Santiago could be my home. It is an enormous city; a beautiful city; a prideful city; an impressive city; a disappointing city. It is no paradise, dreamland, or utopia – but that is exactly what it offers in its ambiguous feeling of homeliness where the positives of living amongst such a diverse group of people working towards making their collective livelihoods better is offset by the negatives of notions of ways it could, in fact, be different and better. Living and, to an extent, working in this city for these past few months has let me get used to its feel, its people, and its daily rhythms that has begun to make Santiago feel normal rather than in any way exotic.
Walking around Santiago, you start to notice patterns. On one block you’ll find both sides of the street completely occupied by furniture reconditioning businesses followed by a block of mini-markets. You’ll walk downtown and find the optical block, followed by the blocks for drapes and rugs. You’ll even find the particularly horrible Cafe con Piernas block the same way – coffee shops with women servers in stiletto heals with ridiculously tight and revealing uniforms serving to, of course, an all-male clientele. Think Hooters, but worse – but beside the point. Examples are abound anywhere you go and I would venture to guess that 95% of Santiago is departmentalized like this from the practical – residential, educational, industrial, transportation, governmental, and financial -- to the ridiculous – two whole blocks of 24-hour funeral parlors a couple blocks from our apartment. I’ve even found an entire shopping mall full of musical instrument stores – a seeming utopia until you find that each store sells the exact same cheap products for around the same prices. Where restaurants are centralized, such as the Mercado Central, you find the ubiquitous pleading of waiters to eat at their restaurants instead of the multitude of others occupying the same space – even though they all offer around the same menu for around the same prices. Delicious, because that’s just how good Chilean products are, but certainly annoying to deal with.
Particularly annoying are the enormous shopping malls conveniently placed in front of every transportation station – the combined enormous San Borja bus station and Estación Central train station being the best example of this. There is no going around walking through the estimated 1 km long mall to get to the local and regional buses. The stores are the same you would find in any shopping mall in the world: all over-priced and offering relatively cheap products. This is not in place by accident, it is clearly intentional -- because people will have to use that space, others will take advantage of that fact. When it’s systematically ordered, as is the Santiago example, it’s borderline ridiculous. People don’t have to buy things (as is recommended by any legal economic form), but since these businesses are all still in place, they obviously do buy in great quantity.
I have previously addressed the issues I find with neoliberal economics – the governmentally reinforced ‘free market’ for all to take part in. The departmentalization of space in Santiago is a clear example of this where no other markets can thrive with the near-homogenization of the neoliberal model. It is where the economic forces influence the cultural makeup of a place. Can an independent 24-hour funeral parlor make it in another section of the city? Probably not, since people’s minds are habitually inclined to think spatially of their city in such a way that funeral parlors can only be found in one part. What about a home-based clothing maker? An independent musical instrument store? Probably not for the exact same reasons – it’s hegemony, cultural logic, the ‘common sense’ way of how things are spatially ordered.
But, can a cheap, China-made clothing store next to another cheap, China-made clothing store make it in a mall in front of a transportation station where people have to go based on the needs of their daily lives? Easily. Is that disappointing? To me, clearly. My complaint will always be that the dominant economic model almost always predetermines people’s supposed access to the free market. In the spatially predetermined Santiago, set in place by the dictator Augusto Pinochet’s strictly enforced neoliberal economic policies in the 1970s and 80s, spaces were set up following the single model developed by economists at the University of Chicago. Success followed for those that were able to fit that model (Santiago’s president, Sebastian Piñera, is one clear example with his success in bringing credit cards to Chile in the 1970s). Others followed suit to varying degrees of success. Soon, you have the excesses of homogenization of forced competition that Santiago is quite noticeably at in the present from its past, where the only way to go is in another direction. You have to change hegemony in order to have any other economic model flourish. This is where there is hope and this is what I love about this city. It is for that same reason that I love Grand Rapids. This is why it could be home for me. That hope is exciting to be a part of.
Restaurants and stores that force their customers rethink where their food comes from is a part of that hope; coffee and tea sellers that make their customers rethink how labor was used to get them the products they love is a part of that hope; a brewery and other local, independent businesses that has their customers rethinking about their sense of community is a part of that hope. Extrapolating these small-scale efforts at rethinking economic and cultural forms to larger problematic businesses and industries such as banks, insurance companies, and food producers becomes a larger effort at kindling that hope for others to get behind. Santiago has this as well as Grand Rapids and that connects them in that ambiguous feeling of home that I feel a part of. Anywhere that I don’t feel beat down by the drudgery of monotony that a socio-politico-economic situation has the freedom to offer, I can make home -- I can be confident in that fact.
However, I will admit that it’s an idealism of home in Santiago because it is impossible to ignore the importance of family and good friends, so Grand Rapids will always be first for me. But, home for me is never going to be that exotic place that offers ‘more’ than what I’m used to, that faraway city in a country that seems more interesting where I can try connecting to its culture, that ‘utopia’ where I will have no troubles, somewhere where I can drown my cynicism of the familiar in the unfamiliar – it’s an idealism that I want to help produce rather than seemingly be perfectly premade for me; it’s unrealistic in every sense of the word. Grounded in reality, home is experiencing the positive with the negative, with the hope of helping diminish the negative for the better. Sometimes, it takes leaving the familiar and finding it in a faraway, seemingly foreign place to realize what’s important.
