By Roger Hamilton

As far as he is concerned, there’s no better place to address the spiritual needs of his Indian brothers and sisters than this sprawling boomtown outside the Bolivian city of La Paz. Some 700,000 people live in El Alto, and many of them have only recently arrived from the countryside. It is a place where the traditions and beliefs of the Aymara people run headlong into the realities of the modern world.

Mejillones, a man of quiet but insistent authority, heads the Council of Qulla Knowledge (Saber), a Bolivia-wide network of Aymara religious leaders created in 1995 that seeks to preserve ancient Andean culture and adapt it to the modern world.

The council has received financial assistance from the IDB-supported Indigenous Peoples Fund for the preparation of documents and to help fund events.

Mejillones began a meeting with an outsider by describing the Aymara system of beliefs: the Pacha Mama and the spirituality of nature; the apus, spirits that inhabit every place and guard the earth; and the three levels of existence.

Then he introduced the other members of his organization, Brother Genaro, Brother Casimiro and Brother Florentino. Their mission, he said, is to promote social and economic development on the basis of traditional systems of beliefs and culture.

Their dream is to build an educational center in the shape of a seven-level pyramid, where new generations would be taught the ancient wisdom.

He took down a styrofoam model of the structure from the top of a file cabinet. The center, he said, would have four faculties: educational, economic, social and spiritual. “I put spiritual last, so that people don’t get the wrong idea,” he said. “First or last, it doesn’t matter.” Each center would teach traditional values and practices, as imparted by elders.

“Some say that the tree of our culture has been reduced to only a remnant, that its leaves have fallen and its limbs have been cut,” said Mejillones. “But the roots remain. From them we will create a new seedling.”

Always Aymara. Mejillones comes from a rural village, where he was a farmer. “I have worked in everything that life teaches,” he said. “I know how it is to suffer poverty, frosts, hail, torrential rains and other natural disasters.” In the city, he learns new things and makes contacts with the outside world, even accepting invitations to attend meetings throughout the Americas and Europe. So like many indigenous people, Mejillones straddles two worlds. “We Aymaras live in the city, we live in the country, but we continue being Aymaras,” he said.

Mejillones describes a complex relationship between indigenous religions and Christianity. He is concerned about the inroads being made among the Aymara people by other religious groups. “They pursue us house by house,” he said, “sometimes even offering money, food and used clothing to get our people to convert.”

In the eyes of Mejillones and other indigenous leaders, the issue at stake is more than religion, but a way of life. Like language, religion is the lens through which a people make sense out of the world.

Although Bolivia’s 1994 constitution recognizes a multiethnic society, it makes no mention of religion. Indigenous people interpret multiethnicity to include religion, but the State does not. As a result, although Mejillones performs marriages and baptisms, these are not recognized by the State.