A Long Petal of the Sea (Book Review)

In 1939, as the Spanish Civil War wound down, thousands of refugees fled across the border into France—which then confined tens of thousands in a deplorable detention camp at d'Argelès-sur-Mer. In partial response, poet Pablo Neruda—also a diplomat—chartered the French cargo vessel Winnipeg to carry 2,200 Spanish refugees across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to his homeland of Chile where, despite isolated episodes of xenophobia, they integrated themselves into local society.

Chartered by Pablo Neruda, the French freighter Winnipeg carried Spanish refugees to Chile.

That’s the historical background for Isabel Allende’s latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, which becomes a tale of exile and adaptation that includes several larger-than-life figures, most notably Neruda himself but also the late President Salvador Allende (Isabel’s father’s cousin) and the notorious Augusto Pinochet (mentioned only in passing). Some characters are fictionalized versions of historical figures, such as pianist Roser Bruguera, clearly based on the painter Roser Bru (who turned 98 in February).

Isabel Allende's novel focuses on one exceptional refugee family.

Bruguera is one focus of a complex family story that melds with an equally complex political history that involves her going into exile, with her husband Víctor Dalmau, from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Allende is especially good at depicting the intrigues and obstacles her characters must navigate, including neighborhood informants, imprisonment, intra-familiar conflicts that tore many Chileans apart, and the disruptions of exile.

The first Spanish refugees would have passed through Arica's customs house (now a cultural center).

Being a geographer, I try to be alert to people and place, and I found one unfortunate error. I expected that, after the Winnipeg passed through the Panama Canal, it would go directly to Valparaíso, whence the refugees would proceed to Santiago and elsewhere in the densely populated heartland. As it happened, though, the ship made a stop in the northern port of Arica, a city I know well, where Chilean officials met the vessel and some of the passengers came ashore to stay.

The nitrate port of Pisagua was the northernmost point on Chile's contiguous rail network.

Allende, though, claims the officials arrived by train, but the northern Chilean railroad network, developed to help exploit the Atacama Desert’s nitrate deposits, never reached Arica—the most northerly major station was in the port of Iquique, roughly 200 km to the south (though there was a smaller station in the nitrate port of Pisagua, only about 125 km to the south). It might have been possible to reach Arica by rail at this time, but that would have involved a roundabout route via Buenos Aires and slow trains to northwestern Argentina and then Bolivia, where the Ferrocarril Arica-La Paz connected the two countries. Given the time, distances, and often contentious relations between Bolivia and Chile, it’s unlikely that anyone would have taken this route and, as it happens, there were flights from Santiago to Arica as early as 1929.

Oficina Chacabuco was the camp where Víctor Dalmau was presumably imprisoned. 

Allende describes, but does not specifically identify, the location where her protagonist Dalmau “ended up at a camp for saltpeter miners in the north that had been abandoned for decades and was now converted into a prison.” That description fits Oficina Chacabuco, about 100 km northeast of the port city of Antofagasta, which is now a national monument and in situ museum that I’ve visited several times. She also offers a plausible description of the Dalmaus’ ostensible rural retreat, outside Santiago, when they return from exile in Venezuela.

 

All in all, Allende’s novel is a rewarding read that provides an insider’s view of refugees, immigrants, and the contributions they make to their new countries—with lessons for countries still including Chile and, of course, the United States (where Allende now makes her home).

                                                                          

  

Argentina's Black Snow (A Film Review)

Ski season started early in South America this year, as Pacific storms blanketed Chile’s side of the Andes with snow, and more than enough made it across the cordillera into Argentina. Skiing, though, is not the theme behind Argentine director Martín Hodara’s Nieve Negra (“Black Snow”), which has recently turned up on Netflix (while the trailer below is in Spanish, the Netflix version has subtitles). Rather, to make a somewhat misleading generalization, it’s a family drama about an inheritance. In fact, it’s more than that, and I’ll try to suggest that without revealing any spoilers.

Presumably set in Patagonia’s “Lakes District”—the film never mentions a specific location—the story centers around a forested property owned by a family whose father has died. In any film about southernmost South America, I always try to identify the locale but, in this case, I noted that the trees along the road to the homestead appeared to be pines or other Northern Hemisphere conifers. Later, researching the film’s antecedents, I learned that it was shot at least partly in the Pyrenees of Andorra and Spain, whose terrain resembles that around Bariloche or San Martín de los Andes, which I expected to be the likely setting.

In the aftermath of the patriarch’s death, the younger brother Marcos (Leonardo Sbaraglia) has returned from Buenos Aires, with his Spanish wife Laura (Laia Costa), to try to convince the rest of the family—including his mentally disturbed sister Sabrina (Dolores Fonzi, in what is barely a cameo)—to sell the property to a forestry company. However, the family lawyer Sepia (a small but noteworthy role played by Federico Luppi) also obliges him to try to obtain the consent of his older brother Salvador (Ricardo Darín), whom Marcos prefers to avoid.

Darín, probably Argentina’s best known contemporary actor, plays a role far removed from his early romantic leads (mind you, at age 60 he’s certainly reached the upper limit for that). Here, instead, he’s a scruffy hermit who has issues with his siblings, particularly his brother. There are issues that deal not just with family secrets, but also on how those secrets fit into a larger context—in this case, I would suggest, the context of public and private corruption in Argentina.

Saying anything more might give away the ending but, in my judgement, it’s more than just a tale of sibling rivalry. Arguably, one might say, it’s an allegory of how Argentine society works, at several levels—until it doesn’t—and its victims are not always obvious at first. In the end, co-optation becomes the default option.

Chile in California

In San Francisco, this past weekend, the tenth annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival took place and, for the second straight year we had a friend visit from far away - in this case, I was able to return the hospitality that my friend Marializ Maldonado had been extending to me ever since my first visit to Chile, three decades ago.

Marializ, in fact, did not come to California specifically to attend the festival, but took advantage of a visit to Tennessee - where her Nashville-based son Miguel Cancino plays lead guitar for singer Natalie Stovall’s touring band - to visit us in the Bay Area. It might seem odd to find a Chilean to play in a country band but, in a sense, it gave me another reason to persuade Marializ - a journalist who has interviewed Mexican Norteño bands such as Los Tigres del Norte - to come visit us for a few days.

Last year, when friends from the blustery Falkland Islands visited us, we found it difficult to persuade them that the autumn weather in Golden Gate Park could be cool, foggy and windy enough to require warmer clothing. This year, though, it was not hard to convince someone who knows the Chilean coastal cities of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar - climatic analogues to San Francisco - that the weather can get damp and chilly in coastal California. The fact that it was so did not deter us from enjoying acts like Richard Thompson, the Flatlanders, and Robert Earl Keen on Saturday.

I have written several times about the connections between California and Chile and, as we spent Sunday and Monday touring the East Bay and San Francisco, the topic was never far from the surface. In Berkeley, for instance, we drove past the Latin American community center La Peña, founded in the aftermath of 1973’s brutal coup by Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet, and its Café Valparaíso, which serves a largely Chilean menu.

Many people are unaware that Chileans played a huge role in the California Gold Rush, even though the popular California-based novelist Isabel Allende portrayed that period vividly in her Daughter of Fortune. Some 7,000 Chileans resided in the San Francisco neighborhood then known as Chilecito (“Little Chile”), in and around the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Kearny Street. It took us some time but, with the help of the Honduran host Conrado Henríquez of Café Vesuvio, we found the sidewalk plaque (pictured at top) placed there by the Chilean consulate in 2003 - that’s because it’s small and inconspicuous, especially in the shadow of Francis Ford Coppola’s Café Zoetrope, in the historic Sentinel Building (it would be no surprise if the building owed its distinctive copper façade to Chilean metals) .

With his help, we also learned something I had never known - at the foot of Russian Hill, on Jones between Greenwich and Filbert, San Francisco has its own Valparaíso Street, a mid-block alleyway that bears the name of Chile’s UNESCO World Heritage Site. By way of reciprocity, of sorts, Valparaíso has plenty of places named San Francisco - including, unfortunately, the landmark namesake church that suffered serious damage in last February’s earthquake.

Don't Overlook the Argentines
Meanwhile, I was surprised to learn, through Buenos Aires Herald columnist Nicolás Meyer, that the Argentines also played a brief but literally noteworthy role in early California history. It’s a complex tale but, in 1818, the temperamental privateer Hipólito Bouchard (a Frenchman who had studied in the United States but gained Argentine nationality during the wars of independence) overran the Presidio of Monterey - California was then part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain - and raised the Argentine flag there.

In Spain’s view, Bouchard was a pirate and, in any event, his rule lasted only five days before he continued south to Chile. En route, he raided a coastal ranch, landed in Santa Barbara and occupied San Juan Capistrano (where his reputation as a pirate survives) before continuing to South America - where Chilean admiral Thomas Cochrane (a Scotsman who created Chile’s navy) dispossessed him of his ships and weapons in Valparaíso. This, of course, could make a good tale for Coppola - who owns property in Buenos Aires and has filmed there - to take to the screen.

Win This Book! Or Choose Another

Acknowledging the importance of tourism to the economy, Argentina recently upgraded its Secretaría de Turismo (Secretariat of Tourism) to full cabinet status, and its top official, Enrique Meyer, is now the country’s first Ministro de Turismo (Tourism Minister). According to Montevideo-based Mercopress, tourism accounts for six percent of GDP and, according to Ministro Meyer (a native of Santa Cruz province who happens to be a neighbor of ours in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo), foreign arrivals in 2010 will total more than five million.

Though the number of visitors declined in 2009, due in part to the H1N1 (swine flu) scare, there has been a strong rebound in 2010 - figures for May, for example, show an increase of nearly 22 percent over the previous year. With only a brief summary of the statistics, I don’t presume to say this is definitive, but there’s no doubt the industry is looking up.

The breakdown of visitors is interesting: about 30 percent come from Brazil (as its strong currency makes Argentina a real budget destination for Brazilians), about 11 percent from Chile, 19 percent from Europe, 12 percent from the United States and Canada, 22 percent from the rest of Latin America, and the rest from elsewhere in the world. Thus, anyone interested in visiting Argentina will be far from alone but, in the world’s eighth-largest country (slightly smaller than India, but with only about 40 million inhabitants), there will be plenty of places to visit without tripping over other tourists.

That brings me to the point of today’s article: In last Friday’s post, I offered a free copy of Moon Buenos Aires to the first two readers who could name the only Spanish-speaking country other than Argentina that permits gay marriage. Unfortunately, the contest has so far gone unanswered, perhaps because I buried it at the bottom of a relatively long article with several photographs.

On a continent that is often below the radar on the international news scene, the legalization of same-sex marriage brought Argentina more notoriety than anything since the military junta of the 1980s invaded the Falkland Islands - in fact, it even made the opinion page of The Onion. Thus I repeat the offer: I will provide free copies of the current edition of Moon Buenos Aires for the first two readers who can name the only other Spanish-speaking country to permit same-sex marriage.

Because I want to give the books away soon, I will even offer a hint: the country in question is NOT in the Americas. Please send all entries to the address in the header above; do not comment on this page. If the winners prefer, they may choose a copy of Moon Argentina or Moon Patagonia.

The Eternal Campaign

Even for political junkies, the United States' process of choosing presidential nominees and the ensuing campaign seem nearly endless, but usually after the election there's a breather. The same should be true in Argentina, since Cristina Fernández won the presidential election last October and replaced her husband Néstor Kirchner in office on December 10th.

Campaigning continues but, oddly enough, for another country. Spain is holding presidential elections on March 9th, and Spanish citizens resident in Argentina--even those with dual nationality who may never have never been to Spain--are eligible to vote. Thus, both the Socialist party of current Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the opposition Partido Popular of Mariano Rajoy are plastering Buenos Aires city buses and utility boxes with campaign posters. Maybe when March 9th passes, electioneering can finally take a holiday.

Or maybe not. Italian elections are set for April 13-14, and according to some estimates there are 400,000 Argentines of Italian extraction who are eligible to vote. In fact, Italians resident in Argentina have their own representation in the Italian parliament.