By my eighth month living in the tiny town that topped the mountain named Vitis, I was beginning to get used to life’s daily monotony being shocked with sudden surrealness. Often this was a result from purely cultural differences; gringos don’t know what to expect in these tiny villages. That’s because our realities are reversed in many ways. Americans are always ditching the slightly-new for the absolute newest; in parts of the Andes, the ancient decides whether or not to allow the modern to move in.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the biggest attractions in Peru are based around the ancient Incan capital of Cusco, which overshadows the modern and fashion-forward Lima. Without Cusco, who would even think of visiting Lima? In the important Peruvian tourism industry, the old capital gives life to the new.
What Americans deem as old-fashioned dominates many aspects of Peruvian life. In Peruvian homes there is no debate about fast vs slow food; food from scratch is the best, and that’s that. And who can argue with Peruvian cooking?
It even seems as if the very nature of Peru decides what technology to accept. WIthout fail, major highways suffer damage and close down due to mudslides during the rainy season. But centuries-old Incan roads stay intact, thriving in the same harsh landscapes.
A Naive Gringo Goes to a Ranza
So it’s no surprise that practical modern advancements are overshadowed by much older traditions, or immersed in them, in the Andes. Such is the case of a Ranza ceremony.
It wasn’t easy to integrate in the 400-person village. But little by little, the coldness I felt from villagers melted into a sort of acknowledgement, accepting that I really was still there and hadn’t gone away yet. Even then, many just stared and nodded when I said hello. I had been promoted from invisible to a mute.
One of the exceptions was Adrian, friendly and helpful from the beginning. Adrian lived with his wife in an adobe house with a tin roof and dozens of guinea pigs which they raised to sell. On one of the first days of the dry season Adrian visited my new room with buckets of paint and two brushes. He announced that we were going to fix up my new home.
Like most of the men in Vitis, Adrian considered himself mestizo, and was short and tan, with deep dark eyes and a large chest. His mornings consisted of custodial work for the municipality, and in the afternoon he’d walk to the farm to attend to cattle or his agricultural plots. We passed the morning painting my one-room home, which included a sink and stove. During our conversation Adrian invited me to his family’s Ranza later in the week. I accepted.
But the thing was, I had no idea what a Ranza was. From what Adrian said, it seemed to have something to do with cows and tape. The word Ranza wasn’t in my English-Spanish dictionary, so my middling Spanish skills were all I had to use.
During lunch three days later I asked my host family what to expect, and they pretty much told me the same things as Adrian. A cattle owner has a Ranza every few years to change the tape on his cows, and he invites others to help. My confusion continued since I didn’t understand why cows would need tape. After lunch I trudged up the hill towards the path that led to the adjacent mountain, perplexed and in search of the Ranza.
I’d walked that path hundreds of times and never tired of it. It’s like Machu Picchu, and not just because everyone in Peru describes a place “like Machu Picchu” for tourist attention. The ancient abandoned town of Cochaswasi sits on a flat part of the mountain overshadowed by two peaks, which are hugged by rivers, similar to Machu Picchu’s geography.
But the reason I love this hike was it connected the perception of Vitis with its reality. Women with black blankets with colorful designs carried cheese, food, and even babies, to and from the terraces, and men carried tools and equipment. Every day there was something to do; move the maize, attend to the alpacas, bring the barley. To afternoon visitors looking for an open store or just a sign of humanity in the main plaza, Vitis was a ghost town. The villagers were on this path, on the way to making their living. On this dirt path surrounded by terraces, mountains almost tall enough to be snowcaps, and the clearest skies that brought storms right above your head, I was able to better understand Vitisinos.
After forty minutes I arrived to a celebration at the top of the mountain. The Ranza was a party. Faces from Vitis and unfamiliar ones shared bottles of beer, packets of cigarettes, and coca leaves as they talked and sang. A wrinkled old man in a bowler hat said something I didn’t understand, then handed me four faded green coca leaves. I stuffed them in the side of my mouth. The Ranza, a strange mystery mere minutes ago, was going to be a cultural experience. I was ready to jump in.
Looking around, for the first time I noticed Vitis was a community in the truest sense. People from different family groups, the ayllus, came together to assist Adrian’s family in changing the family’s cow’s ribbons. The word for tape, cinta, also meant ribbon in this context. Each family has a different type or color of ribbon to mark their cows (kinder to the cow than branding), and the ribbons fall off after a few years. Adrian paid his thanks by providing the booze, coca, cigarettes, food, and entertainment.
But the cows didn’t happily let people hold them down to change the ribbons. There was lots of yelling, mooing, and drunken stumbles as men picked out the next cow to chase, hold down, and change. It was a sight. And it turned out another practical application existed for the Ranza: the cows received vaccinations. As each cow received her new ribbon a veterinarian (presumably the lone sober celebrant) ran up, steadied his needle, and injected her in the right hide. The Ranza’s roots may be centuries-old, but that doesn’t mean new medicinal advances can’t be intertwined.
The cows themselves were dressed for the occasion. The oldest cow had a wreath made of orange, bread, and flowers. The belle of the ball. As she was held down I started to focus on the words of the song being played. There was one older woman banging a traditional hand-held tiña drum and singing. She wore a colorful wool blanket like a cape and was topped with a bowler hat.
I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics. I asked the man next to me what the song was about, and explained that I didn’t understand. Then he told me: the woman, Adrian’s mother, was singing a traditional song for the Ranza in her language, Quechua.
Nobody before wanted to admit to me that Quechua was used in Vitis, but here, when the pressure of the outside world to conform was nowhere to be found, Vitisinos expressed this event in the language spoken in homes. Here, the culture could breathe.
For the first time I was seeing the real Vitis. It had been months, but only now was I beginning to understand how much I still didn’t know. It felt similar to the beginning of freshman year in high school. And a passing invitation from a friend was the only reason I was there.
As is common in the Andes during a certain part of the year, afternoon rain clouds approached the multitude on the mountain. And here the weather dictates life. Buzzed from beer and coca, I didn’t mind the wet walk back, and hopped and skipped down the mountain to town. Soon enough I was putting on dry clothes and warming up water for instant coffee in my room.
By nighttime after the Ranza, the rain had stopped and the clouds floated away. I put on some music and walked about the dimly lit town wearing a heavy coat. It smelled of bonfire. At 12,000 feet above sea level with no light pollution, Vitisinos can almost touch the Milky Way. One can spot a dozen falling starts without trying.
It’s the mountains and flowing galaxy above at night that teach the longest lasting lessons for someone who wants to understand the Andes. Every civilization, every advancement, is just a slight, short-lived change in the landscape, barely noticed by these behemoths as millennia pass by. They were here before our civilization, and they’ll be here after it, too. And Vitis lies under watch of these sacred beings all day, every day.
In this context traditions like the Ranza still thrive. Yes, the vaccinations and ribbon-changing are necessary, but they can be done other ways. But why reinvent the wheel, when we are here for just a blip in time? Like the Milky Way and the mountains, traditions continue well past our mortal bodies, connecting us with generations long ago and with those to come. In an example of Andean magic, the Ranza vaccinates cows, strengthens communities, and ties centuries of people together in one afternoon, all before the rain starts.
Oh Brad this is so fine. Especially your comments about the timelessness of the mountains. I can just see you headed down from the Ranza in the rain, “buzzed on beer and coca”. How small our world would be now if we hadn’t done Peace Corp 15 years ago. Yep—15 years ago.
Thanks, Sarita :)