Thursday, September 22, 2005
home
I'm back in the States. Not too much to report. I've been sick since I got back, and my computer is still dead. So blogging might be light for a bit as I resettle myself.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
11 de Septiembre
This past Sunday was the 11th of September. The date means something different in Chile than it does in the States. Here, it's the anniversary of the Pinochet coup. There are some protests in various parts of the city, and some people leave flowers in memory of the depose president, Salvador Allende. Allende died during the coup itself, while locked in La Moneda, the presidential palace. The official (and widely accepted) explanation is suicide. There are very few permanent memorials to Allende anywhere in Chile. The only one I know of is a statue in front of La Moneda itself.
I wandered around the downtown area on my own for most of Sunday afternoon. My destination was La Moneda, hoping to see a demonstration of some sort; there was nothing like that. There was, however, a makeshift memorial for Allende around the statue. People had left flowers all around it, and a few handwritten posters had been taped to the side of the statue. Most of the writing on these posters was Pablo Neruda poetry (Neruda and Allende were close friends, and Neruda was an active member of the Chilean Communist Party).
There were carabineros all over the square in front of La Moneda, and barriers to keep people out of the area immediately in front of the building. All this seemed to be in anticipation of demonstrations, and possibly riots. There were no signs of either yet. One thing I noticed was the planned method of crowd control: the authorties were keeping people out of a particular area, instead of trying to keep them in a certain area. An interesting contrast to the way authorities in the States usually handle protests.
La Moneda is about half a kilometer from Plaza de Armas, the center square of Santiago. In the area between the two, I counted at least four public performances. One was just a guy and his kids running around with drums on their backs. Two were musical groups of mostly guitars and amps; they both seemed to be playing cantantas. The other was a group dancing la cueca, the national dance of Chile. These last three are important. La cueca is usually performed only around Independence Day (Sept 18), so part of it is probably that. But it was virtually banned under Pinochet, and eventually became one form (of many) of protest against the Pinochet government. Cantantas are a type of song repopularlized by the Nueva Cancion movement in the late 60s and early 70s. It was very heavily associated with leftist politics, and many of its musicians were aligned with Allende's Popular Front campaign. Nueva Cancion was largely banned under Pinochet. I might be mistaken that these bands were playing actual cantantas, but the music was distinctively Nueva Cancion.
Another interesting thing about these performances is that they were done in the middle of the street. This is actually pretty typical. A few of the streets in downtown Santiago were intended to be used only by pedestrian traffic; cars aren't allowed on them. One of them is used as an open-air market from early in the morning until about 10 in the evening, 7 days a week. These performances were going on right in the middle of these major pedestrian thoroughfares, right in the middle of downtown, in the middle of the afternoon. And nobody seemed to care. Contrast that to major cities in the States, where the cops want a permit before you can do anything on a public sidewalk, and will arrest you for "interfering with the flow of traffic."
It was an interesting new perspective on the state of liberty in the United States.
I wandered around the downtown area on my own for most of Sunday afternoon. My destination was La Moneda, hoping to see a demonstration of some sort; there was nothing like that. There was, however, a makeshift memorial for Allende around the statue. People had left flowers all around it, and a few handwritten posters had been taped to the side of the statue. Most of the writing on these posters was Pablo Neruda poetry (Neruda and Allende were close friends, and Neruda was an active member of the Chilean Communist Party).
There were carabineros all over the square in front of La Moneda, and barriers to keep people out of the area immediately in front of the building. All this seemed to be in anticipation of demonstrations, and possibly riots. There were no signs of either yet. One thing I noticed was the planned method of crowd control: the authorties were keeping people out of a particular area, instead of trying to keep them in a certain area. An interesting contrast to the way authorities in the States usually handle protests.
La Moneda is about half a kilometer from Plaza de Armas, the center square of Santiago. In the area between the two, I counted at least four public performances. One was just a guy and his kids running around with drums on their backs. Two were musical groups of mostly guitars and amps; they both seemed to be playing cantantas. The other was a group dancing la cueca, the national dance of Chile. These last three are important. La cueca is usually performed only around Independence Day (Sept 18), so part of it is probably that. But it was virtually banned under Pinochet, and eventually became one form (of many) of protest against the Pinochet government. Cantantas are a type of song repopularlized by the Nueva Cancion movement in the late 60s and early 70s. It was very heavily associated with leftist politics, and many of its musicians were aligned with Allende's Popular Front campaign. Nueva Cancion was largely banned under Pinochet. I might be mistaken that these bands were playing actual cantantas, but the music was distinctively Nueva Cancion.
Another interesting thing about these performances is that they were done in the middle of the street. This is actually pretty typical. A few of the streets in downtown Santiago were intended to be used only by pedestrian traffic; cars aren't allowed on them. One of them is used as an open-air market from early in the morning until about 10 in the evening, 7 days a week. These performances were going on right in the middle of these major pedestrian thoroughfares, right in the middle of downtown, in the middle of the afternoon. And nobody seemed to care. Contrast that to major cities in the States, where the cops want a permit before you can do anything on a public sidewalk, and will arrest you for "interfering with the flow of traffic."
It was an interesting new perspective on the state of liberty in the United States.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Pop Quiz
Because I'm bored, and I happen to be working on it at the moment, here's some Scavhunt triva for y'all:
Item 260. It's near the bottom of page 9. Anyone know? Make your best guess in comments. I'll come back sometime next week with the answer.
Item 260. It's near the bottom of page 9. Anyone know? Make your best guess in comments. I'll come back sometime next week with the answer.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Miscelaneous Updates
Things continue here. A few updates, in a very journal-like fashion:
More on all this to come, I'm sure.
- Carolyn, then Matt, then Nathan all left since my last post. This leaves me as the only United Statesian at the Residencia. Joe is still in Santiago, though he is living in an apartment.
- I added some backround intoductory material to my description of my project. Caution, though, because the derivation is very rough, not fully accurate, and suffers from rediculous notation.
- I could declare myself done with work as of the end of the day yesterday. I'm going in this coming week to see what I can get done. At some point during the week, I'll same most of the data I've taken into a form I can take home with me. There might be better data to share; we'll see.
- Ongoing Project #1 for when I get back home was to make all the past scavhunt lists searchable. I forget when that turned into TeXing them all up into one nice-looking document. But it has. Rather than be frustrated by the slow connections to servers back at home, I've been concentrating on the manual labor of putting the lists into a (computer-)readable format. For some, this is cutting and pasting HTML source. For others, cutting and pasting properly typeset PDF. For a couple, getting Moacir to email me the original TeX source files. For about half of them, it has meant transcribing the PDF by hand (using Word Pad, so I'm not slowed by the response time of the internet connection). As of last night, I have two left: 1991 and 1992.
- My return flight leaves Santiago the evening of September 19th, and arrives in Chicago the morning of the 20th. This gives me about a week during which I have yet to committ to anything. I want to be in Santiago on the 11th (anniversary of the Pinochet coup) to see if I can't observe/photograph protests/riots without getting into too much trouble. I also want to be in Santiago for the 18th (Independence Day). I'm going to want to be in Santiago by the 18th anway, to make sure everything is in order for my flight. So the timing works out pretty well.
- I might try and do a little bit of more traveling in that week before I leave. There are several things in Santiago that I want to go see (more on this, above), and one or two places I'm going to try and goto outside of Santiago. I will probably only make it to one place outside Santiago. If I can make it to only one, it will probably be Isla de Chiloe.
More on all this to come, I'm sure.
