#13: On Leaving 🇺🇸

(the update I never wished to write.)

And that I’ve been putting off. In two weeks’ time, I’ll be back in Chile —in the town I left at 20 & never meant to come home to. I’ve been waiting for words to convey the mix of grief & giddiness I feel when I think of cramming 16 years of my life in a 50-lb suitcase. I’m still at a loss.

So, I’ll begin with pictures— here are some of Nan Goldin’s photos I saw at L.A.’s MOCA.

I 🖤 America in all its tragic goofiness

the country where I’ve loved & been loved —where I’ve published art & partied & learned to teach & mix audio & therapied my freeze & fawn responses

etc.

Where I found I had a voice & options & was initially swayed by its loud-mouthed citizens. Growing up, the adults around me were tight-lipped about politics or spoke in metaphor, shielded behind (dark) humor. My childhood normal included dusk-to-dawn curfews and people who routinely “disappeared” for embracing the wrong ideology or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—for associating with Chileans who were dismissed as «no eran blancas palomas»—no innocent sheep.

Of the many human rights violations that occurred between 1973 and 1990, few were as callous as the practice of dropping prisoners - sometimes while still alive - into the sea, weighted down so they wouldn’t surface.

(From the “Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored” exhibition at Albuquerque Museum, 2023.)

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All that to say, I value freedom and freedom of speech above all else.

And I never expected Americans to be fearful of what came out of their mouths.

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In "He Sent a Photo of a Torture Device. I Knew What It Meant (How to Speak When a Dictatorship is Listening,)” AlisaValdes-Rodriguez writes:

Many Cubans I know talk about power this way: not with confrontation or hashtags, but with metaphor and silence. You don’t announce resistance; you signal it. You don’t fight the system with a bullhorn; you send a photo of a machine designed to punish defiance. The people who survive authoritarianism know better than to say exactly what they mean …

(Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., American Pawn Shop, 2024 - detail)

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I wish I had a lofty reason to leave *this* home, but the reality is as petty as it is stark.

The job market is trash.

And the American Dream feels increasingly like a cruel taunting.

—> A NYT gift article on the topic of wealth inequality.

And so, I’m relocating —again- in hopes of a better, less daunting future.

Onward & upward!

🇨🇱

& more to come.

xo,

~ María José