Charles Simic: Making It New

n February 5, 1916, Hugo Ball, a German avant-garde theater director, and Emmy Hennings, his mistress and a nightclub singer, opened for the first time the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich where they presented exhibitions of contemporary art and performances of experimental music, poetry, and dance. The cabaret had a small stage, room for forty to fifty people in the audience, and was located in a seedy neighborhood of bars, variety shows, and cheap hotels in an otherwise respectable city in which many expatriate artists, writers, journalists, actors, intellectuals, and professional revolutionaries were then living, as well as international war profiteers and spies. Lenin rented rooms on the same narrow alley. Joyce worked on Ulysses in a neighborhood not very far away.

Dada did not yet exist as a movement, nor did it have a name. What started as a series of evenings where poems of modern German and French poets were recited, art songs performed, and compositions by Franz Liszt, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy played on the café's piano changed over the next few weeks into something quite different under the influence of new arrivals on the scene. They were the poet Richard Huelsenbeck, whom Ball had known in Berlin, the Alsatian-born artist Hans Arp, and the twenty-year-old Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and his not-much-older compatriot, the painter Marcel Janco. What brought them together was their hatred of the war and their belief that both art and politics needed a revolutionary change.

Already while living in Berlin in 1915, Ball and Hennings had organized a series of antiwar literary evenings with the intention, they said, to provoke, perturb, bewilder, tease, tickle to death, and confuse the audience. In Zurich, Janco made cardboard masks reminiscent of the ones used in African rituals and Japanese theater, but also strikingly original. As Ball wrote in his journal, "The masks simply demanded that their wearers start to move in a tragic-absurd dance."[1] Patrons of the cabaret who came expecting to hear selections from the works of Voltaire and Turgenev or another balalaika orchestra were subjected instead to skits enacted by masked figures dressed in colorful costumes made from cardboard and poster paint who accompanied themselves with drums, pot covers, and frying pans as they recited poems that sounded like this:

Gadji beri bimba
Glandridi lauli lonni cadori
Gadjama bim beri glassala
Glandridi glassala tuffm Izimbrabim
Blassa galassasa tuffm Izimbrabim.[2]

The noise from the stage was deafening. There was bedlam in the audience too. The performers behaved like new recruits simulating mental illness before a medical commission. In less than a month the cabaret, which at first had welcomed all modern tendencies in the arts and hoped to entertain and educate the customer, had turned into a theater of the absurd. That was the intention. "What we are celebrating," Ball wrote in his diary, "is both buffoonery and a requiem mass."[3] The scandal spread.Lenin, who played chess with Tzara, wanted to know what Dada was all about.

There has never been an easy answer. As late as 1920, Marcel Duchamp said he didn't know what Dada was. The accounts of the original participants in Zurich are conflicting; there is even uncertainty about where the name came from. The most plausible version is that Ball and Huelsenbeck found the French word for "hobbyhorse" accidentally in a French–German dictionary while looking for something else. Another possibility is that it came from the name of a popular hair-strengthening tonic. Whatever its origin, the word, which in several Slavic languages sounds like an emphatic declaration of agreement ("yes, yes"), quickly became as popular as a brand name: a one-word manifesto guaranteed either to amuse or to irritate. Hans Arp tells how he and his friends used to make rounds of the bars, opening the door of each and saying in a loud, clear voice: "Long live Dada!" The patrons would open their mouths in amazement, dropping their forks and their sausages.

The attitude toward the arts that the Zurich Dada brought to light long precedes the movement. "Without knowing one another we worked towards the same goal," Hans Arp later said.[4] He found it sickening to feed art eternally with still lifes, landscapes, and nudes. All forms of imitation, the Italian Futurists had already announced, must be despised; all forms of originality glorified. The idea was to make something no one had ever seen or experienced before. The activities in Zurich gave a name to a loose confederation of artists and poets in New York, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne and Paris who exchanged letters and circulated little magazines and reproductions of their work without ever bothering to iron out their disagreements on aesthetic issues. They no longer believed in trying to understand things from a single point of view. Though they all pretty much did what they pleased, they shared an interest in abstraction, collage, photo- montage, and using chance as a tool. Even more important than any particular technique was their belief that the traditional division between art and non-art ought to be abolished. What they sought was the secret of making masterpieces while repudiating art.

The beginnings of Dada do not lie in art but in disgust, one of its leaders said. This was precisely the attitude of the Italian Futurists who just a few years earlier had demanded that we do away with museums, libraries, and other cultural landmarks for the sake of the Future. However, the war of 1914 divided the sympathies not only of intellectuals of various European countries, but of their avant-garde movements as well. "We will glorify war—the only true hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman," the Futurist Marinetti wrote.[5] Quite the reverse, the poets and artists who were to call themselves Dadaists were pacifists and internationalists. Most of them were draft-dodgers on the run from military authorities in their respective countries. Their revulsion at the butchery of the Great War, in which about ten million men died, over twenty million were wounded, and several hundred thousand lost limbs and sight, had a lot to do with what Dada was to become.

Once the movement was launched, there were manifestos, of course, attempting to explain Dada to the uninitiated. The most famous early ones are by Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, and Richard Huelsenbeck. Their main purpose was not so much to enlighten but to outrage the public and create a scandal. Tzara wrote:

Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada: abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere: trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record: to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least—with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul—pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE[6]

While Tzara's manifesto conveyed the aggressive, polemical side of Dada, it didn't really reflect the thinking of its more thoughtful members. Tzara had a genius for publicity, but he was no philosopher. Besides, the artists who came to be associated with the movement had no desire to follow a party line set down by any self-appointed leader. Oddly, there was always more agreement among Dada poets. "The elements of poetry are letters, syllables, words, sentences," Kurt Schwitters wrote.[7] Poetry, he insisted, arises from the playing off of these elements against one another. He also confessed to preferring nonsense to sense because it had always been neglected in the making of art. Tzara explained in a 1920 manifesto how such poems were to be made:

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.[8]

This is the sort of thing the patrons of Cabaret Voltaire heard. One night Tzara, Janko, and Huelsenbeck took the stage to deliver what they called a "simultaneous poem" made up of separate texts spoken in French, German, and English at the same time. One of the participants compared it to the sound of the Balkan Express crossing a bridge and of a pig squealing in a butcher's cellar. This was followed the same evening by the presentation of two chants nègres, bursts of nonsense language meant to evoke the rhythms of African songs. Ball even invented a "poem without words," which consisted entirely of abstract sounds (such as the line "Gadji beri bimba" quoted above). The subject of such poems, Ball said, was the human voice standing for the individual soul as it battles against the noise of the world. As performance art, such poetry can be spellbinding. It was an attempt to strip poetic language of meaning, imagery, and even lyricism. Luckily, they were not wholly successful. Dada did not produce great literature, though there are many poems by Tzara, Arp, and Schwitters that are great fun to read.

That's not how the artists did it. What one encounters at the current Dada exhibition at MoMA is a proliferation of mutually exclusive styles. The show is the first major museum survey in the United States that deals exclusively with the Dada movement. That was news to me since the work of Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, and George Grosz has long been familiar to museum visitors in this country. What may be less known is how brief their connection to the movement was. Dada lasted roughly from 1916 to 1924, but the actual involvement of many of its participants was not even that long. One of the surprises of the MoMA show is that most of the paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, photomontages, prints, assemblages, and films were done in such a short time. (Of course the readymades—commonplace manufactured objects—simply had to be put on display.) When one recalls the huge influence Dada has had and continues to have among avant-garde artists and poets, one is likely to leave the museum convinced that there hasn't been a single new idea in the last eighty years.

There are nearly 450 works by fifty artists in the MoMA show. The large catalog to the exhibition, which originated at the Pompidou Center in Paris and traveled to the National Gallery in Washington before New York, comes with an introduction, six scholarly essays, hundreds of color and black-and-white reproductions, biographies of the individual artists, and a detailed chronology, making it one of the most comprehensive histories of the movement ever published. It's worth having because a number of notable works reproduced in it are not in the show. The exhibition is organized around six interconnected spaces, each devoted to one of the cities in which Dada flourished. There should have been more room in New York, as there was at the National Gallery. Too many art objects are on display in too small a space and the boundaries between Dada cities are not always clear. Nevertheless, seeing the show is an exhilarating experience. Only those who never had the slightest temptation to break any rules could possibly take fright here.

In the space devoted to Dada in Zurich, one finds Janco's astonishing masks, Arp's collages and painted wood reliefs, abstract needlepoint by the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber, sculptures made of turned wood and marionettes for a puppet theater play, Hans Richter's expressionist-looking portraits, Picabia's tongue-in-cheek technical drawings, and Christian Schad's abstract photographs. Taeuber, who designed textiles and taught at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, brought the tradition of abstraction from decorative arts over into sculpture and painting. Her pieces are among the greatest delights of this exhibition. They have about them the authority and elegance of folk art. Arp also rejected mimesis. He tore paper into squares of various sizes which he then dropped onto a sheet of paper and pasted into place where they fell. He did the same with his abstract wood reliefs, generating forms from automatic drawings which he then had a carpenter cut into shapes. It's hard to believe that Arp let the pieces of paper remain where they fell, that he was never tempted to shift them a bit because they looked better that way, or that he didn't choose some sheets of paper and discard others. Whatever he did, he succeeded in both making his collages formally coherent and giving the appearance of randomness.

The beginnings of the Dada movement in Berlin are tied to the return of Richard Huelsenbeck from Zurich in early 1917. He spread the news of what had happened there during the preceding year and soon joined the artists George Grosz, John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, and Franz Jung in founding Club Dada, which was soon to include Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch among its members. On April 12, 1918, they staged an evening of lectures, poetry readings, and performances. "The threat of violence hung in the air," one newspaper wrote. While Hausmann was reading a pugnacious manifesto, the manager of the gallery turned out the lights. This was the beginning of Berlin activities which culminated two years later in the First International Dada Fair, where nearly two hundred works of art were exhibited.

What set apart the Berlin Dadaists from the ones in Zurich was their clear political message. A number of them were members of the recently founded German Communist Party and were used to passing flyers and selling seditious broadsheets in the street. Some of the Dadaists were jailed; Dada publications were banned and their publishers sued for blasphemy and for having slandered the German military. It is unthinkable that such savage political satire would be published in the United States today. What caused it to be even more effective than traditional caricature was the use of photomontage, which made it possible to paste the face of the Kaiser on a bathing beauty or on a mechanical puppet. Other figures of the German political and military elite were similarly dissected and reassembled using body parts cut out of news photos, fashion plates, and commercial advertisements.

Who invented photomontage? Again, there are conflicting recollections. This is Hausmann's:

In nearly every house there was to be found hanging on the wall a color lithograph depicting an infantryman in front of military barracks. In order to render this memento of the military service of a male member of the family more personal, a portrait photograph of the owner of the martial image had been glued in place of the head in the lithograph. It was like a thunderbolt: one could—I saw it instantaneously—make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. Back in Berlin that September, I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema.

Hannah Höch, who was with Hausmann when the discovery was made, confirms his story. However, the idea may also have come from the practice during the war of pasting subversive photographs and advertisements from newspapers on the postcards sent to soldiers at the front. "Collisions are necessary: things are still not cruel enough," Huelsenbeck said.[9] Germany was on the verge of civil war with strikes, uprisings of workers, street fighting, and a catastrophic economic situation and the art reflects the mood of the times. "Blood is the best sauce," says a caption to one of George Grosz's lithographs depicting two men dining elegantly while soldiers bayonet each other outside the restaurant terrace. Politically charged drawings, collages, photomontages, and paintings by George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Hannah Höch, and the wonderfully irreverent Georg Scholz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter make the Berlin part of the exhibition especially memorable.

Hannover was not a Dada center in the way that Zurich and Berlin were. It was really a one-man enterprise. Kurt Schwitters, who was to become one of the major and most original figures in modern art, was an expressionist painter until 1917. He then adopted collage as his preferred medium, eventually extending its principles to sculpture, architecture, graphic design, music, poetry, and criticism. He gave his art the general name "Merz," which meant openness to any and all materials in making art. In her fine essay on Schwitters in the catalog, Dorothea Dietrich cites his manifesto:

Merzbilder (Merz pictures) are abstract works of art. The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials. Merzmalerei [Merz painting] makes use not only of paint and canvas, brush and palette, but of all materials perceptible to the eye and of all required implements. Moreover, it is unimportant whether the material used was already formed for some purpose or other. A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint. The artist creates through choice, distribution and dematerialization of the materials.

Schwitters wanted to efface the boundaries between all arts. He built his collages and assemblages of materials using anything he could get his hands on: newspapers, labels, leaflets, pieces of wood, and other trash, which he then pasted in layers to a wooden board or canvas, the new layers partly obscuring what was underneath, thickening the texture and transforming the whole into an object never seen before. Dorothea Dietrich points out the tension between the visual and textual in Schwitters's collages. The eyes shift between attempting to decipher the minutiae and trying to take in the whole. This, of course, was even truer of the photomontages Berlin Dadaists produced, where all the fun for the viewer is in the details. Even more than Hannah Höch or Raoul Hausmann, Schwitters wanted to make something that belongs to no literary or visual category. There's an oval hand mirror in the show on which he pasted colored paper, cardboard, wood, metal leaf, porcelain, and a few other odd scraps (see illustration on page 10). It is no longer an ordinary mirror; it is a mirror in which our thoughts are reflected as we gaze into it.

The story of Dada in Cologne in the years between 1918 and 1920 is inseparable from the occupation of the city by the British army following the armistice. The foreign military presence, as well as censorship, hunger, misery, and the failure of most civil institutions, created an atmosphere in which the movement prospered. The leader of the group was Max Ernst, an artist first influenced by Picasso's collages and by de Chirico's "metaphysical paintings," who came into his own after encountering in Munich in the summer of 1919 the magazine Dada edited by Tristan Tzara and the abstract and near-abstract works by Klee, Kandinsky, Hausmann, and Marcel Janko. The Dada years were the most interesting in Ernst's long career and he is well represented in the show. He made collages, worked with photographs, and used pages of illustrated catalogs displaying various kinds of utensils and apparatuses which he then partly covered over with gouache, pencil, and ink until these items were transformed into fantastic imagery we now immediately associate with Surrealism, although both the movement and André Breton's theories about dreams and the unconscious were still to come.

In addition to Ernst, the show includes the works of two minor Cologne artists, Johannes Baargeld and Heinrich Hoerle. They published journals, Bulletin D and Stupid, and made themselves notorious by organizing an exhibition, "Dada Early Spring," which the police closed on grounds of obscenity. Those who wanted to view the art had to walk through a men's toilet in a pub to reach the room in the back where it was hung. Once they got past the urinals, they were met by a young girl dressed for her first communion, reciting lewd poems. Among the works shown, there was a sculpture of hard wood by Ernst to which a hatchet was attached along with the invitation to the visitor to destroy it. The Cologne group broke up soon after when some of its members began to demand a more accessible art and others refused to use art in the service of political ideas.

The New York Dada faction made little news locally. Two bits of scandal occurred, first when when Marcel Duchamp submitted a white porcelain urinal, signed R. Mutt and entitled Fountain, to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, and then when the pugilist and poet Arthur Cravan decided to disrobe on the lecture platform from which he was about to initiate the ladies of Park Avenue into the mysteries of abstract painting. Otherwise, Dadists were hardly visible. The small group of artists who were paying close attention and already had links with avant-garde movements in Europe were either foreign-born or recent arrivals who had come to escape the war. They met at the informal parties at the West 67th Street apartment of the rich patron and collector Walter Arensberg, which housed at that time one of the most advanced collections of modern art ever assembled in the United States, and at Alfred Stieglitz's photo gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue.

Some of the most famous pieces of Dada's art came out of that alliance. They include Marcel Duchamp's readymades and assemblages, Man Ray's mixed-media assemblages and found objects, Picabia's "object portraits," and some intriguing paintings by the little-known artists John Covert, Morton Livingston Schamberg, and Jean Crotti. There are also two sculptures in the show by the legendary Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Lorighoven, who walked around New York with a wastebasket on her head, postage stamps stuck to her face, and her dress ornamented with children's toys, tea balls, and other trinkets she swiped from Woolworth's or found in the streets.

Because they have become so familiar, Duchamp's famous readymades no longer shock. What keeps our interest is the titles. It must have been his sense of humor rather than his much-praised intellect that caused Duchamp to exhibit an ordinary snow shovel and name it In Advance of Broken Arm. When Picabia drew a sparkplug and called it Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity, he knew there is no better way to draw attention to the aesthetic side of a mass-produced object than to connect it to sex. Advertisers of everything from cars to toothpaste have always understood that much. This is the homegrown aspect of New York Dada. They hoped to make a hardware store window, with its pots and pans, screwdrivers, hammers, knives, electric fans, paint buckets, plungers, dustpans, and brooms, more interesting than a visit to a museum, not least by renaming each object.

Dada came to an end as a move-ment in Paris in 1921 despite its furious public activity and the presence in the city of Tzara, Arp, Ernst, Duchamp, and Man Ray. Just in the first five months of 1920, there were six group performances, two art exhibitions, more than a dozen publications, and a great deal of attention in the press. Notwithstanding their success, there were squabbles from the moment Tzara arrived from Zurich. In place of a community of exiles, he found in Paris an avant-garde with strong native roots and not a little xenophobia. The French Dada was led by the poets André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, who saw themselves as heirs to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry, and other French rebels of the past and whose chief ambition was to revolutionize French poetry. The calculated provocations and the hysteria of the hostile public all became predictable. Ridiculing bourgeois cultural tastes can be amusing but is not as dangerous as mocking militarism in a time of war.

In the end, the poets and the painters went their separate ways. Or rather, the artists continued doing what they had been doing all along. A distinct Paris Dada style never emerged. Man Ray's flat iron with a row of tacks glued on the bottom, his metronome with a cutout photograph of an eye on a pendulum, Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a mustache and a goatee, or Ernst's oil-on-wood construction Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale could have been done anywhere. Dada's genius was that it refused to define itself and become an art movement in an era of proliferating avant-gardes. All that its artists had in common were a few ideas about going beyond pictorial conventions, freeing art of its history in order to discover it elsewhere, as well as a sense of humor. That made all the difference—what Harold Rosenberg called "comical questioning of appearances."[10] One only has to watch films like René Clair and Francis Picabia's Entr'acte, which are part of the MoMA show, to realize that their patron saint was that other mad twentieth-century inventor of visual gags, Buster Keaton. The joy of seeing this exhibition is the discovery of little-known works of art, which once were not supposed to be art, but which now look marvelously ingenious, well-made, and even beautiful.

Notes

[1] Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time(University of California Press, 1996), p. 64.

[2] Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 70.

[3] Ball, Flight Out of Time, p. 56.

[4] Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics, with contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor (University of California Press, 1973), p. 391.

[5] Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 286.

[6] The Dada Painters and Poets, edited by Robert Motherwell (Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 81–82.

[7] Kurt Schwitters, PPPPPP (Exact Change, 2002), p. 215.

[8] The Dada Painters and Poets, p. 92.

[9] Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (Thames and Hudson, 2004), p. 39.

[10] Harold Rosenberg, Art on the Edge(University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 180.

Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006

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Pu Zhiqiang: 'June Fourth' Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise

The weekend of June 3, 2006, was the seventeenth anniversary of the Beijing massacre and also the first time I ever received a summons. It happened, as the police put it, "according to law." Twice within twenty-four hours Deputy Chief Sun Di of Department 1 of the Beijing Public Security Bureau ordered me—"controlled" me, in police lingo—to go to the Fanjiacun police station in the Fengtai District of Beijing. This "practical action" of the Chinese government, although it violated basic human rights, was taken in support of the "stability" that the violent suppression at Tiananmen had brought about.

I recall the early hours of June 4, 1989. The few thousand students and other citizens who refused to disperse remained huddled at the north face of the Martyrs' Monument in Tiananmen Square. The glare of fires leaped skyward and gunfire crackled. The pine hedges that lined the square had been set ablaze while loudspeakers screeched their mordant warnings. The bloodbath on outlying roads had already exceeded anyone's counting. Martial law troops had taken up their staging positions around the square, awaiting final orders, largely invisible except for the steely green glint that their helmets reflected from the light of the fires. It was then that I turned to a friend and commented that the Martyrs' Monument might soon be witness to our deaths, but that if not, I would come back to this place every year on this date to remember the victims.

That comment somehow turned into a vow—one that I may need to be fulfilling indefinitely. So far, I have. Every year on the evening of June 3, I have come back to Tiananmen to linger for a while. My wife and I join a few good friends—and beginning in 1995, have brought our son—to gather at the base of the Martyrs' Monument and spend some time in reflection.

For me these visits have also aroused guilt feelings. The government's pressures to forget June Fourth have caused the day slowly to erode in public memory: each year the Tiananmen Mothers seem more isolated, and the massacre seems more a topic to be avoided in daily conversation; even singing "The Internationale," as students did that night, has become vaguely embarrassing. A certain lazy comfort attends this forgetting, and that is why I feel guilt. If I just slouch along through life, taking the easy route, what do I say to the spirits of those murdered "rioters" of seventeen years ago? And if everyone forgets, are we not opening the door to future massacres? Our Tiananmen generation is now in middle age; we are in positions where we can make a difference. Do we not want to? At a minimum, my guilt feelings cause me to telephone Professor Ding Zilin, a leader of the Tiananmen Mothers, every year on June 3 from Tiananmen Square. It allows me to feel that I am bringing greetings to this white-haired mother from the spirit of her dead son.

I know that I am not alone in these feelings, and that is why I involve others in my annual visits. My purpose is not to stimulate resentment. Reconciliation is fine, but it must be based on truth.

This year, about 9 PM on June 2, I sent the following cell-phone text message to a number of friends:

On the evening of June 3 we will gather at the base of the Martyrs' Monument in Tiananmen Square to reflect upon the 1989 massacre. The purpose is to remind ourselves that those events have not been consigned to history but remain deeply rooted in our minds. Pu Zhiqiang asks your support in declaring: do not forget the massacre; uphold truth; promote reconciliation based on legal rights.

In fact it was a minimal gesture, aimed mostly at assuaging my own unease.

I also forwarded the message to the low-ranking police who are assigned to "care for" me. I did the same last year. It is better for all concerned to do this. It prevents causing a shock to the police higher-ups, who, if angered, take it out on their underlings as well as on me. I did not anticipate that this time my message would set off a ruckus.

At 1:10 AM on June 3 my phone rang. It was Officer Cheng Guanglei of the National Security Unit in Fengtai District. He had been ordered to "find his way" to the doorway of my building, from where he was calling to inform me that the Public Security Bureau of Beijing City wanted to have a chat with me. He earnestly hoped that I would "coordinate" with this plan. I offered a perfunctory protest, but then went downstairs, got into the officer's car, and went to the Fanjiacun police station. As we entered the main hall I noticed a blackboard bearing the words "Be Civilized in Raising Dogs." I had to stifle a laugh. If our government were to reach the level of "civilization in raising dogs," then, yes, we would be well on our way to the "harmonious society" that our leaders were touting.

Deputy Chief Sun Di and Officer Han Feng were waiting for me. Sun Di is about six feet tall. He struck me as good-natured, but deadpan: there was no way to guess what he was thinking. He said the police had received a report about my text message, so they needed to talk to me in order to understand the details.

"We all know what place Tiananmen Square is, and what day tomorrow is," he said. "You sent a text message to a lot of people, including quite a few foreign and domestic media, saying that you intend to go there. If everybody goes, and something happens, then what?" In the view of his superiors my text message "endangers stability," he said, so he needed to get clear on a few things: my motive, the message contents, the number of recipients, and the identity of each recipient. He invited me to explain.

I began by saying that I was confident that no one on my list of recipients would inform on me. I didn't imagine that all the recipients would head for Tiananmen Square, either. "I don't have that kind of charisma," I said, "not even Hu Jintao does." Would reporters go? Chinese journalists had long been frightened into silence on this topic, and even if one went, no report could be published. The foreign media? They always report the Tiananmen anniversary anyway—there's nothing you can do about that. People are going to have their own opinions of what I'm doing in any event, so there's no point getting all hot and bothered by it.

Then I explained why I had forwarded the text message to the police. Since I had been under their surveillance for some time now, I thought I might as well be aboveboard about everything and avoid any misunderstandings. But you can't deprive a person of his will, I said, and going to Tiananmen every June 3 to commemorate the dead is a promise that I made to myself. I go there to keep the promise, and would feel wrong if I did not.

I ended by saying that I understood it to be legal to send text messages in China and legal to go to Tiananmen Square on June 3. Moreover, no law prohibits citizens from commemorating the victims of 1989. Since this is so, our whole chat right now is superfluous. For you to come to my building in the middle of the night, without any legal papers and asking for a "chat," is itself an example of illegal use of police power.

Deputy Chief Sun responded that he wished I would lower my profile a bit and stop sending text messages all over the place. "If you want to go, then just quietly go," he advised. "What's the need for text messages?" He promised not to restrict my movements, but said he might assign some people to accompany me "for protection."

"Fine," I said. "I understand." Then I asked Sun to relay to his superiors my own promise that, although I view China's "Law on Assembly, Marches, and Demonstrations" to be in violation of China's constitution, I would make written application in advance if I ever were to plan "an assembly, march, or demonstration." But since my present plan is a purely personal matter, and since Tiananmen Square is a public space, police obstruction of my movement would be unconstitutional. Please also tell your superiors, I said, that I hope the government will finally face history squarely and solve the "June Fourth" problem. A world of make-believe on this issue cannot last forever, and it generates quite a lot of contempt.

Our chat ended about 3:00 AM. Officer Cheng Guanglei saw me home. But that was not the end of it.

At 10:20 AM the police called my home to tell me that I could not go out. This meant, without their saying it, that Sun Di's promise of a few hours earlier was no longer valid. Although I had half-expected this news, it angered me. I went downstairs to walk the dog. Three patrolmen from the National Security Unit of Fengtai District were already on duty at my door. They looked bedraggled from lack of sleep. I telephoned Sun Di from the spot. Since he had broken his promise, I had no choice but to send out a text message explaining that fact, I said. I hoped that he would stay in touch, though, both with me and with his superiors, and do what he could not to break his word too grievously. At least, I said, he should help me to keep my promise of a yearly visit to Tiananmen this evening. Then I walked the dog.

The police joined me on the walk, and afterward I invited one of them, with whom I was fairly well acquainted, to come upstairs for lunch. My elderly mother was home, and we didn't often have guests, so she was delighted to have one. She made special dumplings, and the young policeman helped by rolling the dumpling skins. I was busy composing my text message about "the story that I had no choice but to tell."

Shortly after 1:00 PM Officer Cheng Guanglei reappeared downstairs. He called on his cell phone to invite me down for "another chat." I gobbled down a few dumplings, pressed "send" on my text message, and went down to see him dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and slippers. He, too, looked short of sleep. He told me I would need to come down to the police station again, because some municipal-level officers wanted to see me.

"Why don't they come here?" I asked. "See how cool and bright it is here?"

"You know such things aren't up to me," Cheng said. "Could you cut the questions and just 'coordinate' with us again?"

I could see what was going on. In order to guarantee that I would not be seen that night at the base of the Martyrs' Monument, the police were going to "spend time" with me for a while. They had instructions from above to "frustrate" my personal plans, but they couldn't plainly say so.

The people waiting for me were Jiang Qingjie and Zhang Kaijun of Department 1 of the Public Security City Bureau. Sun Di joined us later. Jiang Qingjie, a 1996 graduate of the Chinese People's Public Security University, was the picture of competence and efficiency—but, like his colleagues, skipped the step of showing any legal papers. Their formal agenda remained the same: they wanted to inquire about my text message, my motive for sending it, and a recipient list. But their real objective, clearly, was to "tie up" my time.

Jiang Qingjie began by saying that to send a text message like this, at a time like this, harms stability and produces consequences. This is why he has to get clear about everything.

I responded that Sun Di had broken his word. Then I inquired whether sending text messages, going to Tiananmen Square, or commemorating June Fourth was illegal. Who, I asked, was actually breaking the law? Just as I have no right to force other people to commemorate June Fourth, so the government has no right to bar me from doing so. But that, I said, is exactly what you are doing right now. If we go by the rules, I don't have to "coordinate" with you and we can end our chat right here.

But the chat did drag on, all afternoon, as the room grew heavy with cigarette smoke. Every now and then we discussed some legal matter, but for the most part the topics lay elsewhere. I asked if the inmates at their detention center could eat wheat pancakes and dough-drop soup these days, or if they still had to survive on corn balls. The policemen offered many topics of their own: how their pay was low, promotions were impossible, and how they always had to work overtime because there were too many cases. I joked with them that if they did a good job "accompanying" me they might get raises. Last year the young man who was assigned to be with me around the clock during the "sensitive time" after Zhao Ziyang's death got a promotion shortly thereafter to deputy station chief in charge of several dozen people.

About 6 or 7 PM, after box dinners all around, they wanted to "do a formality" about my summons.

"Summons? You mean this was a summons?" I asked. "To me it felt rather more like a kidnapping." I told Zhang Kaijun that if I'd known it to be a formal summons, I would have wanted a lawyer.

Zhang answered that he was basing himself on article 82 of the Penal Code of the People's Republic of China on the Management of Public Order.

I said that I was used to illegal detention for "chats," but had never received a summons before. So could he please read to me what that article says? He didn't read it, but showed it to me.

"You're mistaken," I said after glancing through it. "It says here that a summons may be issued 'according to law' only after discovery that a person's behavior has violated the penal code on public order. My behavior has not."

The police responded that article 82 was only a procedural regulation. "If you don't agree with what we're doing, you can go into detail in your statement."

So I "coordinated" again. I answered their questions—pointing out, in passing, where they had broken the law. They took notes. In the end I affixed my signature and thumbprint to their written record, noting explicitly that they had omitted mention of the illegal behavior of the police.

By then I was starting to get cell-phone calls from friends at Tiananmen who wondered where I was. Something else strange was going on, they said. In earlier years the police cleared the square sometime after 9 PM, but this year they were already shooing people out by 8 PM. I explained to my friends that I was at a police station, kidnapped "according to law" for seven or eight hours, and that they should take care not to get into trouble.

At 9:30 PM Sun Di asked me to sign my name "confirming" that my summons had ended at 10 PM. It had begun at 2:30 PM, he said, and as long as it ended within eight hours it was legal. I congratulated him on the successful completion of his mission, which was, as both he and I knew, to thwart my plans to go to Tiananmen. On my side, though, the half-day detention at a police station made me feel as if I had, in fact, kept my promise to remember the massacre victims.

I reminded Sun Di that, counting the two hours of summons in the middle of the night, the total for the day was more than eight. Was this not a dangling vulnerability in his work?

"The morning wasn't a summons," he said. "It was just a private chat."

At noon on Sunday, June 4, I went into the offices of my law firm to do some overtime work. Two policemen, assigned to "maintain overall stability," came with me.

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Alma Guillermoprieto: A New Bolivia?

On a scorching afternoon in an outlying corner of the Bolivian tropics, I stood with Sacarìas Flores, a former tin miner from the freezing, arid, Andean highlands, and listened to him tell how he, a soybean farmer now, and a little less poor, had come to be the current national vice-president of Bolivia's ruling party, the Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS.

Flores, a short, bulky man with a fast walk, has thinning hair and a square, leathery face that sometimes crinkles into a contagious smile. He is short-tempered and even abusive, neighbors who don't like him say, but he is stubborn: of the several thousand Aymara and Quechua Indian highlanders who were encouraged by the government to open up this jungle region to development in the 1970s, he is among the minority who stuck it out. Unacquainted with trees, mosquitoes, snakes, heat, undergrowth, or farming, robbed through corruption of the machinery and technical assistance that was supposed to come with the settlers' aid package, Flores turned the 50 hectares (123 acres) allotted to him into fertile soybean fields and grassland for a few dozen heads of cattle. Barely literate, in command at first of only the rudiments of Spanish, but armed with a miner's long militant tradition, he did something more astonishing still: with his neighbors, he turned an association that had been founded by the first colonos, or settlers, as a mutual aid society, into a radical union, and then into the spearhead of a national federation of colonos. And, as one of the more combative members of that federation, he was among the founders of something poor Bolivians everywhere refer to, respectfully and possessively, as nuestro instrumento polìtico: the party that came to be called the MAS.

Eight years later, Flores told me, he was elected national vice-president of the MAS. Last December his old comrade-in-struggle, Evo Morales, a radical coca farmer who is originally from the Aymara highlands, was elected president of Bolivia on the MAS ticket. The simple fact of his victory has brought about amazing changes: ministers chew coca leaf ceremoniously in Cabinet meetings; the minister of justice is a woman who until recently worked as a maid; the leader of the Senate is a rural schoolteacher. And Sacarìas Flores, who crisscrosses the land on party business every week and is theoretically a very powerful man, comes home to his fields to try to figure out how he will make a living in the future. Other revolutions in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America have taken power in the name of the poor, other political parties have attracted a mass following, other native Americans—perhaps most notably Benito Juárez of Mexico in the 1850s—have become president, but nowhere else has a grass-roots party whose members are not only crushingly poor but overwhelmingly Indian taken charge of a government. It did not happen overnight.
1.

Bolivia, a country with an area approximately twice the size of France, has barely nine million inhabitants, most of whom identify themselves as members of one of the pueblos originarios: the Aymara, Quechua, and Guaranì Indians, who are descendants of the great nations that inhabited the Andes and the jungle before the Conquest, and who were subsequently condemned to lives of odious isolation and unimaginable servitude. Serfdom was abolished at last in 1945, and during the revolution of 1952 latifundio land was distributed to the peasants in the Andes, but the average income for members of the pueblos is still well below a thousand dollars a year. Most other Bolivians are racially indistinguishable from the proclaimed pueblos originarios, and are almost as poor; these are the mestizos and urbanized Indians widely and sometimes insultingly called cholos, who in the Bolivian Andes throng the cities of La Paz, El Alto, Oruro, and Cochabamba, and in the tropics, Santa Cruz.

For its entire post-Conquest existence, Bolivia has survived through one principal export: first the silver from the mountain of Potosì that made the Spanish Golden Age possible; rubber from the Amazon region; then tin from the mines of Potosì and Oruro; coca paste for cocaine, briefly; and now gas from subterranean reserves that are estimated to be the second-largest in South America. The country's dismal infrastructure has grown only in miserly response to the ruling greed of the moment, and so there is just one more or less serviceable road connecting the Andean altiplano, four thousand meters above sea level, with the valleys of Cochabamba, and with the sub-Amazonian departamentos of Santa Cruz and Beni. This fact goes a considerable way toward explaining how, in the course of Bolivia's brief acquaintance with electoral democracy, people like Sacarìas Flores were able to topple one president after another and ultimately take power themselves.

Flores seems to have a shifting opinion of whether he is an Indian or not, but his father, he says, was a miner and "completely Quechua." His mother was a palliri, one of the women who pick through the rubble dumped at mine entrances for small nuggets that might contain residues of silver. His father died in Sacarìas's arms when the boy was fourteen. "And the worst part is that it was just a kidney dis-ease, and he could have been saved if we'd taken him to a hospital," he said guiltily. "But we didn't have money for the bus." It was this event, he says, that confirmed him in the militant outlook of his ancestors.

The miners, having come under the influence of Trotskyism in the only country in Latin America in which this variant of Marxism was dominant, coalesced into a notably resistant and militant labor union, which survived the long string of military dictatorships that ended in the 1980s. In those days, the depleted tin mines of the highlands still provided the only source of Bolivia's puny wealth, so that despite their abject living conditions the miners had some political power. But when international tin prices collapsed in 1985, the economy did too, and miners were the first victims. As a ghastly joke, people I know papered their closets or bathrooms with worthless Bolivian currency produced that memorable year, when the rate of inflation reached 24,000 percent. A millionaire who was raised in the United States, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, was appointed minister of planning in 1986—he would serve as president seven years later—and restored economic balance by, among other things, drastically reducing government spending, closing down much of the government's mining operations, and firing 20,000 of its workers.

History, however, would eventually find a use for thousands of organized, militant, enraged miners, Flores among them, who were left unmoored, and joined the migrant stream to the jungles. The miners brought with them not only their formidable organizing skills but a form of protest that eventually would prove far more effective in their new home: the roadblock. Long ago, protesting miners had been able to stop traffic along the highway between Oruro and La Paz. Now they could set up blockades between La Paz and Cochabamba, an airy city that connects the Andes to the tropics, and strangle La Paz's food supply. As the city of Santa Cruz grew, protesters were able to stop traffic between Santa Cruz and Beni, and have national impact.

Flores was reluctant to join the roadblocks at first, an older neighbor —also a former miner—told me. But then he took to them with a vengeance. As the twenty-first century dawned, the increasingly angry, increasingly powerful brigades of the poor discovered that with minimum planning or expense they could shut down the entire country, and they did so over and over again. In the year 2000, outraged over a government plan to privatize the Cochabamba water supply, the bloqueadores, or roadblockers, essentially destroyed his authority in the course of furious protests now celebrated in militant history as the Guerra del Agua, or Water War. The most active combatants in that war were the bloqueadores from the coca-growing region of the Chapare (on the highway between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz), whose leader was Evo Morales. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, running for the presidency once more in 2002, was startled to find that his main rival was Morales, a forty-three-year-old Aymara whom the State Department described as an "illegal coca agitator." On election day Morales got only 20.9 percent of the vote, but this was hardly comforting; Sánchez de Lozada won with less than two points more. In Bolivia's fragmented political party system, small percentages are the norm.

On the day I met Sacarìas Flores I asked him how the idea first came to the movimientos of forming an electoral party. We were sitting in a café in La Paz, where Flores had arrived carrying a hefty briefcase, wearing a cheap bubble jacket against the miserable altiplano cold, and surrounded by aides who every now and then produced a document for him to sign and stamp. "Our brother workers in the mines created a document back in 1946, called the Theses of Pulacayo," he said, suddenly looking much less like a poor cholo and much more like a militant leader. "Up to then we had been protesting in order to get something concrete in return, but the theses talked about taking power. They called for the organizations of the pueblo to occupy every single political space available. We said to ourselves, 'Why not take these beautiful theses of our compañeros and make them a reality?' And we started organizing accordingly."

The café was the same one in which years ago I had interviewed the legendary mining leader Juan Lechìn, and Flores took note of the coincidence with pleasure. I asked him why, of all the many grass-roots leaders the years of misery and turbulence in Bolivia had produced, it was not a campesinoor a miners' union leader who emerged as the consensus choice to lead the party and run for president, but Evo Morales, a coca farmer who represented only a tiny sector of the population, "Because the cocaleros had a different struggle," he answered. "In my district no one was bombarding my cows or eradicating my soybeans. They weren't threatening our very livelihoods, so our farmers could choose whether or not to join the Federation or go on a roadblock. It made organizing very difficult. In the Chapare there was no choice; they had to fight. So the cocaleros would always arrive at our congresses as a tightly-knit, forceful body. Logically, Evo was elected as the leader."
2.

When Evo Morales was a little boy, his father, Dionisio, a bitterly poor farmer in the mean, windy highlands of Oruro, would gather his llama herd and set off with it and his oldest son for the markets of Cochabamba, where Señor Dionisio went to trade his potato crop and his animals. On the month-long journey the father and son would often walk along the paved highway, and every now and then a passenger bus would go rattling by and one of the passengers would fling out the sucked-out half of an orange. Evo would pick up the detritus of the exotic fruit and eat it, and he would think, "Someday I, too, will travel on a speeding bus, and I, too, will fling out oranges."

Some might consider this anecdote humiliating and others might think it lacks evidence of early patriotic sentiment, but it does speak of dreams wildly fulfilled, and Evo—no one in Bolivia ever calls him anything else—likes to tell it to ambassadors and to audiences at rallies. His older sister, Esther, told me other stories in her working-class home in Oruro: how in 1979 Evo's father heard that those of his neighbors who had migrated down to a strip of jungle between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz were doing rather well, and how he decided to try his luck in the Chapare too.

Tight-lipped strangers in flashy shirts were flying into airstrips hidden in the jungle there, and plying the adjacent riverways, offering laughably high prices for one of the Andes' agricultural staples: coca leaf, as common as tea, but a little more powerful. Coca leaves, brewed or chewed, dull hunger, soothe aches, and leave one with a vaguely energized feeling, and for this small gift they are held to be sacred by the people of the Andes. It is not clear if Señor Dionisio understood that coca —which is a legal crop—was in demand for other purposes in the Chapare, but his son probably did and, like every other coca farmer in the region, considered the matter irrelevant. (The income of a campesino family in the highlands was likely to be a few hundred dollars, or none. In the Chapare the sum could be as high as $14,000 in a peak year.)

Within months of arriving in the Chapare, Evo told me when I spoke to him briefly last November, he had become involved in the local coca growers' union through his love of sports. Soon he was named union sports secretary. With unfortunate timing, the United States unleashed an antinarcotics operation on the farmers of the Chapare in 1986—this was Operation Blast Furnace—just as the first displaced miners began to arrive in the area. Black Hawk helicopters stuttered across the muggy skies, US-trained special forces confiscated passersby's knapsacks and farmers' savings and set their houses and crops on fire. Evo, under the tutorship of a leading Trotskyist organizer from the mines, leaped right to the front of the roadblocks and skirmishes, and then to the leadership of the union. "'Chapareños, indios,'" they would shout at us," says a woman who was on the roadblocks back then. "And Evo would say, 'Yes we are indios, and we have hands and legs to defend ourselves with.' He had no fear, and he spoke out."

I met him in 1992, in a suffocating room at the federation headquarters in the Chapare. He said nothing memorable back then but I remembered him: a curiously langorous young man with a carved Aymara nose, slanted, very black eyes, and a shock of black hair across his brow. He appeared to be uninquisitive, but one sensed that there was a lot of diffuse energy flowing under his skin, and that he could focus it very quickly.

He and the Chapare federation of campesinoswere losing their decade-long roadblock war with Washington: by 1993, coca production represented less than 3 percent of the GDP, down from its all-time high of 12 percent in 1980, and the United States had shifted its antinarcotics operations almost entirely elsewhere. But that was not the end of Evo Morales, the cocaleros' and colonos' federations, or other movimientos populares. The MAS was still to come, and Evo's first run for the presidency in the elections that Sánchez de Lozada won.

In February of 2002, five months after his inauguration, Sánchez de Lozada decreed a huge tax increase, and the country went haywire: there was a roadblock campaign and student protests, which turned bloody; the police mutinied for higher wages, the army was called in against them, and by the end thirty people were dead. In September, it seemed that everyone was out on the barricades—schoolteachers, bus drivers, retirees, and legions of poor peasants, some carrying old hunting rifles and shouting revolutionary slogans. Most prominent were the inhabitants of El Alto, an improvised township next to La Paz whose million or so highland migrants can, on a moment's notice, shut down all access to the capital, including the airport, and who suffer continually from a near total lack of public services. The loyalties of the people in El Alto were divided between local political leaders like Abel Mamani, who is today the minister of waterworks, and a dour man called Felipe Quispe, founder of a fundamentalist indigenista guerrilla organization to which the current vice-president once belonged. On October 12 Sánchez de Lozada called out the army. By nightfall twenty people were dead in El Alto, and in La Paz twenty-one more were killed the following day. The country came to a standstill. On October 17, after fifteen months in power, Sánchez de Lozada fled Bolivia. The recognized leader of the guerra against him was Evo Morales.

The vice-president, Carlos Mesa, took office and was briefly both an ally of Evo and the most popular ruler Bolivia had ever had—according to polls that gave him 80-percent ratings—but twenty months later he, too, was gone, ousted by the gathered forces of the poor who were protesting against practically everything; an insufficiently radical nationalization of the gas industry, the chronic gas and water shortages in their homes, Mesa's failure to convoke a constituent assembly; their miserable lives. Further protests blocked Mesa's vice-president from a constitutionally mandated succession. In June of last year the quiet, retiring head of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodrìguez, was cornered into taking over the presidency, with a specific six-month mandate to call elections which nearly everybody knew would be won by the MAS and its candidate.

In the face of obstacles that included a near mutiny by the entire Congress and threats of secession from the rich, and politically conservative, tropical departamento of Santa Cruz, Rodrìguez made good his promise. On December 18 Evo Morales was elected with 53.7 percent of the ballots, nearly twice what pollsters and normally keen political observers I talked to back then had predicted. It was by far the largest vote—and the smallest rate of abstention—in Bolivia's electoral history, and most of those ballots were cast by the part of the population that calls itself Aymara, or Quechua, many of whom had never bothered to vote before.
3.

What the terms indìgena, or originario, or Quechua, Guaranì, or Aymara might mean in this fluid postmodern world is open to question. An estimated two thirds of those who iden-tify themselves as Quechua or Aymara speak Spanish. Only women wear traditional ethnic costume anymore, and for the Aymara Indians its key component is actually a little bowler hat. And Sacarìas Flores's flexible notion of Indianhood, compatible with his bubble jacket and Marxist beliefs, is presumably very different from that of Félix Patzi, one of the leading academic proponents of Indian identity, who is currently minister of education. I spent a long hour last year in Patzi's shabby offices in La Paz, at a university so ramshackle and poor—it is the country's principal institution of higher learning—that one could enter and lose all hope for the future of its students.

Patzi is a small, unsmiling, folded-in man who never seems to open out, but he did remark at some point that after graduating from this most threadbare of government universities he had somehow managed to get himself to Mexico's National University. He must have been even too poor to live in one of the bohemian student lodgings in that neighborhood, because after I grilled him he finally said that he had shared a room with a relative in the backstreet vecindades of the market district behind the Mexico City Zócalo. He seemed to view Evo Morales as a compromised middle-of-the-road politician, and me with at least as much distrust, but he was willing to talk with me about what he meant by the term "Indian" and Indian politics.

Indian forms of political organization, he believed, will continue to be radically different from what white-skinned societies understand as party politics. The dynamic of social movements, he said, "obeys an ancestral communitary logic...in which individual awareness is not fundamental."

He was referring to an often-noted indigenous approach to decision-making, in order to explain how so many thousands of people could be persuaded to take to the streets again and again. "That awareness might say 'I don't agree' [with a given proposal]," Patzi went on, "but if the group consensus says that it has to be carried out, then the individual is morally obliged to participate.

"The term 'ethnic' refers to a racial description," he added. "It includes culture and language. But no one has touched the concept as a project for [creating a new] civilization." When you look at it from this perspective, he concluded with a triumphant note, "then we're talking about a societal project that can be applied universally."

During his presidential campaign, and particularly since taking office, Evo Morales has stressed the Indianness of his government, despite his skill in soccer, his Marxist political background, and the fact that, unlike his parents, he is hardly fluent in Aymara. His account—the series of battles and triumphs that for him mark the road to electoral victory—is different from that of the indigenista movements. Roberto Choque Canqui, an Indian historian, told me a different story from the one Sacarìas Flores tells, and it begins with his father, a pongo, or serf, expelled from his master's hacienda and left landless for participating in one of the innumerable Indian uprisings that dot the history of Bolivia like flare signals.

Choque mentioned some key points in the Indian narrative: the Chaco war of 1932 between Bolivia and Paraguay, in which peasants like his father were drafted and died wholesale, and which gave the survivors a national vision and a sense of entitlement to match their long-burning fury. "And they came back from the war knowing how to handle a weapon," Choque said. "And often, they kept the gun." There was the Revolution of 1952, led by Victor Paz Estenssoro, and the land reform, universal suffrage, and mandatory education laws that came out of it. As a university student Choque Canqui participated in a back-to-the-roots movement named after Tupac Katari, an eighteenth-century Indian leader who rebelled and was punished by being torn apart by horses. The Katarista movement had many offshoots, including the Indian-supremacist guerrilla group led by Felipe Quispe, and also Indian rights' organizations that led nationwide marches in 1992, during the commemoration of Columbus's tragic arrival in the Americas. This seems to have been the defining moment at which the current generation of Indian activists realized how powerful their movement could be.

Whatever questions about his ethnic identity someone like Sacarìas Flores or even Félix Patzi himself might have, there was no doubt at all about the Indianness of the guests at a picnic in the highland village of Jesús de Machaca, some twenty kilometers south of the shores of Lake Titicaca, in full and splendid view of the looming snow-covered peaks of the Andes. The land was drab and flat all the way to the horizon, and I understood then what Sacarìas Flores had meant when he said that before he migrated to Santa Cruz he had only the barest familiarity with a tree. But there was color everywhere in the gorgeous red llama-wool ponchos and brightly striped caps and carrying-bundles of the mallkus, or village elders, and their wives, the mallku taykas. Silver ornaments and scepters glittered in the sun. The church, a massive structure, was being reconsecrated in commemoration of its first three hundred years, and local authorities from all around Jesús de Machaca district had come in for the event, wearing their finest ceremonial dress.

During Mass, a chorus of Aymara women sang in startling voices that sounded like nothing so much as the highly stylized mewing of kittens. There was also a performance by the symphony orchestra of El Alto (Gershwin and Vivaldi were on the program, and attendance was scant) and lunch. The mallku taykas laid two long parallel strips of plastic on the ground, and then the villagers emptied a few sacks of party treats onto this tablecloth: a river of boiled potatoes of every possible description. There were blue, yellow, and cream-colored harvest potatoes, the frozen brown potatoes called chuños, and brackish dehydrated tuntas—a delicacy. Because it was a major feast, a couple of bricks of fresh cheese were also produced, and a townie in trousers with bleached hair arrived with a sack of roast chicken. The villagers crouched along the strips of plastic and ate parsimoniously.

It was the quietest party I have ever attended, even though there was a considerable amount of drinking. The villagers talked even less with me than they did with one another: introduced to one group of mallkus by a cheerful Jesuit, Xavier Albó, who has worked in the region for decades, I was merely asked in rudimentary Spanish what presents I had brought them. They turned away when I confessed I had none. Backward, I thought to myself, annoyed. Hopelessly isolated. But eventually a mallku did chat with me briefly, perhaps because he had been celebrating so enthusiastically that he no longer cared who he talked to, and in answer to my question he said that he and everyone else in Jesús de Machaca had voted for Evo Morales. Neatly bypassing the question of whether he considered the President to be an Indian or not, he said that what the community expected from the MAS government was money for education and to develop tourism in the area. Then he volunteered that the male mallkus and the female taykas in this district ruled with equal authority, and that in fact they had recently rewritten their laws to that effect. "Gender equality, that's what we're interested in," he said, before vanishing like the Cheshire Cat.

Education, tourism, a new status for women within the most traditional of Indian organizations—the community ayllu. What the inhabitants of Jesús de Machaca were demanding from Evo Morales were the things that can provide them with access to a modern society—the same demand one hears from the colonos and coca growers, the miners, schoolteachers, and university students who made possible Evo Morales's rise to power. But if he is to escape the fate of his predecessors, the new president of Bolivia must also deal with a number of issues for which his long political struggle has not necessarily prepared him.

Having reorganized the nationalized gas industry so that Bolivia gets a fair share of the profits, Morales must deal equitably with Brazil and Argentina, major clients for Bolivia's rich deposits. He must prevent the rebellious eastern half of the country, where gas and agricultural wealth are concentrated, from risking a declaration of independence. He must maintain friendly relations with Venezuela, whose oil and aid he needs, while maintaining a civil relationship with Europe and the United States; and in order to do this, he must keep excess coca cultivation from resurging in his home district of the Chapare. After failing to win a two-thirds majority in elections on July 2 for a constituent assembly, he must deal with the opposition diplomatically. And he must accomplish all this while bringing Bolivia out of the poverty it has been mired in for centuries. Whether and how he can do this will be the subject of a future article.

—July 12, 2006

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