Defiant folklorist of the forgotten: Bolivia's rebellious Antonio Paredes-Candia has devoted his entire life to recording and sharing his country's popular culture.

• Author: Ceaser, Mike

Gloria Garcia de Terrazas, Bolivia's director of cultural patrimony, recalls the time when Antonio Paredes-Candia visited her in her office in the vice-ministry of culture to talk about selling his books on El Prado, La Paz's main street. She explained to him that all selling was forbidden on El Prado.

"I am not asking permission," he told her. "I'm informing you." And Paredes-Candia, author of dozens of volumes on Bolivian culture, proceeded to offer books for sale on El Prado that day and many times since, despite repeated warnings and admonitions from city officials.

"With or without permission, I'm going to sell on El Prado because my people need to read," said Paredes-Candia, flashing a mischievous smile.

In fact, the author, seventy-eight, has fought many fights in his colorful life, not only to bring to his people the culture he holds so dear but also to defend his principles of social justice.

But it was chance that made Bolivian culture the central theme for Paredes-Candia and started him gathering the folklore material for his work of recording traditions, nicknames, funeral customs, and many other aspects of his homeland's popular culture. Head of a wealthy and influential family, Paredes-Candia's father had him slated for a comfortable career in Bolivia's foreign service. But in what would be the first of many rebellions, the young man's principles and personality did not-permit him to take the easy road. With a job in Bolivia's foreign ministry, Paredes-Candia thought he was next in line for a position in Paris. But the Paris job went to a nephew of the president, setting Paredes-Candia off on the first, and probably the most violent, of his many battles for justice as he saw it.

"I entered the subsecretary's office and gave him a punch, and then I left," says Paredes-Candia, laughing hard at the memory. "It came out in the newspapers."

To escape possible retaliation, Paredes-Candia fled to mining towns near Potosi, so high in the Andes that one of his strongest memories is that of an airplane passing by--below him. In the town of Quechisla, Paredes-Candia taught school and improved his students' Spanish by telling stories of European origin, which he had heard from a neighbor woman while growing up in La Paz. One day, however, a girl whom Paredes-Candia had separated from the other students because she suffered from tuberculosis raised her hand.

"I can tell a story," she said. She did.

"It left my mouth hanging open," Paredes-Candia recalls. "How beautiful!"

Paredes-Candia visited the grandmother of another student and was so enthralled by her stories that he soon made the gathering of folklore his main activity, wandering on foot and in wagons from village to village collecting tales in Spanish as well as the native tongues of Quechua and Aymara. Paredes-Candia supported himself and guaranteed his popularity by carrying with him papier-mache puppets, with which he entertained the country people and earned his keep in that pre-television era.

"I crossed the Valley of Cochabamba on foot. I crossed the jungle on foot," he recalls. "I lived with the people. It's the only way. Not to go for a visit, but to stay with them a couple of days."

One day in a bus station a young woman greeted Paredes-Candia with a cry of "teacher, how are you?" It was the tuberculin student, now strong and healthy, whose story had started...