Am I Becoming Paceña*?

*resident of La Paz.

When I was told that I would be going to Santa Cruz for work, I couldn't wait. Santa Cruz is Bolivia's biggest city (bigger than La Paz or El Alto) and is the capital of a department in the Eastern Lowlands that is as different from the Altiplano as can be. The best part: I hadn't been there yet. I was looking forward to experiencing the warmer weather, more relaxed lifestyle, and more liberal point-of-view of cruceños (Santa Cruz residents) that I had heard so much about.

The differences are apparent as soon as you land at the airport. Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz is much bigger and modern-looking than the El Alto airport that serves La Paz. As soon as you step out of the plane you get the whiff of a tropical climate (Santa Cruz lies at 450 m above sea level compared to La Paz's 3600 m). I felt like I had just arrived at a resort destination. The ride to the Pro Mujer office was along a flat road lined by palm and jacaranda trees. There were no steep, curving descents, no rocky hillsides like from El Alto; in fact, I couldn't even spot a hill in the distance.

Santa Cruz is laid out in concentric rings. This makes it fairly easy to judge distances (second ring, close to the center; eighth ring, far). Because the surrounding area is flat, there are no natural restraints to growth and supposedly the city is growing at astounding proportions. The city center is small, with relatively narrow one-way streets. The avenues that form the rings are much wider (usually two to three lanes in each direction). Unlike La Paz, Santa Cruz is a shopper's paradise - plenty of fancy-looking clothing stores with big windows displaying the latest fashion line the streets. It also has a lot of restaurants, bars and cafes, most of them with outdoor seating. (One forgets what it is like to live in a place with really hot summers.) People also dress better, drive fancier cars and in generally like to show all of that off. However, that's all mostly in the central areas. Drive a little bit further out and you will see the same dusty, garbage-strewn streets as you see in El Alto. With a couple of differences: in Santa Cruz most people are dressed in short sleeves, skirts/shorts, and sandals, and not bundled up in multiple layers like people in El Alto; and then there are the horse-drawn wooden carts ... much like the gipsy carts one can sometimes spot in the less glamorous parts of Sofia. It is too cold for open carts at 4000m. More than anything, the outskirts of Santa Cruz reminded me a lot of Nicaragua - one- to three-story buildings, dust, tropical vegetation, scorching sun.

When it comes to the people, there are also considerable differences. There is a long-lived animosity between cambas (the inhabitants of the lowlands) and collas (the inhabitants of the Altiplano). Most times it takes the form of jokes and innocent leg-pulling, but sometimes it borders on discrimination. Personally, the first thing I noticed about the people in Santa Cruz (or at least the ones in customer-service positions) is that they seemed to be in a bad mood and definitely less friendly. There was no exchange of greetings, no smiles. I was really surprised, as I hadn't yet experienced that in other towns and cities in Bolivia. Most had the attitude that you were bothering them by requesting their attention. I guess I had gotten "unused" to that kind of attitude although it is also pretty common in Bulgaria, for example. My "favorite" example is from a big-chain supermarket. A colleague and I went to buy some water; she was at the register in front of me. She handed the girl a 20 Boliviano bill to cover the 3.20 Bs charge. The girl's comment was, "Don't you have 3.50?" Wow, it's not like she got handed a 100 Bs or 200 Bs bill. My colleague told her that she didn't have change. The girl then tried to give her gum as change instead. My colleague wouldn't have it. At which point the girl angrily exclaimed, "You are supposed to have change when you come into a supermarket." Hmmm, and here we were thinking that it's the supermarket that is supposed to have the change. After all, you are not a little kiosk on the street. But, I guess we were wrong. I am not trying to be smug or anything, but this kind of thing has never happened to me in La Paz. And it's not so much the fact that she had no change that bothered me, but her attitude. Instead of being apologetic, she was mean and made it out to be our fault. That is one example. But there were multiple instances during my three-day stay in Santa Cruz when I felt that people were rude to me for no reason. I am not quite sure what it is, perhaps people there think they are better than everyone else. After all, Santa Cruz is the richest city in Bolivia; people are used to abundance and don't have to deal with a harsh climate (the region has the most fertile land and is the agricultural mecca of the country; in addition, it is rich in natural resources). They don't have to work as hard as the people in the Altiplano to make ends meet. Maybe that's why they don't feel the need to be nice to customers. Or maybe that's the normal state of being and nobody really notices it or cares. Or maybe these were all just coincidences, and people are in fact super nice. Or maybe I have become the adopted paceña (as my colleague sometimes calls me) and am defending "my city". Either way, it left a bad taste.

Another big difference are the men. While in La Paz men don't really pay much attention to women on the street, in Santa Cruz they stare blatantly, whistle, and sometimes shout out obscenities. I guess, the hotter climate brings out the more sexually liberal spirit. In that sense, the Altiplano parts of Bolivia really seem to be an exception to the Latin American guy stereotype.

All in all, I think I prefer La Paz over Santa Cruz. I will give it another try though in a couple of weeks when Milos and I will be making a trip to the city and the Jesuit mission towns in its vicinity. Hopefully, the rural parts of Santa Cruz department will make a better impression on me than the city itself did.