Imagining Mobility at the “End of the World”
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02757206.2013.761211
ISSN1477-2612
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America
ResumoAbstract Chile's geographical remoteness has largely defined the imaginaries people share about this Latin American country. Despite its historical image as finis terrae ("the end of the world"), migrants from all corners found their way to these isolated peripheral lands. Thanks to new means of transport and communication, Chile nowadays is as exposed to the global circulation of people, objects and ideas as the rest of the world. Based on a combination of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces how old (and originally foreign) imaginaries about Chile as an inaccessible island keep on influencing how contemporary Chileans participate in and frame their perceived exclusion from a plethora of new transnational mobilities, regardless of whether they have the means and freedom to cross imaginary boundaries and real borders or not. Although increasingly under outside pressure, the value of immobility remains at the core of the Chilean social imaginary, geo-politics and cultural life. Keywords: ImaginaryMobilityUtopiaCultureChile Acknowledgements The research presented in this article was funded by the European Commission (Grant No. PIRG03-GA-2008-230892) and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO PDO No. 1.2.210.09.N). I truly thank my research assistants, Lucina Toro in Chile and Monica Espinoza in Belgium, for their invaluable help. I am also grateful to Francisco Osorio, Carolina Valdebenito and the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments. All omissions and errors are mine alone. Notes All translations in this article are my own. For an overview of the intellectual history and contemporary uses of the imaginary in anthropology, see Strauss (2006 Strauss, C. 2006. The Imaginary. Anthropological Theory, 6(3): 322–344. (doi:10.1177/1463499606066891)[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen (2009 Sneath, D., Holbraad, M. and Pedersen, M. A. 2009. Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction. Ethnos, 74(1): 5–30. (doi:10.1080/00141840902751147)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Despite their frequent references to the imaginary, contemporary anthropologists have been less concerned with imaginative processes than with the product of the imagination. Thomas More (1478–1535) coined the term utopia for an ideal, imaginary island nation somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean whose political system he described in On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia (1516). The seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system stood in sharp contrast with the contentious social life and chaotic politics in Europe at the time. More's book is not only the forerunner of the utopian literary genre, wherein fictional ideal societies and perfect cities are detailed, it also inspired people to set up real intentional communities that attempted to create ideal societies. I carried out fieldwork and archival research in Chile in December 2009 to January 2010 (supplemented with data from previous visits to the country since 1998). The study mainly took place in the capital Santiago, supplemented by short stays in Concepcion, Valparaiso, Viña del Mar and La Serena. The method used involved various types of free-flowing interviews with key informants and other significant actors in the field of transnational mobility (mainly migration and tourism). Ancillary data gathered include secondary sources, audio-visual data, news media, documents, archives, websites, etc. In addition, I used exhaustive notes and personal diary entries to record all my findings. In this context, there is a nice example of how imaginaries are mistaken for reality. On his first trip to the Juan Fernández archipelago, Chile's President Sebastián Piñera referred to Robinson Crusoe as a person that had actually lived there (El Mostrador 2010 El Mostrador. 2010. "Piñera 'mata' a Nicanor Parra y dice que Robinson Crusoe existió." Accessed August 9, 2011. http://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2010/04/24/pinera-mata-a-nicanor-parra-y-dice-que-robinson-crusoe-existio [Google Scholar]). I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. Neruda's project can be seen as one promoting the "mobility" axis: Chilean identity and history, while dear to the poet's heart, and central to his own sense of self, should not be regarded as isolated but as connected. In La Raza Chilena (1904), Palacios argued for the immigration only of those "races" that would blend with Chileans, excluding all matriarchal races and those from warm climates (including iberos, blacks and all Latin races) in favour of Nordic and Germanic races, which he denoted as godos or Goths (Larraín 2001 Larraín, J. 2001. Identidad chilena, Santiago: LOM. [Google Scholar], 95). This type of ideas was recycled in Chilean laws regulating migration. A law approved as late as 1953 (DFL 69, creating a Department of Immigration) still stated that "selective immigration will contribute to perfect the biological conditions of the race". There had been two earlier important phases of Chilean emigration: transitory emigrations (1810–1840) and more massive emigrations related to the gold rush in California (1840–1850) (Cano and Soffia 2009 Cano, V. and Soffia, M. 2009. Los estudios sobre migración internacional en Chile: Apuntes y comentarios para una agenda de investigación actualizada. Papeles de Población, 15(61): 129–167. [Google Scholar]). Peruvian (and Bolivian) migrants are looked down upon and discriminated against because they are seen as indigenous, which in the dominant social imaginary equals dark skin, ugliness, laziness and poverty. While the exact origin of the phrase "Talca, París y Londres" is contested, from the moment Talca was connected with the capital by rail at the end of the nineteenth century, its proud inhabitants for a long time imagined their city to be like cosmopolitan Paris and London. This has since become a common reference when talking about how European-like Chile and Chileans are. Another reason could be the partial acceptance and manipulation of Chile's enduring image in Western popular culture as a wild and tropical country. Classic examples include Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901), or the Hollywood movies Adventure (1945), with Clark Gable, and The Sea Chase (1955), with John Wayne. International flight connections have existed since long. PANAGRA (Pan American-Grace Airways, now defunct) and Air France started flying to Santiago in 1929, followed by Condor in 1935 and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (now British Airways) and KLM in the 1940s. In 1946, LAN-Chile started with international flights to Buenos Aires, in 1956 to Lima and in 1958 to Miami (Canihuante 2006 Canihuante, G. 2006. Turismo en Chile: Paisajes y culturas del pasado, presente y futuro, La Serena: Fondo Editorial. [Google Scholar], 64). As far as business is concerned, Chile became a member of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in 1994 and currently has twenty-one commercial bilateral agreements with fifty-seven countries (including the free trade agreement with the USA, signed in 2003). The country also has a state-of-the-art telecom infrastructure and regulatory system, and the highest mobile telephony and Internet penetration rates in Latin America. This is an idea I borrowed from Roberto Castillo Sandoval. Of course, this type of discourse sounds even more offensive since Barack Obama became president of the USA, because he could also be classified as a negrito de Harvard (Obama is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review). The term McOndo was introduced by the Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet, as a play on the name of Macondo, a town featured in Gabriel García Marquez's famous magic realism novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Magic realism is a literary genre commonly associated with contemporary Latin American writers and Chile has, in Isabel Allende, one of the most famous authors.
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