Renovación

I've arrived after five years plus a pandemic to a place I called home 18 years ago. It's surreal sharing stories of Arizonan farmers lamenting the uncertainty of the future of agriculture and hearing the same from my tío. The weather is changing and this year the fruits are small and flavorless. The ocean is surging, and the current is slowing. The macha disappeared thirty years ago, the camarones fewer as well. The agrochemicals are too pricey, the big empresas own the government, but millionaires don't pay taxes. It's so achingly similar to every single case I'm hearing, and the fighting is in the sierra, in Puno and Juliaca, the places where indigenous resistance is more common.

What are we digging up?

To renew and to renovate are different in some ways: we indicate with one term a cycling, a growth, an emergence. The other connotes ideas, design, construction - something less organic for some reason. I find this place full of magic and full of promise and full of webs. I didn't make plans, but yet I'm welcome. I feel valued, seen, and understood the best ways possible given my strangeness. Another validation after another trip to see another aunt. My resolve grows.

I see Renovación Arequipa (R in a house is their symbol) and I see the face of my former host father on political campaign posters faded by weather.