scores, there was no guarantee of getting a place in a university program, especially for students like Rosita whose parents were not inclined to send her far away to study. Spaces were few in popular fields such as the natural sciences. Moreover, it was generally assumed that parents with money bought their children’s way into their program of choice, making the competition even tougher. “You would think I would be happy about graduating,” Rosita commented as we chatted after my observation of her Chemistry lab. “But I’m kind of worried, since I don’t know what I will be doing a year from now.” There was also a lot of pressure not to continue studying, Rosita added, because of the difficult economic situation. She might have to get a job, or help her older sister who had two children already. “People always say that adolescence is a difficult period to get through. But I would say this stage is nothing compared to what I will be confronting after I graduate.” Meanwhile, Rosita’s father wanted her to either get a job or get married. “He is worried that I will end up single and pregnant, like so many girls my age who graduate with nothing to do,” she told me. As I discuss later in this chapter, teen pregnancy was a signifier that effectively contained and condensed the complexity of adolescence as a period of sexual unruliness that was somehow both inevitable and historically conditioned, while also sustaining the inconsistent moral terms by which youth and adults alike judged male and female adolescent behavior. Moreover, there was a common perception—expressed by youth and adults—that the uncertain and often extended period between secondary school graduation and enrollment in a higher educational program created a dangerous temporal breach during which time young women were particularly susceptible to becoming pregnant. In this sense, the figure of the adolescent mother was overdetermined, produced at the intersection of the negligence of the patriarchal teacher state and the negligence of the patriarchal family. While in general parents exerted fewer pressures and imposed fewer constraints on sons than on daughters, older male students were not

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

177

exempt from the pressures of graduation. This was a regular topic of my conversations with Marco, a sociable, at-times-philosophical, fourth-year student, one of the few male students at Liceo Parra to choose the Humanities track. “You think that each year it’s the same thing: dictation, study, quizzes, projects, and exams, term after term. So each year the routine gets more familiar. But you have to be careful, because the material we study, that gets harder.” I asked Marco what it was like to be approaching his last year. “In some ways it’s a relief because, you know, you can see the end in sight. But in some ways it’s difficult because, well, you don’t know what’s coming next.” But, I proposed, he knew what was coming next because he was planning to go on to study journalism, wasn’t he? Yes, he concurred, that was what he planned to do. But you never knew for sure. It depended on whether his test scores and grades would be good enough, whether there would be a spot for him in the department at the university in Zulia, because the ULA didn’t have a Communications program, and whether university classes would even be held, given all the disturbances and strikes. “Once you finish secondary school, nothing is certain anymore, really,” he sighed. I asked him whether his mother, a retired schoolteacher and widow, had any particular expectations for him. He said that she was generally supportive, but he suspected that she was worried about him not going right on to the university. “Often she makes comments about young people these days, how they are not as hard-working or responsible as in her generation. I think she fears I will wander off to the city and pick up bad habits, or never come back, like some of the other guys my age. But I’m not like that. I don’t have those tendencies,” he insisted. The trepidations Rosita and Marco expressed as they explored the unsettling uncertainty of life after graduation were among the sentiments I heard expressed by those older students I had the chance to get to know individually. (Rarely did students express those kinds of worries about the future in the whole-class conversations I audiotaped. As the reader may recall from previous chapters, in those formal, perhaps more mutually performative settings, perhaps imbued with the expectations associated with the classroom setting, students tended to convey their plans with apparent certainty and confidence.) What makes Rosita’s and Marco’s comments striking in the context of this chapter is how they made use of behaviors and dispositions associated with adolescence to explore their experiences and to express their own sense of self. Both students distinguished their behavior, and themselves as kinds of people, from the apparently normative assumptions about adolescent behavior and personalities that circulated within their families and community. In

178

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

doing so, they were able to give meaning to their uncertain future, while perhaps asserting a modicum of individual agency about the way that future might unfold. In this sense, Rosita’s and Marco’s comments are indicative, not only of the epistemic weight that the discourse of adolescence had in Santa Lucía in the early 1990s,3 but more particularly of how that discourse linked adolescence to schooling, and in particular to secondary schooling. Nonetheless, the discursive intertwining of adolescence and secondary schooling was as varied as it was pervasive. For instance, some parents attributed their teenage children’s poor academic performance to laziness or lack of drive, qualities they associated with adolescence. Other parents, in particular fathers who associated diligence and effort more narrowly with work (be it agricultural, commercial, or vocational), complained that secondary schooling contributed to their children’s laziness. I heard similar disparities in the causal connections parents made between secondary schooling and other troubling behaviors they associated with “this generation of young people.” Some parents said that being in school kept them out of trouble, focused, and working hard; others expressed concern about the bad influences they were exposed to at the Liceo, influences the parents bemoaned having no control over. It is perhaps not surprising that within the normative framework of negligent patriarchy, the influence of secondary schooling was often contemplated by parents in relation to teenage girls’ sexual behavior. Secondary schooling was either the institution that kept girls from getting into trouble by “directing them toward their studies,” as the mother of a ninth grader proposed, or facilitated their getting into trouble, as several fathers I knew were quick to pronounce—particularly within earshot of their teenage daughters. Adolescence as presented in school textbooks and classrooms was markedly different from its discursive rendering in household conversations. Beginning in the sixth grade, adolescence was included as a curricular unit in the Family Education and Citizenship class. As the course title suggests, students were presented with the concept of adolescent development as it related to their relationships with family and peers. Students as young as 10 or 11 learned that adolescents experienced significant physical and psychological changes, that their primary challenge was the formation of their identities, and that they associated increasingly with their peers rather than with members of their family. But this was not problematic. Rather, according to the course text, in their peer groups adolescents found “understanding, support, approval, etcetera” (Rodríguez Benítez 1989, 378). In striking contrast to the assumption of

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

179

Santa Lucian parents that adolescent girls tended not to be able to control their sexuality, the Ministry of Education textbooks proclaimed that “adolescent females are better able to repress their sexual drives, whereas male adolescents tended to externalize them, influenced by their environment” (377). These same propositions were reiterated in the second term of the eighth-grade class by the same name. What I found particularly striking about the eighth-grade curriculum as it was presented in the textbook and by Liceo Parra eighth-grade teachers was that the unit identifying the psychosocial upheavals and vulnerabilities characterizing adolescence was followed by a unit identifying the institutions of the Venezuelan State that guaranteed the rights and protections of its youth. While the textbook focused on the Ministry of the Family and its organs, Liceo Parra teachers focused on the school. “The purpose of schooling,” declared Mr. Guerrero, “is to guide you through this difficult stage toward a productive life as a citizen and worker.” Implicitly, secondary education was provided by the Venezuelan State to its youth in order to serve as a stable, predictable conduit facilitating young people’s otherwise naturally difficult transition through adolescence.4 For graduating Santa Lucian students like Rosita and Marco, however, the institutionalized pathway from secondary to higher education was just one more uncertain road to choose from as they navigated their journey into adulthood. Venezuelan Adolescents Today The third Thursday in that same month of May, I arrived home after a day of classroom visits at Liceo Parra, checked to make sure the pots I had placed beneath the two low points in my roof were catching the slow drips of rainwater into the house, and put up water for coffee. I was just settling down to prepare for my evening English class at the Cultural Center when I heard a tapping at my front gate. Four students, all of them teenage girls, had come to ask whether I would serve as their advisor (asesora) for a project for their Psychology class. I was expecting them. The previous week Ms. Romero, the fourthyear Psychology teacher, had approached me at the snack bar between classes. I was chatting with Maritza, the young woman who had just come back to work at the school after having her baby. The young mother, who looked to me to be in her late teens, sold the empanadas, meat pies, and juices that her mother-in-law made for the school. Maritza raved about her beautiful baby—“she is so good, so quiet!”—

180

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

and told me how hard it was to leave her month-old daughter with her widowed mother while she worked. I asked her why she didn’t switch jobs with her mother for a few months. She explained that her mother suffered from high blood pressure and it would be too hard for her to be on her feet so long. “Besides,” the young mother commented, “I like being here at the school. I was never able to study past primary, because my father died and I had to work. But maybe when my daughter is older I can go back to school. Here in the high school they have the night program for adult students, and that is what I would like to do.” I was going to ask Maritza what her husband thought about her idea of going back to school (a risky question given that I did not know whether Maritza was married or even involved with the baby’s father), when Ms. Romero approached. Her arms overflowing with textbooks and papers, she asked if she could interrupt our conversation for a moment to request a favor of me. She had assigned a project for her fourth-year Humanities students, a report and presentation on “The Venezuelan Adolescent Today.” Ms. Romero explained that she always liked to assign report topics her students would find interesting and relevant. “The textbook presents the basic concepts about adolescence. I thought it would be interesting if they could apply those concepts to themselves.” She paused and smiled. “After all, they are adolescents.” I smiled back somewhat uncomfortably, realizing that in doing so I was colluding with the teacher in her construction of her students as a particular class of people, without quite knowing what being an adolescent meant to Ms. Romero, to her students, or to myself for that matter. Ms. Romero continued, explaining to me that she had told her students that each group was to work with an advisor. This, she emphasized, was a requirement for graduation: Each student had to do one project each year of the Diversified Cycle, in which they received supervision by an “expert in the field.” Since I was doing research on how students’ sexuality affected their school achievement, she said—representing my work in terms that had become commonplace at the school by then—it occurred to her that maybe I could advise one of the project groups. I resisted the temptation to call into question my purported expertise in the area of adolescent psychology. Instead, I told Ms. Romero that I would be more than willing to help in any way I could, and asked if she had a particular group in mind for me to work with. She explained that she had divided the class into five small groups. Since the girls never wanted to work with the boys (“the girls always complain that the boys leave them to do all the work,” she told me, echoing the complaints I had heard many times from female students), she had assigned each of

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

181

the four boys in the class to one group. She had hoped I would work with the one group of all girls, who had chosen as their topic “adolescent mothers” (“las madres adolescentes”). I told the teacher that there would certainly be a lot of material on this topic in the news press—in fact, I had been saving clippings on the subject—and asked what she expected of the students and what my role should be. Ms. Romero explained that the goal was to encourage the students to do most of the work on their own while giving them some guidance. “In some ways these older students need more attention than the younger ones. They get so preoccupied with themselves; you know how youth at this age tend to be. They’re more interested in spending time with their friends, watching novelas.” “Especially the girls,” she added. “The boys get themselves into problems, but they know how far they can go. But some of these girls, well, they don’t seem to want to behave like young ladies. I don’t know where these bad influences come from.” It wasn’t until I was writing up my notes from our conversation later that afternoon that I noticed that Ms. Romero differently contrasted girls and boys as students, and girls and boys as teens. I never did get a chance to ask Ms. Romero what she thought of that difference; nor did I have the chance to ask her who, exactly, the girls were behaving badly with, if not the boys who apparently “know how far to go.” I also wondered whether Ms. Romero, and the four students I would be advising, would consider Maritza, the young mother behind the snack bar counter, to be an “adolescent mother.” Was she an example of that burgeoning class of young women,5 subjects of newspaper articles and television news commentaries that alternately described teenage mothers as “living in a state of crisis,”6 victims of the country’s crisis, or themselves the “reproducing agents of the critical socio-economic situation” that caused their “premature pregnancy” (El Nuevo País, February 1993)? Or was that young woman simply following in the path of her mother and her grandmother before her, both of whom, I had learned in prior conversations, had their first children before the age of 20? What were the criteria for “adolescent motherhood?” Was it purely a matter of age? Or did one’s civil status—as married or single—determine whether a young woman would be the victim of the scourge of that modern scarlet letter? After all, according to an article in the regional newspaper El Merideño (April 1992), by 1991, 70 percent of all adolescent mothers in Venezuela were single. I also wondered about Maritza’s self-perception. The afternoon following our conversation, I wrote myself a note in the margins of my field journal that I should try to engage in a conversation with Maritza about the topic. But it was something I never did feel comfortable broaching

182

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

with her, sensing rightly or wrongly that it might offend. She apparently self-identified as undereducated, given that she aspired to return to school. But did she consider herself to be an “adolescent mother”? Given the similarities between herself and her own mother, how would Maritza, and how should we, interpret her own young motherhood? As evidence of national crisis or regional stability? Besides, unlike her mother, this young woman expressed a desire to return to school, to be someone in life. Looked at through the eyes of certain kinds of feminist standards—those that correlated increased educational levels with improved social status and conditions—the experience and perspective of this young mother could potentially be interpreted as evidence of women’s progress. But I’ll never know how Ms. Romero, or Maritza, would have responded to such questions. Instead, my conversation with the teacher had ended with an agreement about the nature and extent of the work I would do with the four Psychology students. I would meet with them two or three times, help them locate information on their topic, help them analyze the information they collected, and possibly offer suggestions on how they might present their report to the class. I ended my journal entry on that day by noting that I was looking forward to finding out what Ms. Romero’s four fourth-year students made of adolescent motherhood, and worrying whether I would be of much help in their research project on the topic. The First Meeting: Defining Adolescent Motherhood My initial Thursday afternoon meeting with the four Psychology students began much like other school-related visits I had with groups of Liceo Parra students. While the four girls found seats in the living room around the coffee table, I brought them demitasses of sweetened coffee. As they sipped their coffees, I asked whether they could first introduce themselves to me, since the only student I knew outside of the school was Mr. Castillo’s daughter, Alisa. Alisa smiled and confirmed timidly that we had met before, when she was in town with her father. It turned out that the four girls had a lot in common. All four lived with both parents and had older and younger siblings. The girls described their fathers’ occupations as “working in agriculture,” but what this meant varied. Joly’s father transported produce to large cities east of the Andes; Alisa’s father, as we know, ran a produce dispatching operation, but did not himself travel; Magda’s father managed their small family farm; and Rosy’s father was a day worker who also rented out the service of plowing fields, as he had two pairs of oxen. Three of the students described

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

183

their mothers as “tending to the duties of the house.” Only Magda’s mother worked “outside the home,” helping the owner of a nearby corner grocery store in the afternoons before she and her younger siblings came home from school. They all described their families as poor, but as having what was necessary to live comfortably. We then talked briefly about school, what they liked and didn’t like about their classes, whether they were planning to graduate—“Oh yes, of course,” they said almost in unison—and if they had thought about what they would do after they graduated. Three of the girls said they knew they wanted to continue their studies, to have a career, but they were not yet sure in what field. Only Joly, the merchant’s daughter, knew what she wanted to do. “I chose Humanities to learn different languages, especially English, because I want to go into Tourism.” Joly was fascinated by Tourism because you get to travel a lot, she explained. I asked her whether that was because her father traveled for his work. She giggled at my suggestion. “Well, maybe, although I want to travel to other countries.” She then blushed and added, “But he doesn’t know that,” and the other three girls giggled knowingly. A long pause followed their self-disclosures, and it occurred to me that it might be helpful to chat a bit about the project topic. “So,” I asked, “what do you think about studying adolescence in your Psychology class?” I expected they might be uncomfortable talking about a topic that was constructed around the intimacies of physical and psychological changes, and whose subject matter necessarily included them. But to my surprise, they plunged right in. Rosy said that she liked this part of Psychology class the most because it made sense to her. “We talk about how our bodies are changing and how these changes in things like hormones cause the adolescent to have different moods.” Joly commented that studying adolescence in Psychology class was important because it helped her understand what she was going through. “Sometimes I would think that maybe I was going crazy, because I would feel fine one day and feel very depressed the next day. But studying adolescence in school helps.” When I asked if she could explain how it helped, Magda chimed in: “I think I know what Joly means. It’s like you suddenly realize there is nothing wrong with you. It’s just part of this stage of adolescence.” A comment Joly punctuated by noting that, “Yes, you realize that what you’re going through is normal. I think our teacher said that it is a natural part of human development, that everyone goes through it.” The three girls bounced comments back and forth, alternating between generalizations about adolescence and specific self-reflections.

184

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

Alisa, the most reserved of the group, sat quietly until I asked her what she thought about the class. She paused, looking perhaps for a way to reflect on the topic without exploring or exposing herself. Then she commented that she liked the way the teacher presented the material, because she made it interesting. She recalled that they had studied adolescence previously, in their Family Education class. “But then we just read about adolescence in a textbook.” Alisa said that sometimes her [male] teacher made jokes about the part about sexual development and that made her embarrassed. “But Professor Romero, she is very open, and she never jokes about it. When she talks about these things, like physical development, or rebelliousness, or adolescent mothers, she is very serious.” Alisa’s reference to adolescent motherhood allowed me to shift the conversation to their projects. I asked them how they had selected the topic. Magda explained that they were supposed to do their reports on something about Venezuelan adolescents in present-day life that they could relate to. “They’re always talking about adolescent mothers on television, or in the newspapers. We know it’s a big problem these days in our country.” I asked whether it was a big problem here in Santa Lucía as well. There was a pause. “Well, for us, no,” Rosy said to a chorus of giggles. “I mean, not us or our families.” But, Joly pointed out, they all knew one or two muchachas from school who were now mothers. “Yes,” the others concurred, “there was so-and-so, who had dropped out when she got pregnant; and another girl who got married right out of school and had her baby and didn’t continue her studies . . . oh yes, and that other girl, what’s her name, who had her baby and now she’s going to night school. Yes, she moved in with her marido’s family, didn’t she?” As the girls reviewed the cases of “adolescent mothers” they knew, I found myself struck by the range of scenarios they described. So I asked them what, from their points of view, made all these young women “adolescent mothers.” The girls thought for a minute. Alisa proposed that it was because they were all youth. “That is, they are not adults yet.” I asked if she was referring to their age, and she said yes, they were not really old enough to have children. “Yes,” Joly chimed in, “this is why they call it ‘early pregnancy.’ That’s why it is a social problem. Because one is not yet ready to be a mother at that age.” But I was not convinced that they were any more sure about what constituted adolescent motherhood than I was. Positioning myself precariously at the boundary between ethnographer and educator, I suggested that their mothers, or aunts, or grandmothers, may have had children before they were in their twenties. Had they been “adolescent mothers?”

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

185

Magda could see where I was going with my questions. She proposed that adolescent mothers are girls who get pregnant by accident. The others concurred. Yes, so you become a single mother. That was the real problem. Then what about the Santa Lucian young woman they knew who had gotten married and had a child right out of secondary school? Was she no longer an adolescent mother? We went round and round a bit more, struggling to fit the pervasive media images and discourse that posed adolescent motherhood as intrinsically a problem or a danger, to the examples of actual young Santa Lucian mothers they knew or knew about. As the dinner hour approached, we decided that we did not have to resolve the definitional confusion, but rather that their first task would be to do some research about adolescent motherhood in order to come up with a definition they could all agree upon. They would use public library texts, newspapers, and magazines as their sources, and I assisted by handing over my folder of newspaper clippings on the subject. We agreed to meet again at my home the following Monday. The Second Meeting: Reconstructing Adolescent Motherhood and Expertise The following Monday afternoon, the four students returned for our second meeting as planned. It had been raining a bit harder that day, and so the process of settling in involved an initial shaking out of umbrellas, hanging up of jackets, and unveiling of the notebooks that each girl had carefully wrapped in plastic bags and tucked into her backpack. As the girls got their materials ready, apologizing for each drop of rainwater that fell on my concrete floor, I served the requisite coffee. They took their seats around the living room coffee table. Anticipating that the girls might once again be reticent to initiate conversation, and wanting to satisfy the role of “advisor,” I had prepared a meeting agenda. But before I had a chance to launch into my first agenda topic—“review research sources”—Magda pulled out her notebook and displayed the newspaper clippings she had collected and the notes she had taken from the public library encyclopedia and a university-level Psychology text. As I reviewed her notebook, nodding approvingly as I felt she expected, Magda explained that she had worked with Joly. Meanwhile, Alisa took out her notebook showing the work she had done with Rosy, which included copying selected passages from the newspaper clippings I had lent them and taking notes from two teenoriented magazines, one of them a Spanish language version of the magazine Seventeen. As I looked over their notebooks, adopting an air of

186

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

authority expected of my role, I asked them how their research had gone. “Very well,” they replied in unison, and then waited for my next question. They were eager to share the fruits of their labor but apparently not ready to lead the discussion. That was clearly my role as advisor. So I recognized the extent of the work they had done and asked them what they had learned about adolescent motherhood. For the next half hour or more, with media images and headlines spread out over the living room table, the girls and I explored the material they had come back with, considering the range of descriptions of and claims about “early pregnancy” and adolescent mothers. I asked the girls if the resources had provided them with a clear definition of adolescent motherhood, to which they responded by quoting headlines. “This article says girls get pregnant too young if they have no motivation.” “This one says more girls who drop out of school get pregnant.” “This one says that most adolescent mothers are single.” I suggested we distinguish between statements describing adolescent motherhood and propositions about how it came about. The only consensus we could come to about adolescent mothers was their age, and their “stage of life”: They were all under 20 and all adolescents. “That’s correct,” Joly said. “Because that’s what causes this problem. Having children too young.” Alicia suggested that it wasn’t the mother’s age, but what made her decide to have the baby. “It’s because when you’re an adolescent you act without thinking sometimes. Or you just do what your boyfriend wants, without thinking about the future.” This was the point at which Rosy made the comment with which I opened this chapter, that for her the problem of teen motherhood was the result of the situation the country was in. “Look at how many girls get pregnant after they graduate, while they are waiting for a space in a university program. That’s not their fault. That’s because of the corrupt people in the government.” As we looked at the resources, I pointed out that of the textbook passages, newspaper and magazine clippings the students reviewed, approximately one quarter of the bibliographic references were Venezuelan, one quarter were other Latin American texts, and fully one half were North American or British. Moreover, several magazine and newspaper articles the students had copied and brought in were translated reprints of articles originally written for U.S. newspapers: Two had appeared in the New York Times, one in the Los Angeles Times, and one in the Boston Globe. This led to a discussion about whether they could use articles from other countries if they were supposed to be studying about Venezuelan adolescents. If adolescence was a stage all youth went through, and if teen pregnancy was a problem in other countries, did

Adolescents in (Times of) Crisis

●

187

that mean it was caused by adolescence? Was it the same kind of problem in the United States as it was in Venezuela, the girls asked me? I confessed that I wasn’t an expert in teen pregnancy in the United States, but that I did think its occurrence and consequences varied by region and by social class. The notion that adolescent motherhood might not be a universally definable state of affairs—the way adolescence apparently was, if they were to believe the experts—seemed to prompt Joly to question whether the articles they had read about adolescent mothers even applied to Santa Lucía. They looked at the images spread out in front of them. Joly pointed out that all the articles described young women in barrios—poor urban neighborhoods that, I would point out to the reader although I didn’t bring up to the students, were symbolically charged urban places laden with the significance of crisis. As we contemplated the images of poor urban girls sitting on stoops or walking down streets with babies in their arms, the students were prompted to consider whether or not the experiences of poor urban adolescent mothers were comparable to those of young Santa Lucian mothers. This potential distinction led to a flurry of discussion, as the girls grabbed onto familiar discursive scaffolding. It wasn’t the same to be poor in the city as in the country, since in Santa Lucía they were poor but they always had what they needed. Santa Lucía wasn’t a violent or dangerous place, or full of vices like the barrio; and families were more united in Santa Lucía than in the barrios. “It’s true,” Alicia added. “Besides most barrio schools aren’t as good as Liceo Parra. So maybe more girls drop out in the barrios.” “So maybe,” Magda summed things up, “it’s different to be an adolescent mother in a small town than in a city.” I was thoroughly delighted by the critical quality of the conversation. But by the end of the half hour, the girls, no more certain about adolescent motherhood than when they were started, were concerned. Magda wondered how they would prepare their report if they weren’t sure about their materials. I felt badly, now concerned that in my effort to encourage the students’ critical thinking about the issue, I had left them confused and without direction. It occurred to me that perhaps in deviating from my role of “expert advisor,” I had risked more than my own selfpresentation. In the end, it was shy Alicia who saved me, and her classmates, from my transgression. “Well, if the articles are not about adolescent mothers in Santa Lucía, maybe that is who we should talk to.” The idea caught on instantly. The group decided to leave their newspaper clippings to one side and gather information for their report by talking to young women

188

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

in town whom they knew were teen mothers. I tried impulsively to salvage my authority as advisor by framing the proposal as a “life history” project, offering to check with their teacher to make sure this approach would be acceptable. The students were confident it would be, so we spent the rest of the meeting considering who to interview and what questions to ask. The four girls proposed that each should interview one adolescent mother. If possible, they would also interview an older woman, perhaps a family member, whom they knew had had at least some of their children while still adolescents. “As the professor said,” Rosy noted referring to me, “if adolescent motherhood is always based on age, then these older women will have similar experiences to the young mothers today.” We then discussed the interview process. They knew a bit about conducting surveys, like they did for their parish, but had never interviewed anyone. I suggested that for a life history interview it was best to ask a few big questions. They settled on four questions: “How did you become an adolescent mother? What is it like to be an adolescent mother? Has it changed your life? Do you have any regrets?” Without meaning to discourage the young researchers, I expressed some concern that they might offend the teen mothers by asking such explicit questions about their experiences. After all, wasn’t it considered shameful to be an adolescent mother? But the girls were certain it would not bother the young mothers at all, who, they agreed, were generally proud of their maternal status, regardless of any regrets as to how it came about. “It’s not like the old days, when girls who got into trouble had to hide inside their homes. Now they take their babies with them everywhere,” Rosy pointed out. “In Santa Lucía, it’s really not shameful to be a single mother. Even the grandmothers are proud of their new grandchildren.” It occurred to me that night as I reviewed and filled in my notes from our meeting that the girls’ decision to interview adolescent mothers, followed by their refutation of my assumptions, followed by their taking charge of the research process, constituted a moment in which the locus of expertise had shifted from the ethnographer advisor to her student subjects. They were now in charge of constructing adolescent motherhood in their own way. I looked forward to our final meeting next Thursday and to all that I would learn about adolescent motherhood in Santa Lucía.

CHAPTER 9

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement* The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations (1969)

As the reader may recall, I began my story of Santa Lucian youth coming of age by relating an encounter I had at my house with two first-year Liceo students, Veronica and Andrea. The meeting entailed an exchange: I provided assistance with an English lesson, and in return they provided answers to my questions about their educational and adult aspirations. Andrea told me that she planned to study Forestry and have a family of one or two children—a small family because of the crisis. Veronica hoped to become a journalist. She emphasized the importance of completing her studies before having a family because, she said, “you need a career to defend yourself when your husband leaves you.” Two paths toward adulthood, each responding to the presumed certainty of the uncertain conditions of crisis and negligent patriarchy, each a nascent fairy tale offering counsel (Benjamin 1969, 86) in meekly defiant response to the ponderous weight of the myths of meritocracy and the myths of classic patriarchy. In many ways, this book represents my effort to make anthropological sense of the counsel contained in those two students’ life plans, an effort based on the understanding that the process of youth coming of age in Santa Lucía was a fundamentally historical process, never reducible to mythically categorical scenarios that deny history and agency. My aim throughout has been to represent the simultaneously creative and conformist efforts of Liceo Parra students to produce their own life paths and identities in ways that—wittingly or not—incorporated and transformed the continuities and contradictions between the cultural * An earlier version of this chapter appears in La Educación no. 129–131, 1998: 101–120.

190

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

landscapes and social relations of local town life, family and peer expectations, and a national civic imaginary. My ethnographic task has been to portray these efforts as dialogic interruptions of dominant monologues, the ordinary person’s story taunting while yearning for the myths of the ruling class.1 In the process, I have found that the work of ethnographic interpretation occurs within a similar process of conformity and creativity. The struggle to use existing ways of thinking about the educational experiences of youth carries with it the risk of reducing the historical particularity and cultural uniqueness of Santa Lucian youth’s experiences, through recourse to categories and constructs that are meant to illuminate educational practices but are in fact facets of the dominant cultural terrain upon and against which those youth struggle to construct their lives. In other words, the analytic categories to which one has access—categories of academic success or failure, cultural reproduction or resistance—are not outside of, but rather part of, the ethnographic story one is trying to tell. This makes ethnographic representation a dangerous interpretive prospect, in which the story one is telling is constantly working on and transforming the terms by which one is making sense of that very story. In this last chapter, I come to the end of my story about Santa Lucian students coming of age by discussing the life courses of a few Santa Lucian students once they graduated from or dropped out of Liceo Parra. These are students whose postsecondary school trajectories cannot be neatly mapped onto the ahistorical, mythic landscape of modern liberal individualism—with its single road to success and every deviation a dead end, a reminder that the lack of correspondence between the culture of one’s home/community and the culture of the school is a recipe for school failure. Nor can the pathways of these secondary school students—each of them unique while also in some ways representative of their peers—find a place within the educational topographies mapped out by social reproduction or cultural resistance theories that, not unlike the liberal landscapes they seek to contest, limit the life paths of youth to two structurally opposed possibilities: those along the dominant path who are gently coaxed by the structures of power toward success and class reproduction, and those along the subaltern path who are either forced or enticed by those same structures toward failure and class reproduction. As Carolyn Steedman (1987) has pointed out in her critique of representations of working-class lives, analysis like this denies its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis; and it denies the child,

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

191

and the child who continues to live in the adult it becomes, both an unconscious life, and a particular and developing consciousness of the meanings presented by the social world (10–11).

Instead, the life courses of these youth as they came of age unfolded by twists and turns along side roads obscure to the topographies of the neoliberal petroleum state and the local patriarchal family economy. The stories of these students as they came of age remind us that the contradictory lessons they learned as students, family members, and citizenworkers-to-be set them along particular paths with outcomes that were repeatedly unexpected and unpredictable. It is in these postsecondary stories, stories of how a few students made their way to adulthood by carving out new paths along roads previously not taken, that we can look for new social configurations sustained within the tension between the pull toward the local patriarchal family and the national patriarchal state. It is along their paths to adulthood that we may find evidence of young women and men battling with and within, if not transcending, the dialectic of negligent patriarchy. Xiomara’s Story Xiomara and her family lived a few doors down from me in Santa Lucía. Theirs was the last house on the lane that ran along the hillcrest in front of Liceo Parra. For weeks before meeting Xiomara, I saw her walk to school each morning as I sat on my patio sipping a morning coffee before heading to the school myself. Occasionally we smiled at each other in recognition, but we never spoke. Six weeks into the school year, I finally met Xiomara through her mother, Josefina. Josefina managed a newsstand in town where she sold newspapers and magazines, coffee and empanadas, and lottery tickets. It had become my custom to stop by the newsstand each Saturday after an early morning walk, buy a newspaper or two, and chat with Josefina or her middle son, Manuel, a gregarious young man who was completing his undergraduate thesis in Sociology at the University of the Andes in Mérida when I first came to Santa Lucía. Manuel was always eager to talk about national and global politics and to modestly proffer his opinions about local goings-on. On one of those Saturday mornings, Josefina made a point of introducing me to her daughter, who was helping to prepare the empanadas in the back of the shop. Josefina told me—with Xiomara standing there but as though she weren’t present—that her daughter loved English, wanted to learn how to speak better, and was hoping I could teach her.

192

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

I’ll never know if Xiomara was too shy to ask herself, or if the idea was her mother’s. When I turned to Xiomara, she was looking down at the floor, fidgeting with her hands. So I waited until Josefina had stepped into the back room to resume making empanadas, and then I casually invited Xiomara to stop by my house any time she wanted to practice speaking English with me. That invitation initiated a conversation with Xiomara that blossomed over the months into a friendship. Xiomara and I had numerous subsequent conversations—about her family, life in Santa Lucía, school, her personal and career aspirations— but it was from her teachers and not her (or her mother) that I learned she was one of the best students of her class. When I met Xiomara, she was in her fifth and last year of secondary school, studying diligently to pass her baccalaureate exam. I soon learned that Xiomara genuinely loved English. She said she loved to listen to it: “I love hearing how the words sound,” she told me on several occasions, expressing the kind of delight with English that I heard from many students her age (see chapter 6). Xiomara explained that, although she would have loved to study English at the university, she had chosen the Sciences and not the Humanities track for her last two years of schooling. This was because she was “good at Sciences” and because her parents had told her there were more job opportunities in the Sciences than in the Humanities. Xiomara expressed no bitterness in following her parents’ and, particularly, her mother’s, dictates. As she explained, it was her way of showing appreciation for her mother’s commitment to her education. (Both Xiomara and Manuel had told me on separate occasions that the reason Josefina got up at dawn every day to work at the shop was to ensure that her children could get a university education.) But there was more to it than obedient appreciation. For Xiomara, a university degree represented the first step toward her ability to eventually repay her parents for the sacrifices they had made for her. As Xiomara once commented, “When I think about my education and my future, I think about how I can help my parents have a more comfortable life . . . because they are the ones who have given me everything. Especially my mother. She has made great sacrifices for all of us.” For Xiomara, as for many Santa Lucian youth, the value of schooling was infused with familial expectations of generational reciprocity that had their roots in the premodern ideologies and social arrangements of classic patriarchy, and contrasted with the modern developmental ideas of education for individual self-improvement and the progress of one generation over the next (see chapter 3). There was never an uncertainty in Xiomara’s mind that she would continue her studies after secondary school. Or at least I could detect

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

193

none in the unwavering way she asserted her decision, as though there were no other options. “You have to get your degree if you want to be someone in life,” she explained. And while Xiomara never explicitly compared herself to her older siblings, they had set an impressive example. Her oldest brother had just received a Master’s Degree in Engineering; another brother was finishing his undergraduate thesis in Sociology; and her older sister was studying Chemistry—all three at the University of the Andes in Mérida, the principal and most prestigious university in the region. Over the course of the year and a half I spent in Santa Lucía, I watched Xiomara graduate from secondary school and take her entry exams to get into a technical program at one of the vocational, or technical, colleges outside of Mérida. She had decided to pursue a vocational degree in technical drawing because it was quick: She would have her degree in two years and then be able to find a good job. When I asked her why she had forsaken her original desire to go to the university, she explained it in terms of her parents’ wishes, and in terms of the crisis: “I would like to enroll in a university program. But you know, the situation has gotten more difficult, because of the crisis,” she explained. I asked Xiomara what she meant when she said because of the crisis. “Well, everything is so hard,” she answered. “The money doesn’t go as far as it used to. I would have to work while I study. Besides, with all the student disturbances and the way they suspend classes all the time—it can take years to finish a degree! As my parents say, it’s just not practical anymore. A technical career is more practical.” It was a perfect arrangement. Xiomara would share an apartment with her older sister in Mérida and commute to the school, which was 20 minutes away by bus. This arrangement suited her parents tremendously. Like many Santa Lucian parents, they were none too keen about their daughters living alone or, even worse, sharing an apartment building or dormitory with strange men in the big city. But it is important not to hastily interpret this trepidation (which in some families was so strong as to prevent parents from allowing their daughters to pursue a university degree) as indexing a “traditional,” “rural,” or “peasant” attitude toward women’s education—even though some of the students I talked to judged their parents in these terms. Similar attitudes were prevalent among urban parents as well. And while some middle-class, professional parents of female students in Mérida were comfortable with their daughters attending the university, it was often because they could do so while living at home. In fact, several female secondary school students in Mérida told me they were going to have to wait to go to the university

194

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

because their parents wouldn’t let them apply to programs at universities outside the city unless they had a family member to live with; while others were obligated to study toward degrees they weren’t interested in because the field of their choice wasn’t taught locally. Nor can parental conservatism be neatly correlated with socioeconomic class background. In Santa Lucía (and in the city of Mérida, for that matter), some young women from middle-class families described their parents as being “open” or “modern” about their daughters’ educational adventures, while others characterized their parents as “traditional.” (These were also the terms parents used to describe their own positions on the matter of their daughters’ postsecondary schooling.) More often than not, it was the father who set the limits, substantiating the reputation of middle-class fathers as being particularly protective of their daughters, much as they were with their wives.2 Meanwhile, some—though by no means all—Santa Lucian parents of limited resources were willing to relinquish control over and surveillance of their daughters so that they could continue their studies at the university, with the expectation that a university education would bring their daughters lucrative job opportunities. This expectation was readily voiced by several parents I knew and well recognized by their daughters. But patriarchal perspectives and practices are not so easily overruled by economic need. In the matter of schooling, as with so many issues in which the ideologies of gender, class, and education impinge on and contradict each other, one would be hard pressed to discern logical patterns that accounted for the myriad unique stories of how particular students and their parents negotiated the conflicting options their distinct circumstances presented. For instance, in the two cases I knew of young Santa Lucian women from lower-class families who left home to pursue university studies, the fathers either had little authority or little effective control in the house: One was a constantly binging alcoholic; the other was a produce dispatcher who was always on the road and rarely at home. When I asked Elena, the daughter of the dispatcher, about her move to the city, she admitted that her father was not happy with the situation and had once threatened to come to Mérida to take her home. She mimicked his declarations that “it is shameful for my daughter to be out wandering the streets with pretensions of being a university student.” Elena excused her father’s position as being typical of Andean men, who are, she said, very “celosos”—a word that means both jealous and protective, connoting the patriarchal correspondence between a father’s protection of his women and the protection of his reputation. When I

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

195

asked Elena whether she feared that her father would in fact bring her back to Santa Lucía, she said “no” and pointed out that she had relatives in Mérida on her mother’s side with whom she roomed and an older brother who worked in Mérida at a major produce market and looked after her. Like several university students I knew, Elena was able to take advantage of extended family networks linking Santa Lucía to the city in order to partially reconcile the modernist mythology of educational achievement with local norms of social appropriateness for young women. But let me return to Xiomara’s story. In the late fall of 1993, soon before I was to leave Venezuela for the United States, I visited Santa Lucía and learned that Xiomara had been accepted to the program of her choice at a technical college outside of Mérida, and was currently looking for an apartment to share with her sister. Xiomara was never one to show much enthusiasm in her voice or on her face, but I remember sensing considerable indifference, bordering on apathy, as she recounted her plans to me. At the time, I thought that perhaps she was masking the nervousness she felt as she prepared to leave her home—and her mother—for the first time. Before I left we exchanged addresses. While I didn’t really expect her to write, I did expect that by the time I returned to Santa Lucía she would have graduated. I teased her, telling her that soon I would have to call her Licenciada. (Licenciado/a is the formal title given to individuals with undergraduate university degrees.) A year after I had left Santa Lucía, three years after meeting Xiomara for the first time, I learned that she had never enrolled in the technical school but had become pregnant and was still at home living with her parents. I was shocked. As far as I had known, Xiomara didn’t even have a boyfriend. By the time I learned of the whole matter, the father-to-be had long since left town, gone to Maracaibo to study Engineering. Apparently, the unforeseen course of events hadn’t interrupted his educational trajectory. Why was I shocked? After all, this wasn’t the first time I’d learned of a young woman’s life taking such a turn. In fact, during my stay in Santa Lucía I lost two potential English students to similar fates: one who had been planning to study Tourism, the other Physics. The scenario was all too common. A young woman graduated from secondary school and began to make plans to go to the university. But the universities were overcrowded and the competition to be accepted into a specific department was fierce and often corrupt. As a result, there was an almost inevitable wait of a year or more, often involving shifts in career plans.

196

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

While waiting to get into a department or program, the young woman became pregnant, abandoned her plans, was often as not abandoned by the man who got her pregnant, and settled back in with her parents— not necessarily to her parents’ dismay, I might add. Of the young Santa Lucian women I knew who had followed this unplanned path, only one maintained a relationship with her child’s father. When I left Venezuela, none had returned to school and one was working for her father’s business in town. Xiomara appeared to have wandered onto a life path that was well paved, whether or not it was the one she had intended to follow. Perhaps I was surprised because I had unwittingly succumbed to the very same modern liberal myths about female school achievement I challenged in chapter 8—for instance, the myth widely propagated by the Venezuelan news and popular media that increases in female student school participation did not just correlate with, but actually led to, a reduction in teen pregnancy. Not that I was opposed to teen motherhood per se, but rather that I had unwittingly accepted the mythical construction of the successful female student as coextensive with the total control, exclusion or denial of the young women’s sexuality, maternity, or both. As though school success functioned as some kind of prophylactic. In other words, perhaps I had come to accept the implications of that mythology, believing that the social roles of “successful female student” and “teen mother” must be mutually exclusive, and the adult life courses each role predicted were divergent. But perhaps I was also surprised because deep down, despite pretenses of ethnographic impartiality, I wanted Xiomara to go ahead with her plans. Again, not because I valued a professional career over motherhood, but because it was what I thought Xiomara wanted for herself. But perhaps Xiomara didn’t really want to “be someone in life”; or perhaps she did in the abstract but was a little scared of it in reality. Perhaps she didn’t know quite how to be someone in life, while she knew quite well how to be a mother—or a girlfriend. But then again, it was just as likely that Xiomara did have a concrete idea of what it meant to be someone in life, and hadn’t intended to end up pregnant. After all, I reminded myself, she had three older siblings who were all role models for becoming an educated adult—and one of them was a young woman. Perhaps her story was similar to that of Gloria, another fifth-year student I had met at Liceo Parra. Pressured to have sex by her boyfriend, pressured away from contraceptives by the moral strictures of the church (and secretly thinking that if she got pregnant her none-too-committed boyfriend might marry her), in February of her final year of school she ended up with child, without boyfriend, and with no foreseeable plans to graduate

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

197

or continue her studies. Nonetheless, when I heard the news about Xiomara I recalled the vision of a life course she had painted for me on one occasion: I think that if I work hard I can finish my technical degree in about two years. Then I can move back here and help my mother so she can retire. Of course I’d like to have my own family one day, but first I have to think about my studies.

Sometimes language neither reflects nor creates lived experience. And sometimes human motivation is beyond the ethnographer’s short and narrow grasp. On the face of it, there had been ample reason for expecting Xiomara to go ahead with her plans. First, she had her parents’ total support; second, her siblings had all gone on to pursue higher educational degrees; and third, her teachers considered her to be one of the best students in her class. Indeed, Xiomara appeared to be the ideal female protagonist for the liberal mythology of academic achievement: She had a supportive home environment, good modeling from her siblings, and the will to succeed.3 In other words, according to causal propositions that bolstered the myths of educational achievement embedded in both populist democratic and liberal social science discourses, Xiomara had everything going for her. But the postsecondary school trajectories of Santa Lucian female students called the cultural logic of those liberal scenarios into question. I watched some young women in Santa Lucía graduate from secondary school and become single mothers, while others started the university but were forced to leave by their boyfriends who refused to marry them otherwise. Still others sailed through secondary school with high marks and absolutely no intention of studying beyond the last year of secondary school; they were merely occupying their time until they were old enough to marry their boyfriends and start a family. Some thought school was fun and enjoyed trying to get good grades. Others thought it was boring but kept their grades up to make their parents happy. Yet others dropped out because they could not or would not make the transition from secondary school to the university. For a variety of reasons, they succeeded in secondary school but did not pursue the path predicted by that success in theory. Given the commonality of these trajectories among young women graduates of Liceo Parra, we would be hard pressed to read Xiomara’s

198

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

story—that of a female student who succeeded in school, who articulated an identity for herself as an educated, professional woman, who chose a career path which was not conventionally female even though she attended a school that was riddled with explicit gendered educational practices, who had the support of her parents and role modeling of her siblings—as an exception that proved the mythic rule of school success. Instead, her story calls into question both the modern mythology of academic achievement as a step along an ineluctably progressive path toward educated adulthood, and the logic of mechanistic analytic frameworks that bolster that mythology. But the point of telling Xiomara’s story is not to encourage the development of better, more predictive frameworks for young women’s academic success and failure. As I suggested at the opening of this chapter, I want to resist the temptation so prevalent within educational research to cast suspense-filled gazes upon students as they navigate the treacherous life course of the modern meritocracy, waiting for each minority student to fall off the precipice, hoping to see a few students from oppressed groups or social categories avoid the abyss of school failure, and looking eagerly for explanations as to what social factors kept them on the path. As Varenne and McDermott (1999) have argued poignantly, the charge of the ethnographer is not to collude with the analytic or ideological terms of “success and failure,” but rather to locate students’ school experiences holistically within a broader landscape of their lives. In the case of Xiomara and her peers, this means locating their academic achievement within a landscape in which the modern educational meritocracy was only one of many topographies they navigated in coming of age. As I proposed in earlier chapters, the relation of learning to power and authority in Santa Lucía was experienced and expressed by students through spatial practices that acquired meaning and value as they led their lives in and between the house and the street. For young women, the activities and dispositions associated with succeeding in school not only reinforced their passivity and acquiescence to male authority, they also attuned female students, through the vehicle of formal knowledge, to the rewards of obedience and discipline. Ironically, because young women did not have to challenge socially acceptable gender practices and identities in order to achieve academically, the school diffused what might have been a more contestatory context, discouraging their resistance. In the short run at least, neither official ideologies regarding education and opportunity, nor local gender ideologies, were contradicted in Santa Lucian girls’ school experiences.

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

199

I say in the short run because, as Xiomara’s story illustrates, a young woman’s academic success in secondary school did not guarantee her a place in the state’s mythic narrative of egalitarian progress, or in a nuclear family that this narrative both presupposed and presumed to create. In sad and often brutal contrast to the idyllic dreams young secondary school graduates had of a work life and family life in which so many conflicting gender arrangements and expectations were reconciled or erased, for more than a few young Santa Lucian women their secondary school successes set them along a tumultuous life course laden with conflicts and sacrifices. Such had been Delia’s story. Delia’s Story Delia was a young Santa Lucian woman whom I met after she had graduated from Liceo Parra and had begun her university studies in English at the Universidad de los Andes in Mérida. She was back in Santa Lucía for the Christmas holidays, and her mother brought her by my house to ask whether I could help her with her English studies over vacation. We arranged a few study sessions and later, when I moved down to Mérida to teach at the university, Delia attended the English classes I was giving to a few faculty friends and student neighbors at the residencia where I lived. Delia’s secondary school experience had resembled that of Xiomara: She was a high-achieving student who expressed considerable enthusiasm for school learning. Unlike Xiomara, Delia had managed to weather the year’s wait to enter a university program sexually unscathed. But if Delia did not give up her virginity, she gave up her professional ideals. Delia had wanted to enroll in a Nursing program but there were no openings. So she switched to English, not out of any particular interest, but because her grades were good and she didn’t want to waste another year out of school. Delia was an excruciatingly timid young woman who spoke looking at the ground, in a nearly inaudible whisper. She was a studious and diligent student; but she was having an incredibly difficult time at the university. One evening after sitting in on my English class, she lingered to talk. After a year in the English program, she was coming to the decision that it wasn’t for her. I asked her what her parents thought. She said that her father left those decisions to her mother, as long as she didn’t waste her time and the family money switching back and forth between careers, as some students were known to do. Meanwhile, her mother was encouraging her to follow through with the program she started in, more

200

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

for reasons of principle than practicality. “You should always finish what you start,” was Delia’s mother’s rule of thumb. I listened as Delia debated whether to transfer to a different department within her College, or attempt to get a place in another College altogether. She had her eyes on Nursing, but knew she didn’t have high enough grades to get a place. It occurred to her that if she did well in her Humanities classes she could attempt to transfer to Nursing in a year or two. I was reluctant to advise her, since the terms by which I had been encouraged to make this kind of decision—always study what you are most inspired by and to hell with practicalities—were underwritten by a certain comfort and flexibility my class position afforded, but which Delia didn’t have. We reviewed her various options, and reached the tentative conclusion that, whatever she did she should stay in school because, given the “situation,” (a euphemistic reference to crisis and its association with the regular disruption of university studies) one never knew whether one could study for a degree at some future date. A few weeks later, Delia passed by my apartment to return a book I had lent her. She was all aglow and accompanied by a young man she had met in her Spanish Literature class, who she introduced as her “friend.” They were just passing through, but Delia informed me of her decision to transfer into the Literature program. She told me how much she loved her studies, and how relieved she was to have given up the English degree. For quite a while after this brief visit I heard nothing from Delia, and chalked it up to budding romance. Several months went by, and I finally gave Delia a visit. She immediately excused herself for not having stopped by: She had been having a lot of problems with her studies and was trying to improve her grades before the end of the school year so that she wouldn’t fail her classes. She seemed frantic, distracted, and very embarrassed. I asked her if everything was alright. There was a long pause, a sigh, and then Delia’s quiet confession spilled out. She had had a lot of conflicts with her “friend,” leading to their break up. The ensuing conversation was brief, but I didn’t have to hear much to recognize a familiar scenario. As Delia’s relationship with her friend became more serious, the two began to talk about marriage and their future. The more they talked, the more he began to insinuate that once they married she should give up her schooling, have children, and stay home to raise them. Delia explained that even though she didn’t really know what she wanted to study, she knew she didn’t want to give it up. So she gave him up. She seemed sad but resolute, and I found myself greatly admiring this modest young Santa Lucian woman whose quiet reserve belied an unusual amount of inner

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

201

strength. Our conversation led her to a rare spontaneous reflection on her own life. I was always a good student, and I always liked to study. I knew that if I worked hard I could get good grades. I thought that all you needed to go the university, to get ahead, was to apply yourself. But now I see that the secondary school didn’t prepare me for anything . . . And you know, the university men in the city are just as machistas as the men in the village . . . But I know that my mother would be so disappointed if I don’t finish my degree.

And so in a certain sense, Delia stayed the course of academic achievement, but at the cost of romance and the postponement of family life. Neither she nor Xiomara had found a way to reconcile the conflicting expectations of the liberal “teacher state” and the patriarchal family, and each had deviated from the paths those mythologies laid out in response to the negligence that underlay their mythic power. Myths of Male (Under)Achievement But it was not just young Santa Lucian women whose educational paths refused to conform to the mythology of school achievement. The trajectories of Santa Lucian male students further confounded liberal myths of educational achievement and progressive myths of educational resistance. Year after year, a significantly smaller percentage of the entering cohort of male students finished secondary school than did female students. But almost all the young Santa Lucian men who did graduate from Liceo Parra went on to pursue their university degrees, aiming to become agricultural engineers, lawyers, doctors, architects, or secondary school teachers. However, the achievements of these young men compared to their female counterparts should not make us concede to myths of male school achievement, since so many of their male peers never even made it to graduation. Certainly, any attempt to account for the school performance of Santa Lucian male students should not ignore the local labor terrain. As I discussed in chapter 2, Santa Lucía was a regionally exceptional rural economic landscape in that it offered an abundance of work in and related to agriculture that did not require a higher educational degree or even a baccalaureate. And some of that work, particularly in dispatching, was well remunerated. Easily available, well-paying work was a powerful incentive—often magnified by parents, peers, and girlfriends—coaxing

202

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

male students away from school. But economic factors always have to be placed in cultural perspective if we are going to attribute them with motivational force. Perhaps I can do so best through illustration, by comparing the stories of two teenage boys I knew, Carlos and Victor. Carlos was one of only three male students in the fifth-year (graduating) Humanities class of 13. This in and of itself made Carlos unusual among his male peers. But what made Carlos even more unusual was that he was the son of farming parents. The other two male students graduating in the Humanities track came from families of middle class, professional background, as was true of the two male students I knew who had graduated in the Humanities the year before. Both Carlos’s parents were from Santa Lucía, the father’s family having for generations farmed a smallholding located along a hillside just outside of town. Carlos had two older brothers and a younger sister. Both brothers had studied through ninth grade, graduating from primary school and then incorporating themselves into the family farm, which their father was successfully expanding. Where in the past they had only been producers, Carlos’s father had decided to diversify the family economy and began dispatching produce as well—a very lucrative move on his part. Carlos’s brothers chose paths to adulthood common among Santa Lucian young men of their generation; they counted among the hundreds from their entering secondary school class who had dropped out before graduating, knowing full well that the long and arduous path toward a university degree could not guarantee them a better livelihood than they had access to as landowning farmers. But somehow Carlos had gotten it in his head that he wanted to get a degree in Communication, of all things. He wanted to be a reporter or, eventually, a news broadcaster. Infected by the bug of modernity, Carlos felt that farming was not only old-fashioned but also a dead end: “In this country, there is no future in agriculture,” he declared to me, adding that if one wanted to be someone in life, one had to choose a modern career. These viewpoints made Carlos unusual not only within his family, but among his peers as well. He claimed that his interest in journalism was politically, not monetarily, motivated. Carlos was the only Santa Lucian student I knew who expressed an interest in engaging in political activities, and one of two students who listed journalism as his career choice on the survey I conducted at the school. Carlos had never been a particularly accomplished student in the academic sense. In discussions I had with his class cohort, Carlos discussed academic performance in instrumental terms. “When I thought I was going to be a farmer like my brothers, I never bothered to do much more

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

203

than pass. I wanted to keep my mother happy and I didn’t want to have to waste my summer doing reparaciones [the system of retaking a class and class exam in the summer in order to pass into the next year at school]. But once I decided to become a news reporter and chose the Humanities track, I started to get more serious about my grades,” he explained. During our conversations prior to his graduation he boasted about his high marks and his decision to quit the indoor soccer team in order to study for his placement exams, the results of which would determine if and where he would be able to attend the university. I asked him what his parents thought about his plans. He admitted that his father was not supportive. “He never tells me I can’t be a news reporter, but he tells me that he won’t invest his hard earned money in university studies. I have to do it on my own. I think he doesn’t believe it will happen. But he’ll see,” Carlos smiled, good-humored and optimistic as ever. The fall following his graduation, Carlos was working as a dispatcher with his father, studying to retake his entry exams, having fallen just short of the marks needed to get into the program that interested him at the nearby national university branch in Trujillo. When I met up with him at the Cultural Center where he was taking a computer class to better prepare himself for the university, he seemed determined as ever. I asked him whether the unstable situation of the country had made him rethink his decision. “To the contrary,” he rebutted. “It just makes it a more exciting time to be a news reporter.” By the time Xiomara was back home expecting her baby, Carlos was enrolled part-time at the nearby university and working on the weekends for his father to pay his way through his program. Victor’s Story Lest one think Carlos was the only exception to the local pattern of farming students following in their family’s footsteps, the story of Victor, whose socioeconomic background was the inverse of Carlos’s, bears recounting as well. I met Victor because he would stop by on his way home from secondary school to watch my compañero painting on our front porch. He was always dressed quite well—within the parameters permitted by the school uniform—and was very chatty and selfconfident for his young age of 15. We didn’t have to inquire to learn that Victor’s family was from Portugal: He was quite proud of his European background. His grandparents had come to Venezuela when Victor’s father was a child and had made a life as merchants in Santa Lucía years ago, setting up a general store that eventually became an upscale furniture

204

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

store catering to Santa Lucía’s small upper class. Victor was anything but modest, and sometimes he would boast about his great successes in school. He especially liked Sciences. “I am going to be a petroleum engineer, and make a lot of money,” he announced one day. And from the forcefulness and drive he displayed even at such a young age, I must say I believed him. He said he was going to go to a private university, since his parents could give him the best education possible, as he put it. It couldn’t have been more than two months after that conversation that Victor sauntered by our house during school hours, not in uniform. I asked him whether he was taking the day off, and he announced that he was dropping out of school. I was incredulous, but didn’t have to press him to find out what had happened. Victor explained that he was having problems with some of his teachers, who thought he was too outspoken in class and wanted to transfer him to another section. He, or his father—he seemed to move back and forth between the two in explaining the situation—had become disgusted with the whole system, and decided Victor should pull out of school. “I don’t need to spend my days listening to a lot of useless chatter,” Victor declared defiantly. Victor’s father had decided that the boy would work with him instead, and Victor was already planning to open his own little tourist store outside of town one day. Tourism. That’s where the money is these days, he affirmed triumphantly. In an ethnographic essay on the myth of “the silent, underachieving Indian,” Doug Foley (1996) reviewed the myriad social science models that purport to make sense of the pervasive tendency of Native American students to “sit passively and silently in white classrooms” (1996, 82) and compared those models to the explanations and rationales that the Native American students he worked with offered for their classroom practices. What Foley found by listening to these young men was “a welter of different feelings” that were not reducible to the rationalistic models of cultural resistance or sociolinguistic mismatch that aimed to create patterns of practice and psychology out of unique individual histories. Foley’s comparison between the social science models and the youth’s own accounts illuminates not only the limits of social science frameworks in representing the students’ worldviews and practices, but also the inability of those models to transcend the very stereotypes the students were partially resisting, or subverting, or acquiescing to through their silence. Instead, as Foley’s essay poignantly shows, the analysis of “the silent Indian” furthered the other-ing terms of the wider society to which these youth were responding.

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

205

Similarly, the accounts that male students like Victor and Carlos offered for their educational and career decisions were at odds with and irreducible to the logic of either meritocracy or local patriarchy. Moreover, like the Native American students whose accounts Foley presented in his essay, the significance of Santa Lucian students’ descriptions of their life plans lies in the distinctiveness of each one—in their imperviousness to generalization. The stories of Santa Lucian young women and men once they graduated from, or dropped out of, secondary school, fly in the face of any simple calculus that would predict a patterned relation between students’ school experiences and their social locations in the unfolding of their adult lives. It is my hope that these stories—hardly unusual among the Santa Lucian youth whose life courses I was able to follow—will serve as a reminder that the reality of a particular life history is unaccountable by any dominant mythology, no matter how forcefully that mythology is pressed upon individual experience. Rather, as these stories show, it is in that Bahktinian tension between the pull toward the monologic center of the dominant mythology, and the push away from that center by the individual subject responding to and struggling with her social context, that a life story emerges—always unique and unpredictable. Xiomara’s Story Continues: An Ethnographic Epilogue As it turned out, Xiomara taught me more than once the ethnographic lesson of avoiding the conceptual and representational temptation to sew up the seams of stories that continue to unfold and unravel after one has left the field. When I returned to Santa Lucía nearly three years after my initial stay, I found Xiomara’s life had taken yet another turn, a turn with an almost predictable unpredictability that is worth a brief telling. Before I even arrived from Mérida to Santa Lucía, I had heard through friends that Xiomara had a little boy, José Luis. After giving birth in September of 1994, she had stayed home with her son for a year, helping her mother in the shop. But the following year, she enrolled in the technical program she had initially planned to follow, leaving little José with his grandmother while she studied architectural drafting. When I went to visit the family in December of 1996, Xiomara was in the third and last year of her program, and José Luis was a timid two year old. Xiomara had reorganized her goals to include her son, but in a way that continued to take into account her mother’s needs. She told me then that she hoped to find a job in Santa Lucía that would pay enough to allow her mother to give up the shop altogether. “That way she can stay

206

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

at home and take care of her grandson, rather than work,” Xiomara explained, invoking the distinction commonly made among her peers and her elders, between unremunerated housework and paid labor outside the home. But the apparently satisfying ending—or at least continuation—of Xiomara’s story had consequences that proved less than ideal for her brother, Manuel; and it was now his story that took a turn off the predictable path he had studiously paved for himself. Manuel was the second eldest sibling, and was immersed in writing his undergraduate thesis in Sociology at the time I was living in Santa Lucía. Manuel and I chatted frequently and easily, and I think he saw us as colleagues of a sort. On several occasions, he told me about his career intentions, commenting that, while he would prefer to stay in Santa Lucía to help his mother, he realized that there were no job opportunities for him in his field. During the time I was there, he began exploring job possibilities in cities across the country. He seemed to have reconciled his conflicting career and familial desires by planning to find a lucrative position elsewhere, save money, and eventually move back to Santa Lucía and start his own business so that his mother could stop working at the shop. When I returned in 1996, Xiomara was in school, José Luis was at home with his grandmother, and Manuel was working in the shop. He had finished his degree but had abandoned—for the time being—all efforts to find work in his field. Some may read Xiomara’s continuing story as reaffirming the determinative force of those socioeconomic and biographical factors that had led me initially to assume she would move along the educational and career trajectory she had set out for herself years earlier. But I read Xiomara’s story as a vivid reminder of how thoroughly unpredictable is any life course. After all, Xiomara didn’t simply continue where she left off; she continued her studies as an unmarried mother. Moreover, the twists and turns in her life course spilled out beyond the boundaries of her individuality, and just as her life began to appear “predictable” again, it had the effect of disrupting the previously predictable life of her brother Manuel, who found himself abandoning his career goals in order to tend to the store while Josefina took care of José Luis. It is precisely these contingents, often improvised and certainly unpredictable facets of social life—that “certain ‘something more’ that can neither be reduced to nor derived from structure” (Rosaldo 1989, 104)—to which nonprocessual, objectivist analyses of school achievement as individual accomplishment are fundamentally blind.

Myths of (Fe)Male Achievement

●

207

Xiomara’s circuitous story also serves as a reminder of the determinative force of the social relations forged by family and household. It was these culturally specific, material, and symbolic relations and not such abstractions as gender or class that gave form, meaning, and direction to Xiomara’s and other young Santa Lucians’ lives. It also illustrates how, for Santa Lucian youth living in times of “crisis,” when the prosperity that is supposed to breed a predictable future is itself unpredictable, floating like a moving target upon a distant horizon, at such times one’s story and one’s future are, to paraphrase Bakhtin, always half someone else’s.

This page intentionally left blank

POSTSCRIPT

Years Later, Having Graduated: Reflections on Crisis and Coming of Age Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. John Berger, A Fortunate Man

Among the challenges posed by ethnographic narrative is its tendency to limit the expanse of the lives populating that narrative to the temporal and spatial frameworks of the ethnographic experience. In the process, the ethnographic experience itself takes on the function of a landscape— to draw metaphorically upon John Berger’s insight quoted above. All too often, the ethnographic landscape obscures the complexities and contradictions of everyday existences, reducing them instead to a common cultural logic in the effort to render them comprehensible; or, as the healer in Michael Taussig’s Magic of the State proposes, in order not to marvel at that which we fear because it is strange (1997, 9). This act of reduction has particularly ironic consequences for feminist ethnography, for it serves to mask the often illogical but always-meaningful heterogeneity, creativity, and thus agency of people’s lives. One of the ways I have tried to resist or rupture this kind of reduction is by locating myself and my ethnographic experience within and not beyond the narrative landscape, while also periodically projecting my stories of Santa Lucian youth beyond the temporal framework of the ethnographic study through reference to events that have taken place since my initial visit. I have written this short postscript in order to further poke at the periphery of this book’s ethnographic landscape by

210

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

briefly relating some of the contradictory ways Santa Lucians have engaged with the political, economic, and social transformations Venezuela has undergone in the 15 years since I completed my initial fieldwork. I locate my experience and understanding of that engagement along my own process of coming of age, as it has had a bearing on my engagement with the community of Santa Lucía. * * * A crisis is the past that does not finish leaving and the future that does not finish arriving. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

As the reader may recall, the stories I have related about Santa Lucian secondary school students and their families are based primarily on fieldwork I carried out from 1990 through 1993, ethnographic research that was the basis for my doctoral dissertation. During that time, I lived in Santa Lucía for nearly two years, visiting Mérida regularly in order to participate in activities related to a university-associated women’s research and advocacy group. Although these visits were not part of a conscious ethnographic methodology, inasmuch as cultural analysis relies on the ethnographer’s estrangement from the routines of daily life, the back and forth between the rural town and the city had the unintended effect of periodically shocking me out of the local cultural logic and social sensibility of Santa Lucía, helping me to perceive and experience it in relation to another, urban reality. Since, as I discussed in chapter 2, the movement and settlement of rural Andeans between city and country had considerable local import, it is even possible that my periodic peregrinations offered me some amount of insight into that facet of Santa Lucians’ reality. I spent my final six months in Mérida more than Santa Lucía, carrying out fieldwork in two of Mérida’s secondary schools and teaching a university course in feminist methodologies during the first months of my pregnancy. While my research in the two schools was a deliberate attempt to enrich my understanding of Liceo Parra, I suspect I learned more about the workings of—and women’s organized and spontaneous resistances to—negligent patriarchy within state institutions through my engagement with the university and medical systems. I left Venezuela in January of 1994, six months pregnant and accompanied by my unborn son’s father, reluctant to leave a place that had begun to feel like home, but eager to settle into a routine near my own family that I imagined would ease the challenges of raising a son while writing a dissertation. But once settled in my native land, I encountered

Years Later, Having Graduated

●

211

conditions of crisis, insecurity, and violence, oppressively obscured beneath a veneer of world-dominant prosperity and effervescent optimism. It was a crisis that worked on people quite differently than crisis had worked on Santa Lucians. Where Santa Lucians talked openly and explicitly about facing a crisis they experienced as a confluence of conditions external to themselves as individuals, back in Chicago the crisis seemed to work secretly, surreptitiously, hiding itself behind the ideological work of individualized responsibility that masked oppression with a discourse of blame. Another variation of negligent patriarchy, perhaps. In the book’s preface, I considered how my experience of the hidden crisis I confronted back home contributed to my interpretation of the explicit, extravagantly expounded crisis in Venezuela. What I did not discuss was how the U.S. crisis—masked though it might be—was nonetheless quite material in its consequences for educated adults coming of age such as myself. And so, not unlike the many Santa Lucian students who periodically faced detours and roadblocks on the road toward adulthood despite the promised protections of the patriarchal family and state, I soon found myself drifting, despite my own best intentions, away from a professional path toward academic tenure whose certainty I had long taken for granted, and toward a more improvised, uncertain professional trajectory. Again, not unlike those few Liceo Parra students I knew who had become single mothers soon after graduation, my own entry into single motherhood contributed significantly to the rationale behind my professional improvisations, including my decision to stay close to home, where I could receive the kind of support that Santa Lucian single mothers generally received from their immediate and extended families. Since my initial fieldwork stay, I have returned every two years or so to visit my son’s Venezuelan side of the family, keeping in touch with friends and colleagues in Mérida and Santa Lucía. Just as my own personal and professional trajectory has borne little resemblance to what I had imagined and planned prior to, during, and after my stay in Santa Lucía, I learned during these visits that few of the Santa Lucian young men and women I first met at Liceo Parra had followed the paths they had set out for themselves while in secondary school. Much like myself, and at times for similar reasons of unexpected family demands or changing professional interests and opportunities, the lives of these young adults have taken twists and turns as a result of some complex and disorderly engagement of our personal goals and identities with the changing social, economic, and cultural conditions in which we lived. The challenge

212

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

for this ethnographer has been to refuse the seductive tendency to read those similarities as a common allegory that supersedes the specificities of local conditions, since it is within a local landscape that each of us engages in and contends with the struggles, achievements, and accidents of our lives. * * * The construction of the revolutionary fatherland as armed struggle excludes the principle of the feminine, or includes it tangentially, as a literary fact, as metaphor. Ileana Rodríguez, House, Garden, Nation

In March of 1994, two months after I left Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías and his coconspirators in an attempted coup d’état were pardoned and released from prison by President Rafael Caldera, a key symbolic gesture of the populist agenda on which Caldera had run his successful presidential campaign. Chávez’s release set the stage for his own spectacular rise to presidential power. In 1998, Chávez was first elected president. He was reelected in 2000 and again in 2006. In that role, he has altered the national discourse about progress and modernity as dramatically as his Bolivarian government has altered the course of Venezuela’s socioeconomic policies and practices, ostensibly transforming a neoliberal capitalist regime into a neosocialist populist one. The Chávez government’s anti-imperialist discourse, economic reforms, and social policies have drawn the international spotlight toward Venezuela, appearing as high drama on the global stage and promoted as sweeping, often Salvationist transformation at a national level. However, in rural towns like Santa Lucía the impact of the Bolivarian Revolution seems to work upon the social landscape like one of many streams trickling slowly and unevenly down from the mountain peaks (the top-down metaphor being quite apt), carving out a new stream bank as it works its way toward the valley’s vast river into which its impact melds. Massive government-funded housing projects serving the needs of the municipality’s poorer sectors pour out along the town’s periphery, with construction work providing an abundance of local labor that pulls young men out of secondary school prior to graduation, much as labor in the ever-prosperous agricultural sector has always done. Government efforts to promote the use of organic farming techniques and materials in an effort to produce a cleaner local ecology take place amidst the proliferation of flatbed trucks for the transport of local products that chug up and down the town’s streets alongside massive SUVs, jeeps, and pick-up

Years Later, Having Graduated

●

213

trucks, all of which pump massive amounts of carbon monoxide into the verdant mountain valley. As programs are implemented by the Chavista mayor and his government through the various federally sponsored missions—free health clinics, adult education, a proliferation of sports programs, the restructuring of the elementary school as a Bolivarian school, the installation of a Bolivarian agronomy school, among others—the town, like the country as a whole, has become fiercely divided. The Chavistas laud the changes brought about by local and national governments as “socialism in the making”; while the “opposition” claim that local developments have been slow, disappointing, and corrupted by cronyism and poor management. In this sense, local political discourse is reminiscent of the regular banter and rumor-mongering that existed prior to the Bolivarian Revolution, when communities were rigidly divided according to affiliation with one of the two dominant political parties. The same wall by the central Plaza Bolívar that had been used by the town’s “Timoto-Cuica Movement” to celebrate the town’s indigenous heritage and to implore residents to join in the rescue and reclamation of native culture and artifacts now boasts Chavista slogans: “the Bolivarian Movement for freedom, democracy, and justice”; “Equality is for everyone.” Meanwhile, the daily newspapers—whether of the officialdom or the opposition—maintain their long-standing practices of adorning their back pages with images of young women in scant bikinis who are winners of or contenders for one or another beauty contest, and darkskinned criminals who have been arrested for any number of heinous crimes. Each time I visit Santa Lucía during this Bolivarian Revolution, the regular contradictions of daily life come to feel more and more like living photomontage. Is it the dogmatism of official and oppositional discourse that contributes to this sensibility, or is it the perception of the anthropologist turned visitor? While the preservation of the construct of the “neo” by the Chávez government serves as a reminder that many kinds of state formation can take place within the cultural logic of modernity and its celebration of newness, the radical discourse of the Bolivarian Revolution did seem to effect changes in the ways Santa Lucians talked about the state of their nation. Here I am thinking in particular about a shift away from the once-pervasive discourse of crisis in local discussions about the country’s socioeconomic condition or its global standing, toward a discourse of struggle against the forces of imperialism. (Even the Santa Lucians I knew who had aligned with the opposition had foregone the

214

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

discourse of crisis as a framework for couching their critiques of the president, painting him primarily as a dictator, or a Communist, “just like Fidel,” someone who, they claimed, worked against freedom and democracy for all.) It is, I believe, a culturally and ideologically powerful shift, although its material significance remains to be seen. The discourse of crisis constructs a pessimistic national identity based on modern notions of pathology, disease, aberrancy, unruliness, of being abnormal or out of control, of chronic, ahistorical reaction rather than deliberative historical agency. By contrast, the discourse of global struggle—hearkening back to 1970s dependency theory (Puerta 1994) with its clear identification of the north as the locus of imperialist domination thriving on the exploitation of the colonized south—promotes a national identity of heroic resistance to the forces of imperialist oppression. During my visits to Santa Lucía between 1998 and 2005, I no longer heard people talk about national or local economic conditions in terms of crisis, but rather in terms of revolution: both a national struggle between classes and a global struggle against empire. The shift was so intriguing to me that I decided to run the idea by a couple of friends with whom I had regular political discussions. When I described my observation to David, an artist who worked in his father’s mercantile store and who had briefly been in my English class, he concurred, relating the shift to a distinction construction of national identity: “Before we thought we had to be just like the gringos if we were going to amount to anything as a country. But thanks to Chávez, we have come to realize that the gringos are the source of our problems, not the solution.” The other person I discussed this shift with was Manuel, a thoughtful young man who supported Chávez and his government but not uncritically. Manuel was quite aware of this shift in discourse and considered it to be a crucial example of how Chávez had “awakened” the people. “The idea of crisis was seductive when we were ignorant. But thanks to Chávez, the people are becoming educated. We understand about petroleum, we understand about globalization. We know who the real enemy is. We don’t blame ourselves anymore.” While these conversations were personally validating (we ethnographers always like the confirmation of the native informant that we’re on the right track), they were also disturbing in that both of my interlocutors attributed the shift to Chávez himself rather than to the Bolivarian movement more generally. They were disturbing because that attribution of change to the leader himself seemed to contain and express a populist tension within the Bolivarian Movement—between its claims to repre-

Years Later, Having Graduated

●

215

sent and work for the people, and its tendency toward authoritarian political processes and ideological intolerance of debate and dissent, even as it promoted participatory democracy at the grassroots. If the denial of historical agency inherent in the discourse of crisis melded modern notions of dystopia with more Manichean notions of moral decadence, the sense of historical agency permeating the new discourse of defiant revolution borrowed readily from both modern socialism and pre-modern Christian messianism. I wondered whether this shift away from a discourse of a nation in crisis had also contributed to a shift away from a discourse of crisis in the description and understanding of other realms of social life. Or would I find, as Ileana Rodríguez proposed in her work on literary representations of gender and nation in times of historical transition, that conservative ideas, such as that of crisis, were “carried over as ballast from past into future radical agendas” (1994, 19)? I received a partial answer during a conversation one day within the home of Sarita, my former neighbor. I was catching up with Sarita’s two oldest granddaughters who were in their last years of secondary school. I asked them about some of their friends and learned that three of the young women, neighbors I had known since they were toddlers, were either pregnant or already mothers and had dropped out of school. “So,” I asked rhetorically, assuming an ethnographic demeanor for no particular reason, “teen pregnancy continues to be an issue in Santa Lucía?” “Yes,” they concurred. In fact, one of the girls said, “it has gotten worse. More and more girls drop out each year because they get pregnant.” At that point, their uncle Carlos, a produce dispatcher who stayed with his mother between trips to the coast, chimed in, “Yes, it’s become a real problem in the community.” Directing myself back to the girls, I asked them why they thought teen pregnancy was on the rise. The girls shrugged their shoulders. “Some girls don’t take care of themselves,” one suggested. The other added that some get pregnant on purpose so that their boyfriends would marry them. These were the same reasons for teen pregnancy that I had heard 10 years earlier, although back then those female failings were couched in the discourse of youth crisis. I was going to suggest that this did not account for the increase in teen pregnancy, when Carlos (who happened to be a Chavista) spoke up: “I’ll tell you why. It’s because of all the time girls spend in school these days. It seems that the more girls go to school, the more they get pregnant.” Carlos’s comment took me aback. I asked him why he thought that might be. Did he think that education was bad for young women? “No,

216

●

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis

not at all,” he told me. “To the contrary. As the President says, this country has been illiterate for too long. We need more education so that we can participate more fully in our new society.” The reason so many girls who went to school were getting pregnant, Carlos explained, was because the liceo was an unsupervised place, lacking in discipline, where young women were too often left to their own devices. “It was different when I was a student,” he added. “Back then the school formed its students to be citizens and workers. But it has lost its mission.” However, Carlos assured me, this problem would soon be resolved as the liceo was converted into a Bolivarian school. Adopting the slogans of the government, Carlos explained that in Bolivarian schools, “students are taught strong morals along with the knowledge they need to be workers and citizens.” And then he proffered a challenge. “Come back in two more years and you’ll see: all our young women studying, marrying, and working . . . before they get pregnant.” I told him I hoped to come back in two years and thought to myself that I looked forward to seeing how young women and men were coming of age in times of revolution.

Notes

Preface 1. After much deliberation, and despite the encouragement of some people to use the actual name of the town where I lived and did research, I decided to use a pseudonym out of respect for all those residents who were not able to weigh in on the representation of themselves and their town.

Chapter 1 1. “Liceo Parra” is a pseudonym for the town’s public secondary school. This was the only secondary school in the township and served students from Santa Lucía and several neighboring small towns and villages. In the interest of confidentiality and consistency, I have also used pseudonyms for all individuals, even though most people I talked to did not feel this was necessary and some were rather disconcerted that their names would not appear in a book about their town. 2. In Venezuela, at the time of my study, children attended primary school for six years and secondary school for five years; at the end of that time, they could take qualifying exams for entry into a range of higher educational programs. In 1974, the pre-higher educational structure was reorganized into a “Basic Cycle” of nine years and a “Middle Diversified Cycle” of two years. See chapter 3 for a discussion of these two educational structures. 3. As noted in the preface, I have used a pseudonym for the town where I conducted my doctoral research, despite the mixed responses of those with whom I worked and about whom I write. 4. See Varenne and McDermott (1999) for a critique of the theoretical limitations and political pitfalls of cultural mismatch approaches to the study of student success and failure. 5. Maria Mies (1986) and AnnMarie Wolpe (1978) have criticized the notion, prevalent in feminist research on education, that “men-women relations can be changed through education or other forms of socialization” (Mies 1986, 22), for its culturalist (or idealist) and individualist perspective.

218

●

Notes

6. Santa Lucians used the terms marido and esposo interchangeably for husband. Townspeople invariably referred to Eduardo and me as spouses, perhaps as a token of respect. Several single women friends, in their early thirties like myself, told me they would never move in with their boyfriends before getting married because their parents—in two cases their mothers, specifically—would never permit it. Many Santa Lucians told me that kind of arrangement was “libertine.” Although Eduardo and I weren’t married, I never argued the point with Santa Lucians. 7. Kristina Bohman (1984) and Rosario Montoya (1995, 2002) similarly conceptualize street and house as gendered spheres of meaning, moving beyond the mechanical and reductive understanding of these places as male and female spheres, respectively. (See also Hurtig 1998.) 8. That is to say, for heterosexually identified men. Certainly patriarchy is, by definition, heteronormative. I cannot speak to distinctions in the ways homosexually identified men or women might relate to the spheres of house and street by virtue of their sexual identities. 9. Veronica said “Bueno, porque hay que tener una carrera para defenderse cuando su marido la deje.” By using cuando with the subjunctive form of the verb dejar, Veronica may have been conveying either certainty (when) or possibility (if ), or something in between. 10. In Education, Class Language, and Ideology (1979), Noëlle Bisseret discusses the distinct ways in which French secondary school students represented themselves in narrating life plans depending on their class background and their sex. 11. See Nash (1986) and Hurtig, Montoya, and Frazier (2002) for discussions of this tendency within Latin American research on women and gender. See Beechey (1979) for a discussion of the pervasiveness of this split in conceptualizations of patriarchy. 12. McIntosh (1978) and Mies (1986) discuss the historical tendency for patriarchy to be transformed without being destroyed. 13. For an engaging discussion of the art of ethnographic fieldwork, see Harry Wolcott, The Art of Fieldwork (1995).

Chapter 2 1. All translations of conversations and Spanish-language texts are mine, unless otherwise noted. 2. At the end of the fifth year of secondary school, students qualified to earn their baccalaureate. 3. The epithet comes from Jesús María Espinoza Marín’s “Canto a Santa Lucía” (1993). 4. Demographically, Santa Lucía resembled the state of Mérida more generally in having noticeably few inhabitants of African or mulatto ancestry. See Pollak-Eltz (1975) on the historical basis for the absence of an African presence in the Andean region.

Notes

●

219

5. I say “most” Santa Lucians to account for the possible exception of the few elite families in town whose economic means and upper-class status enabled mobility unknown to the rest of the town’s residents. At the time of my stay, this elite represented less than 1 percent of the town’s population (PROCARI 1994, 15). 6. The tension between the normative premise that women’s “bad” life choices (around work and sexuality in particular) have irreparable consequences, and the actual reversibility of certain “bad” decisions is an important facet of patriarchal social control. (See Montoya’s [1995, 2002] discussion of this dynamic in a rural Nicaraguan village.) 7. This discrepancy was common among parents of Liceo Parra students, particularly those of poorer backgrounds. 8. Clinics refer to private medical facilities that provide all the services of a public (state) hospital, but at many times the cost. By specifying her desire to work at a clinic, Ramona framed her life project in relation to a particular vocation and a particular social status.

Chapter 3 1. This nickname comes from “Grupo Escolar,” the official name given to primary schools under the administration at the time the building was constructed. With each new national government, there has been a formal reorganization of the educational system, and a renaming of the educational units at each level (cf. Hanson 1989; Marrero Pérez 1987; Puerta 1992). 2. Whether Santa Lucian youth thought of being a student as a social role or an identity, or both, is something to be ascertained and not assumed. See, for instance, Rouse’s cautions (1995, 53) about scholarly tendencies to universalize identity formation based on Western Enlightenment notions of the individual. 3. See Willis (1977) and Eckert (1989) for their discussions of distinct student subcultures. 4. This young man’s situation is an apt illustration of Noëlle Bisseret’s (1979) discussion of the ecomomic dimension of class reproduction via education, which, she suggests, is not sufficiently attended to by Bourdieu and Passeron (in their reduction of “the mechanisms of the appropriate of knowledge to the sphere of symbolic violence” [120]). 5. This notion I am proposing, of a past relationship between political status and formal education (and with being a teacher), is based on interviews I had with older Santa Lucians who had important political and cultural positions in the community. 6. According to one architectural historian, this style of house, derived from Andalusian domestic architecture, continues to inspire urban housing construction across the country (Gasparini 1962, 122). This is particularly true

220

●

Notes

in the state of Mérida, where there is a conscious effort to maintain the colonial, or so-called “typical,” quality of villages and small towns. 7. Beginning in the 1970s, a rhetoric of educational decentralization circulated that was supposed to guide contemporary state educational planning (administrative as well as curricular); however, its implementation was halting at best. (See Hanson 1981 and Albornoz 1991.) 8. As part of the regionalizing impulse of the national educational system I referred to earlier, in Santa Lucía Agricultura had replaced the standard Educación Pre-Militar. 9. What I am calling “official discourse” on education does not refer to a unitary voice or position: Both television programs and newspapers stories regularly presented critical assessments of the educational system and a spectrum of proposed solutions to the “crisis in education.” Nevertheless, these positions shared certain assumptions regarding the social role education should have, with critics debating whether it was realizing that role or not, or what the system’s fundamental problems and remedies might be. 10. Many of the teachers with whom I talked informally or formally interviewed claimed to have chosen teaching as a career because of the abundance of job opportunities, or because it was a relatively “short career,” referring to the number of years of higher educational studies. Others saw it as the only way they could continue to do work in their fields (such as history or psychology). Only a very few claimed to have a specific interest in teaching per se. 11. I base this comment on interviews with several former Liceo Parra students whose life stories included discussion of activism and protest they engaged in as students, between the 1970s and early 1980s.

Chapter 4 1. The three classes that regularly broke with the predominance of rote, whole class teaching were the science classes devoted to laboratory work that students attended in their last three years of secondary school, physical education class that students attended four days per week, and the crafts (manualidades) class that was only part of the seventh grade (first year) students’ curriculum. 2. See, for instance, Burroughs 1974 and Sanchez 1963; more critically, Bronfenmayer & Casanova 1986; and Rodríguez T. 1989. 3. See Albornoz 1992; Kaul de Kliskberg 1984; Puerta 1992; Rodríguez T. 1989.

Chapter 5 1. In March 1994, two years after his imprisonment, Hugo Chávez and several of his fellow conspirators were granted clemency by then President Rafael Caldera. In 1998, Chávez was elected president of Venezuela.

Notes

●

221

2. From a leaflet circulated by the Movimiento Bolivariano in Mérida less than a month before the second coup attempt. 3. The feminist scholarship on gossip attests to the janus-faced qualities of its effects. Marcela Lagarde has proposed that gossip is a verbal tool women use to define and defend themselves (1992); but the normative terms for social and sexual behavior contained in gossip tend to draw upon and reinforce patriarchal gender ideologies (see S. Harding 1975; Montoya 2000). If gossip is verbal tool that both defines and defends women, rumors are tools that both define and defend the state. 4. If, as Marcela Lagarde points out, “secrets and the ignorance of certain facts by certain people are key to maintaining personal relations” (1992, 54), these are also key in the state’s hegemonic control of civil society. Where gossip depends on secrets and the potency of their revelation for its effects and functions, maneuvering tactically around the structures of official truths and rumors, rumors are disseminated from above, deployed strategically and depend on the masses’ faith in “information” (cf. De Certeau 1984). Although the gendering of gossip as a female and thus intuitive or emotional verbal genre naturalizes the magic of its operations, while the gendering of rumors as a male and thus rational verbal genre mystifies its magic, the two are similar in their ideological workings. 5. In The Magical State (1997), Fernando Coronil explores the ideological effects of this official reconstruction of the Gómez regime as premodern and proposes that the Gómez regime, bolstered by an emergent oil export industry and the support of Euro-U.S. oil importing countries pacified, stabilized and consolidated Venezuela into an economically, militarily, and administratively centralized modern oil-exporting country. For contending views of the nature of the Gómez regime and the development of the modern Venezuelan State, see Yarrington (1997) and Roseberry (1983).

Chapter 6 1. Santa Lucian students used the verb pronunciar (to pronounce) to describe the act of uttering words in English. In some contexts, the term referred to the ability to speak the language; in other contexts, it referred to the ability to pronounce words well. 2. In contrast to Santa Lucian secondary students’ enthusiasm for English, many urban students I knew were unabashed in their repugnance toward English, the language of los gringos. If the state conceived of teaching English as in the interests of the developing nation, many politically engaged students and teachers I spoke with in Mérida considered the rejection of English a necessary expression of their anti-imperialist nationalism. 3. I heard this criticism from two English teachers as well, and it is possible that it had filtered down to the students. The notion of technology as a pedagogical panacea also circulated through official discourses, including media

222

●

Notes

reporting, which used the presence of computer technology in schools as a barometer of the Venezuelan public school system’s progress, backwardness, or ability to surmount the purported educational crisis.

Chapter 7 1. Gill (1997); Luykx (1999); Levinson (2001); and Stromquist (1992) are examples of ethnographic work on education in Latin America addressing issues of gender in this way. 2. Juan Vicente Gómez was dictator of Venezuela from 1908 to 1936.

Chapter 8 1. While theorizing the time of the Other has always been central to the anthropological project (see Nunn 1992), Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983) was seminal in extending that theorization to consider how notions of time inform the anthropological production of the Other within and through the “Time” of field research and ethnographic narrative. 2. See also Buckholtz (2002) for an overview of recent anthropological work exploring youth agency in processes of identity construction and resistance to dominant practices around the definition and social control of teenage youth. 3. See Lesko’s (2001) application of the Foucauldian concept of a discursively constructed episteme (Foucault 1970, 1980) to adolescence. 4. Many comparative ethnographers of secondary education have explored the institutionalization of adolescence as a developmental stage corresponding to the years of secondary schooling. See, for instance, Levinson (2001); Reed-Danahay (1996); and Stambach (2000). 5. Of all Venezuelan women under the age of 20, 18 percent were adolescent mothers, claimed the headline of a February 1992 article by Elizabeth Cohen, which appeared in one of the leading national newspapers, El Nacional. 6. This statement was made during a television broadcast in the series “Alerta, addressing various national crisis.” The particular broadcast focused on “Youth in Crisis.”

Chapter 9 1. In this passage, I draw on Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, and de Certeau, each of whom aims in distinct ways to account for the role of ordinary people in making and making sense of their own lives up against the forces of dominant classes.

Notes

●

223

2. Historically, elite women across Latin America were restricted spatially and controlled socially more than poor women (Graham 1992; Socolow 2000; Stern 1996). As the control of women became linked to upward mobility within modern liberal capitalism, women from middle class families were increasingly subject to severe patriarchal control (Levinson 2000; Mies 1986). 3. Across the vast literature examining minority student failure, ranging from “reproduction” theories (Bowles & Gintis 1976) to “cultural incongruence” theories (Phillips1983; Heath 1983) or “caste theories” (Ogbu 1978)—and even when the authors are critical of how education reproduces social inequalities—there is a shared assumption that certain home environments or family practices are optimal in producing an academic achiever, while other environments tend to produce academic failure. Regardless of the study’s focus, the implicit model of an optimal home environment is that of the socioeconomically privileged, well-educated family.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Achor, Shirley, & Aida Morales. 1990. “Chicanas holding doctoral degrees: Social reproduction and cultural ecological approaches.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 213:269–284. Acosta Saignes, Miguel. 1949. “Esquema de las areas culturales de Venezuela.” Revista Nacional de Cultura 72:31–42. ———. 1952. “El area cultural prehispánica de Los Andes venezolanos.” Archivos Venezolanos de Folklore, vol. 1. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Albornoz, Orlando. 1993. La Agenda Educativa de la Nación: Retos y Desafíos de la Educación Venezolana en el Siglo XXI. Mérida, Venezuela: Fondo Editorial Fermentum. Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands. London: Zed Press. Arcila Farías, Eduardo. 1966. El régimen de la encomienda en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Arellano Moreno, Antonio. 1974. Orígenes de la Economía Venezolana. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Arías Amaro, Alberto. 1976. Lecciones de Historia de Venezuela. Tercer Año, Ciclo Básico. 3rd ed. Caracas: DISEME. Armas, Cesar, et al. 1978. “La relación pueblo-campo en los Andes venezolanos.” Unpublished manuscript. Mérida, Venezuela: Facultad de Ciencias Forestales, Universidad de los Andes. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Vern McGee, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press. Beechey, Veronica. 1979. “On patriarchy.” Feminist Review 3:70–82. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. H. Zohn, trans. New York: Schockton. Bigott, Luis Antonio. 1978. El Educador Neocolonizado. Caracas: Editorial La Enseñanza Viva. Bisseret, Noëlle. 1979. Education, Class Language, and Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Blanco Muñoz, Agustín. 1974. Oposición entre Ciudad y Campo en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Bohman, Kristina. 1984. Women of the Barrio: Class and Gender in a Colombian City. Stokholm: University of Stokholm Press.

226

●

Bibliography

Bolívar Chollett, Miguel. 1994. Población y Sociedad en la Venezuela del Siglo XX. Caracas: Fondo Editorial Tropykos. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, & J. C. Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. R. Nice, trans. London : Sage. Bowles, Samuel, & Herbert Gintis. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books. Briceño-León, Roberto. 1992. “La expectativa de futuro del venezolano y la crisis.” Espacio Abierto: Cuaderno Venezolano de Sociología y Antropología 11:5–18. Bronfenmayer, Gabriela, & Ramón Casanova. 1986. La Diferencia Escolar: Escolarización y Capitalismo en Venezuela. Caracas: CENDES Fondo Editorial Acta Científica Editorial Kapelusz Venezolana, S.A. Buckholtz, Mary. 2002. “Youth and cultural practice.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31:525–552. Burguera, Magaly. 1982. Historia del Estado Mérida. Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República. Burroughs, G.E.R. 1974. Education in Venezuela. Hamdon, CT: Archon Books. Calonge, Sary. 1988. Tendencias de la orientación en Venezuela [Special issue]. Cuadernos de Educación 135. Cariola, Cecilia, et al. 1989. Crisis, Sobrevivencia y Sector Informal. Caracas: ILDISCENDES, Editorial Nueva Sociedad. Chomsky, Noam. 1999. Profit over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order. London: Seven Stories Press. Cisneros, Mirna. 1988. Evolución Educativa y Laboral de la Población Femenina.” Venezuela, Estadística e Informática 2 (3): 6–25. Clarac de Briceño, Jacqueline. 1981. Dioses en Exilio: Representaciones Prácticas Simbólicas en la Cordillera de Mérida. Caracas: Fundarte. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Collier, Jane, & Michelle Rosaldo. 1981. “Politics and gender in simple societies.” In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Sherry B. Ortner & Harriet Whitehead, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 275–329. Consejo de Bienestar Rural. 1954. Problemas Económicos y Sociales de los Andes Venezolanos. Volumes 1 & 2. Caracas: República de Venezuela. Coontz, Stephanie. 2002. “Revisiting Marx and Engels on the family.” In The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics. Nancy Holmstrom, ed. New York: Monthly Review Press. Coronil, Fernando, & Julie Skurski. 1991. “Dismembering and Remembering the Nation.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 332:288–337. Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cuadernos de Educación. 1981. “Proceso a la enseñanza media.” Cuadernos de Educación No. 5 (Número extraordinario.) 4th ed.

Bibliography

●

227

Cunnill Grau, Pedro. 1987. Geografía del Poblamiento Venezolano durante el Siglo XIX. Caracas: Litografía Tecnoicolor. da Matta, Roberto. 1991a. “Espaço: Casa, rua e outro mundo; O caso do Brasil.” In A casa y a Rua. Editora Guanabara Koogan, S.A. Pp. 33–70. ———. 1991b. “The many levels of carnival.” In Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Randell, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Domínguez, Freddy, & Napoleón Franceschi. 1988. Trabajos Prácticos de Historia de Venezuela Contemporánea. Caracas: Colegial Bolivariana, C.A. Drost, H., W. C. Mahaney, M. Bezada, & V. Kalm. 1999. “Measuring the impact of land degradation on agricultural production: A multi-disciplinary approach.” Mountain Research and Development 19 (1): 68–70. Duplá, F. Javier, et al. 1976. Los textos de inglés, vehículo de colonización [Special issue]. Cuadernos de Educación 39. Duplá, F. Javier. 1991. La Educación en Venezuela. Caracas: Centro Gumilla. Ebert, Teresa. 1996. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press. Espinoza Marín, Jesús María. 1992. Historia mínima de Timotes. Timotes-Mérida, Venezuela: Centro Editorial Escuela de Comunicadores Populares “Mario Kaplún.” ———. 1997. Anécdotas y Tradiciones de Timotes. Timotes, Venezuela: Colectivo Literario “La Gaviota.” Espinoza Marín, Jesús María, et al. 1993. Canto General a Timotes: III Recital de Poesía Timotense Don Pedro Pablo Paredes. Barquisimeto, Venezuela: Editoriales Carteles C.A. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fanon, Franz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Febres Cordero, Julio. 1960. Obras Completas. Bogotá: Editorial Antares. Foley, Douglas. 1990. Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1991. “Reconsidering anthropological explanations of ethnic school failure.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 221:60–86. ———. 1996. “The myth of the silent Indian.” In The Cultural Production of the Educated Person. Bradley Levinson, Dorothy Holland, & Doug Foley, eds. Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. ———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings. New York: Harvester Books. Franceschi, Napoleón, & Freddy Domínguez. 1988. Historia de Venezuela. Octavo Grado. Caracas: Colegial Bolivariana, C.A.

228

●

Bibliography

Freire, Paulo. 1985. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, Paulo, & Donaldo Macedo. 1987. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. García, Carmen Teresa. 1991. “Mujer y educación en Mérida 1950–1981. Una primera aproximación en cifras.” El Vigilante. Mérida, Venezuela. Pp. 9–11. ———. 1995. “Las categorías de análisis también nos excluyen: El caso del llamado ‘sector informal’.” Fermentum: Revista Venezolana de Antropología y Sociología Año 5 No. 12:24–39. Gasparini, Graziano. 1962. La Casa Colonial en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Gibson, Margaret. 1982. “Reputation and respectability: How competing cultural systems affect students’ performance in school.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 131:3–27. Giménez, Justo R. 1993. “Apuntes sobre el menor infractor.” Paper presented at the First Roundtable on Research by the New Generation of Anthropologists in Contemporary Venezuela, Mucuchies, Venezuela. Ginsburg, Faye, & Anna Tsing. 1992. Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. González Baquero, R. 1962. Análisis del Proceso Histórico de la Educación Urbana (1870–1932) y de la Educación Rural (1932–1957) en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. González Tellez, & Phelan. 1992. ¿Qué Quieren los Venezolanos? Valores Sociales y Vivienda en Venezuela. Caracas: Ediciones Capriles C.A. Gott, Richard. 2000. In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela. London: Verso. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, eds. and trans. New York: International. Hanson, E. Mark. 1986. Educational Reform and Administrative Development: The Cases of Colombia and Venezuela. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. ———. 1989. “Decentralization and regionalization in educational administration: Comparisons of Venezuela, Colombia and Spain.” Comparative Education Review 251:41–55. Hellinger, Daniel. 1991. Venezuela: Tarnished Democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview. Henry, Jules. 1965. Culture against Man. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1971. “The education of the negro child.” In Jules Henry on Education. New York: Vintage Books. Hernández, Josefina de, & Nelson Prato Barbosa. 1986. “Las relaciones de producción en la agricultura venezolana y sus transformaciones 1900–1980.” Cuadernos del CENDES: La Agricultura en Venezuela 6:13–68. Hernández, Tosca. 1989. “De las mariposas en la noche y de sus cas/zamientos.” In y hasta cuándo esperaremos mandan-dirun-dirun-dán: mujer y poder en américa latina. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad.

Bibliography

●

229

Horkheimer, Max, & Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. John Cumming, trans. New York: Herder and Herder. Hurtig, Janise. 1998. “Gender Lessons: Schooling and the Reproduction of Patriarchy in a Venezuelan Town.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan. ———. 2002. “Debating women: Gendered lessons in a Venezuelan classroom.” In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. New York: Palgrave. Pp. 21–44. Hurtig, Janise, Rosario Montoya, & Lessie Jo Frazier, eds. 2002. “Introduction: A Desalambrar: Unfencing gender’s place in research on Latin America.” In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. New York: Palgrave. Pp. 1–18. Jauregui, Moreno, & Jesús Manuel. 1948. Apuntes estadísticos del Estado Mérida. Mérida, Venezuela: Imprenta Oficial del Estado. Kaplan, Temma. 2002. “The disappearing fathers under global capitalism.” In The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics. Nancy Holmstrom, ed. New York: Monthly Review Press. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1991. “Bargaining with patriarchy.” In The Social Construction of Gender. Judith Lorber and Susan Farrell, eds. London: Sage. Kaul de Kliksberg, Ana. 1984. Las Ciencias Sociales en la Escuela Primaria Venezolana. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Kelly-Godol, Jane. 1987. “The social relation of the sexes: Methodological implications of women’s history.” In Feminism and Methodology. Sandra Harding, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Krohn-Hansen, Christian. 1996. “Masculinity and the political among Dominicans: ‘The Dominican tiger.’ ” In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Constructing the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. Marit Melhuus & Kristi Anne Stjlen, eds. London: Verso. Lagarde, Marcela. 1992. “Los chismes.” ISIS International Ediciones de las Mujeres 16:47–58. Lares, José Ignacio. 1952. Etnografía del Estado Mérida, Publicaciones de la Dirección de la Universidad de los Andes, No. 7. Lave, Jean. 1993. “The practice of learning.” In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 3–32. Leacock, Elinor. 1992. “Anthropologists in search of a culture: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and all the rest of us.” In Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire and the South Pacific. L. Foerstel and A. Gilliam, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lesko, Nancy. 2001. Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. London: Routledge Falmer. Levinson, Bradley. 2001. We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Levinson, Bradley, Dorothy Holland, & Doug Foley, eds. 1996. The Cultural Production of the Educated Person. Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press. Lizarraga Bernal, Alfonso, & Rosario Colli Misset. 1992. “Los desafíos del presente y la formación de profesores.” Fermentum: Revista Venezolana de Sociología y Antropología. 2 (5): 94–108.

230

●

Bibliography

Luna, Enrique Pérez. 1992. Pedagogía, dominación e Insurgencia. Caracas: Editoral Abre Brecha. Luykx, Aurolyn. 1999. The Citizen Factory: Schooling and Cultural Production in Bolivia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. MacDonald, Madeleine. 1981. “Schooling and the reproduction of class and gender relations.” In Schooling, Ideology and Curriculum. L. Barton et al., eds. Barcombe: Falmer Press. Machado, Giovanna. 1979. En Defensa del Aborto en Venezuela. Caracas: Editorial Ateneo de Caracas. Mackintosh, Maureen. 1977. “Reproduction and patriarchy.” Capital and Class 2:119–127. Margolies, Luise. 1979. “Urbanization and the family farm: Structural antagonism in the Venezuelan Andes.” In The Venezuelan Peasant in Country and City. Caracas: EDIVA. Marrero Pérez, José Rafael. 1987. Teoría y Realidad de la Educación Básica en Venezuela. Caracas: Editorial Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de La Educación de Venezuela. Marx, Karl. 1977. Selected Writings. David McLellan, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mbilinyi, Marjorie. 1989. “ ‘I’d have been a man.’ Politics and the labor process in producing personal narratives.” In Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Personal Narratives Group, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McDermott, Raymond P. 1993. “The acquisition of a child by a learning disability.” In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 269–305. ———. 1997. “Achieving school failure 1972–1997.” In Education and Cultural Process: Anthropological Approaches. 3rd ed. George D. Spindler, ed. Longrove, IL: Waveland Press. Pp. 110–135. McDonough, Roisin, & Rachel Harrison. 1978. “Patriarchy and relations of production.” In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production. Annette Kuhn & AnnMarie Wolpe, eds. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McIntosh, Mary. 1978. “The state and the oppression of women.” In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production. Annette Kuhn & AnnMarie Wolpe, eds. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McNay, Lois. 2000. Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Mehan, Hugh. 1993. “Beneath the skin and between the ears: A case study in the politics of representation.” In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Melhuus, Marit. 1996. “Power, value, and ambiguous meanings of gender.” In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Constructing the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. Marit Melhuus & Kristi Anne Stjlen, eds. London: Verso.

Bibliography

●

231

Melhuus, Marit, & Kristi Anne Stjlen. 1996. “Introduction.” In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Constructing the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. Marit Melhuus & Kristi Anne Stjlen, eds. London: Verso. Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor. London: Zed Books. Ministerio de Educación. 1984. Hacia un Nuevo Curriculum para la Educación Primaria y Secundaria. Caracas: República de Venezuela. ———. 1986. Congreso Nacional de la Educación Venezuela. Caracas: República de Venezuela. Ministerio de Educación, Oficina Sectorial de Planificación y Presupuesto ME, OSPP, División de Investigaciones Educativas. 1990. Informe Diagnóstico acerca de la Educación Media Diversificada y Profesional en Venezuela. 1a versión. Caracas: República de Venezuela. Ministerio de Estado para la Participación de la Mujer en el Desarrollo. 1983. Venezuela: Bibliografía Inacabada. Evolución Social 1936–1983. Caracas: Ediciones Ministerio de Estado para la Participación de la Mujer en el Desarrollo y Banco Central de Venezuela. Monfort Tomas, Eduardo. 1985. Machismo: El Macho Latino y Otros Ensayos. Barquisimeto, Venezuela: Editorial Boscan. Montilla, José Alberto, & María Cristina Parra. 1992. “Proyecto educativo del populismo en Venezuela.” Espacio Abierto 11:83–101. Montoya, Rosario. 1995. “Fractured Solidarities: Utopian Projects and Local Hegemonies in Nicaragua, 1979–1990.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan. ———. 2002. “Women’s sexuality, knowledge and agency in a Nicaraguan village.” In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, & Janise Hurtig, eds. New York: Palgrave. Pp. 65–88. Montoya, Rosario, Lessie Jo Frazier, & Janise Hurtig, eds. 2002. Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. New York: Palgrave. Moore, Henrietta. 1990. Anthropology and Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moreno Pérez, Amado. 1986. Espacio y Sociedad en el Estado Mérida. Mérida, Venezuela: Universidad de los Andes, Consejo de Desarrollo Científico, Humanísitico y Tecnológico. Naím, Moisés. 1993a. Paper Tigers & Minotaurs: The Politics of Venezuela’s Economic Reforms. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment. ———. 1993b. “The launching of radical policy changes, 1989–1991.” In Venezuela in the Wake of Radical Reform. Joseph. S. Tulchin, ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Nash, June. 1986. “A decade of research on gender in Latin America.” In Women and Social Change in Latin America, June Nash & Helen Safa, eds. South Hadley: Westview. Nunn, Nancy. 1992. “The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21:93–123. OCEI. 1981. El censo 80 en Venezuela: Resultados Básicos. Caracas: Oficina Central de Estadística e Informática.

232

●

Bibliography

———. 1992. El censo 90 en Venezuela: Resultados Básicos. Caracas: Oficina Central de Estadística e Informática. ———. 1993. Mapa de la Pobreza. Caracas: Oficina Central de Estadística e Informática. Ogbu, John. 1978. Minority Education and Caste: The American System in CrossCultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1988. “Colonialism and modernity: Feminist representations of women in non-Western societies.” Inscriptions 3⁄4:79–93. Ortner, Sherry B. 1978. “The virgin and the state.” Feminist Studies 4:19–36. ———. 1989–90. “Gender hegemonies.” Cultural Critique 4:35–80. ———. 1995. “Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 371:173–193. ———. 1996. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Ortner, Sherry B., & Harriet Whitehead, eds. 1981. “Introduction: Accounting for sexual meanings.” In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Palma, Milagros. 1992. La Mujer es Puro Cuento: Feminidad Aborigen y Mestiza. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editores. Penalvar, Luz. 2003. “Modernidad, medio ambiente y equidad: Una propuesta para su estudio en los valles altos de los Andes venezolanos.” Fermentum: Revista Venezolana de Sociología y Antropología 13 (36): 73–88. Pérez Martínez, Herón. 1994. Refrán Viejo Nunca Miente: Refranero Mexicano. Michoacán, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. Phillips, Susan. 1983. The Invisible Culture: Communication in Classroom and Community in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. New York: Longmans. Picon Salas, Mariano. 1976. Comprensión de Venezuela. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores. Pollak Eltz, Angelina. 1975. La Familia Negraen Venezuela. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores. Poovey, Mary. 1988. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. PROCARI. 1994. “Plan de Desarrollo Urbano Local de Timotes, Estado Mérida.” Timotes, Venezuela: Alcaldía de Miranda. Puerta, Jesús. 1992. “Dos líneas de modernización: Un espozo histórico.” Fermentum: Revista Venezolana de Sociología y Antropología 25:9–25. Rangel, Domingo Alberto. 1968. El Proceso del Capitalismo Contemporaneo en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Reed-Danahay. 1996. Education and Identity in Rural France: The Politics of Schooling. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, & Alicia Reichel-Dolmatoff. 1961. The People of Aritama: The Cultural Personality of a Colombian Mestizo Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

●

233

Reinharz, Shulamit, & Ellen Stone, eds. 1992. Looking at Invisible Women: An Exercise in Feminist Pedagogy. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America. Rhoads, Russell D. 1992. “The intergenerational transfer of a new rurality: The family farm and commercial production in the Venezuelan Andes.” Urban Anthropology 214:311–352. Rivas Mazzei, Luis Alfredo. 1991. Rasgando la Niebla. Mérida, Venezuela: Publiandina Impresos. Rodríguez, Ileana. 1994. House, Garden, Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in PostColonial Latin American Literatures by Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodríguez Benítez, Ramón. 1989. Enciclopedia Popular: Educación Básica. 6° Grado. Caracas: Publicaciones Populares Deiba. Rodríguez T., Nacarid. 1989. La Educación Básica en Venezuela: Proyectos, Realidad, y Perspectiva. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia. Romero, Lenín, & Carlos Manterola. 1985. “Nueva ley de educación.” Cuadernos de Educación, nos. 78–79 Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Culture in motion.” In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Roseberry, William. 1983. Coffee and Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rosenblat, Angel. 1981. La educación en Venezuela, edición 5. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores. Rosillo, Carmen. 1992. “La participación política de las mujeres en Venezuela.” In Fermentum: Revista Venezolana de Sociología y Antropología 2 (4): 37–51. Rouse, Roger. 1989. “Mexican Migration to the United States: Family Relations in the Development of a Transnational Migrant Circuit.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. ———. 1995. “Questions of identity.” Critique of Anthropology 154:351–380. Sanchez, George. 1963. The Development of Education in Venezuela. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Office of Education. Saramago, José. 2002. The Cave. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: A useful category of historical analysis.” American Historical Review 915:1053–1075. Silverstone, Roger. 1989. “Let us then return to the murmuring of everyday practices: A note on Michel de Certeau, television and everyday life. Theory, Culture & Society 6:77–94. Silvert, Kalman H., & Leonard Reissman. 1976. Education, Class and Nation: The Experiences of Chile and Venezuela. New York: Elsevier. Simon Fray, Pedro de. 1963 [1612–13]. Noticias Historiales de Venezuela. Vol. 2, Fuentes para la Historia Colonial de Venezuela. Caracas: Editorial Arte. Socolow, Susan Midgen. 2000. The Women of Colonial Latin America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

234

●

Bibliography

Sonntag, Heinz, & Rafael de la Cruz. 1985. “The state and industrialization in Venezuela.” Latin American Perspectives 124:75–104. Stambach, Amy. 2000. Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, Community, and Gender in East Africa. New York: Routledge. Steedman, Carolyn Kay. 1986. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stern, Steve. 1995. The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, & Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Stølen, Kristi Anne. 1996. “The power of gender discourses in a multi-ethnic community in rural Argentina.” In Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Constructing the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. Marit Melhuus & Kristi Anne Stjlen, eds. London: Verso. Stromquist, Nelly, ed. 1992. Women and Education in Latin America: Knowledge, Power, and Change. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner. Suardíaz, Luis. 1989. “El paisano Ramón Palomares en su reino de este mundo y otros.” Actual. Revista de la Dirección General de Cultura de la Universidad de los Andes, nos. 16–17:141–155. Suárez, María Matilde. 1982. Fincas Familiares en los Andes. Caracas: Cuadernos Lagoven. Suárez, María Matilde, & Mario Dipolo. 1979. “An historical approach to the study of rural-urban migration.” In The Venezeulan Peasant in Country and City. Luise Margolies, ed. Caracas: EDIVA. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Thompson, John B. 1989. Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication. New York: Polity Press. Trigo, Benigno. 2000. Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Trinca F., Delfina. 1981. “El agro andino venezolano: condicionantes de su transformación agraria.” In Hacia una Nueva Geografía Agraria de los Andes Venezolanos. Mérida, Venezuela: Universidad de los Andes Facultad de Ciencias Forestales. Varenne, Hervé, and Ray McDermott. 1999. Successful Failure: The School America Builds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Velázquez, Nelly. 2003. “Ambiente sociedad e historia en los valles altos andinos de Venezuela (1930–1999).” Fermentum: Revista Venezolana de Sociologia y Antropologia 13 (36):38–54. Volosinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolcott, Harry. 1995. The Art of Fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Bibliography

●

235

Worsley, Peter. 1992. Foreword. In Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire and the South Pacific. L. Foerstel and A. Gilliam, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Yarrington, Doug. 1997. A Coffee Frontier: Land, Society, and Politics in Duaca, Venezuela, 1830–1936. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Newspapers and Magazines Correo de los Andes Mérida El Merideño Mérida El Globo Caracas El Nacional Caracas El Nuevo País Caracas El Diario de Caracas El Vigilante Mérida La Frontera Mérida La Nación San Cristobal

This page intentionally left blank

Index

References to maps and illustrations are printed in bold type. References found in endnotes are followed by “n.” Adolescence 24–25, 169–188 and crisis 24, 170–174, 215, 222n6 ethnography of 222n4 as modern concept xvii, 170–171 Agriculture agricultural economy 27 Ministry of Agriculture 44 work in 17, 31–33, 51, 60, 85, 182, 201–202 See also Family: family farming Bakhtin, Mikhail xxi, 66, 104, 207 Benjamin, Walter 16, 123, 189, 222n1 Bigott, Antonio 128–131, 142 Bolívar, Simón 26, 42, 78, 117, 127 Bolivarian movement 117–118, 127, 213–214, 221n2 revolution 213 Bronfenmayer, Gabriela 70 A career to defend yourself 13–15, 167, 189. See also Students: life plans of Casanova, Ramón 70 Chávez Frías, Hugo 30, 73, 116–117, 120, 124, 212–214 City compared to village 32–33, 38, 42–45, 48–49, 53–55, 60, 61, 115–116, 183, 187. See also Rural: versus urban; Urban life

Clarac de Briceño, Jacqueline 41, 48 Classroom setting 66–67, 79–80, 91–113, 161–162, 177. See also Pedagogy compared to house and street 109 gendered qualities of 79–80, 84, 98–102, 112–113 as site of cultural production 91 Coming of age 19–20, 34, 58–59, 198, 211, 216 Coming of Age in Samoa 24 and crisis 15, 24, 29 and ethnography 25 as modern concept 24–25 youth’s work of 90–92, 131, 142, 189 Coronil, Fernando xiii, 43, 221n5 Corruption 118, 122, 125–126, 129 Crisis xiii–xx, 14–19, 27–34, 117–120, 125–131, 181–182. See also Adolescence; culture shock discourse of 22–23, 119, 174, 213–215, 220n9 and education 85, 98, 122 gendered discourse of 119 and modernity xiv and students’ life plans 59–63, 129, 169, 189 and urban life 43 culture shock xv–xvi and crisis xviii, 170

238

●

Index

da Matta, Roberto 9–10, 78 de Certeau, Michel 11, 66, 77, 91, 111, 151–152, 156 Dewey, John 101. See also Pedagogy: Deweyan Duplá, Xavier 70, 71, 108, 141–142 Education and class 70 in crisis 23, 126 (see also Crisis: and education) educational opportunities 49, 54, 175 and gender 29, 62, 84–87, 153, 183, 193, 215–216 modern notions of 72, 75–76, 112, 171 and neocolonialism 129–130, 141–142 and social mobility 70–71, 182 theories and principles of 5, 100, 112, 131, 140, 153–154, 219n4 Venezuelan 6–7, 37, 66–72, 76–77, 81–83, 100–101, 108–109, 128, 219n1, 220n8 Venezuelan Ministry of 12, 76, 100–101, 136, 179 See also Higher education; School Educational success and failure 5–6, 29–30, 103–104, 140, 190, 196–199, 217n4 English 12–13 and neocolonialism 142–143 nonlearning of 140–150 teachers 7, 89, 143–145 teaching and learning 6–7, 26, 89–92, 107, 133–145 Espinoza Marín, Jesús María 23, 40 Ethnography xvii, xxii, 9, 15, 23–26, 170–172, 190 feminist 11, 20–22, 209 of schooling 91, 93–99 temporal frame of 58, 205, 209

Family Andean xix, 36–37, 50–56 and crisis 23, 62, 126 family farming 1, 32–34, 37, 44–48, 52–53, 174, 202 life cycle 170–171 patriarchal 14, 27, 36–37, 44–48, 52–56, 112, 117, 176, 191, 197 relations xix, 23, 49–50, 53 and youth’s adult plans 18, 32–34, 51, 57–62, 82–83, 189 Foley, Doug 28, 103, 131, 204–205 Freire, Paulo 97, 131 Goffman, Erving

67

Henry, Jules 20–21 Higher education 18, 33, 49–50, 54, 58, 145, 152. See also Education House and street and school 67–69, 75–80, 99–100, 161, 198 spaces of 6, 9–11, 52, 118, 137, 151, 157, 218n7–8 Housewives 2–4, 19, 49–50, 54 Indigenous people. See Santa Lucía: indigenous past Levinson, Bradley

79, 174

Machismo 9–11, 33, 51, 94 Massey, Doreen 36–37, 44 McDermott, Raymond 11, 140, 153, 198, 217n4 Mead, Margaret 24–25 Men Andean men 33, 51, 194 Santa Lucian men xix, 10, 18–19, 52, 87, 91, 201–202 See also Machismo Mies, Maria 14, 20, 22–23, 53, 135, 150

Index Modernity xiv–xxiii, 23–24, 27, 37–44, 52–54, 212–213. See also Education: modern notions of gendering of 59 modern nation state 69, 71, 76, 118, 127, 145 and patriarchy 14, 23–24 and youth 13–19 Montoya, Rosario 53 Patriarchal bargain 14, 19–24, 53, 101, 107 Patriarchy 14, 40, 156, 189–192. See also Pedagogy: patriarchal qualities of capitalist patriarchy 50 modern patriarchy 55 negligent patriarchy xviii–xix, 14–30, 55, 77, 87, 141, 150, 154, 210–211 versus gender 23 Pedagogy Deweyan 101 dictation 89–90, 95–99, 102–104 exams 108–112 explication 105–108 gendered qualities of 94–95, 99–101, 105–107 neocolonialist 129–130 (see also English: and neocolonialism) patriarchal qualities of 93–96, 101, 104–108, 112–113 See also Classroom setting Pérez, Carlos Andrés xiv–xv, 73, 117, 119–120 Rodríguez T., Nacarid 101, 108, 122 Roseberry, William 39, 45 Rosenblat, Angel 6–7, 108, 128 Rural 41–43. See also City compared to village rural education 78, 101, 146 versus urban 26, 32–33, 42–43, 48–49, 86, 126, 210

●

239

Santa Lucía 3, 39, 31–63 agricultural economy of xviii, 33, 44–45 and crisis xviii, 58 indigenous past 40–43 a place where nothing happens xvi, 36, 110, 173 prosperity of 1–3, 26, 43–48 town identity 32–36, 40–44 in school text books 41–42 urbanization of 49 youth views of 32–38 School school building 72–80, 161 secondary school gendered space of 66–67 (see also House and street) as an institutional space 67, 75–80 resemblances to house and street 99, 108 students’ views of 65–69 Simón Bolívar. See Bolívar, Simón Steedman, Carolyn 19–20, 37, 59, 133, 190 Students as citizens 82–83, 87 gendered identities of 69–72, 81–88 identities and hometown 32–35 life plans of 13–18, 31–37, 50–51, 56–63, 82–84, 138–139, 192–205 rural versus urban 86 (see also City compared to village) social meanings of 81–88 Taussig, Michael xix; 21–22, 153–154 Teachers 80–81 gendered practices of 78–79 Trigo, Benigno xiv, 119, 170 University education. See Higher education

240

●

Index

Urban life 26, 42–43. See also Rural: versus urban Urbanization 44–50 Varenne, Hervé 11, 140, 198, 217n4 Venezuela conceptions of xiv–xv, xx, 119 education in (see Education: Venezuelan) history of 45, 48 students and Venezuelan history 85–86 Venezuelan Andes xv, 2, 38–40 Andeans 12, 41 history of 38–40, 45 Venezuelan people 98, 116, 118, 124–125

Venezuelan State 23–24, 37 and education (see Education: Venezuelan) patriarchal 13–14, 36, 50 Willis, Paul 69, 71, 219n3 Women Andean women xix, 33 in the curriculum 155 in the house 10, 49 mobility of 53–55 Santa Lucian women 5, 10, 16–19, 49 Venezuelan women 29, 151–167 and work 33, 50–54 Women’s organizations 5, 6