Learning the Language 237Language and Titles
Next comes a more sensitive issue which I hope I shall
handle fairly. When you meet someone of obvious indigenous
background, specifi cally if that person is wearing typical
Indian dress or work clothes, you may be addressed as
caballero (roughly ‘gentleman’) for men, and señora for
women. The old caste system is built into the language. (This
casting of the language may suddenly diminish now that
Bolivia has elected a president of Aymara heritage.)
When called caballero, egalitarian principles may move you
to respond with the same terminology. If you do so, rather
than being seen as fair-minded and socially conscious, the
person who addressed you will feel he is being ridiculed.
So much for good intentions—you are not going to change
the social structure of a country with one out-of-context
egalitarian response. If addressed as caballero, the proper
response is to address the person by fi rst name.
Bolivian fi lm director, Mela Márquez, has given her own
analysis of this ‘almost unbridgeable gap’ between the
classes. “I don’t think I fully realised the level of racism here
before I went to Europe. Of course it exists there as well,
but here there are explicit rules as to the level at which you
must live. The rich here are more likely to know Miami or
Buenos Aires than a small village just down the road from
their homes.”
I have expressed my discomfort about these linguistic
manifestations of caste to a Bolivian friend who had lived
in the United States.
“In the US,” he responded, “there is a social prohibition
against all expressions of race and class difference when the
company is mixed. But I have been in rooms with no blacks
present, when the racist garbage I heard was nauseating. I’m
not sure which is better,” he added, “our brutal honesty or
the hypocrisy back in the US.”
Before Bolivia became a nation, the Spanish language
was already burdened with both a formal and a familiar
‘you.’ If you are addressed with the formal Usted in Spanish,
you should respond with Usted as well. Only after a social
relationship develops over a period of time because of