Where desert meets city: linked to the harsh La Guajira peninsula, these native peoples face the intersection of tradition and modernity.

• Author: Ceaser, Mike
• Position: Cover Story

On the sandy, brush- and cactus-covered peninsula of La Guajira, the Epiayu family lives in adobe homes, raises sheep and goats, and cultivates beans, yuca, and corn. They live as their Wayuu people have done for countless centuries--but with a difference. Today, from a few miles away, the Colombian cities of Riohacha and Maicao and from across the border Maracaibo, Venezuela, beckon the young people with school, jobs, and excitement.

On a recent day, several Epiayu family members took refuge from the desert heat in hammocks strung in the shade between their adobe homes, while nearby children herded goats through the brush.

"The grandchildren leave home only to look around, but they return to the nest," family patriarch Jose Epiayu, who estimates his age at around sixty, asserts in his native tongue of Wayuunaiki. "Their place is here."

But today more and more young Wasyuu are deciding that their place is also in the city, whether in Venezuela or Colombia. As a result, the Epiayus, like their people, find themselves straddling multiple worlds: Venezuela and Colombia; countryside and city; rancher and merchant; they are a people holding on to tradition and identity while also reaching out to a new culture.

That is clear from a walk down any hot, busy street in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, probably home to more Wayuus than any other place. The street markets are crowded with Wayuu women, who, dressed in their traditional brightly colored body-length blouses called mantas, sit shielded from the city's notorious heat by broad umbrellas. And a few miles away on the campus of the University of Zulia, the number of Wayuu students has surged in recent years.

Forty-five, year-old Celia Castillo, who sells clothing from a stall in a crowded Maracaibo indoor market, is part of that migration and transformation. From her childhood home in a town without electricity or running water, she came to the big city to find a new life. She herself completed only elementary school, but one of her daughters is a journalist and the other a preschool teacher, and skinny fourteen-year-old son Joel plans to go to college and study "petroleum."

"Maracaibo is the richest country, because it has everything," she says. "He who dies of hunger here wants to."

Perhaps the Wayuus acquired their endurance from the harsh and remote peninsula which gave them the name outsiders still use--La Guajira. During the colonial period, the European invaders found little to interest them in this dry and barren peninsula curving out into the Caribbean with its warlike population. As a result, the lawless region became popular with Dutch, French, English, and Spanish smugglers--a role it continues playing today.

The present-day variety of skin tones, features, and surnames among the Wayuu evidences the genetic contributions of those visitors, as well as the peoples of Arab, African, and criollo heritage who have come since--all of them outsiders called by the Wayuus "alijunas." In fact, Colombia and Venezuela paid so little attention to La Guajira that even today they disagree over the border.

Wayuu tradition says that the god Maleiwa created their people from a rock called Alasu in the Alta Guajira, on which the symbols of the various clans are still etched. On their rocky land, the Wayuus defied centuries of Spanish and then republican domination, maintaining such a warrior reputation that as recently as the 1930s Henri Charriere, or Papillon, the famed writer and escapee from French Guiana's notorious Devil's Island prison, lived six happy months among the Wayuus--safe because neither the Colombian nor the Venezuelan authorities dared venture into La Guajira.

Papillon saw the Wayuu as the stereotypical noble savages, ferocious defenders of their...