Ana, Elly and Poldi
La Paz, Bolivia, c. 1948

My parents were Austrian refugees from Nazism in Bolivia, where both my sister Elly and I were born. Despite the years that Ana worked in our house in the Calle Mexico, and the many hours she spent with our family and especially with my sister and me on an almost daily basis, we really knew remarkable little about her and her life. A certain cultural distance remained unbridgeable between her and my parents, reinforced in part by the hierarchical master-servant, employer-laborer, division that underlay their relationship, and in part by some unspoken, and perhaps unexamined, unwillingness by each of them to grant the other more than restricted access to their respective private and collective universe. In one of our family albums there is a photo of Ana standing near the street entrance to our apartment with my sister Elly and me. Elly and I are dressed up in costumes -- for Carnival perhaps. My sister is outfitted to look like an Andean "Indian boy," wearing coarse linen pants, a hand woven indigenous cloth belt, a knit wool cap with ear-flops, a woven cloth ahuayo slung across her shoulder. I am costumed as "Mexican Indian peasant," with wide-brimmed "sombrero," poncho, pants tucked into boots, and I am carrying a miniature guitar. Ana, dressed normally in her every-day "chola" style but with her dark bowler hat set somewhat rakishly at an angle on her head, is between the two of us. She is laughing broadly, without apparent resentment -- seemingly in good-humored amusement about the imitation "indios" in her company. Looking at the photo, I recall the time when this Ana took me along to see where she lived in a part of La Paz where I had never been before, into a crowded area of small stores and houses quite far from our apartment and the main concentration of refugee settlement. There, in the midst of her kinfolk, neighbors, and numerous children, I became an object of curiosity and display. I was stared at, examined, touched -- a blonde, hazel-eyed anomaly in a crowd of black-haired people.


submitted by Leo Spitzer
Vermont USA
June 1996



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