Tarqueada

They never grow tired of their festivals and folk dancing here. Last Saturday was the Entrada Universitaria, or the Parade of University Students. They celebrate the autonomy of the higher education systems (as opposed to solely state-run colleges), or at least that is how it started. Now it seems to be a grand excuse for the youth of La Paz to come together and dance. The closest equivalent I can think of would be homecoming parades.

So, like the parades of the fiestas in Tiraque when Brad and I danced the Kullawada with hundreds of students, this parade consisted all sorts of dances, from all over Bolivia. Thousands of university students, each academic department dancing a different dance, rehearsed for days or months. Although Raúl is in law school, he has joined the architecture department for the last several years, partly to dance along side some friends, and partly because the law school dances Morenada (our least favorite dance), and the architecture students do Tarqueada, which he can do without actually dancing, but rather playing the tarqa, which is a wooden instrument native to the Bolivian Andes.

Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t have once ounce of natural talent when it comes to music, and anything that I have accomplished on the guitar or dulcimer has been accomplished by rote force and stubbornness. The tarqa proved to be no different, and the three days of rehearsal that we had was far from enough. I was able to learn the first part of one song, which I played with gusto whenever that part came up. For the rest of the song, and for the other three songs, I just moved my fingers to the rhythm (the best that I could find it) and skipped along with the crowd. There were only four of us girls playing, but there were about 30 guys so they easily (and fortunately) drowned me out. The funniest part came when we arrived at the place where the television cameras were setup, broadcasting us throughout all of La Paz, and most of Bolivia. Because we ladies were in the front and I was on the edge, the camera was right on me. A man came up with a microphone and put it right at the end of my tarqa. Being as it was one of the 3 ½ songs that I don’t know, I promptly stopped blowing and pretended with all my might that I had some idea what I was doing, and eased closer to the girl next to me so that the microphone would pick up the sound she was making instead of the silence my tarqa produced.

We entered the parade 4 hours behind schedule, which is impressively late even by Bolivian standards, and played and danced from one end of La Paz to the other, about 3 miles. One thing Raúl didn’t tell me beforehand was that in addition to playing the tarqa, we would be dancing and singing at the same time (try singing with a wooden instrument in your mouth!...just kidding we alternated singing with playing). Dancing I can do, especially folk dancing, as long as I have a little practice before hand, but I was caught off guard, and I had focused so much in trying to known the melody of the songs well enough to move my fingers at the right time (while not actually blowing, to at least give the impression that I was playing the same song as everyone else), that the rhythm required to dance with everyone took every last bit of coordination that I had. But in the 2 ½ hours that we paraded, the audience got drunker, rowdier, and began dancing in the middle of the street in the midst of us, so whether I was playing, dancing, shouting or jumping up and down I fit right in, and I had a blast.

Parades and dancing like this, the strong presence of tradition and folk culture that is so tightly embraced by all Bolivians, young and old, is perhaps the part of Bolivian culture that I am going to miss the most, and that I will lament that today in my own country, such tradition only persists in small pockets.