Francisco (left) and Alfonso Ichu Tamo at work in their shop. Credit: Miguel Ángel Souza /IPS

By Anna Infantas
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, Jan 10 2013 (IPS)

They belong to the Amazon of Bolivia, where their people, the Moxena nation, are found, and they are brothers. Francisco and Alfonso Ichu Tamo came to this southern city to become the premier makers of musical instruments.

The work of Francisco, 36, and Alfonso, 33, takes place every day behind the walls of “Amatista”, their small shop in the southeastern city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, one of the largest in Bolivia.

Far from the bustle of this city of nearly three million people, their shop is perfect for listening to the melodies emerging from the instruments the two brothers create and repair. They inherited a taste for music from their father, and took it a step further by becoming luthiers.

The Ichu Tamo brothers were born in a jungle area near the town of San Ignacio de Moxos, in the northeastern part of Beni, and for them the music is part of their existence.

“In 2000 I was one of 30 members of the Orquesta Hombres Nuevos (New Mens’ Orchestra). Played the violin. Had the problem that no one could fix our instruments. As a prank, I started repairing the bow of my violin … The teacher saw me, and told me I had a knack for becoming a luthier ,”Alfonso told IPS at his workshop.

Until then, the younger of the two brothers had never heard the word “luthier”, but it seemed very appealing.

That was how he ventured into a different field, which still kept him attached to his passion: music. Alfonso began combining two of his skills. To his musical talent he added his expertise as a craftsman and was slowly making his way.

A year later, the non-governmental Fundacion Hombres Nuevos (New Mens’ Foundation), driven and led by a Catholic priest, gave him a scholarship to pursue a specialisation in French masters. The training took place in Urubicha, an indigenous Guarayo town, famous in Bolivia for its school of American Renaissance and Baroque music.

The Instituto Formacion Integral (Integrated Training Institute), Choir and Orchestra of Urubicha are footnotes in the rescue of the little known classical Bolivian identity, which is a unique syncretism of string and wind instruments. So is the Bolivian New Men Symphony Orchestra that Alfonso belongs to.

This orchestra, participating in international festivals of early music, has rescued Baroque music composed in the 17th and 18th centuries in the Catholic missions established by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) during the Spanish conquest.

They practically single-handedly preserve the oldest of the Chiquitos mission in Santa Cruz district, the one of the Moxenos in Beni, adjacent to the north, because other Indian missions were destroyed with all their wealth.

Some time after finishing his training in Uribicha, Alfonso encouraged his brother to move into the same craft. CAF, the Latin American development bank, took responsibility for completing his training, and helped him set up his workshop about 15 kilometres from the city centre, capital of Santa Cruz district.

Being luthiers was not difficult for these brothers, who left their native community to settle in a more vibrant city of Bolivia.

“One is born with the knowledge. It was easy for me, for example, to learn to build the sound box of the instruments, because my father taught me to carve. In the countryside, we created many things with wood … planes, cars, instruments, played with our imagination, and there was always music in our surroundings,” said Francisco.

Making and repairing musical instruments has become a way of life for Alfonso and Francisco, who can produce a violin, cello or viola in a period of between two and four weeks.

“Whatever you want! If we don’t have the pieces we make them,” boasted Alfonso, smiling. “You spend not only effort in making these instruments, but also feelings. Therefore, the instrument sounds according to the emotion of the maker… I do it thinking about big concerts,” he said seriously.

The brothers Ichu Tamo have learned the techniques of French, Swiss, Argentine, German, Venezuelan and Italian masters.

As a result, they know that to get a good instrument not only requires concepts of physics, mathematics or chemistry, but you also have to know how to choose good wood, know how to synchronise sounds and have talent, because each piece is an expression of the manufacturer’s deep feeling.

Their reputation as luthiers has risen to the point that the district’s various symphony orchestras come to them for the repair and manufacture of instruments. Several pieces have even been exported to countries in Europe and America.

“When we make a new instrument, we like to know for who it will be, because as musicians are jealous of our art,” said Alfonso, as Francis nodded.

The two Moxenos, who speak the native language of their parents as well as Spanish and some English, grew up with three brothers in a lonely farm in the Amazon jungle, away from neighbours and relatives.

“We didn’t travel to the city either, so there was only us and our imagination,” said Francisco.

The Bolivian Moxenos, also called Mojenos, belong to the Arawak culture that spread between the Caribbean and the Gran Chaco, composed of southern Bolivia and northern Argentina and Paraguay. One of its characteristics is the importance of music in ancestral rites and activities. It is composed of about 30,000 members in the urban and rural areas.

While the Ichu Tamo brothers work together, each develops his work differently.

Francisco is himself an artisan carver, who enjoys wood carving in total silence. Alfonso takes the baton on the sound, where his experience as a musician favours him.

He is responsible for the accessories, and calibrating each instrument to produce sounds according to the requirements of the future owner.

“To understand the instrument you have to know two things that go together,” says the artist. “We’ve been blessed,” said Alfonso, a way of recognizing that his tradition and artistry allows him to lead a dignified life.

“We like to perfect the art, so perhaps for this reason we do not worry about the financial issue, but we do not complain,” they said as a team, as Francisco’s meticulous and unstoppable hands gave shape to a piece of wood, which in a few days would transform into a violin.

Life in the back alleys of the Degüi Ayoreo community, outside Santa Cruz. Credit: Miguel Ángel Souza/IPS

By Anna Infantas
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia , Dec 18 2012 (IPS)

No one knows exactly when they will show up, but when they do, it’s impossible not to notice them. In one of the busiest street markets in this bustling city in eastern Bolivia, a handful of members of the Ayoreo indigenous community periodically take over a portion of the sidewalk.

From that base of operations, Ayoreo women and children roam around, selling crafts or panhandling. “Buy my necklace, pretty blonde girl,” says an elderly Ayoreo woman, in broken Spanish, while a barefoot girl comes up saying “give me something.”

In Santa Cruz, a city of nearly three million people, the Ayoreo Indians have become an example of how urban sprawl can devour a culture, making it invisible and stigmatising and endangering it, said anthropologist Luca Citarella.

The Italian-born researcher stated in a study published this year that “in their process of urbanisation, the Ayoreo have become identified and stigmatised as street beggars, sex workers and slum dwellers.”

This can be seen in the Bolívar neighbourhood on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic capital and one of the fastest growing cities in Latin America, whose population has doubled in less than 20 years.

Bolívar contains one of the two urban slums inhabited by the Ayoreo, a historically nomadic group whose language, Zamuco, remains intact.

A block-long sign behind a wall announces the “Degüi Community”, where some 100 families live in 86 houses, most of them made of mud and cane.

An estimated 400 people live in this slum, the most populous of the 29 Ayoreo communities scattered over approximately 600 square km in the eastern department (province) of Santa Cruz, whose capital is Bolivia’s most cosmopolitan city.

“In the countryside there is no work, and we have no healthcare, so our only option is to come to the city,” the leader of the community, Isaac Chiqueno, told IPS.

The Ayoreo are one of the last native communities in Bolivia whose cultural fabric has been torn apart in the clash with mainstream society. Their sedentarisation process began less than 70 years ago.

Teresa Nominé, the first Ayoreo member of Congress, told IPS that “Life in the city is not like in our towns, because there is so much discrimination. We aren’t properly attended to in the hospitals, and in the schools, our children are shunned,” said the legislator, who added that her people were haunted by “bad luck.”

The ancestral home of the formerly nomadic Ayoreo was the northern part of Bolivia’s Chaco region. The Gran Chaco, the largest dry forest in South America, is shared by Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay.

There are an estimated 5,600 Ayoreo – a word that means “true people” in Zamuco – left in Bolivia and Paraguay.

Traditionally hunter-gatherers, their main activities in rural areas today are subsistence farming and forestry work, while in the cities they are employed mainly in the construction industry and as gardeners.

In both rural and urban areas, the women make, use and sell bags, necklaces and even clothing using the fibres of the garabata plant, which they gather in the forest.

The Ayoreo presence in the city is marked by a traumatic change in their way of life and social patterns. “Besides losing the foundations of the reproduction of their culture, they have been deprived of their dignity,” said Citarella.

Nominé concurred. “The cojñone (whites or mixed-race people) do not give us opportunities, and that changes our reality,” she said. “We come as fathers and mothers to improve our children’s quality of life. As indigenous people, we aren’t familiar with vices. But we come to the city and discover alcohol, drugs and prostitution…it’s our bad luck.”

Irene Roca, a sociologist, said discrimination was the main problem faced by the Ayoreo people living in the city.

“They are the most visible of the indigenous people living in Santa Cruz…The problem is that they are very visible, in a negative way,” she told IPS.

They are seen “as falling outside the acceptable limits of urban behaviour – as sources of crime, begging, sex work. They are depicted as a symbol of urban poverty,” said the expert, who holds a masters degree in ethnology from the social sciences faculty at the Sorbonne university in France.

She stressed that among the urbanised Ayoreo there are many who have tried to complete their secondary studies and get ahead. And she complained that these members of the community are the least visible and acknowledged face of the Ayoreo in the city, to which they have been forced to flock by the poor living conditions in their ancestral territory.

Chiqueno himself is an example. Just before his 50th birthday, he became one of the first eight Ayoreo students to graduate from secondary school, in 2011 at the Degüi school. This year, 15 more students graduated.

“It’s a sacrifice for us; and we need more Ayoreo teachers,” said Chiqueno, who excitedly talks about his next goal: to study political science at the university.

In his family, education comes first, said Chiqueno, a married father of five who hails from the village of Sapocó, some 300 km from Santa Cruz. He tells his children that the only way to get ahead in life is by studying.

Luisa, one of his daughters, is studying social work at the university, and runs the child care centre in Degüi. “Some kids listen to what their parents say,” he said, with evident pride.

Besides education, another of the chief problems faced by the Ayoreo is access to health services.

“In the hospitals, they forget we’re human beings; we only want to be treated with dignity,” said Nominé, who came to Santa Cruz five years ago from the Ayoreo village of Puesto Paz.

In the Ayoreo communities, children still die from diarrhoea and women die in childbirth, while community members who go to the hospital in critical condition have to wait “until someone feels like assisting them,” says a report by the non-governmental organisation Apoyo al Campesino-Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (support for indigenous campesinos – small farmers – in eastern Bolivia).

The report, published in May, studied the conditions faced by the just over 2,700 Ayoreo living in Bolivia.

Many of the problems in access to healthcare are directly related to discrimination and the lack of inclusive policies in public health, the experts said.

It is precisely to seek out healthcare that many Ayoreo leave their rural communities, to become “invisible” urban Indians, said Roca, the sociologist and ethnologist.