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Floating Slums of Iquitos: Acculturation in the Peruvian Amazon
| Article
# : |
19685 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
3,842 Words |
| Author
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Peter Gorman
Peter Gorman, a free-lance writer and collector for the
American Museum of Natural History, has researched and
written
extensively about the peoples of the Amazon. |
It is not yet down, but already the sprawling marketplace is coming to life. The great concrete staircase leading up the hill from the Amazon is crowded with men and women who carry yucca and sugarcane bundled on their heads. Water boys struggle up the 110 steps, rolling their 55-gallon drums of river water as carefully as if they were filled with porcelain.
The sound of haggling is everywhere, crude jungle Spanish and strange dialects echoing from the corrugated steel roofs of the market stalls. Deals are struck. Fruits, vegetables, dried fish, and turtle eggs change hands and are piled on the vendors' tiny tables. From the restaurant stalls come the smells of frying fish and plantains; they mingle with the scents of medicinal herbs and the foul odor of blood and animal intestines as fresh game is butchered. Nearby, stray dogs and gallinosas, huge jungle vultures, keep an eye on any scraps that fall from the butchers' tables.
At the bottom of the hill, water taxis and old canoes pick up and discharge passengers. They wind through the flooded streets, beneath the pilings of stilted homes, in concert with a small armada of other water taxis headed toward the muddy port on the Amazon. A second armada of canoes, already filled with jungle products, heads in the opposite direction, crowding the streets. Early risers wash their clothes through holes in the floors of their raft shanties; there is constant wailing from the babies who are lowered through the same holes for their morning rinse.
The canoes emerge from the streets into the Amazon's wash, then head to the section of riverbank that serves as dock for the motonaves (flat-bottomed riverboats with clanking steam engines). On the muddy bank, groups of men and boys, dark and well-muscled with Indian features and oriental eyes, work frantically to unload the morning motonave's cargo of lumber, thatch, latex, and other raw materials from the jungle--all headed for the factories of Iquitos. Down the riverbank, other groups work just as frantically to load a motonave that is preparing to leave. Its cargo of clothes, kerosene, tinned food, and other finished products is headed up the Ucayali River to towns like Nauta, Requena, Contamana; from there the goods will make their way to the villages and outposts that dot Peru's Amazonia.
This is Belen, one of the ports of the city of Iquitos. Built on rafts and stilts at the end of the nineteenth century, it provided cheap labor and market products for the rubber barons who were at that time transforming Iquitos from a jungle town into a
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