Chicha de Manzana and the Revolution of Place

I went to Chile at 20-years-old, an undergrad from a better-but-not-the-best State University. I’d taken Spanish classes since 6th grade and was near fluent upon arrival...if I were speaking to a Spanish teacher from Mexico or Spain. I was not, however, prepared to understand a Chilean accent or my peers’ slang. I enrolled in classes at the Universidad de Chile: rural sociology, historical geography and copper enameling; in addition to a mandatory Chilean history class for gringos.

This was to be the beginning of my career as a rural social scientist, working in international development! I, like a lot of 20-somethings, was going to save the world! And I had to go halfway around the world to do it! More exclamation marks!!!

I hadn’t decided if I wanted to work for USAID, Oxfam, or some other NGO after graduation, but ever since a mission trip to Tijuana with a church youth group in junior high (where I felt like a total outsider and picked up a lot of religious baggage, but that's another post), I knew I wanted to work in Latin America. Eradicate poverty. Feed the hungry. Educate girls. GINI coefficients and Engel’s Law and anti-Malthusian theory and all that. Oh, what a sweet little white girl I was. Apologies to everyone for those supremacist world views, which I am still working to dismantle.

It was January of 1998 when the plane touched down in Santiago. I’d been seated next to another young woman from the same exchange program during the flight. We talked for 13 hours straight and drank a lot (a lot) of red wine, tickled not to be considered minors in international airspace. She and I are still friends to this day.

January 1998 was an interesting time to go to Chile, and not just because I almost immediately got to explain President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to my Chilean host family, jet lagged and fumbling for words in passable academic Spanish. This was also when former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was extradited. I’d read a few history books before going, but hadn’t really understood until I got there that recent history is not actually history yet. He’d not been out of power even a decade. At 20 years old, a decade seemed like a long time, but now at 40+ years old, I’d say a decade is not long at all. I wanted to go to the campo (the countryside) to learn about land reforms under Allende, the democratically elected Socialist president who preceded Pinochet and who my government helped to oust violently.

I didn’t even know about that before I got there. Kissinger who? The one U.S. history class I took ran out of time at the end of the term and rushed through everything after WWII, as if nothing much happened after WWII.

I wanted to write a paper about how great land reform had been and how terrible privatization was and how things had changed for the worse in rural communities with the shift to exporting table grapes in the new neo-liberal global economy. Remember, 1998 is almost pre-internet; consolidated agriculture and globalization were still kind of new back then. Even then, they were clearly the absolute worst. It was all so very black-and-white at age 21. Sigh. All I needed was to do a quickly executed case study (while hungover after a night of pisco sours and dancing) in a second language in a town where I had just one connection to prove my point.

I don’t have a long list of regrets in my life but the way I went about that case study is one of them. I’ve written and burned many letters of apology over the years for how I mishandled that experience: to my Profesora, to her contact in the small town where she sent me, and to the many people I didn’t speak to with while I was there. I was paralyzed with anxiety that day, and instead of staying overnight to complete a series of key informant interviews, I caught an early bus back to Santiago with just a hand drawn map of the town in my field journal, based solely on my own word-less observations, highlighting where all the Protestant churches were located in relation to the vineyards. That could have been an interesting thing to get curious about, seasonal agricultural work and Protestant churches. But I was too deep in my anxiety, and the addictions that helped me to cope with it, to wonder much about that. My rural sociology paper was mediocre, but it didn’t matter because the university was “en paro” (on strike) more often than not. Students barricaded doorways with piles of desks. There were marches and chants. We Americans were advised not to take part, but I wanted to hear everything my Chilean roommate and his friends had to say about what was going on. Sometimes it was clear to me what the demand was. Other times I had no idea why classes were canceled. When there was no class, I would explore the city on foot. Sometimes friends and I would go to the Mercado Central (central market) for big bowls of caldo siete mares (seafood stew). I love food and I love shopping for food. Whenever I travel, whether it’s internationally or to the next county over, I want to go to the markets. Atole in Morelos in winter; fiddleheads in Seattle in spring; sweet corn in Wisconsin in summer; pasties in London in fall...almost all of my travel memories involve a market. In Santiago, I went to the produce market almost every week, lugging home huge slices of squash on the bus and “dientes de dragon” (bean sprouts, so much more magical when called “dragon teeth”) But even at the fancy supermarket in my upscale neighborhood of Providencia...or the even fancier supermarket in the even more upscale neighborhood of Las Condes, which was a rare trip across town to splurge on a tiny jar of that exotic treat, peanut butter...the produce was not often “calidad de exportación” (export quality), or if it was, it was grandly marketed as such and priced accordingly. Mostly it was a little blemished, not so big, spotted, second rate stuff...that was perfectly fine to eat. But the best of the best stuff was shipped out of country, much of it to my home country. Woah. More things I hadn't learned in school. “Ropa Europa”...huge bales of used clothing, the stuff they can’t sell at American secondhand shops, priced by the kilo for wholesale flea market vending.

Coca-cola logos everywhere.

Bombing Serbia.

Columbine. I was far from American soil, but more intensely aware of my country’s presence than ever before. And not in a way I could be proud of. The street protests intensified. Watching the news this month (October 2019), seeing millions of Chileans waving Chilean and Mapuche flags in Plaza Italia and across the country, has me remembering the sound of the “guanacos” (water cannons) and the sight of “carabineros” (military police) in 1998.

One afternoon I was spending time in a hilly park that overlooks the main thoroughfare, probably because classes were canceled again, and the park went on lock-down due to protests in the streets below. We couldn’t leave, and it was getting late. This was shocking to me. Some students had, the year before, on my college campus in California, gathered in the quad once to decry the anti-immigrant Prop 187. There was a stage and a microphone and a list of speakers and a small crowd. Someone might have written a slogan on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk. (Years later, my alma mater would make news for campus police pepper spraying protesters in nearly the same location.) But the idea of a mass wave of students shutting down what is essentially a highway and all of the businesses and amenities along it...what the what?! It might not have been in that exact moment, stuck there on the hill watching the protest in the street below, but sometime during those months in Santiago I realized something that changed my career path: Chile didn’t need an American to come to its rescue. Neither did any of the other places I’d imagined working. I was/am pretty much useless when it comes to rescuing anyone but me.

I needed to rescue me first, and then use my personal transformation as a catalyst for change with those closest to me...and maybe if that’s all going well, eventually I might tackle my own country and the messes it’s in, and the messes it makes around the world. Equal parts disillusioned and delighted with myself, I dropped out of the exchange program before the second semester began and traveled South America until I ran out of money in Peru. I came home and told my adviser — who I learned so much from and still hold in high esteem, with deep gratitude for his work to conserve biodiversity in potatoes and corn — that I would be spending my last year of school focused on agricultural education. Forget working overseas; I wanted to teach Americans about food systems and inspire them to participate in agriculture in ways that would not be extractive or damaging to the land or the communities who live upon it. I’ve always wondered if that disappointed him; if he felt like my choice to work domestically and not internationally was a rejection of his work and/or of the major.

In the 20 years that have followed, my domestic work in agriculture, food security and public health has been international, in a lot of ways....taking notes at focus groups with farm workers from Mexico; equipping U.S. military health professionals with tools for an austere overseas environment; coordinating plots in a community garden where people spoke more than a dozen languages.

It’s also been the absolute opposite of international. Even those examples above were wholly place-based and localized to a small group of people connected to that place.

Whatever it is, it starts where you are standing in this moment. You already know everyone you need to know to make whatever it is you want to happen, happen. Sit down and listen to the land. It has all the answers.

---

Chicha de manzana is a fermented apple drink common in Chile and elsewhere. The way I learned to make, from conversations with women selling it from coolers on their front porches in southern Chile during the fall, is to put some fresh apple cider in a jug on your front porch in the fall and leave it there for a few days. The longer it sits, the harder it gets. Pretty simple. There are more elaborate recipes to be found online, but I quite like this one that assumes you've got everything you need at hand: some fresh juice and a jug and a place to put it. Every year now, when my family presses cider here in the Pacific Northwest, I leave some out to enjoy a cold class of chicha a few days later. Tonight, I drink it in solidarity with a new generation of Chilean students. Salud!