Wednesday, April 16, 2008

A Rant About Roaches

In Daddy and mine’s favorite movie, there is a great scene where someone is standing behind a bus, letting the exhaust engulf him. When a woman asks him what he’s doing, the character says, “Just wanted to feel like I was back in California”.

Somehow that has to do with how I feel about Lima – more than willing to brave the ugly, I suppose.

On the beaches of Peru, this Latin metropolis, pushing on 9 million inhabitants is want for charm and so covered in smog that most days the sun seems more a hot haze than a defined distant shape. Lima is perfectly urban, in every sense of the word, and that makes it straightforward and un-confusing, and that makes it a wonderful friend. She’s not hidden behind colonial style downtown restoration projects, flashy tourist districts or a get-old-quick-one-business-town-feel; its just normal people doing normal things.

La Paz is a little-big town, similar to DC – but Lima is huge, and not even sprawling, just full-to-the-top enormity. Her crime reports are high and I’m sure she's dangerous; not so long ago she was overrun with Marxist Guerrilla’s car bombs. I don’t think cities survive that kind of unpredictable conflict and come out innocent – people start carrying iron rods in their cars. But despite the crime, I never felt the decaying sense of corruption that I’ve sensed in places like Managua, Nicaragua. People trying to make a buck sure, lots of black market absolutely, but not right out cheat you to your face. Cheating systems are one thing, but ripping someone off to their face is disheartening to my concepts of humanity.

One of my favorite Limeños likens his compatriots to cockroaches that can get in anywhere and survive anything: including bombs, earthquakes and a failed economy. Among the evidence of said cockroachness that I gathered on my stay, were two accounts of airport security violation (in the name of romance) and a host of black market activity. The most fascinating was observing the highly skilled and detailed work of selecting only the finest quality imitation brand clothing for resell. This, it turns out, is hard work requiring a skill-set and knowledge base: someone should get paid to do it. It takes a trained eye to identify a well-stitched logo, perfectly textured fake label tags etc... And we’re all suckers for paying more for a name, because these products really are just as good. We’re not talking about generic drugs or rip-off electronics that don’t last as long. We’re talking about people who want to feel cool and waste money. And we’re possibly talking about a company’s dominion over its name and image. However, I think the former interests me more and it definitely interests Lima more.

But just as my affinity for Lima smog seems connected to the movie character’s affinity for California smog, the illegality of selling fake designer brands seems connected to the capriciousness of country citizenship, visas and the randomly assigned rights to cross randomly drawn territorial borders – an increasingly manifest pet peeve these days.

Part of my research supposedly measures people’s empowerment within a given context, taking into account personal capital and opportunity structures. Protected brand names and travel visas fall into the Formal Opportunity Structure variable. That’s the variable I love to hate, because its easy and sometimes fun to get mad at “the man” or “the way things are.” But it’s also the most difficult variable to overcome. Cultures (informal opportunity structures) are always evolving, and personal capital is almost always accessible through education and determination. But changing laws, and institutions takes large-scale collective work and lots and lots of time.

Anyway, I think the cockroaches of Lima are quite impressive in their evasion of a formal opportunity structure that seeks to provide no opportunities whatsoever. I think its safe to sympathize with what I’ll call their quest for empowerment.

So can you name the movie?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Reading this after talking to you is so different than reading it cold...no idea what the movie is by the way. Thank you for sharing as always.