Surviving Santiago

author: Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Running Press, 2015 

grades 7-up 

Chilean, Chilean American

Surviving Santiago, Miller-Lachmann’s companion-sequel to Gringolandia, takes place in 1989, in the waning days of the US-sponsored Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, after the plebiscite that removed him from power, and before he actually stepped down. It’s told from the POV of 16-year-old Cristina Isabel Aguilar Fuentes, known in her adopted country and by her friends as “Tina Aguilar.”

Tina’s mom—who, in Gringolandia, had relocated with her family to Wisconsin, and now is divorced from Marcelo and remarried—has sent her to live with her papá for the summer; and returning to her homeland is the last thing Tina wants to do. It’s a strange place, Santiago de Chile, not a place she remembers, and not a father she remembers. Marcelo, a revolutionary who had been tortured by the regime, has come out scarred, inside and out. He is addicted to alcohol and when he drinks, he becomes violent and abusive. Papá had wanted Tina to spend the summer with him, but when she arrives, she finds she’s on her own.

Throughout, Miller-Lachmann paints a complex and realistic picture of what torture under the dictatorship did to individuals and families—in this case, post-traumatic stress causes Papá to lash out at those he once loved. Tina soon sees how he dehumanizes Tía Ileana—who is lesbian and the only person who takes care of him. Tina remembers her papá from childhood—how he would drive the children to school, how they would go to the beach, how they would play cards together. But now, she abhors that he has become, as she spits out, “a bigot and a jerk.”

Indeed, Marcelo is a broken person, yet he never drinks at work, because this work is too important to screw up. His friend and colleague, Ernesto, adores him. “We worship him, Ernesto says. “He taught us everything we know about investigative journalism.” “During the plebiscite,” he tells Tina, “he was on the air for thirty-five hours straight. Said he couldn’t sleep until he knew the bastard was going down so he might as well work, but I’m sure it’s an on-air record.”

As in Gringolandia, there’s a metaphor here that’s not really a metaphor: Papá has rescued two parrots who had been abused by a bird torturer; one was un desplumado who eventually grew back his feathers, and the other has chewed off part of his foot. What will happen to Papá as a result of the torture he suffered at the hands of the Pinochet regime? Will he heal or will he remain physically and emotionally broken?

When an attractive, motorcycle-riding dude—a delivery boy—arrives on the scene, something is not right. Although Tina and Frankie share a love of Metallica and both are dealing with fathers who have alcoholism, Frankie’s extreme right-wing views of the regime and Chile’s history and world events—such as how “Franco stopped the Communists” in the Spanish Civil War—are the opposite of what Tina knows to be true. And they’re the opposite of all that her papá has fought and suffered for. Still, Tina sees Frankie in a way that only a love-struck teenager can: she senses, yet ignores, the oncoming danger. This is Chile, after all, and Augusto Pinochet is still in control. The military police and the regime’s hired guns are still “disappearing” people. In this tense, dangerous scenario, what’s Frankie’s role? Who is he, really?

As the tension builds and careens to a satisfying conclusion, everyday people try to survive and families continue to search for the bodies of their “disappeared” relatives, those who had been imprisoned and tortured struggle to become whole again, and Pinochet and his thugs do their best to see that his fascist legacy continues. This is 16-year-old Tina’s narrative—usually on-point, sometimes naïve, but every word believable.

Where appropriate in narration or dialogue, Miller-Lachmann uses idiomatic Chilean Spanish, and seamlessly inserts English interpretations (some of which will be a hoot for Spanish-speakers):

The moment I set Pablo down, he fluffs his tail and takes a dump on the counter. Tía Ileana yells at me. She hasn’t yelled at me since I got here, but I guess I’d yell too if a bird pooped where I sort of cooked.

¡Pégame un tiro ya! Pablo screams back.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you,” I murmur, stroking his head.

He keeps screeching, “Just shoot me,” in Spanish….

When the parrot quiets, I say, “Hello. How are you?”

“¡Alfonso, conch’e tu madre!” the parrot squawks at me.

I don’t reward him for calling someone named Alfonso his mother’s private parts. Instead, I repeat, “Hello. How are you?”

This time, the bird squawks, “Vamos, pajero dormilón.”

Laughing, I say, “I did get my lazy ass out of bed.”

Like Gringolandia, Miller-Lachmann’s latest effort is one I’ve read several times and I’ve wanted to quote from practically every page. It’s that good. And, like Gringolandia, Surviving Santiago is an important historical novel, and is highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 6/26/15)

I Lived on Butterfly Hill

author: Marjorie Agosín 

illustrator: Lee White 

Simon & Schuster, 2014 

grades 5-up 

Chilean, Chilean American, Mapuche

Agosín is an acclaimed poet and essayist whose dozens of published works explore the lives of women and Jewish people in her native Chile and the struggle for human rights around the world. I Lived on Butterfly Hill, her first novel for young readers, is the story of 11-year-old Celeste Marconi, who lives with her parents, grandmother, and Nana (nanny who is considered part of the family) in the port city of Valparaíso, Chile.

When she sees the harbor full of large ships, Celeste knows something is wrong. Her friends don’t notice, except for Cristóbal Williams, whose magic pendulum also shows trouble. Celeste’s parents, both doctors, are busy helping the survivors of a landslide in a poor neighborhood of her city, which is built on 42 steep hills. Shortly afterward, when a military coup topples the elected democratic government, Celeste’s parents are forced into hiding. They leave the youngster in the care of her grandmother, who had escaped the Nazi Holocaust, and Nana Delfina. 

At school, things change as well. Her beloved principal flees and is replaced by a military officer. One of her best friends, along with her parents, disappears. Girls are forced to wear skirts, and boys must cut their hair short. Children who fall asleep in class, give the wrong answers, or misbehave in any way, are beaten, among them her friend, Cristóbal. Eventually, Celeste’s parents send word that it’s time for her to leave the country.

Now 12 years old, Celeste travels alone to Maine to live with her Tía Graciela, her mother’s flighty sister. Here, she adjusts to a new language and culture, but two years later, just when she begins to feel comfortable in her new home, the dictatorship falls, and she is sent back. But her parents are still missing, and with the help of old friend Cristóbal and his magic pendulum, she sets about trying to locate her parents and all the other disappeared.

I close my eyes and strain to listen. Squawk! It sounds…just like…the pelicans! “Celeste, Celeste!” But how is it that I understand—really understand, not like when I was little—what they’re saying? Squawk! Their cries are growing louder and impatient. “This way, Celeste!”

Agosín’s novel is based on a real history, though she compresses the time period—the Pinochet dictatorship in fact lasted 17 years from 1973 to 1990—and changes other details in the service of her story. In response to a question on this topic, Agosín writes, “Although this book mirrors Chilean history and the era of Pinochet, the names [of the historical figures] are invented and I re-imagined the time frame. I could not bear to make Celeste Marconi endure 17 years of a fierce dictatorship. Three was enough.”

As a result, the author’s focus is on Celeste and her world of coastal Valparaíso and coastal Maine. Both settings are exquisitely drawn, and Lee White’s charming illustrations add much to this unique middle grade novel that blends history, fantasy, and magical realism. Agosín’s skillful use of the earthquake as a metaphor—Chile has experienced some of the world’s most intense earthquakes—conveys both the preciousness and the precariousness of life:

Everyone in Chile has an explanation for earthquakes. I say that the earth has the right to yawn and stretch just as I do in my bed when I don’t want to wake early for school, and also has the right to sneeze as we all do when covered in dust.

And when the elected government teeters on the brink of a military takeover, Celeste’s mother tells her, “I feel that Chile soon will suffer many earthquakes of the soul.”

Magic and mysticism are important elements, and Agosín adds dimension and depth by showing how children and adults from the different cultures within Chile—including Nana Delfina, a Mapuche woman from the south of Chile, and Grandmother Frida, a Jewish refugee from Central Europe—incorporate the supernatural into their lives. Celeste emerges as a strong character, one who will engage and inspire middle grade readers, as she allays the suspicions of her Maine classmates to become a good friend to them and later on, as she leads a harrowing search to find her missing father. In a market filled with narrow, formulaic, cookie-cutter books, I Lived on Butterfly Hill is a standout, a novel that will challenge middle grade readers and show them that there is a fascinating and beautiful world beyond their horizons. Highly recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 8/16/14)

Parts of this review appeared in The Pirate Tree (www.thepiratetree.com) and the “Waging Peace” blog of the Albany Times-Union (blog.timesunion.com/wagingpeace).

Gringolandia

(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)

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