Blogging & Social Media,  Bullfighting,  Crossing Cultures

Writing on Bullfighting for HuffPo

Fernando Roca Rey at Acho, Nov. 2008; photo c. Jorge Vera

I’ve been away from An American in Lima for a little while (understatement) but thanks to my friend Levi Novey, aka Mr Green HuffPost, I’m getting a bigtime nudge to return to blogging. Which I do love doing, by the way.

Levi let me hijack his column today to guest rant about bullfighting (The Twisted Temptations of Bullfighting in Peru). It’s a confession about the thing I experienced at Acho that I never wrote about before.

Call it my testosterone moment in the bullring. The column includes nice photos by El Fotografo, by the way.

I only went to the bullfights twice in Lima but I still think about what I saw and felt on those hot, dusty afternoons. It’s one of the strange things about living in Lima, which has never shaken off its colonial past. The longer I live in Lima, the more deeply I feel the presence of all that Spanish colonial-era stuff —  the importance of one’s family name, the rigid social/racial hierarchies, the passion for dancing horses/bleeding toros. You’d think that after two and a half years I would have gotten over the strangeness of Peru, but it’s the opposite. Lima is just getting odder and odder to me.

I was away in the United States for a month, which might be partly responsible for my state of mind. (Not that the U.S. felt any less odd while I was there). I enjoyed being in the States but was happy to fly back in January and start teaching. Even with the chaotic traffic, life is simpler here. People aren’t killing each other with handguns.  There’s no such thing as a FICO score. Vegetables are cheap.

The racism, the bloody animal stuff — that still needs work. Time for Peru to get a move on.

I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.

9 Comments

  • Jessie Kwak

    I’m excited to see you back–I’ve been checking your site on and off hoping for a new post, and I got a great surprise today! I really enjoy your writing, so here’s a big Thank You for past and future posts.

  • Barb

    Thanks, Hubert.

    Aw, Jessie, I’m blushing. 🙂

    (Readers, check out Jessie’s cool South American travel blog.)

  • Josue

    I don’t think it’s very accurate to say that Peruvians do bullfighting when only a few do. About race and hierarchy, I am never racist nor I believe in social status.

    Isn’t there racism and hierarchical mindset in the US? Or it all vanished with the Civil War?

  • eduardo salazar

    Hello Barb, good blog! I´ve recently found it because of a link from Jean de Buren´s blog…

    I think about Bull-fighting,,, that´s such a retrograde custom, and cruel, that should not be allowed in this XXIth century…

    even in Spain some voices talk about stop this kind of “sport”, but there´s something true: Bullfighting is not popular in ALL Lima, only in the “upper class” people,

    And about the racism, you are totally true, this is a racist country, and what ironic, a country 99% indian percent is racist against himselves (ourselves)… that´s because of the spanish government and the creole governments from 1821 to nowadays…

    I think with time, equality and education this racism could be over and we can build a strong united country.

    Good blog again!

  • Barb

    Hi, Eduardo. Nice to meet you and to learn about your blog, too.

    Thanks for adding your opinion about bullfighting. I think that this is an issue that needs to be discussed by Peruvians — not just by animal rights activitists and by bullfighting aficionados, but by ordinary Peruvians who may not go to the bullfights but who do, nevertheless, have a stake in it because of bullfighting’s relation to Peruvian identity and cultural patrimony.

    A number of outsiders (nonPeruvians) who have weighed in on this issue have mentioned the possibility of moving Peru away from Spanish-stye bullfighting (w the kill in the bullring) to other forms in which the bull is not slaughtered, either at all or in front of spectators. I think that the “no kill” approach would be a good compromise; however, there needs to be a grassroots movement to advocate for this, and so far, the people involved aren’t interested in compromise: they either want to ban bullfighting or keep it the bloody, traditonal way.

    It hink it would be up to Peruvians themselves to make the bloodless bullfighting a reality. But do people really want this?

    Yes, I think that Peru could solve its racism problem. It does go hand in hand with the poverty issue, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed.

  • Angelo

    A country with 99% indians????

    Are you Peruvian? That is not accurate. Peru is a MULTI-CULTURAL country with different kind of people:

    White 16%
    Indian 42%
    Black 3%
    Asian 2%
    Mixed blood 37%