The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman

The Exotic Amazon and the Exotic Woman

by Andrea Vela Alarcón

• THE PLACE • The Exotic Amazon

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I am a woman attached to a place1. That place is the Amazon, specifically from the selva baja or Omagua. Located in the North of what today I call Peru. I was taught to know about the Amazon as:

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A vast land occupying around 68% of the country.

Rich in biodiversity, around 31 ecosystems, many exotic plants and animals. There are Indigenous communities that were here before us, around 20 (but.I.only.know.three).

The Amazon is the house of the largest river in the world, a one of the seven natural wonders.

This land is also the lungs of our world, so it is important to care for it.

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I am a woman attached to a place. That place is now known as the Amazon, and I got to hear about its essence thanks to Manuelita, the teen that came from a river community to take care of me when my parents wouldn’t. Manuelita told me stories that went beyond this place’s fertile greenness and prosperous blackness. These stories introduced me to spirits who didn’t belong to a mestiza like me, descendant of Chinese immigrants, Spanish settlers and maybe ‘Indians’ nobody bothered, nor wanted to trace.

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|| Iquitos • Loreto • Amazonia || What do I know about it, besides being the place I was born in and left when I was 15.

Besides the exotic, the mystique, the sensual…

I don’t know much.

Reading through the history ‘They’ chose to give my place, I understand a few more things about it, and about me, about them and the many “us.”2 Everything that has happened to my place and the women, like me and different from me, who are attached to it, starts to make sense.

So.

This is me, trying to make sense of my place.

In Search of Paititi

Recounting a history

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You got history when They decided you should get it, and your history starts when They came to civilize you. When They went looking for el País de la Canela in the high jungle and when They came for the Paititi, here in the low jungle. They, los conquistadores, all eager for your cities made of gold and cinnamon forests embarked in long explorations. But it was in 1542 that your new name and history started to be written.

Francisco de Orellana bumped into your main artery, the river that connected you with the Atlantic. De Orellana called your wild river the Amazonas, supposedly after he encountered the arrows of women warriors who reminded him of the Greek myth of one breasted fighters with the same name. De Orellana’s river expedition left him and others wanting to see more of you, particularly the many cities of golden abundance.

With the conquistador’s arrival your new era started. They started by cutting you into pieces they called borders. These imaginary lines would help them to know what parts of you

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now belonged to them Europeans, the Spanish and Portuguese.

Not too much after that, you would start to see the traces of the west’s ravenous exploitation of your land and your first people.

They didn’t find Paititi or el País de la Canela, but there was always a new mythical gold city, like El Dorado o Manoa.

Eventually, your dense forests would calmed these desires for accumulation, but they were not enough to calm the Europeans desires of expansion.

The conquerors from exploring expeditions, those searching for the Paititi, were the beginning of your entrance to civilization, your insertion into the western practices of accumulation. However, after the first expeditions another type of conqueror arrived, the missionary. Around the 1600, Jesuits and Franciscans started making their way through your low jungle. With a new set of symbols in hand, their aim was to “achieve Christianization and civilization of the wild tribes”3.

They wanted to take the savage out of you, to domesticate you

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and your people’s corrupted nature. In order to tame you, they put in motion many mediums to civilize your people and introduce them to the buenas costumbres. The missionaries would lure your people through commercial exchange and when that wouldn’t work, they would go ahead with “correrías” or slave expeditions, which were justified as the rescue missions for your now “wild people”4. Once your people were settled under the missionaries’ power, they were introduced to a new life, a righteous one. A life of a single catholic god, a single truth, a “one-world” world. Your people were forced to stop seeing your soul, your feelings and your consciousness in the different living beings that you host. People, old and new, were taught to no longer live WITH you, they just could live IN and FROM you.

During the 200 years of the missionary presence, your relationship with people changed. You became the Amazon, part of nature, there to be tamed. Your people, and then those

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like me, became humans, the only ones that mattered. Here to tame you. From then on, some of your people and the ones to come, no longer needed your consent to take from you. You were officially the Amazon, a public space up for grabs. The western belief system had successfully set a path for the modern extractive system, in which the export of your Nature answered the capital accumulation demands of the Spanish crown and other empires.

This is how the history They gave you started. Today, your history and your relationship with the western countries, the center of the capitalist system, repeats with slight differences.

• THE SPACE • The Exotic Woman

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I’m 15 years old and I move to Lima.

I’m already embarrassed to say where I’m from, so sometimes I fake my accent. I know my place, the Amazon, scars my body with different images of who I am supposed to be. The images I fear the most are related to my body and what NourbeSe Philip calls the space that lies between the legs5.

I’m 15 years old and I’m no stranger to the fact that the space between my legs, my inner space, has a higher demand in the new place I’m in.

I think I’m not the only one familiar with that fear, I think other Amazonian women have also felt the sexualized stigma that is attached to our body and to our land. They probably know it better than me. We, women from the Amazon, from Loreto, from Iquitos. We are fixed through the representation of the “Charapa Caliente,”6 the two dreadfully words denoting insatiable sexual desire and permanent sex availability as our sole identity. We carry the weight of this identity differently,

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but it is mostly felt in our inner space, the space between our legs.

I always asked myself how was it that our body and the space between our legs became a precious object in the eyes of the foreigners. The spread idea of the Amazon as the exotic land of rich resources waiting to be used by intrepid adventurers, makes me go back to the times when the Amazon got its name, my colonial legacy. I search in the history of the women who saw the first foreigners arrive, the ones who turned the Amazon theirs. I don’t find much, but I can’t help to think that when He was controlling the outer space, the native women’s place. He also controlled the native women’s inner space, the one that lied between their legs . When the women who came before us were turned into an outer space, into a place… was it then that the space between our legs got forced to live in the public place?

Was it then that her body and our bodies became another resource worth of extraction?

The Lustful Indian

Recounting a History

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As a mestiza, what do I know about the history of my body, and the history of the ribereña and Indigenous women’s body on this land?

I don’t know much.

I’ve heard and read a few things about the colonial times, enough to know that the weight of our sexuality starts forming there. The first Spanish, the conquerors explorers, arrived with many desires that didn’t require to see the native men and women as humans, but as replaceable savages. A few years later the missionaries arrived, and it was them who would offer the natives a salvation, an opportunity to become human.

Under the eyes of the western man, to become human meant to embrace the single god, one that commanded to live in decency.

From then on, the natives needed to “cover their shames”7, because nudity was a sentence to sin. It also was a transgression

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of the white man’s virtuosity, one that would lure him into lust and trap him into immorality.

The missionaries arrived to introduce the natives the need of salvation. This new life purpose meant for the natives to change what the western men considered sexual debauchery habits, such as women having the freedom to change their men whenever they wanted or whenever they were abused8.

Salvation required a cease of the transient marital arrangement, an end to vice and libertinism. Salvation meant the formation of a different kind of family, one that required A woman and A man to join in holy matrimony.

The efforts of the missionaries managed to subjugate some of the natives, but they couldn’t rule over the Amazon’s beastly weather. For the missionary the humid and hot sweat running down every body translated into physical and moral corruption.

For the westerner, the Amazon’s weather awakened the carnal

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passion and conditioned the Indigenous to live in sin. Sunk in the laziness and sensuality of their vicious nature.

In this new era the natives faced the commands of western decency and greediness. Their memory and wisdom were being disregarded by the western knowledge, because the white men came to impose and profess, and not to share and learn. In the colonial collectivity the native was given an unfair, bias and arrogant narrative, a quote from a Jesuit chronicler shows it the best: “Their lives and habits are vicious: polygamous, lustful, cannibals, lazy, anarchical, and liars. Is not that they commit sins, is that their life itself is a sin because they live as brutes”9.

The attempts of civilization from the missionaries clashed with the desire of exploitation of the conquistador. While the missionaries were trying to “save” the natives, the other westerners went on slave hunts and forced natives into

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servitude. During the XVIII, the saved and doomed natives would rebel against both oppressors, and forced the missionaries and some governors out, making the crown to postpone their colonization project until the beginning of the XIX century.

However, after 200 years of missionary presence, the native’s unclaimed, indecency and lust were already imprinted on their bodies as sexual libertinism and became the native colonial identity.

For over 300 years, the Amazonian colonial narrative would evolve and make a nest in the Amazonian women’s body. The lust and indecency associated to the native would serve as the base for the national sexualized stereotype of women like me, like you and like the Indigenous and ribereñas of today.

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Endnotes 1 Hello! I’m taking Max Liboiron’s invitation and example to make the endnotes a space to practice gratitude and recognition with those who are part of this text. From the writers, researchers and artists who shared knowledge with me and, now you reading it.

This text was inspired by Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s essay: “Dis Place—The Space Between.” When I read it something in me trembled. One of my biggest fear was manifested through her words and the words of other she presented. “All women have imprinted in them the basic politics of male territoriality” (A. Fell cited by Philip). I see that in me, I see it in and through the space between my legs. When I went back to Iquitos, that complex city in the Amazon, I shared a Philip’s line: “How you interact with the outer space is determined by protection of the inner space”. A seemingly obvious statement, but the same shiver I got when I read it for the first time, I saw it in every woman I read it to.

Philip’s essay made me want to write about women and Iquitos as place. I wanted to write from the place and not about the place. I wanted to write from my memory and not from history. I wanted to write from desire and not victimhood. But, for the first three parts of this text... I couldn’t. I realized that I haven’t processed the history of the women who came before me, and worst I don’t know how to find them in my memory.

What you have in your hands is the behind the scenes of my, and maybe our, resistance to a violent outer space. A recognition of history, so we can start carving new memories.

2 This text (an myself) is entangled in the complexities around the ‘us.’ I’’m aware my experience doesn’t represent every body in the Amazon who has experience gendered violence, but the ‘us’ is my way to find and imagine solidarities.

3 Jesús San Román wrote “Perfiles Históricos de la Amazonía Peruana” in 1994. This is one of the few texts that trace the histories of the place I come from and it has allowed me to learn and make

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sense of my research and my location within these histories.

4 Monika Ludescher wrote “Instituciones y prácticas coloniales en la Amazonía peruana: pasado y presente.” A very painful text to read at certain moments. The colonial construction of wild people has served to hold the binary between the civilized west and the south in need of salvation through civilization. This discourse persists and I’m grateful for Monika shows how colonial practices are not events that ended but continue to impact our reality.

5 In “Dis Place—The Space Between,” Marlene NourbeSe Philip speaks of the vagina as the space between the legs. This affectively shocked me, the absence of the term made the violence I have felt more present. I borrow her words throughought the text as I don’t have the capacity or artistry to translate a feeling into such affectively charged words.

6 “Charapa caliente” is a derogatory term that refers mostly to women and it is often used by non-locals. The first time I was called that name I was 14. I was on my high school prom trip in the Peruvian Andes when some boys found out we were from Iquitos and started harasing me and another friends.

7 The text “Sexualidad en la Amazonía: la construcción del imaginario social,” by the anthropologist José Barletti has helped me to make sense and learn about how the “charapa caliente” came to be.

8 I have known the anthropologist Alberto Chirif since I’m 12 years old. His teachings were shared with me through his daughter, and good friend, Selva. His work has taught me about the Amazon as a complex space, marked by violence, hope and resistance. In the text “El Imaginario de la Mujer Loretana,” he speaks of gendered colonial histories. Research that has been fundamental to how extraction, gender and colonialism are tied together.

9 This crushing quote was taken from the text of José Barletti mentioned above.

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