This morning, on the river, we passed a pecky-pecky boat with about ten passengers inside, and I asked Emerson where they were going.
“To la minga. It’s a custom here. If you have a chakra [a small field of crops] and you need to harvest it, you invite all your neighbors and they come spend the day working at your place. Then, when your neighbor needs to harvest his chakra, or catch a bunch of fish, or fix his roof, you go to his place.”
“So it’s a system. Reciprocity.”
“Yes, how do you say, Communal?”
“Communal, yes.”
“Yes, but the thing is, when you have la minga, you are expected to provide food and masato for everyone who is there. And the people drink the masato while they are working.”
Masato is a drink of fermented yucca. It's fermented with saliva. The women in a village stand around a tub, chew yucca, spit it out, leave it overnight. Supposedly the alcohol is strong enough to clean all the germs from the saliva. But it can't cure it of the lumpy texture and the taste, which I've read somewhere is "as awful as it sounds." Later, when we were hiking back to the station, I asked Emerson if he drinks it. "I do," he said, grinning. The other guys in our group, all campesinos, started smiling and laughing at my shock and revulsion. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about this being practiced by uncontacted peoples. But ribereños like these? And Emerson--when he's not working for the Project, he's a waiter in Iquitos. "Devon drinks it too," Emerson told me. Devon, the director of Project Amazonas, a biologist from Canada. "Whenever we go into a village, he's the first one to try their masato," Emerson laughed. I have not tried masato. I might find myself in a situation where I have to so as not to insult the people I am staying with. I am not looking forward to it.
Anyway, I wasn't really surprised to learn about la minga. Indigenous life tends to be full of these cute little forms of communism. And communists especially would love this boozy dialectic: not just bringing people together but also erasing the divide between work and play entirely. But the possible ramifications of la minga didn’t really sink in for me until we took our mosquito nets to the second pueblo for the day, Catorce de Julio. As we walked across the soccer field in the middle of the village, it appeared completely abandoned. There was one old man waiting for us in the local communal, sweeping the dusty cement floors of the classroom/church/meeting hall. Emerson opened the main doors and dragged over one of the wooden desks which were piled in the corner and placed it near the front door like we were a storefront. The first man to show up to get a net was tall, shirtless and swaying like a tree in a gail. He was plastered to the point where everyone avoided eye contact with him in fears of him becoming beligerent. He would shake my hand and mumble something and I would nod and smile and look away. Once he called me “Meester” to try to fuck with me.
“How old are you sir?”
“47.”
“And your spouse?”
“17.”
“How many children are living with you.”
“Well she just had her first, and it’s a couple months old.”
“Ok, sir, one net for you and your family.”
We put the net in his hand. He looked down at it, wobbled around, kept standing there. I knew it would be risky asking him to move along, so I followed everyone else’s lead and just ignored him. Emerson motioned to the old lady behind him, “Pase por favor.” She stood in the narrow space between the old man and Emerson.
“How many of your children are living with you, Señora?”
“Uh, well, there’s Segundo.”
“And how old is he?”
“28.”
“And he is still living with you?”
“Yes.”
“And he is not married?”
“No.”
She named 5 other sons, between the ages of 28 and 16, all of whom, she claimed, were not married and still living with her. So this is the village where everyone tries to bullshit us, I thought.
However, when the drunk guy saw this solitary old lady leaving with six mosquito nets, about 2 or 3 more than the average family received, he spoke up.
“I have other children.”
“Sir...”
“Older ones. From my dead wife.”
“Sir, we asked you how many of your children were living with you and you only said one.”
“No, the rest are still living with me.
Another man, middle-aged, was leaning against the door, looking out, and shaking his head, vigorously, “No.” We just ignored the drunk guy. Soon he quieted down. But he kept standing there, wobbling. By the time he left, he was full of warm feelings for all of us. It was a different vibe than anything we had experienced so far. But after these first two individuals, everyone else was fairly gracious, cooperative, honest. As usual, the confident old people of the community came to shake our hands and tell us thank you. An enchanting little girl with a wide-eyed, tooth-missing smile came up to me to ask me a question. It was something very simple--three, maybe four words--but no matter how many times I asked her to repeat it, I could not understand what she was saying.
As the hour progressed, groups of people would emerge from a bush to the left of the soccer field. Women holding an umbrella in one hand and a baby in the other, with gold on their front teeth, their milk-swollen breasts bulging or their old bags sagging through their threadbare tank tops, which they never thought twice about pulling up to breastfeed in front of me. You could see a lifetime of difference between their sullen, uninterested faces, and the enchanted smiles of the little girls. I asked one of the women where they were all coming from. "Nuestra chakrita," she said.
I asked Emerson, “Is there a lot of alcoholism here?”
“Yes. It’s la minga. After they get done with the masato, they start taking agua diente. Rum.”
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