Not in Bolivia Anymore, Toto

I indulged in a guilty pleasure last night and found Arequipa's 10 screen cineplex to go see a movie. It was inside Saga Falabella, a Chilean shopping mall chain, which looked a lot like West Farms Mall in my CT hometown: department stores with perfume and handbag displays, food courts with Pizza Huts and KFCs, etc. I know this certainly isn't the Peruvian norm, but it's definitely nothing like the shopping experience I grew accustomed to in La Paz, which was dominated by street markets and sidewalk vendors. More than anything, I was struck by how it seems as though the infrastructure of consumerism can be read as a marker of class, how the Saturday night family outing to Pizza Hut becomes a sign of economic well-being, of having "made it," in a country like Peru, where most people don't have access to these experiences and products except through the mediated experience of television.

I guess it's not much different from consumerism in the States - where most people can't live like the characters on "Friends" or "Sex and the City," but still strive to wear the shoes or buy the products that reaffirm identity and mark status. The products may be different, but the impulse is the same. For me, the weirdness here comes from having an experience so strangely like my normal gringo life back home -- going to the movies at the mall -- but noticing the small, slight differences that remind me I'm in Peru, and that this is not at all "normal Peruvian life." After 2 months in Bolivia, all the similarities that I hardly noticed in Argentina in Chile -- where there are clearly more middle and upper class consumers than here -- are jarringly obvious in Peru. I wonder how I'll feel stepping off the plane in the Sao Paulo airport, full of duty free shops and expensive restaurants, or in JFK for that matter? Commodities and consumerism are so ubiquitous at home, and were so largely absent in Bolivia: all the things I used to walk past without paying attention to at home have been, at least here in Arequipa, subtly shifting to the foreground of my consciousness, impossible to ignore. It's amazing to notice the small things that signal economic status, both in individuals and in a society at large.