(Note: This is an updated version of the review, which
corrects the location of the swimming pool depicted on the cover of Gringolandia.)
author: Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Curbstone Press,
2009
grades 7-up
Chilean, Chilean American
During the years
of the US-installed and –supported Chilean military dictatorship of General
Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean secret police (DINA) operated clandestine prisons
in which they tortured or executed thousands of people. Villa Grimaldi—which
the torturers referred to as “el Palacio de la Risa” (the “Palace of
Laughter”)—was one of four of these torture centers on the outskirts of
Santiago. From mid-1974 to mid-1978, the DINA killed or disappeared 236 of the
4,500 prisoners held there.
Sometime towards
the end of the Pinochet regime, the torture centers were all but razed,
probably as an attempt to erase from public consciousness what happened there. In
1978, Villa Grimaldi was sold to a developer and, after a
public campaign was launched in the name of human rights and historical memory,
the infamous torture center was transformed into the Villa Grimaldi Corporación
Parque por la Paz, a memorial of the lives taken there.
Part of what is
left of “El Palacio de la Risa” is a nondescript swimming pool that had been
used in the tortures. Now, with discolored green tiles covering the bottom, it is
fenced off for both citizens and tourists to view. A photograph of this
swimming pool—with a dove flying out of it—is the cover of Lyn
Miller-Lachmann’s amazing young adult novel, Gringolandia.
Having Chilean
friends who were tortured in those years—as do I—Lyn told me that she started
working on Gringolandia in 2004, after
the revelations of the tortures committed by military police personnel of the
US Army and other US agencies conducted at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Then,
she said, as during the Pinochet dictatorship, people were generally shrugging
off torture as an aberration or justifying it as a way of obtaining
information. Meanwhile, FOX media, in its award-winning drama series “24,”
helped create the kind of division and suspicion to convince people to “follow
the leader” rather than protest.
Meanwhile, the
stories of the Chilean people—victims, survivors, and disappeared—were not
being told and, given the responsibility of our government for installing and
supporting the dictatorship that tortured, murdered or disappeared some 35,000
people, Lyn told me, she set out to create a young adult novel that “was real,
honest and truthful” to tell those stories.
Much of Gringolandia is narrated by Daniel
Aguilar, an immigrant teenager living with his mother and younger sister in
Madison, Wisconsin. Part One, entitled “Then,” is told in third person;
detailing Daniel’s beating and the horrific arrest and torture of his father,
Marcelo, an underground journalist and revolutionary, by the Chilean secret
police.
Someone
grabbed Daniel by the hair and jerked his head back. He looked up into the
covered face of the tall one. The boss. The man’s eyes were black and
terrifying in the shadow, and his mouth, a little round hole cut out of the mask,
moved like the mouth of a robot.
“Boy,
you watch this,” he snarled. “This is what happens to communists.”
The
helmeted soldiers left. The tall man crouched and ground his knee into Daniel’s
shoulder blades. Rough hands in his hair twisted his head back. The other three
masked men pounced on Daniel’s father, aiming blows at his head and body. His
glasses flew off and were crushed beneath a black boot. He fell to his knees.
Blood ran down his face into his beard.
Daniel
closed his eyes and tried to shut out the sound of his father coughing and
choking, horrible gasps. They’re beating
the life out of Papá. Someone…make them stop. When Daniel opened his eyes
again, his father was on hands and knees. A soldier’s boot struck the side of
his head. He flopped onto his back and lay motionless.
“Let’s
get him out of here.”
Part Two, “Now,”
begins almost six years later. While Papá remains imprisoned in Chile, Daniel,
his mother and younger sister have fled to Madison, Wisconsin. Mamá works with
the Latin America Solidarity Committee, and Daniel, now 17, has carved out his
own niche: a junior in high school, he plays lead guitar in a rock band and is
dating a minister’s daughter. But Daniel is also traumatized and silenced; he
keeps his head low and doesn’t call attention to himself. “Here, nobody talks
about it,” he says, “at least not outside social studies class. And when they
do it in class, I make my mind go somewhere else.”
When he drives
to the airport to pick up his newly-released father, Daniel finds Papá damaged
in body and spirit: partially paralyzed, Marcelo is a self-destructive
alcoholic who has nightmares, lashes out at his family and can’t stand to be
touched—and is bitter at having been exiled to the place he calls “Gringolandia.”
It would appear that the dictatorship has succeeded in silencing both Daniel
and Marcelo.
In Parts Three
and Four, we meet Daniel’s girlfriend, Courtney—“La Gringa”—a well meaning but
naïve, self-centered young woman who passionately wants to be part of something
she doesn’t understand—and unwittingly comes close to sabotaging the survival
of both the family here and the underground movement in Chile.
Although the
dictatorship succeeds in breaking up Daniel’s parents’ marriage, it doesn’t
succeed in silencing Marcelo—and it leaves Daniel with an important decision to
make: Should he remain in the relative safety of family and friends in Madison,
or risk torture and death by joining his father in combating a brutal
dictatorship in Chile? What Daniel decides will have teen readers thinking
deeply and making connections between the microcosm of their own families and
the macrocosm of the world outside.
In Part Five, “A
Bird Named Pablo: A Metaphor,” the dictatorship has been defeated by, of all
things, a plebiscite, and Marcelo, back in Chile, is healing from his
wounds—physically and spiritually. Here, he has written an incomparably
beautiful story about a conure (a protected species in Chile)—tortured by a
torturer—whom Marcelo has rescued and rehabilitated—and who builds a family of
his own. A metaphor that’s too close to home to be a metaphor.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s
book is complex and multilayered and beautifully written. It takes twists and
turns and shifting perspectives, but the overarching theme is Daniel’s struggle
with guilt over his father’s arrest, and his struggle to reconnect with a
person who is substantially different than the father he knew and loved. “Papa’s words race through my mind,” he says.
I want to think of him as a hero and me as the son of someone who did great things. Like investigating secret prisons and bearing witness to what went on there. But there’s a huge empty space in my chest when I think of all the time we missed together. Five years, three months, and sixteen days, to be exact. And when I walk out of the studio, my fists are again clenched, and my neck and shoulder ache, as I think of how he put us in danger, ordered us out of the country—and still wants to go back there.
The story of how
one small family survives a cruel and sadistic regime is a gift to all of the
survivors of dictatorships, those who have become permanent residents of the US
and those who have repatriated. Without polemic, without didacticism, Lyn Miller-Lachmann
has created a disturbing, thought provoking novel that succeeds in being “real,
honest and truthful.” Gringolandia is
highly recommended.
—Beverly Slapin
(published 7/15/13)
(published 7/15/13)
Note: A number
of excellent videos exist about Salvador Allende, the 1973 coup, the Pinochet
dictatorship, and the quest for justice. They include: the three-part The Battle of Chile, directed by Patricio
Guzmán (1975, 1977, 1979); Chile:
Obstinate Memory, directed by Patricio Guzmán (1997); The Pinochet Case,
directed by Patricio Guzmán (2001); A
Promise to the Dead, directed by Peter Raymont (2007); The Judge and the General, directed by Elizabeth Farnsworth and
Patricio Lanfranco (2008); Archeology of
Memory: Villa Grimaldi, directed by Quique Cruz and Marilyn Mulford (2009);
Salvador Allende, directed by
Patricio Guzmán (2011); and No!, directed by Pablo Larraín (2013). —BHS
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