Finding My Place

December 17, 2024

Juan and I are on the fourth leg of travel, visiting four cities, three or four nights each, with two nights on planes. Friends have asked why we are traveling. For many years, I traveled for work, mostly to professional meetings to deliver papers or serve on boards, and Juan came along. This year, we had no such international travel, although we had a wonderful summer of trips to the far northern ends of North America with several grandchildren. We took the lull as a chance to visit Chile and Uruguay, where we had former students and other old friends.

Chile

So, Santiago, Chile (pronounced in one U.S. airport as “Santiago da Chili”). We did not know the neighborhoods and chose a comfortable tourist hotel that turned out to be right downtown. We were in walking distance from several of the major historical attractions and right down the street from “Pica de Clinton,” a restaurant where reportedly the President grabbed some lunch during a visit decades ago. Several of the streets had been turned into pedestrian malls and we enjoyed the sidewalk shopping and outdoor lunches and dinners. We were warned not to have our cell phones out as we walked or they might be grabbed, but we did not personally see any street crime. Thousands of people felt safe there.

Uncharacteristically for us, we went to only two museums. The National Museum held an important lesson for me in framing. True to its name, it started with wars of independence from Spain and was dominated by large oil portraits of white men in uniforms and displays of weapons. The maps were of boundaries, fought over with Peru in particular. Trade also played a role: I hadn’t realized that the gold rush in California had created demand for wheat so far south. No attention to indigenous people. It seemed that the Spanish had already taken care of that problem, and it therefore did not in any way shape “national” history for Chile. “History” was not a story about the land and the people who lived on it.

The national museum ended with Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president whose vision was a worker-led country. The part of the museum that will deal with Pinochet was temporarily closed, reminding me of a museum we visited in East Berlin where the section on Hitler was “closed for rethinking.” The other museum we visited, which we had seen on a previous visit, details the coup and Pinochet era. As Americans in 2024, we left chilled to the bone.

I kept asking about the people who were on that land before the Spanish arrived, both in Chile and Uruguay. Whose land was I on? One friend dismissed the question, reporting that the indigenous people had been exterminated. The current movement for indigenous rights was led by people who “claimed” to be descendants. Another shared a story of violence from a well-recognized indigenous group in their area.

Our other Chile stop was Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in continental America, which sits on what we were taught to call the Magellan Straits. The naval history museum there was also all about white men, European flags, ships and their routes. Nothing on who they met when they arrived. (It’s great traveling with a history teacher. Juan told me that Magellan was killed in armed conflict with indigenous people in the Philippines, a later stop on the voyage he hoped would be around the world.)

Finally, on our guided tour to Torres del Paine National Park, I asked our guide right away about the people who lived on the land before Europeans arrived – and he knew a lot. He told us about the groups that lived in various areas that now make up “Patagonia.” Some were very tall and Magellan was quite short; apparently the explorers were impressed. The word Patagonia itself is derived from the Spanish words for big feet, referring to the footprints the indigenous inhabitants left with their snowshoes. The Europeans mistook those for the marks of the feet themselves and extrapolated giants. The guide gave me a small pamphlet with descriptions of the characters in the HAIN festival the Selknam people celebrate on Tierra del Fuego, the huge island south of Punta Arenas. With that pamphlet in hand, I started to recognize that the characters were displayed in several places where we went, including at our hotel breakfast room. At last, some consciousness of whose land we were on.