I was told I had to check-out the women of Pereira, Colombia. I was
told I had to check-out the statue of El Liberator in Pereira's Plaza
de Bolivar. I was told that the women of Pereira were beautiful. I
was told that they were unabashedly sexual.
I was told these jokes:
Question - What do women of Pereira do when you ask them to dance?
Answer - They lie down.
Question - What do women of Pereira put into their ears to make
themselves look sexy?
Answer - their knees
Here in what was once a remote pueblo in the high, Northern Andes,
the descendants of Crypto Jews, the descendants of refugees fleeing
the bloody, civil wars, achieved covert, underground, subtle and not
subtle liberations of the human circumstances. This dramatic mixing
of the American Indian, the European, the Hebrew, the African, has
produced physically beautiful people endowed with a wonderful hybrid
vigor, and an accomplished art of the living of life in this South
American Canaan they were thrust into, an arduous land of conflict,
uncertainty, of hope, utter despair, wild joy, anguish, disaster,
obstinate reconstructions, and stubborn resurrections.
Pereira is immediately distinguished from all other pueblos in
Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, by it's depiction of Simon Bolivar.
In all other pueblos the plazas of Bolivar have statues of a stiffly
dignified caballero (gentleman) in a military uniform on a stately
caballo (horse) on parade. But in Pereira El Liberator is a skinny,
balding, naked dude on a supernatural, mythic horse. He
is going balls-to-the-wall to the horizon, on a lathered up, legs in
the air, wild and crazy mare.
In his right hand El Liberador holds what could be the flaming torch
of the transcendent human liberation/or it could be his ballooning,
flapping underwear - from which he has been liberated.