¡Huatia, papitas a lo macho, pué!

In the altiplano of Peru an established tradition at the time of the potato harvest includes a worthwhile activity called la Huatia, pronounced Wateeya, and it takes the form of a potato barbecue, more or less. The women in the field build an edifice like a dirt clod igloo that they fill with straw and dried animal dung. This, they light with a match and allow it to burn furiously until the dung is completely consumed and the inside of the little beehive has become a miniature oven. Into the little kiln they stuff a quarter bushel of small potatoes. They then collapse the whole affair onto them and wait for about an hour.

They take a break from whatever activity they have going, from harvest itself to road repair. The women smile at you, their sun and soil blackened faces get ruts like a bad road with no one to fill the chuckholes by the time they are 30. They freely and unabashedly nurse their babies while they eat. Quantity of teeth is inversely proportional to age as one might expect. Their blackened hands show the years of toil and their feet, shod only by hojotas, tire rubber sandals, are universally cracked and callused.

If you happen by, they always invite you to come and eat the potatoes, and you sit on the ground while they uncover the turd baked potatoes. If you have been invited, campesino etiquette dictates that you bring along a wheel of homemade cheese or a couple of liters of pop or that you buy one off of them in one of their little home/stores. Likewise, if you hope to be invited again, you eat what you are offered from their poverty showing no sign of disdain.

Charred and dusty, they take the potatoes out of the ground at last and pour them out on a rice sack or right onto the stubbly turf. You scrub the potato against the short brushy grass to clean it up. You then peel off the skin with your fingernails and clean out any wormy bits before eating it, at least I do. Everyone says that potatoes that have had one worm at least have a sweeter flavor. I am not sure I discern yet since they all manifest evidence of at least one. I have a pretty clear sense that I have eaten worms a time or two. Still, the huatia tradition is a delight.

The women cluck their Quecha and chortle heartily. They gently chide, “Yau, chai gringota manan intindinichu. Curu papata micuskani.” (This gringo doesn’t understand us. He just ate a potato with a worm in it). And they laugh again thinking I didn’t understand them. Sometimes I get things all twisted around and think I came here for the money but life is about much more than that.

You sit there under the early winter sun, eating the smoky potatoes, chewing slowly and savoring them with a lump of salty white cholo cheese that shows your sooty fingerprints. The potatoes are sweet and sometimes you eat a worm. Indeed they eat no meat with this except for the worms but in the end you usually only note, the slightly sweeter savor… Then you pass around a cheap plastic cup, taking turns, filling it with some iridescent, pseudo-mango-peach flavored, corn syrup charged pop for the next person. There you have it, that is what it is all about.