Lines in the Water by Ben Orlove

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Is it an illusion to perceive the islands as a piece of the past, floating in a lake of the present? There is no reason to take seriously the notion, encouraged by some tour guides, that the residents of the islands are the last living descendants of the Urus, a hunting and gathering people who fled centuries ago to these remote swamps to escape the successive conquests of the altiplano by the Tiwanaku, Inca and Spanish empires. The floating islands and the communities built on them are relatively recent, by Andean standards at least, the product of a movement of land-based villagers from Coata and Huata on the shores of Puno Baylate in nineteenth century. However, there is equally no reason to deny that the islands reflect a long and continuous history of involvement with the lake, a history that demonstrates an intimate knowledge of the lake and a thorough exploration of the possibilities that it offers. Such a history is a history of livelihood rather than a living history--a history that is alive, that changes and responds. In this kind of history, the living draw on their memory of the earlier generations, rather than attempting to impersonate them for an audience.

This history of livelihood has many chapters. The establishment of the floating islands was one such chapter in the nineteenth century; the poorly recorded earlier decades of that century may well contain other chapters as well. In the twentieth century, two major chapters of this history may be recognized. The first was the development of a new use for totora, one that has provided a source of cash income that does not require migration from the altiplano. This new use-the simple practice of feeding green totora to cattle--allowed many villagers to purchase calves late in the rainy season and to fatten them up for sale during the dry season, at a time when other sources of fodder are very scarce.

Through the late 1930s [footnote 4], villagers primarily harvested the dry yellow stems of the mature totora, which they used it for thatch, mats and balsas. They ate fresh green shoots of young totora plants on the occasions when they lacked potatoes and staple grains. Such times of scarcity could come in the rainy season before the first crop harvests came in, or in years of famine, especially during the long drought of the 1940s. They never harvested the green totora for cattle fodder, though they occasionally fed green totora stalks to donkeys and mules when grasses, crop residues and other fodder were scarce. By the early 1960s, the use of green totora as cattle fodder had become the most widespread use of totora. No longer a novelty, this practice now seemed entirely routine. About 6,500 households harvested totora for cattle fodder in the early 1960s [footnote 5]. The number was close to 13,000 in the early 1980s, and 22,000 in the mid 1990s [footnote 6].

This practice was linked with the increase in demand for meat in southern Peru after the recovery from the depression of the 1930s. Once the drought of the 1930s and 1940s had ended, traders who supplied the cities in that region with meat were eager to purchase animals. They traveled to the cattle fairs that have been held in the altiplano since the eighteenth century and to the new markets that opened in the livestock-producing areas in the 1940s and 1950s [footnote 7]. Hearing word that these buyers were offering high prices, the villagers tried to find ways to raise more cattle. The principal obstacle that they faced was the scarcity of fodder during the dry season, once the grasses and other plants that grew during the rainy season were no longer available. Their supplies of dried barley stalks and other crop residues were limited, and they were reluctant to plant alfalfa rather than food crops in their fields, so they began to experiment with alternatives. Some gathered large quantities of lakeweed, the plants that grew entirely submerged in the water. Though the cattle ate it with relish, its high water content made it heavy and difficult to harvest and carry to shore. Others considered totora. Since it grew in the lake, it remained green throughout the dry season. However, many cattle refused to eat it.

Cirilo discussed this problem when he described at length a trip that he took to a cattle fair when he was a young man in the mid-1950s:

There are cattle that don't recognize totora as a kind of fodder. They are the ones that had never eaten it from when they were calves till they were two or three years old. They have grown up eating grass. In the high pastures where they graze, there are small ponds where a kind of lakeweed grows, and they eat that too.
Then someone will travel from the shores of Lake Titicaca where there's totora, and travels to the alturas, the high country to buy cattle in May or June. Then he takes the cattle from the qhatu, the market to the village. First he gives them totora, and they don't want to eat it, because they don't recognize it, they only recognize grass. So he gives them lakeweed and they eat that.
Now there are two things that we can do with this cattle that don't know totora. We cut up the totora that is mixed with lakeweed. The cattle remember the lakeweed in the ponds in the high pastures where they used to graze, and then, when the cattle eat the lakeweed, they are also eating totora with it. But if the cattle don't know either lakeweed or totora, there is something else we can do. We mix green barley stalks with green totora, both of these in pieces of the same length. Then they eat the barley stalks together with the totora, as if it were just barley stalks. It's another way to get them used to totora.

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