Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires was as amazing as hoped for, and coming back a little harder than expected. It was a very good thing to go away for only 4 days because otherwise coming back would have been very difficult. I leave you with some pictures from the trip, both contemporary and historical (and recently digitized).

My grandmother's 90th birthday. 30 people came over for a party. Here is the family (+ a few wanna bees and minus my mom). We all wore sweaters made for us by my grandmother (the one in the middle with the pink dress, which she made for herself for my brother's wedding 3 years ago).

Blowing out the candles

My cousin participated in a very fancy hat design show. Here my sister tries out her creation, made in mimbre (wicker), while my grandmother tries to understand what it all means.

My grandparents and my mom, about 1945.

My mom getting married. My grandmother kissing her, looks like she is crying. It amazes me how Catholic and traditional and fancy their wedding was.

My father - to the right of the man - with his family, on holiday in Mar del Plata, about 1950.

With Fatima, my ex-boyfriend's sister. Amazing coincidence we were both in Buenos Aires. Last time I saw her was for my goodbye from Madrid, over 4 years ago. Very nice to see her.

Holiday!!

One month after arriving I am going on holiday! My grandmother turns 90 years old and my sister and I are going to Buenos Aires for her birthday. We come back on Friday; short holiday. As part of the celebration I am allowing myself to complain about a few things. As my friends, you get to hear them.

The things that irritate me most...
1. Essays about current day politics and society that base their argument on something Plato or Aristotle said.
2. Essays that define concepts by telling you the etymology of the word. (together, #1+#2=99% of essays I've read here).
3. Being asked if I did that (live in the U.S., go to grad school, work in Madrid) "alone" (¿y hiciste eso solita?). Not everyone is satisfied by the mention of my San Francisco brother, no one accepts friends as enough to free you from "alone", and amazingly ex-boyfriends or a fictitious current boyfriend are not what they are looking for either. It seems like only marriage and children can fully free you from "alone" here.
4. Being treated like a hero for having done that "alone".
5. Taxi drivers and bus drivers; mad men. To stop a bus at the bus stop, you must throw yourself onto the street. You can't read at the bus stop and then rely on your little arm to stop the bus. Throw yourself at the machine.

The things I am learning to live with....
1. The crazy amounts of children everywhere you go.
2. Being asked don't you what one (a child) too? I now respond in a very sweet voice: no, I am really enjoying my neice and nephew and don't see any need for me to have a baby too when everyone else is doing that already.
3. Cigarette smoke everywhere.
4. Service staff everywhere: my father's building has 24 hour staff at the door plus several cleaning and maintenace staff. Most apartments have a maid. Shops - even those with one client an hour - have one person at the cash register and another that gets you what you want to buy.
5. Very boring conversations about daily anecdotes: what happened when you got dressed this morning, the dog that looked at you walking down the street, the woman who slept through the earthquake and thought thiefs had broken into her house....
6. The mystery of the Chilean sense of humor. I just don't get it and its becoming more and more obvious that I don't get it. This may move up to the other list by next month...
7. People asking me about my work and then interrupting me with some "joke" or anecdote or another question about something completely different.

So its not too bad. Objectively, life here is very boring and were it not for my family, our nice apartment and bakery, my good memories from the past, and the hope of travels to the Andes, I might be in despair right now.

After dissing Chilean humor I leave you with some political humor. This photo is from a satirical journal. Some necessary cultural background: though the national myth is that there is one "Chilean race" racial differences do exist. The whiter you are the more more likely you are to come from the upper class, and vice versa. A very common topic of conversation is to mention that "my grandmother had blue eyes", "when I was little I was blond", "you wouldn't believe how light my uncle was" (I've been to three social events and in two of them these comments were heard). With that in mind...

Condoleeza Rice with President Piñera. It says "I have a black brother". Really the joke is on all Chileans, this is not specific to Piñera. It is making fun of the "arribismo" of Chileans. Arribismo is a pejorative term for people who want to climb the social ladder.

Family

Family defines life in Chile to a very large extent, and I am no exception here. Things are going well, though I am looking forward to a "fun break" in Buenos Aires next week. Approximately 90% of my conversations occur with family members: father, brother, sister, sister-in-law, nephew, niece, and sister-in-law's family. Say hello to some of them below.

Family is about reproduction in Chile. A recent newspaper article on the rise of the birth rate (it dipped 2004-2006 and is now back to its 1999 level), tells us it is good for the birth rate to rise, but does not say why. According to a sociologist "it is still very important for people to have children because they give stability when things are difficult at work and you don't know how long your partner will be around". Children make up for the deficiencies in your professional and love life. The article goes on to say that, unfortunately, the increase in natality isn't observed in women aged 20 to 34 but in "high risk groups": teenagers and women of "advanced age". The only women I know in Chile who have had children over age 35 are having their 3rd or 4th. On the other hand, another recent article in the same paper was entitled: "16 and Pregnant: the MTV show that is uncomfortably close to Chilean reality". It is well known that the teenage pregnancy rate has risen steadily and terribly over the past 20 years, due to the combination of increased political and economic freedom with sustained levels of Church-led social control.

No one talks about what comes after birth: how these fearsome mothers stressed by the instability of work and love can raise their little dolls. Compound the problem with the low, low quality of schools (more on this some other day). A friend (with no children) said to us that, during a recent trip to Argentina, he was amazed by how much Argentine parents love their kids, because that is not the case in Chile (he is Chilean). On a recent bus ride I encountered three anecdotes that provide some evidence of this. A 10-year old boy told his mother, at the bus stop, that he made the winning goal during their soccer match. The little kids beat the big kids. The mother said nothing: no bravo, no hug, not even a smile. A father, in his suit, pulls his 10-year old with him to the front of the bus line, cutting in front of everyone else. I complained, everyone else was mute. Finally, another 10-year old rolls up his sleeves as high as possible because it was hot on the bus. His care-taker (his uncle I think) tells him: you look like a nerd if you do that. When you roll your sleeves they can only go 3/4 of the way up, thats the cool way.

One more story, picked up in my first two weeks here. You've seen that I've been going biking and hiking in the nearby countryside and mountains. Through that I met a friend of a friend; he is in his early 30s and has full custody of his 6-year old daughter. The mother seems to not be very interested (who knows the truth). He loves to talk about her and he also loves to spend the weekend on his mountain bike and hiking. A few months ago he sent her to live with his mother because, he told me, it was too hard to meet his work commitments and her time-table. But he doesn't even spend the weekend with her. Frankly, bullshit, it was too hard to take her mountain biking.

Meanwhile neoliberal public policies - on health, education, you name it - assume a stable and cooperative family where both parents work and pay the bills. No statistics exist on this, but I bet that a conservative estimate is that 45% of Chilean families are "broken": ie., the father left long ago, the grandparents care for the kids, the mother had a child with each one of her 3 or 4 different partners, the maid is the primary care-giver, etc. In this context its good for the birth rate to increase? I think every priest, bishop and pope should go live with a Chilean family and pay the bills before they express any further opinions (chastity belts included please).

Diego (nephew), at the end of his first afternoon with me. (hahaha) 

Ricky and Lola, my sister's cats, in our apartment. She said: You don't understand, they are like your children.

Sara (niece), she is "mi gorda exquisita", I just can't resist her!!! She laughs ALL the time. Look at those legs!

Father, brother and kids in the stroller I got them in Oakland, on a Sunday stroll together. This building was built in 265 days to be ready for a big UN meeting in 1972, under Allende. Pinochet turned it into a military headquarters. It burnt a few years ago, and was just reconverted into a cultural center. Its very nice actually.

The pedophile next door

Around the world the priests of the Catholic Church are being accused and found guilty of pedophilia. Chile, where the Church is very strong, is no exception. From my window I gaze onto the Church of El Bosque, one of the most upper class Catholic communities in Santiago, led until a few months ago by Priest Karadima. In 2003 Karadima was first accused of "abusing boys", yet he was removed from his post less than 6 months ago (ie., 2010). He has now been dispossessed of millions of dollars he accumulated under his name (pressumably for the Church) and a whole circle of protection around him is being uncovered. He was one of the most powerful Church leaders in Chile.

One of Karadima's victims is Jimmy Hamilton, and his case is somewhat typical of this case. Jimmy was 17 when Karadima started asking him to masturbate him. This situation lasted until Jimmy was in his 30s, married with three children. The family would go have dinner at Karadima's house (located there within the Church grounds), and at some point Karadima would say: "Hey Jimmy, come to my little office back here so I can check your heartbeat" (Karadima was trained as a doctor) and the abuse would happen, as the children ate their meat and rice outside. Finally Jimmy decided to seek a divorce from his wife through Church channels: that is, an annullment, granted by the Vatican when marriage is not freely entered into. For many decades this was the Chilean upper class' way of getting divorced because divorce was not legally possible. Jimmy argued he was not free to marry because he had been at the time a victim of abuse by Karadima!

Karadima's case has shaken the upper class to the roots. They feel their trust has been betrayed and, to protect themselves somewhat, they continue to call it a case of pedophilia rather than homosexuality. It comes on the heels of the case of the "Cura Tato", priest at an upper class girls school where he had sex with many adolescent girls and left one pregnant. He was moved around from diocese to diocese (including other countries) until a group of lower class girls denounced him. He now lives in peaceful retreat in the Swiss Alps where he asks foregivness for "this dark side within me".

Unfortunately these cases have had much more resonance than that of Marcel Maciel, founder of the Legionarios de Cristo, an ultra-conservative upper class Catholic "sect", found to have raped a 15-year old girl, fathered a child and kept the mother as a mistress in a double life he led for years, in addition to many other acts of pedophilia. The cases of sexual abuse are evidence of the Catholic Church's crisis, but so is the rise of these ultra-conservative sects - also prey to scandal though incomprehensibly with less resonance. Yesterday I came to this question: could the demise of the Catholic Church lead to the rise of these ultra-conservative sects, actually leaving us in a worse (from my point of view) position than with a strong Catholic Church?

The beautiful view from my office, one a cold day after a rainfall (snowfall in the mountains). Very atypical for November.

The red steeple of the Church El Bosque, from my office window.

Grafiti saying "Karadima Pedofilo" on a nearby sidewalk. This is very strange; this is the only grafiti that exists and Karadima's upper class victims (and their friends) are hardly the type to do grafiti. 

Karadima's playground, the city of Santiago, from a mountain-side to the East of the city. We had to cut our hike short because of the rain that came in.