Waiting for a Jewelry Buyer:
Chela's Story

I’m going shopping … well sort of. Today I’m looking for a jewelry buyer while I sit in a ten-foot-square vendor’s stall practicing Spanish and learning about tourism, politics, and hand crafted Peruvian jewelry.

This is the artisan market in the “base camp” for Machu Picchu, Aguas Calientes, a tiny town sculpted into the canyon walls at the foot of the mountain. Tomorrow, 6 a.m., we take the bus to the gates of this great wonder.

But today, I’m looking out at the tourists wandering by, hoping one will be a jewelry buyer. Beside me, Machu Picchu native Graciela Zuñiga patiently eyes a young German blond who is fingering one of Graciela’s exquisitely fashioned pendants. We’ve strolled through many a Peru market, but here’s a viewpoint I’ve not yet experienced.

"¿Cuanto es?" the German asks in Spanish.

"Cien cuarenta," Graciela says. (A hundred and forty sols – US$47.) It’s handmade, she says. She points out the detailed inlay work, names several semi-precious stones. Graciela is the artist. She figures it took her a week to make the pendant.

The German girl turns it over, lays it down, glances over the smaller, cheaper necklaces at the end of the counter. She looks at some machine-made bracelets, then moves on to the next stall.

She wasn’t really a jewelry buyer, Graciela tells me. The backpackers seldom are.

Graciela’s friends call her Chela. I spend three hours in her booth today, watching tourists buy her work (and others reject it), chatting about being an artist, about growing up in Machu Picchu, about change in this gateway village.

Chela is a friend of my language-learning partner in Cusco, Mariarosa Holgado Vargas. Mariarosa urged me to look Chela up when we visited Machu Picchu, then called Chela to tell her we were coming. Chela met us at the train station and helped haul our gear to the hostal.

Chela spent her childhood on the other side of the Peru shopping network, helping her parents sell snacks and trinkets to tourists when they got off the train from Cusco. She didn’t get to go to school. Now, she’s sending three children to college with the proceeds made from from selling her art, one piece at a time, to passing jewelry buyers.

Some years ago, Aguas Calientes began to boom as Machu Picchu’s fame grew. Chela and a group of friends saw the growth – and the benefits – passing its longtime residents by. The new wealth to be made from Peru shopping was going to outsiders. They lobbied for land to build a local market. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. They protested, demonstrated, pushed. Eventually government set aside land for them. They formed a vendors’ syndicate and established an artists’ market at the train station. It grew and prospered. For the past three years, Chela has been the syndicate’s secretary, a tiring, often thankless, job. Think office politics, where your “office mates” are competitors, all trying to scrape out a living from passing tourists in this warren of stalls.

The 2007 designation of Machu Picchu as one of the seven wonders of the modern world has set Aguas Calientes booming anew. Tourist visits are expected to mushroom. As in other boomtowns, newcomers have swarmed in. They don’t know the town’s history, its customs, its values. Chela estimates that only thirty families from her youth remain.

We find Aguas Calienties to be a charming little town, tranquil, chock full of good restaurants. No traffic. No motorized vehicles – everything’s on foot here. Its namesake hot springs is a delight: attractive, well-kept, scrubbed clean every night after closing.

But, as well-heeled outsiders flock into town, Peru shopping becomes burdensomely expensive for the locals. Chela frets over the skyrocketing prices. I worry for her. What price fame?

--Posted by Terry, October 13

October 15-18 update: My visit to Machu Picchu produced an unexpected Spanish language learning opportunity. Back in Cusco, when I wrote Chela a one-page thank you note, it turned into a major lesson in my daily language sessions with Mariarosa. I wrote the original in my sub-novice Spanish. She corrected it, not only grammar and spelling, but content. I rewrote it. She corrected it again. I rewrote it again. She sent it off – via a friend rather than through the postal system. Chela called her; she was thrilled I had “bothered” to write. As for me, I tucked another tool – and a special memory waiting for jewelry buyers – into my language learning strategies.

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