#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.