La Perseverancia's Chicha-less Festival

During the festival a band played to a crowd seated in front of the church. 

I attended the La Perseverancia neighborhood's annual Chicha Festival this year, only to be  isappointed - there was no chicha for sale. An acquaintance met there explained that the chicha had been sold out to a record crowd on Saturday. That's no too surprising, since the last several weeks have been quite warm, with a blazing sun. I suppose that that's a vote in favor of the festival organizers' decision to move the festival from its historical October date, when it often rained.

A dancer spins during the chicha festival.

La Perseverancia is a traditional blue-collar neighborhood on the lower reaches of Bogotá's Easter Hills, between La Macarena and the National Park. Originally built by and for the workers of the Bavaria Beer Brewery with the support of the company's far-sighted owner Leo Kopp, it has become known instead for brewing of chicha, a traditional drink made from fermented corn. 

Serving chicha from a plastic bottle.
This was about the only chicha I saw today.

The neighborhood, known affectionately as 'La Perse', grew up in the first decades of the 1900s, when families migrated from the Egipto and Belen neighborhoods to work in the Bavaria Brewery, located down the hill across Ave. Septima from what was then a prison and is now the National Museum. The old Bavaria brewery, with its recognizably German arquitecture, today contains shops and offices. The company, which continues to dominate Colombian beer-making, has a newer brewery in western Bogotá. 

A street fills up - but not with chicha drinkers. 

Bavaria owner Kopp, a Jewish-German immigrant, helped his workers pay for their homes and assisted them in bringing water, electricity and sewerage services to the neighborhood. Many families also built adobe homes with their own hands and sweat. In the spirit of a blue-collar community, the church was named after Christ the Laborer and the plaza featured a 'Monument to Work', which has apparently disappeared. 

The neighborhood became a stronghold of support for fiery leftist politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, who was assassinated in the city center in 1948. Today, there's a small statue to the martyred leader, his right arm as always raised up toward the sky.

A crowd in front of the
Church of Christ Laborer.

The chicha festival, which began in 1988, honors a drink which has survived in a hostile world. For decades in the early 1900s the beer and liquor industries and the government propagandized against chicha, claiming that it caused diseases and turned drinkers insane. The anti-chicha lobby's real motives were economic - to sell more of competing alcoholic drinks. The government also wanted to turn the public away from homemade chicha, which didn't pay taxes, to other drinks, which did. 

But chicha has survived, and continues holding an important place in the stomachs and minds of many Bogotanos.

Chicha's survival also happens to be an illustration of another thing - the futility of trying to prohibit mind-altering substances.

Candies for sale. 

A poster celebrates the festival...but where's La chicha?

A man selling pieces of cocoanut fried in sugar cane sugar. 

A statue of working-class hero Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, who was assassinated in central Bogotá in 1948.

A children's band performs traditional music.

An uncommonly warm and sunny day. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Artist Gonzalo Ariza: Linking Colombia and Japan

Gonzalo Ariza in his studio. 

Bogotá's Museum of Modern Art has an exhibition celebrating the centennial of the birth of Colombian Gonzalo Ariza (1912-1995), whose work included both painting and photography, who linked Colombia and Japan and who played a role in Colombia's political and artistic dramas.

Ariza was born in Bogotá, in a house located beside what are now the gardens of the Palacio de Nariño. His father was a well-known photographer.

Monserrate and Guadalupe. 

From early on, Ariza practiced painting and put into practice his interest in human rights. In the 1930s he illustrated a book of testimonials of the Venezuelan torture victims of Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gomez. Soon after, he won a Colombian government scholarship to study art in Japan, a nation which would mark his artistic life's work. Afterwards, he lived for a while in Paris.

Bogotá, under a cloudy sky. 

With World War II imminent, Ariza returned to Colombia where he soon became widely known. Perhaps too-widely known, because in 1953 dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla had Ariza arrested and tortured for possible connections with an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Rojas Pinilla. Powerful friends got Ariza released and nominated to be Colombia's cultural attache in Japan. He returned to Colombia with Rojas Pinilla's downfall in 1957.

Not long after, Ariza got involved in another kind of battle. This time it was Marta Traba, a fellow Colombian artist, who criticized Ariza for being two 'nationalistic.' The fued continued for years, with Traba supposedly once even burning one of Ariza's works in front of her art students.

'Clouds over Mesitas del Colegio.'

Detail of a painting showing Monserrate behind a eucalyptus tree. 

A Japanese baby. 

A Japanese woman. 

A street in Japan. 

A Japanese landscape. 

Pinos en La Calera. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Slippin' and Slidin' in the Bullfighting Stadium

Bogotá's Plaza de Toros, La Santamaria, is experiencing an uncharacteristic kind of display these days. Instead of sand, there's ice. And instead of bullfighters facing off against bulls, there are young people slipping and sliding. The performers may be less graceful, but they look like they're having lots more fun.

Normally, January and February are Bogotá's bullfighting season. But Mayor Gustavo Petro announced an end to bullfighting in the Santamaria. The bullfighters went to court and won when a judge ruled last year that cities could not ban bullfighting where it's traditional. Petro responded that he's not banning bullfighting, but just not renting out the plaza, which belongs to the city.

Many suspect that Petro arranged the ice skating as an excuse not to allow bullfighting. In other years, they put an ice skating rink in Plaza Bolivar, where it looked strange between Congress, the Cathedral and the Supreme Court.

A few minutes' observation makes clear that this is Bogotá, not Quebec or Holland. Few of the Bogotanos slippin' and slidin' around have ice skated before.

Try, try again.

Oops!

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Massacres and Money Making

Demonstrating a shirt's bullet-stopping capacity.

United States massacres may turn into a business opportunity for a Colombian company.

Miguel Caballero makes children's vests, backpacks, t-shirts and other wearable things that are (supposedly) bulletproof. Remember how mom sent you off to elementary school with the admonition 'Keep your jacket on so you won't catch cold,' or 'Wear your raincoat so you don't get wet'? Well, now moms can add a third warning: 'Keep your bulletproof gear in case a madman with a high-powered gun bursts into your school (or house of worship, or shopping mall, etc) and starts blowing holes in people'.

It's only practical good sense, after all.

Armor your kids today!

Of course, the danger from shootings has been wildly exaggerated by the massive media coverage of the recent massacre in a school in Connecticut. I'd be willing to bet that children stand in far more danger from a traffic accident on their way to or from school than they do of getting shot. But, nevertheless, I'm sure that some psychologically vulnerable, overprotective parents will take money away from their children's schoolbooks and computer funds to buy V-Bags, Puffer Kids, T-Shirt Kids and Safety Vests which will make their kids feel embarassed and uncomfortable and little safer.

But the totally insane thing here is that, unlike cold and rain, this is a danger which shouldn't exist at all. It only exists because in the United States high-powered rifles are sold so freely violent mentally ill people can and do buy or steal them and then start killing.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with Caballero manufacturing wearable bulletproof accesories for children - except that it makes totally unnecesarry threat seem normal and acceptable, when instead society should be addressing the cause - too many guns. The social hysteria reminds me of the Cold War paranoia, when many people, including schoolchildren, lived in constant dread of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union. But the U.S.'s gun threat is a completely home-made danger.

The U.S.'s gun lobby is already very powerful, and thrives economically on these massacres, which cause booms in gun sales. (I just wonder whether, in their hearts of hearts, gun company executives felt a secret thrill when this latest massacre happened, because they knew it'd mean huge new Christmas sales). But a gun protection industry will create an even stronger lobby. I'm waiting for bulletproof pews for worshippers to take cover behind, bulletproof store windows in malls, and on and on, until everyday life is lived in a paranoid fortress and a multi-billion firearm-industrial complex has grown up which will defend to its last dollar of profit the right to commercialize high-powered murder machines.

During the 1980s and '90s feature stories about Colombians using bulletproof business suits were regular fare for the international media, and deepened the country's image as one big free-fire zone. Altho it still has a serious homicide problem, Colombia has changed profoundly since the Pablo Escobar days. Interestingly, according to news reports, the company now sells 95% of its products outside of Colombia.

Now, the paranoia has shifted north, to the U.S. But, unlike the case of Colombia, which has long been victimized by global drug trafficking and drug prohibition policies, the U.S.'s mass murder problem is completely domestically-created.

Interesting Addendum:

The Canadian government made an awkwardly-timed announcement the other week celebrating "new market opportunities for its gun makers in the form of exports of assault weapons - which are banned in Canada - to Colombia. The announcement came the day before the assault rifle massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Those "new market opportunities" for Canadian companies are evidently a result of the recent Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Since assault weapons are, thankfully, not available on store shelves here in Colombia, I assume that any "market opportunities" would be sales to the military or police. But those organizations have had serious human rights issues.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours