#8: February 20, 2024: Day 40

 I have been in Chile for forty days, and will be here for eighty days more. I thought that this would be a good milestone, a good way for me to split this journey up, to conceptualize it and reflect.

It has gone by both incredibly fast and incredibly slow. My first day here seems so long ago. And yet, other firsts--the first trip to the coast, for instance--feel like they happened just yesterday. I suppose that's how time works. I feel like I have done so much, but also feel like there is so much I haven't done yet. 

Forty days is about twenty-five days longer than I have ever been away from home. Some days are harder than others. I have now built a good routine into this place--the metro, the shops, the parks, classes--but I would be lying if I said that I didn't miss home. I have realized being here just what a magical place Iowa City is. Sometimes I wonder how much it has to do with the city itself, and how much it is just because I know the place, in a fundamental way.

This leads me to the great, but difficult, part of being in Santiago, which is the experience of a brand new space, new culture, and most significantly, a new language. It is breathtaking to experience something new, to learn something new. But there is also a friction that comes with it. As I move through this 1/3 milestone, I am trying to lean into the friction. This is where growth happens, sure, but it's also where life happens. I try to keep in mind what Kalmia told me before I left, something like: "Don't forget to do stuff." Her only small "regret", about her months abroad in Guatemala, was not doing more stuff. At this point, I am beginning to understand what she meant by this, and I will try my best to keep putting those words into action. And it truly has gotten easier in my time so far...I feel settled in very nicely.

I got some acrylic paints from Lider and my first painting was so terrible. I am telling myself that I would more closely resemble Van Gogh if only they had oil paints. This might be my new favorite fallacy: Blaming the Medium. I abandoned pastel drawing long ago...maybe I'll get some watercolors.

Trip for spring break is set: I'm off to Mendoza on March 1st. My only plan right now is to pick up a Messi jersey. Will keep you posted.

#7: February 8-9, 2024: Londres 38, and the Living Historian

 On Friday, the 9th of February, I met with Julio Aguilar Hidalgo, a historian living here in Santiago. We got in touch with each other through my professor and advisor from the University of Iowa, Viridiana Hernandez Fernandez. We met by a KFC outside of metro stop Los Leones, and walked to a coffee shop nearby. Very quickly, I started talking about the environmental history texts that I have read, my thesis project, and my quest to construct a reading list of Latin American environmental history. He answered my questions patiently and had a lot of interesting things to say.

At one point, he said something like: "I was talking with Viridiana a few days ago about our meeting, and I mentioned that you are here in Chile at a very interesting time, a historic time...between the wildfires in Valparaíso and the death of our former president (Sebastián Piñera)...what do you think about being here in this moment?"

I struggled to answer his question. In the end, the best I could come up with was something like: "These events are tragic and it is an interesting time, but I feel like I lack the context within which these events are happening...because of that, I don't know exactly how to interpret them from a 'historical' angle, or even from a personal angle really.''

This is, obviously, a tremendously unsatisfactory answer. But I think it's true, and I think its a function of existing in any new place. That being said, there are things in Santiago that work against this problem. It could be said that the place itself--understood as a mass of people and infrastructure and noise and art and space, public space and private space--is working constantly to offer up the context within which to understand itself. In other words: the city is an embodiment of the memory of its past, continually re-remembered as it continually makes itself. Events in the present are understood intuitively as part of a continuum of history that grows.

A perfect example of this is the monument that seven of us in the program, led by our professor, the fearless Andrés, went to on Thursday the 8th. It's called Londres 38, a building in downtown Santiago that has gone through many conversions along its continuum. Up until 1973, it was used as a headquarter building for the Partido Socialista de Chile. After Pinochet's coup in 1973, the state converted the building into a torture chamber for political dissidents. In 1975, 1000 victims later, the torture stopped in the building, and its ownership was ''transferred'' to the O'Higginian institute, a Pinochet-affiliated organization bent on obscuring the truth of the building's use. Finally, in the mid-2000s, the ownership of the building was transferred to the state (that is, the democratic state) and its role as a place of memory began. It has since developed into a series of exhibits that remember the past (so as not to repeat it) and wrestle with the future. Speaking to this, one room of the monument is dedicated to those who protested on the streets of Santiago beginning in 2019 in response to acute inequality and a cost of living crisis. There is a clear sense of the connectedness of all of these things across the breathing timeline of Chilean history.

#6: February 2, 2024: Isla Negra and Pomaire

 On Friday, the 2nd of February, our program took a day trip, again to the coast of Chile but this time south of Viña del Mar, to a town called Isla Negra. This was the last place where Pablo Neruda lived before his death in Santiago following the coup on President Salvador Allende. In Isla Negra, Neruda was buried, exhumed, and buried again following an investigation from 2013-2015 into his cause of death--as this investigation showed, his cause of death was murder, not cancer. Neruda and his wife rest there in Isla Negra, their feet pointed toward the sea. 

His house there, now the museum Casa de Isla Negra, was fascinating. It turns out, Neruda was much more than a poet. The museum displays a vast array of his collected artworks and artifacts, as well as his insect and shell collections. As one can surely imagine, he was fascinated with natural life. This must be a reason why he found Isla Negra to be a creatively stimulating place. Looking out from his windows, one gets a tremendous view of the ocean, churning water continuously against a wide and sturdy outcropping of boulders on the shoreline. This flow is beautiful from afar, but got to be somewhat violent as we got closer, hopping between the rocks. Faced with this threatening advancement of waves, I began to think about the small earthquakes we have been feeling in Santiago so far this semester. On the coast and in the city, over the past 15 years, much destruction has been caused by earthquakes, especially in conjunction with coastal waters. Neruda's house itself sustained damage from a 2010 earthquake, and Pomaire, a small town we visited on our way back to Santiago, was badly damaged by the event. Both places, as our program visit itself demonstrates, operate with strong tourist economies. Both the interjection of natural disasters and the disruption of things like the COVID-19 pandemic have altered these economies in ways that are often difficult. 

When we ate at a restaurant in Pomaire, La Fuente de mi Tierra, our placemats had a message on them: "Mr Tourist: Buy Greda (clay sourced locally, pottery being a historic and present commodity in Pomaire), help maintain and sustain our identity. Pomaire is sinking, and that is caused by the invasion of products that don't contribute to tourist development in our town. When you buy these products, you encourage and enrich the person who only looks for their own self-benefit. Prefer Greda."

Indeed, walking through the block of Pomaire dedicated to shops, we were confronted with a puzzling assortment. Many shops carried the same types of goods, often sold for very different prices. Some sold "artisinal"-seeming hats, others sold ball caps. There was much pottery, but also many other goods that simply seemed more "touristy". These distinctions were lost on most of us (who did not read the placemat closely), and I think this flattening might be part of the issue. Tourists do not have a discerning eye for engaging with a new environment in which some of their actions might help stimulate a delicate and precious set of livelihoods, while others might work against them. We spent an hour sweeping through the town, an advancing wave, and then we were gone, retreated back. What kind of force did we enact upon the town?

I have been thinking a lot about the tourist visa that allows me to stay here. What kinds of obligations does this designation imply? What are my responsibilities? What is my role here? Do I have one? These are complicated questions, and I am not the one who can answer them. I think the best I can do is to take the messages I receive, on restaurant placemats and in the classroom and through the dynamic structure of the earthquake-resilient buildings that move beneath my feet, and internalize them as best as I can.

#5: January 27, 2024: Is This Heaven? No, it's Fantasilandia.

 Fantasilandia, a theme park within Parque O'Higgins, is the place where celebrations proliferate, thrills abound, and young adults and children make themselves dizzy for entertainment. The food is fatty, the rides are just about functional, and a Pepsi costs four times what it does outside of the park's gates; in all manners, this magical place reminded me of home. This is also not to mention the abundance of cerveza circulating the premises, a precious commodity on any ninety-degree day, especially in fantasy-land. Inhibitions must be thoroughly dismantled before one takes on "El Boomerang", a gut-churning rollercoaster that rivals Chile's coastal bus system in terms of velocity and g-force.

I myself mostly stuck to the kids rides: A teacup that spins inoffensively, a rotating swing, and the refreshing water rides. I found myself mostly fascinated not with the rides themselves but with the aura of the place. It reminded me of Lost Island in Waterloo, and Arnolds Park in Okoboji. For the longest time, I thought there was something distinctly midwestern about theme parks, but Fantasilandia has disrupted that notion. I guess thrills are universal.