We blow into the outskirts of Arequipa on the bus from Cuzco at 5 a.m. It has been a 12-hour odyssey. My German friends and I are gobsmacked. Innumerable soaring peaks topped by snow and glaciers greet our tired vision. The highest frigid pass is Patapampa Pass at over 16,000 feet above sea level. Now the mountains give way to the edges of the city and its markers of poverty. A seemingly unending shantytown is a shock after the pristine white grandeur of the southern tip of the Valley of the Volcanoes.
Our double-decker bus has been roaring through the darkness all night. For a $10 one-way ticket, our bucket of bolts is clean. The seating is imitation velvet plush. At daybreak, seeing over the edge of the steep embankments and switchbacks our driver has been navigating in the narrow beams of his headlights is enough to make me cringe. (Perhaps the Peruvian, however, is accustomed to such unnerving speed over such precipitous terrain.) From the upper deck where Carolin, Steffen, Birgit, Axel and I are installed, even though it’s been ages since the last bathroom break, only Axel dares attempt to weave his way to the lavatory on the lower deck.
Shoulder to shoulder with me, to my left in the aisle place, is a man in his 20s plugging the charger to his mobile phone into an overhead outlet. Across the way, ahead of Steffen, another man is shamelessly pushing trash out the window. Steffen waves and mouths “guten morgen.” We roll our eyes at each other in disapproval. The trash is sucked away by the rush of outside air, an invisible vacuum cleaner, the breathtaking landscape Peru’s unwelcome vacuum cleaner bag.
Partially covered by a blanket, a couple and a pair of infant girls are spooned across the space in front of me. With the backs of their chairs reclined, they have been practically in my lap for the duration of the journey. Hearing not a peep from either child – what is there for me to complain about?
With a population of 1.2 million, Arequipa is the second largest metropolis in Peru after Lima. (It is anyone’s guess how and where exactly the tabulations on any census begin.) The main bus terminal, Terminal Terrestre in the Jacobo Hunter District, lies on the far side of Arequipa’s historic center. We navigate lanes of battered vehicles spewing black exhaust. When traffic stalls, vendors swarm the streets selling cigarettes, chewing gum, homemade Jell-O in little plastic sacks, steamed corn on the cob, lottery tickets, stem roses and statues of Jesus Christ.
Motorists in Peru don’t cede way, they take way, honking to let other motorists know they are coming through. (It’s a matter of courtesy, the locals say.) Colectivo minivans are taxis that run fixed routes across town. Door boys or girls hang far out into the congestion, shouting destinations as the colectivo nears a stopping point. The youths are charged with collecting fares and hollering to the operator to let him know when to get moving again. The vans make frequent stops, swerving and cutting each other off, endeavoring to outcompete each other for potential customers. At this hour, they are packed with passengers who pay a few Peruvian soles to be transported.
As we draw closer to the heart of the city, a concrete shopping mall and cinema complex overtake roadside stands and the open backs of trucks, where everything from pineapples to a pig’s heads are sold. The entire area seethes and hums with a cacophony of human activity.
“Arequipa has never had a significant Indigenous presence,” an attendant at the Basilica Cathedral in the main square of the city informs me. Nevertheless, native subsistence farmers still tilling irrigated fields of potatoes come down from the cold wild mountains to the world of faded European eliteness. Women wearing colorful traditional polleras (skirts) and regional monteras (hats) to attract tourists hawk anything from cheap trinkets to textiles in and around the Plaza de Armas. Entirely familiar to them are the sacred volcanoes that, were she to awaken from the grave, would be familiar to Juanita the Ice Maiden. El Misty, Chachani and Pichu Pichu, the most famous volcanoes surrounding Arequipa, retain the Quechua/Aymara names used by Indigenous ethnic groups before Juanita was born. These are the appellations she would have recognized as her entourage approached Apu Ampato and the imminent sacrifice of her unblemished life to the gods.
In the 16th century, during Spain’s Golden Age, five monasteries and one convent were founded in Arequipa. Convento de Santa Catalina de Siena is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, considered a masterpiece of colonial architecture. It occupies an entire block just off the Plaza de Armas. A city within a city, its construction spans 300 years. The structure is protected by imposing high walls designed not only to keep outsiders outside but also Christian novitiates inside. Passing beneath an archway marked silencio (silence), novices would have entered a series of courtyards, cloisters and cells that are the sparse living quarters of a handful of aging nuns to this day. As a visitor during the late afternoon, I am hushed not only by the so-called silencio arch but also, into the evening, by candlelight, whose glow gives these stern spaces a gentler aura.
Sor Ana de Los Ángeles Monteagudo Ponce de Leon (1602-1686) had been a part of the Dominican community of Santa Catalina since she was 3. She liked to run her hand along the porous volcanic sillar stone from which her surroundings were built, welcoming as a tiny act of rebellion the times its roughness made her skin bleed. As a young woman graduated from novice, she purposely trod the convent’s winding cobblestone streets so that they echoed the rhythm of a flamenco dancer’s tapping feet on a hard floor. This was often the only sound she heard apart from the cooing of doves as they basked on the steps leading to the priory’s rooftop. Now she was permitted to enter the orange tree cloister. In this space, she breathed deeply into the base of her lungs because the heady fragrance of blossoms was intoxicating to her. It made her imagine what it must be like to live as a Romani woman in Granada in southern Spain, a place she had only read about in books but to which she felt inexplicably connected.
It was within the orange tree cloister that Ana secretly danced in the early hours before dawn. Beneath a pale watery moon, she could see the dark mountains like inky thunderclouds silhouetted against the horizon. She could hear the green branches of the trees rubbing against each other in the breeze and the horses moving in the alleyways beyond her enclosure’s perimeter. It was now that she was awakened to the places of her ancestry and sensed an intrinsic joining to Castilian soil – to its primitive mythology of fecundity, bloodletting and death. And it was from here, she knew, that the art in her originated.
When she danced, it was as if the trail of tears left by a wandering people was visible in movement. She embodied an authenticity that seized her like a demonic spirit and climbed up inside her, inducing an almost unendurable feeling of pleasure. She flowed with the zeal of the Earth and a spontaneous power that she acknowledged but could not explain. Her expression affirmed liberty without limits and revolted against the stagnant repression she experienced in the Catholic Church. She spoke of love and desire, always with its counterpoint of the potential for anguish and loss. Barefoot and clothed only in an ivory ankle length gown, her long glistening hair followed the circle of her body’s every turn, her copper thighs iridescent beneath the gossamer of her dress. The facility with which she declared her presence signaled a courage borne of claiming truth and living according to its difficult demands. Hers was a fearless sagacity that would not be extinguished by any amount of prohibition.
Warm lilies perfumed the salty air as Arequipa sighed for the sea. Purple shadows lengthened beneath quivering stars. A bright caravan moon hung in the gypsy night, nudging the sunrise later into the morning. Sol Ana did not expect the moment to fulfill her but, rather, she allowed the moment to be the gift itself. It was in that mysterious zone that she experienced herself in a state of Grace.
Santa Catalina stands apart from most of Arequipa’s colonial edifices. She is painted not only in casbah terra-cotta, as if inspired by Mohammedans, but also in shades of blue. Mirrors to a sapphire sky at dusk, a cerulean sunlight radiates from within walls that echo the legendary Blue City of Morocco. Did invading Moors crossing the Strait of Gibraltar into Spanish Andalusia in 711A.D. facilitate an Iberian assimilation of Chefchaouen blueness? Did Francisco Pizarro’s conquistadors bring with them to the New World not only violence, slaughter and a taste for a shortcut to riches but also a taste for cobalt? Space and temporality, Santa Catalina, the city inside the White City, is held by celestial hues.
Mario Vargas Llosa, (1936 – 2025), was a son of Arequipa. In April, 2025, The New York Times called him a “literary voice that thundered beyond borders.” Perhaps because of the Llosa legacy, Arequipa is, among other things, a city of intellectuals, philosophers, artists and numerous bookshops. Liberia El Lector is on San Francisco Street, just off the Plaza de Armas, a few doors down from the hostel where I am staying. Ever the flâneuse, I peruse its shelves that sell publications in Spanish as well as English.
Llosa’s voice may have transcended borders when he was alive, but we don’t yet know whether the halo around his head will shine across time itself. He joined the circle of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, authors who became famous in the 1960s and whose fictions I read when I was a student. After his initial critical eye for the corruption, moral compromise and cruelty festering in Peru, as well as a distaste for the conventions of the bourgeoisie, Llosa broke ranks from leftist ideology.
He ran for the Peruvian presidency as leader of Freedom Movement, a right-wing political party comprised of white elites. It contrasted an electorate made up of impoverished Runasimi/Quechua-speaking people and Peru’s mestizo population. Llosa believed in many of the principles that the current administration in the U.S. is attempting to implement – privatization of state enterprises, slashing government spending and layoffs in the civil service sector. He also vociferously supported the inclinations of the leaders of the State of Israel.
He lost in a landslide to Alberto Fugimori in 1990.
At Liberia El Lector, I purchase two novels by contemporary wordsmith Jose Maria Arguedas. From his desire to portray Indigenous culture more authentically, Arguedas created a new idiom that blended Spanish and Runasimi/Quechua, expertly crafting poetic sentences into powerful stories. He has become regarded as one of the most notable figures of 20th-century Peruvian literature, perhaps already eclipsing Llosa. “Open Veins of Latin America,” which I also bought, is by world-renowned Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano. My friend Birgit had read the book in German. “What did you think of it?” I ask her over cocktails at Museo del Pisco, a tapas lounge on Moral Street. “Well,” she says, “it’s communistic! It’s socialistic!”
Birgit’s remark has not dampened my enthusiasm for thinking about where the world is headed and how we might move forward. What we do know is that freedom of the press and literary work across the board is threatened under authoritarian regimes. Extinction is a part of nature. If we consider that Llosa, the writer and the man, may prove to have been on the wrong side of history, his legacy may, indeed, go the way of the dinosaur. Arequipa, however, the fascinating and beautiful White City from which he originated, will remain.
Janice Jada Griffin is a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute Of Art in London, a designer and an internationally-sold painter who owned her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon, for a decade. She lives and works in Santa Fe, and is currently writing a book based on her ongoing experiences in Peru. For more information, visit avant-garde-art.com or email her at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
