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In 1956, Dwight Heath, a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, was preparing to do field work for his dissertation. He was interested in land reform and social change, and his first choice as a study site was Tibet. But six months before he was to go there he got a letter from the Chinese government rejecting his request for a visa. “I had to find a place where you can master the literature in four months, and that was accessible,” Heath says now. “It was a hustle.” Bolivia was the next best choice. He and his wife, Anna Cooper Heath, flew to Lima with their baby boy, and then waited for five hours while mechanics put boosters on the plane’s engines. “These were planes that the U. S. had dumped after World War II,” Heath recalls. “They weren’t supposed to go above ten thousand feet. But La Paz, where we were headed, was at twelve thousand feet.” As they flew into the Andes, Cooper Heath says, they looked down and saw the remnants of “all the planes where the boosters didn’t work.”
From La Paz, they travelled five hundred miles into the interior of eastern Bolivia, to a small frontier town called Montero. It was the part of Bolivia where the Amazon Basin meets the Chaco – vast stretches of jungle and lush prairie. The area was inhabited by the Camba, a mestizo people descended from the indigenous Indian populations and Spanish settlers. The Camba spoke a language that was a mixture of the local Indian languages and seventeenth-century Andalusian Spanish. “It was an empty spot on the map,” Heath says. “There was a railroad coming. There was a highway coming. There was a national government. . . coming.”
They lived in a tiny house just outside of town. “There was no pavement, no sidewalks,” Cooper Heath recalls. “If there was meat in town, they’d throw out the hide in front, so you’d know where
it was, and you would bring banana leaves in your hand, so it was your dish. There were adobe houses with stucco and tile roofs, and the town plaza, with three palm trees. You heard the rumble of oxcarts. The padres had a jeep. Some of the women would serve a big pot of rice and some sauce. That was the restaurant. The guy who did the coffee was German. The year we came to Bolivia, a total of eighty-five foreigners came into the country. It wasn’t exactly a hot spot.”
In Montero, the Heaths engaged in old-fashioned ethnography – “vacuuming up everything,” Dwight says, “learning everything.” They convinced the Camba that they weren’t missionaries by openly smoking cigarettes. They took thousands of photographs. They walked around the town and talked to whomever they could, and then Dwight went home and spent the night typing up his notes. They had a Coleman lantern, which became a prized social commodity. Heath taught some of the locals how to build a split-rail fence. They sometimes shared a beer in the evenings with a Bolivian Air Force officer who had been exiled to Montero from La Paz. “He kept on saying, ‘Watch me, I will be somebody,’ ” Dwight says. (His name was René Barrientos; eight years later he became the President of Bolivia, and the Heaths were invited to his inauguration.) After a year and a half, the Heaths packed up their photographs and notes and returned to New Haven. There Dwight Heath sat down to write his dissertation – only to discover that he had nearly missed what was perhaps the most fascinating fact about the community he had been studying.
Today, the Heaths are in their late seventies.
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