A Day at the Beach / A Night behind the Camera

When I first came to Lima, at the tail end of the coastal winter, the city was wrapped in a constant fog, a garua, that formed an unchanging grey backdrop over the tops of the buildings. Spring was similar, with the fog lightened only by a diffuse brightness slipping through the sky. But now it's summer, my first summer without a birthday to start the celebration, and everyday the light burns through my opaque plastic walls to wake me up in a sweat. I'm probably becoming chronically dehydrated, but you know what they say, "don't throw stones if you live in plastic houses."

So it is summer, and Jeff and I went to the beach. It's supposedly the hottest summer in years, though it's probably in the high 80s - which is warm, but not exactly Death Valley Days. Though there are playas right here in Miraflores, we decided to hitch a ride to the south and a little pleasuredome called Asia, the richest and swankiest resort on the entire Peruvian coast. We loaded up our towels and headed to the bus station.

Asia is about an hour south of the city, down the lonely Pan-American past long empty stretches of arid nothingness. The beach doesn't seem to change considerably in quality, but every few kilometers is another resort, or a club, or something with a wall and a billboard covering the scrub between the highway and the ocean. But Asia is a different beast, an exclusive exclave of Lima's aristocracy sitting in the southern sun, and the bus rolled right up to it.

Unfortunately, Jeff and I didn't get off our bus. We stayed on, until after the bright lights and big boards of Asia had receded into the distance. We alerted the driver, and he stopped long enough to kick us out onto the pavement in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing there, nothing, just dirt and sand and the brittle remnants of grass by the side of the road. Another fine mess.

We ended up in Asia a little while later, and the town (if it can be called that) is nothing more than a single unpaved street flanked by white-painted beach homes and a giant outdoor mall. Hidden behind a gate - and an armed guard - the mall sprawls out like anything you'd find in Orange County, filled with the same selection of high- and higher-end stores, each built in a bizarre, post-modern, Gehry-on-the-cheap style. There are luminous cubes selling flat-screens. There are leggy blondes in mini-skirts trying to get me to fly LAN Chile. There are Crate & Barrel clones selling the decorated accessories of some anonymous, or even fictional, ethnic group to wide-brimmed housewives. Several famous Lima restaurants have outposts here; the mall is Lima in miniature, the Lima of Miraflores and San Isidro, of ostentatious displays of wealth in a very poor country. Jeff and I remarked that the mall reminded us of a stage, or a set, with its ersatz urbanism trying to hide the barren mountains, the empty fields, on the other side of the highway. Fairly disgusted, we continued on towards the beach.

Walking in the opposite direction along the main road were dozens of young women, all toweling their hair, all wearing the androgynous rough-cloth smock of a Peruvian maid. We asked them what they were doing. They said protesting for human rights. It turns out, if we hadn't gotten off the bus in Asia + 10km, Jeff and I would have seen these women walk down to the water's edge, strip out of their costumes, and dive into the cool blue waters of the Pacific. If only all protests could be so refreshing.

These women were protesting the right of maids to enjoy the beach at Asia - which is not private - whenever they want. Currently, all maids (which basically gets expanded to anyone too dark or too poor) cannot be on the beach unless they are working, and cannot go into the water before 6pm. This rule, enforced by who knows, is just part of the great expanse of Peruvian racism.

It isn't like I've never encountered racism before, either at Yale or in Southern California, but the openness with which it is practiced in Peru is shocking. Por ejemplo: clubs in Miraflores have bouncers at the door, but I've never been asked for ID. No one is ever asked for ID. Their job is to turn away anyone who "doesn't belong," the cholos, the perjorative to describe anyone darker or poorer or just lower class than you. White people in Miraflores cholar the middle class, who in turn cholar the people out in the shanty towns. Heck, even they cholar the people still up in the mountains or down in the jungle. Everyone knows their place.

(Also, racial caricatures are perfectly acceptable. We have a bag of "Negrito" brand charcoal with a logo that hasn't been seen on an American product in a hundred years. It's a Sambo, a no-shame-about-it Sambo, and I'm horrified what it says about Peru. My favorite product that could never be brought to the States is at D'onofrio, the Baskin Robbins-equivalent. Up on the board above all the flavors are little sundaes, each shaped like something goofy, like an elephant or a cannon or something. But number 23 is the "Chinito," a scoop of vanilla with a Fu Manchu, a conical hat, and slanted eyes. Yikes.)

I got burned, but the beach is nice, with a giant monolith two miles offshore as a crude approximation of Catalina. Eventually, the sun went down and Jeff and I went home.
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In other news, our office had a little movie-making competition, and this is my submission. I did it three days, and is pretty much self-explanatory.

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