A Lifelong Journey Began with a Vacation in Chile
When I was ten years-old, attending the Learning Tree free school on the tip of a windswept peninsula in Tiverton, Rhode Island, I met a classmate whose mother was Chilean. "Mathew" (not his real name) and I became inseparable friends, sleeping at each others houses, baking cakes together, wearing one another’s shirts, laughing at the idiocies of the world and playing chess until three o’clock in the morning.
When Mathew asked me if I knew where Chile was, I didn’t want to seem ignorant and so I guessed: "It’s in Asia, right?" Mathew just laughed. Soon, I learned at first hand about the dictatorship that held Mathew's homeland in its iron fist.
How I went to Chile
It was only after our seventeenth birthdays, when the news reached us that Mathew's mother had given birth to twins back home in Chile, that Mathew announced with utter determination that he was returning home to Santiago to see his new twin sisters.
When Mathew invited me to join him, I still knew little about Chile, probably because the ongoing Pinochet dictatorship and the need to maintain absolute secrecy prevented Mathew from discussing it with me. So, I chose that summer between learning Spanish in a foreign country, or spending another insipid "vacation" in New Bedford, Massachusetts, alone and without my best friend. I chose to go with Mathew.
How We Raised the Money to Go Overseas
To raise money for the trip, Mathew and I drove around our neighborhoods, looking for people with rusting and abandoned cars in their yards. If they gave us the cars, we called salvage yards to have them towed away, and we received fifty dollars each for the carcasses. And so we arrived in Santiago during the Chilean winter of 1981.
I didn’t know that Chile was in the midst of a struggle against a brutal dictatorship and Mathew, observing the caution one exercises when words can kill, rarely discussed the situation there. But, he did caution me not to speak about the dictatorship in public.
Mathew had a little brother, thirteen years old, who was part of an experimental arts school in Santiago, where the school year was still on. Every afternoon Mathew’s brother’s friends came by the dozens to our house, where we cracked open and ate walnuts from the fifty pound bags that grew on Mathew’s mother's farm in the mountains, while the music students played guitar, flute and other instruments. I began to learn to sing in Spanish before I learned to speak Spanish.
The Music Awakened Me
My political conscientization came from the songs that we sang, songs by Victor Jara, who was killed in the first days of the Pinochet dictatorship, when the military rounded up all of its most well-known well-known potential opponents in Santiago’s National (soccer) Stadiam, tortured and killed them. Victor Jara led his fellow prisoners in song just before he died.
We sang the songs of Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes of Cuba in which they recounted their recent visits to Chile when it was still a Socialist democracy, and in their songs they promised to return to help free the people they had known.
Yo pisaré las calles nuevamente,
de lo que fué Santiago ensangrentado
Y em una hermosa plaza liberada
Me detendré a llorar por los ausentes.
I’ll tread the streets again one day,
of what became bloody Santiago
and in a newly liberated plaza
I’ll stop and cry for those who are absent . . .
Yo Pisaré Lãs Calles Nuevamente, Pablo Milanés (1974)
The mere fact of singing the songs was radicalizing, since we knew that they we could be arrested for singing these songs, for imagining freedom and wanting the return of democracy.
My First Visit from the Secret Police
One morning, at around six a.m. Santiago time, I was sleeping in the room that I shared with Mathew and his brother when someone ordered me to wake up. Still able to say very little in Spanish, I said, "Gimme a nickel". But the voice was insistent: "Wake up!" I peeked my head out of my sleeping bag to find three men in gray suits standing in our bedroom. They separated us in different rooms and demanded to know what books we were reading and who was living at the house. I knew better than to say anything about what little I knew. (Mathew told me later that they had drawn a gun on him and threatened to kill him, but he had kept silent.)
The Power of the Protest Songs
I began to write down the lyrics of the protest songs my Chilean friends were singing, and I searched for the words in the dictionary. I sang with them, repeating them, and sometimes comically so. When my friends sang the Mexican Revolution song, "with my thirty thirty I go marching" ("Com mi treinta-treinta me voy a marchar!"), I misunderstood the lyrics, didn't know the words, and unfortunately sang, "Com mi treinta-treinta me voy a matar!" ("With my thirty -thirty I'm going to kill myself".) My friends were so patient with me!
Meanwhile, as we walked and rode buses from house of our friends, we saw military police guarding official buildings and stranding on random street-corners with machine guns leveled at normal Chileans, and at us.
Each day, we visited friends from accross Santiago, some who lived in luxurious homes with maid, and other who lived in one-room shacks in neighborhoods where hundreds of residents shared one water faucet while open sewage ran in the streams.
Wherever we went, we sang protest songs (interspersed with the Beatles and Queen). And from each protest song that we sang, I learned a new piece to the puzzle of the experience we were living, and I decided to make Latin American studies and Spanish the focus of my undergraduate education.
I returned to the United States and enrolled in college, but within four months I was back in Chile, on "field study", to learn and to know and to do something with that knowledge. I had bought a professional tape recorder to record the revolutionary songs, translate them and write about them.
The Mapuche of Villa Rica
Students from the University of Santiago heard about me and invited me to travel with them to an Indian reservation in Villa Rica, where students from all over Chile go during their annual vacations to use their budding skills for volunteer work. We saw the utter poverty in which the Mapuche Indians lived while the government cut down huge swaths of the trees on their native land and sold the lumber overseas. I learned the word, "Injusticia".
Hitchhiling back to Santiago, we were careful never to accept a ride in a grey Chevy C-10 pickup truck (the trucks of the secret police) and careful also never to say to much to strangers, because anyone could be a government "sapo" (toad) and an errant word to the wrong person could land us our friends and their families in the government’s torture chambers.
We Were Dying to Protest the Government
I was staying with these students in Santiago when they began preparing to attend a demonstration one morning. My Spanish was still rudimentary, but I understood they were going to downtown Santiago to participate in a massive and secretly-prepared student demostration. They tried to dissuade me from going, warning me of the potential danger, but I said, "If you’re going then I’m going too!"
We took normal city buses toward downtown Santiago. As we got closer and looked into the side streets, we noticed long lines of green military buses full of police in full riot gear, seemingly waiting for something to happen. When we arrived in downtown Santiago, a mall where improvised telephone lines hung three and for stories above us between the buildings, we looked like just any students out for a snack and a stroll after school. (Except that I am Black and was inherently conspicuous; I only saw two other Black people in all of my time in Chile.)
We were like a crowd of shoppers and tourists until someone yelled, "El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido," which is the chorus to a song that martyed Victor Jara sang in the national stadium before he was killed. Suddenly dozen and then hundreds, perhaps thousands of us were chanting, while the police repression was just as immediate. The appeared on horseback, on foot and then in large trucks mounted with water canons. They chased on down the mall and we were careful not to enter any deadend streets from which we could not escape.
I confess that I was having fun. I was an American and probably would be ordered to return to the United States if I was arrested, or so I naively believed. But I knew also that my friends could be arrested, tortured and disappeared if we were caught. So we ran and we chanted for what seemed like hours. All traffic stopped and the carefully and brutally maintained facade of dictatorship gave way for a moment to the manifest discontent and determination of the Chilean people.
Allí nuestra canción se hizo pequeña.
Entre la multitud desesperada.
Y tuve el deseo de cambiar cada cuerda
por un saco de balas.
There our song was rendered small,
among the desperate multitude,
And I wanted to trade each string on my guitar
For a sack of bullets. Yo Pisaré Las Calles Nuevamente, Pablo Milanés (1974)
What I Learned from the Dictator, Augusto Pinochet
Back in the United States, I joined groups and organized protests, worked to bring an end to injustices everywhere. I read about Chile in US newspapers and learned the vast difference between the news as we see it here and what is actually going on overseas. I learned that "the only way to know is to go", and I eventually visited five other Latin American countries, and served briefly as an intepreter for US medical students in Nicaragua during the Contra War.
I eventually earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish and a law degree and defended Latin American immigrants in political asylum hearings. But I never stopped feeling small relative to the huge injustices I had seen in the Chile of General Augusto Pinochet.
Recently, I visited my childhood friend "Mathew" again, and spent two weeks with him and his three beautiful children. We celebrated together, because even a brutal dictator like General Augusto Pinochet had not been able to kill our determination to live and live on in peace with our families and friends.